Happy Birthday, Robert Hamer! Born today in 1911, this British screenwriter and film director is best known for co-writing and directing the 1949 British black and white black comedy film 'Kind Hearts and Coronets'.
Loosely based on British writer Roy Horniman's 1907 humour fiction novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, the film tells of when his mother eloped with an Italian opera singer, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), was cut off from her aristocratic family.
After the family refuses to let her be buried in the family mausoleum, Mazzini avenges his mother's death by attempting to murder every family member (all played by Alec Guinness) who stands between himself and the family fortune.
However, when he finds himself torn between his longtime love, Sibella (Joan Greenwood), and the widow of one of his victims Edith (Valerie Hobson), his plans go awry.
British poet Alfred Tennyson wrote a poem entitled "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" as part of his collected Poems published in 1842.
The poem is about a lady in a family of aristocrats, and includes numerous references to nobility, such as to earls or coats of arms. One such line from the poem goes, "Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood."
The poem is about a lady in a family of aristocrats, and includes numerous references to nobility, such as to earls or coats of arms. One such line from the poem goes, "Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood."
This line gave the title to the film 'Kind Hearts and Coronets'. English writer of children's fiction Lewis Carroll's poem "Echoes" is based on "Lady Clare Vere de Vere".
Hamer had been active from 1943–1960.
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