Charles Kennedy should be ashamed of himself But those in-between years were the happiest of my life.Miller later had a cameo role in the all-star flop Won Ton Ton, the Dog That Saved Hollywood (1976), and made her final film, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, in 2001.She made many small-screen appearances, and appeared in one of the most famous of American television commercials. As a housewife treating her husband to one of Heinz's Great American Soups, she responds to a remark about "making a production of everything" by breaking into song and dance Thirties fashion, rising out of the ground while tapping on top of a gigantic can of soup, backed by a 24-piece band, a line of chorus girls and a 20ft-high "dancing waters" special effect.In 1969 she opened as the sixth Auntie Mame in the Broadway musical Mame, which had been running for three years, and audiences responded wildly. With Mickey Rooney in the revue Sugar Babies from 1979 she won a Tony Award nomination, and in 1989, when they brought it to the Savoy Theatre in London, she was nominated for the Olivier Award.Miller was recently seen in the television programme The 100 Best Musicals. Her main companions in later years were her two poodles, and once a year she visited her jewels in their bank vault. In 1979 she told the reporter Tex Reed, I have worked like a dog all my life, honey. Dancing, as Fred Astaire once said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and you slave and the audience doesn't think you've got a brain in your head. So every time a good-looking millionaire came along chasing me with cars and jewels, I married him because he promised I'd never have to dance again.Tom Vallance.
There are reasons to be sceptical about yesterday's pictures of Mars beamed back by the European space probe orbiting the planet. The competition between the Americans, whose six-wheel equivalent of a Martian sports utility vehicle has broken down, and the Europeans, whose Beagle vanished in a crater, is generating an epic public relations battle. And we have, of course, seen evidence of water ice sheets on Mars before. But water on Mars is such a big discovery that additional evidence is important. Because water on Mars means the possibility, at least in the past, of life on Mars. Even if it is microbial and simple, life - defined as something that can reproduce and evolve - would be astonishing. It would mean that life was not incredibly rare in the universe but probably common. If it could be found on two of nine planets in one solar system, it could be found everywhere Mars Express: tell us more. Charles Kennedy should be ashamed of himself. |
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