INTERMEZZO / Remains of the Day / "SHADES" of ... Brown / Orange / Yellow and Green ...

Grand Designs Indoors - The Dilapidated Georgian House, London (S01E03)

Grand Designs - the Dilapidated Georgian House

"Featuring Tony and Sharon Relph, a couple restoring a dilapidated 200 year old Georgian house in London, to its former glory. They have very little money and plan to do most of the work themselves. If they manage to restore the grade two listed house in the Georgian style, the council will allow them to live there rent free for a period of their lease. They peel back layers of wallpaper to find a historical scrapbook of finishes which is donated to The English National Heritage. A modern interpretation of a period home with close attention to detail and sensitive repair, this is a true labour of love."

( In “Virtuoso Channel”)

Give Three-Piece a Chance! Protest on Savile Row

The Fall from grace of Lady Amanda Bruce ...

The fall from grace of an aristocrat's wife

Lady Amanda Bruce had it all. Married into one of Britain's oldest aristocratic families, she lived on a 15,000 acre estate in a historic country house where she brought up her three doting children. Her latest home is far removed – it is a jail cell in Texas more than 4,500 miles away.

By Robert Mendick and Nigel Rosser 8:00AM GMT 17 Jan 2010 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7006496/The-fall-from-grace-of-an-aristocrats-wife.html

Her fall from grace has been spectacular ever since going on the run from the UK, leaving behind a string of unpaid debts. It is a journey that has taken her first to Europe, then to Hollywood, where she mixed with such A-list film stars as Keanu Reeves, and finally to prison for theft. Her victims – and there appear to be many of them – have described her as an 'evil' fraudster who deserves to rot in jail.

Born in Alaska to impoverished parents and whose mother drank herself to death – she discovered her mother's dead body drowned in the bath – the fortunes of the then Amanda Movius were transformed on a holiday to Scotland at the age of just 22.

Considered to have 'rock star' good looks by her friends back home, the then Ms Movius met Lord Charles Bruce, an Old Etonian and descendant of both Robert the Bruce. He is also heir to the 11th Earl of Elgin. It was the 7th Earl of Elgin who seized the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon in Greece and brought them to Britain.

Theirs was a whirlwind romance – described as a 'Highland fairytale' – that by 1990 had led to marriage and all the trappings that go with a union with aristocracy. Living in Abbey House on the family estate, at Culross, Fife, the couple had three children Antonia, now aged 18, 17-year-old James and George, who is two years younger.

But with three small children to care for, the marriage was doomed to failure amid gossip that the American arriviste had embarked on a series of affairs.

By 1996, the couple had divorced while a custody battle followed. Lady Amanda lost the children. Four years later, she had quit Britain for good, leaving behind her children, a failed Edinburgh clothes shop and debts totalling £130,000.

Her father Jim, 72, a retired electrical engineer, would later tell the LA Times: "Whenever she gets in a tight spot, she bolts."

For years she went largely unnoticed, flitting back and forth from Europe to the United States, and in her wake leaving a trail of credit card debts, failed businesses, defrauded friends and angry ex-lovers.

One detective said: "It is obvious she criss-crossed the world trying to escape a crap childhood. She thought she had found stability and all she needed in life when she married Lord Bruce in Scotland. But Hunting, Shooting, and Fishing Scotland isn't blue collar America. She couldn't cope so she just scrammed and kept on scramming when things got tough."

Along the way, she met suburban property developer David Grimes in Seattle on the US west coast, whom she married. Their relationship also soured after about a year. "Everything about her was a mystery to me," explained Mr Grimes, who complained his wife would disappear for days, sometimes weeks, at a time without explanation or reason.

In 2004 they divorced so that by 2006, the now ex-Mrs Grimes had popped up in Hollywood, claiming to be a screenwriter, even posing for pictures with A-list film stars Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Junior and Woody Harrelson on the set of the movie "A Scanner Darkly". No one had reason to doubt the scriptwriting credentials of the pretty woman with the British accent.

Already wanted for dodging a hotel bill in Seattle and using a stolen credit card, she pleaded guilty to theft in 2007 under the name of Amanda Leigh Grimes. But she didn't appear for sentencing and a warrant was issued for her arrest.

Next she popped up in Austin in Texas in the autumn of 2008, using a new alias Amanda J George. She told a writer she met in a coffee shop she too was a screenwriter and showed him the photograph of herself with Keanu Reeves and the other stars. She suggested that they write a film together; she almost certainly would have ripped him off.

By now Amanda was also setting herself up on the internet as a rental agent for expensive holiday homes in Hawaii, in the process defrauding among others the travel editor of the LA Times, Catharine Hamm. Ms Hamm had sent her almost $5,000 for the rent on a house in Hawaii where she planned to spend her honeymoon. Inevitably, the deal was bogus and with the wedding just days away, Ms Hamm was forced to find an alternative. "On our wedding day, the humiliation of having been ripped off hung over Carl [her husband] and me," wrote Ms Hamm, "I wondered how I could have been such a fool."

But by now the net was closing in on the 41-year-old.

In April this year and with nowhere to live, she booked into a hotel room in Austin, but was arrested when she tried to leave without paying. After being bailed she took a bus to Carmel in California where again she was arrested, this time for trying to bill meals to a room that wasn't hers.

Texas authorities issued two more warrants for her arrest, including one for pocketing $5,000 for offering a rental home she didn't own to a Canadian man.

By May, authorities had brought her back to Texas to face eight charges, including identify fraud, theft and driving while intoxicated. She failed to find her $400,000 bail.

Detective Carl Satterlee of Austin Police Department's Financial Crimes Unit said: "She appears to have constantly moved from place to place living off other people's money and stealing from people every day."

Last month she finally pleaded guilty to four charges and was given a 15-month jail term, which she is serving out in the Travis County Correctional Unit's building five.

At least, her family are standing by her. Her brother James Movius, 42, a biochemist in Seattle said: "I know she's hurt a lot of people, including her family. I can understand wanting to seek some sort of measure of revenge. But I know this woman, Amanda Movius. And I know she struggles and I know she suffers, and I want her to find her way to help."

Her children back in the UK have been supportive too. Back in the summer when internet chatrooms were full of anger aimed at the con artist, two lone voices struck a rare note of support, defending Lady Amanda from criticism. One of the boys posted about enjoyable holidays shared with his mother. That in turn inevitably attracted more anger, prompting the other boy to jump to his defence. One of the boys – either James or George – then wrote: "I think my brother is allowed to talk about his mother in this way – he is only trying to cope with this.

"It's a lot to take. And if reaching out to someone who has been hurt by what she has done is what he wants to do, then I support it. I am sorry that you had to be part of one of her scams, but he has every right to talk about happy memories of our mother."

"Lord Bruce, a descendant of the 14th century King Robert the Bruce and one of Scotland’s most eligible bachelors, was smitten by the vivacious blonde American.

Born Charles Bruce, his father is the 11th Earl of Elgin, and Lord Bruce will become the 12th. Their ancestor the Seventh Earl of Elgin took the Elgin Marbles, now found in the British Museum, from the Parthenon in Athens."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2726984/From-Scottish-aristocrat-Texas-jailbird-How-daughter-alcoholic-housewife-Alaska-lived-Cinderella-story-marrying-Highlands-lord-turning-life-crime-US-Internet-artist.html

The title Earl of Elgin was created on 21 June 1633 in the Peerage of Scotland for Thomas Bruce, 3rd Lord Kinloss. He was later created Baron Bruce of Whorlton in the Peerage of England on 30 July 1641. His son, Robert, succeeded him, and was also created Earl of Ailesbury in the Peerage of England. The two Earldoms continued united until the death of the fourth Earl of Elgin, when the Ailesbury and Bruce titles became extinct, and the Elgin title passed to the Earl of Kincardine; the Lordship of Kinloss became dormant. Thereafter, the Earldoms of Elgin and Kincardine have remained united. The most famous Earl was the 7th Earl, who removed and transported to Britain the so-called Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon. In Dublin there are roads that come from the Earl's titles. These are Elgin Road and Ailesbury Road.

As well as the titles Earl of Elgin and Earl of Kincardine, Lord Elgin also holds the titles Lord Bruce of Kinloss (created 1608), Lord Bruce of Torry (1647) and Baron Elgin, of Elgin in Scotland (1849). The first two are in the Peerage of Scotland; the third is in the Peerage of the United Kingdom.

The Lordship of Kinloss held by the first four Earls was inherited on the death of the 4th Earl by the 3rd Duke of Chandos. Through his daughter it passed to the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos, and is now held by these Dukes' heir of line.

The Earl of Elgin is the hereditary Clan Chief of Clan Bruce.

The family seat is Broomhall House, three miles south-west of Dunfermline, Scotland.

Flanked by two young pipers, Lord (11th Earl Of Elgin) and Lady Elgin are seen at their Broomhall home with top table guests attending the annual Bruce Dinner, organised by Dunfermline Heritage Trust.

The 11th Earl Of Elgin, Andrew Bruce outside his family home , Broomhall House in Fife

From Scottish aristocrat to Texas jailbird: How the daughter of alcoholic housewife from Alaska lived out Cinderella story by marrying a lord before turning to a life of crime in US as Internet con artist

Amanda Movius was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and married Scotland's Lord Bruce in 1990; the couple had three children

After their divorce in 2000 amid claims of infidelity, ex-Lady Bruce moved back to US where she married real estate developer David Grimes

Second divorce a year later was followed by Amanda Grimes' departure for  California where she tried to establish herself as a screenwriter

Grimes served six months in prison in 2010 for committing theft involving fake vacation home in Hawaii that she had tried to rent to people online

The woman was arrested again this year under an alias on charges of credit card fraud and theft 

By SNEJANA FARBEROV FOR MAIL ONLINE

PUBLISHED: 02:47 GMT, 17 August 2014 | UPDATED: 13:02 GMT, 17 August 2014

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2726984/From-Scottish-aristocrat-Texas-jailbird-How-daughter-alcoholic-housewife-Alaska-lived-Cinderella-story-marrying-Highlands-lord-turning-life-crime-US-Internet-artist.html

The rags-to-riches story of a poor girl from Alaska who became the wife of a Scottish lord has come full circle when Amanda Bruce Grimes landed behind bars in Texas earlier this year.

But for the attractive, blonde mother of three who for a time was known in Scotland as Lady Bruce, the April arrest on credit card theft charges was only the latest in a long series of run-ins with the law.

Amanda Bruce Grimes, nee Movius, spent six months in a Texas prison in 2010 for committing theft involving a bogus Hawaiian rental home, Sunday Telegraph reported.

Not long after her release, the former wife of Scottish aristocrat Lord Bruce, heir to the earldom of Elgin, was back behind bars for stealing credit cards from people who thought they were renting a vacation rental property in Hawaii, which in reality did not exist, and using their information to rent houses for herself in Austin.

According to local reports, the former Scottish lady-turned-con artist used a similar setup to defraud a California journalist and a Canadian businessman - crimes that resulted in her incarceration between December 2009 and June 2010.

But repeated stints in prisons seemingly have not taught  Ms Grimes anything.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that the woman who at one time was a member of Scotland’s high society was busted in Hays County, Texas, four months ago under yet another alias, Amanda Reyna, on charges of credit card fraud and theft.

Immediately after bonding out of jail, the woman was arrested again on theft and fraud charges in Travis County, and thrown into the local jail where she remained until her release in June.

The previous year was also a busy one for Ms Grimes, who added counts of DUI, marijuana possession and blocking traffic to her already lengthy rap sheet.

The middle-aged, disgraced aristocrat is still wanted in Hays Country on a pair of outstanding charges of credit card fraud and identity theft.

Swapping names and identities has become a habit - as well as an illicit source of income - for Grimes over the past two decades.

Born Amanda Movius in the family of an Alaskan engineer and an alcoholic housewife who ended her life by drowning in a bathtub, the future con artist left Fairbanks at age 18 to go to college in Washington state.

In 1989, the then 22-year-old Amanda Movius went on vacation in Scotland where she met her future husband at a party.

‘When I met Charlie, I didn't have a clue who he was,’ she told Austin American Statesman. ‘It was just a typical boy-meets-girl situation.’

Lord Bruce, a descendant of the 14th century King Robert the Bruce and one of Scotland’s most eligible bachelors, was smitten by the vivacious blonde American.

Born Charles Bruce, his father is the 11th Earl of Elgin, and Lord Bruce will become the 12th. Their ancestor the Seventh Earl of Elgin took the Elgin Marbles, now found in the British Museum, from the Parthenon in Athens.

A whirlwind romance in the Highlands concluded with a fairy-tale wedding a year later, the Telegraph reported. 

The couple settled in a 19th century, 30,000-square-foot mansion in Fife staffed with maids and cooks at Lady Amanda’s beck and call..

Denim Dudes by Amy Leverton.

"Denim Dudes is a street style book with a difference. This richly illustrated title showcases over 80 metalheads punks, indie kids, rockabillies, bikers, hipsters, geeks, and other enthusiasts who are obsessed with denim.

As well as talking to and featuring pieces key players in the global denim business, such as Henry Holland (House of Holland), Francois Girbaud (Merithé et Francois Girbaud), Adriano Goldschmied (The Godfather of Denim, Diesel, Evisu), and Kenichi and Kenji (Warehouse Japan), Denim Dudes also explores the very best and latest denim styling on the street. The photography has been shot exclusively for the book in the key international centres of denim, including Paris, Tokyo, London, New York, LA, Milan, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Barcelona, Osaka, Melbourne and Berlin.

This inspirational title will appeal not just to designers and fashion professionals but to a public increasingly obsessed with the world of denim. It offers unrivalled insight into the stylish and sometimes eccentric 'dudes' involved in this fascinating and diverse industry."

http://www.amazon.com/Denim-Dudes-Vintage-Workwear-Obession/dp/178067418X

MEN OF THE CLOTH by Vicki Vasilopoulos

MEN OF THE CLOTH Trailer from Vicki Vasilopoulos on Vimeo.

MEN OF THE CLOTH is an inspiring portrait of three Italian master tailors who confront the decline of the apprentice system as they navigate their challenging roles in the twilight of their career. The film unravels the mystery of their artistry and reveals how their passionate devotion to their Old World craft is akin to a religion.

Geraldine McEwan died aged 82.

Geraldine McEwan obituary

A brilliant and fascinating exponent of high comedy and darkest drama

Michael Coveney

Saturday 31 January 2015 / http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jan/31/geraldine-mcewan

Geraldine McEwan, who has died aged 82, could purr like a kitten, snap like a viper and, like Shakespeare’s Bottom, roar you as gently as any sucking dove. She was a brilliant, distinctive and decisive performer whose career incorporated high comedy on the West End stage, Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, and a cult television following in EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1985-86).

She was also notable on television as a controversial Miss Marple in a series of edgy, incongruously outspoken Agatha Christie adaptations (2004-09). Inheriting a role that had already been inhabited at least three times “definitively” – by Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury and Joan Hickson – she made of the deceptively cosy detective a character both steely and skittish, with a hint of lust about her, too.

This new Miss Marple was an open-minded woman of the world, with a back story that touched on a thwarted love affair with a married man who had been killed in the first world war. Familiar thrillers were given new plot twists, and there was even the odd sapphic embrace. For all her ingenuity and faun-like fluttering, McEwan was really no more successful in the part than was Julia McKenzie, her very different successor.

Although she was not easily confused with Maggie Smith, she often tracked her stylish contemporary, succeeding her in Peter Shaffer roles (in The Private Ear and The Public Eye in 1963, and in Lettice and Lovage in 1988) and rivalling Smith as both Millamant and Lady Wishfort in Congreve’s masterpiece The Way of the World in 1969 and 1995.

And a decade after Smith won her Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, McEwan scored a great success in the same role on television in 1978; Muriel Spark said that McEwan was her favourite Miss Brodie in a cluster that also included Vanessa Redgrave and Anna Massey.

McEwan was born in Old Windsor, where her father, Donald McKeown, was a printers’ compositor who ran the local branch of the Labour party in a Tory stronghold; her mother, Nora (nee Burns), came from a working-class Irish family. Geraldine was always a shy and private girl who found her voice, she said, when she stood up in school and read a poem.

She had won a scholarship to Windsor county girls’ school, but she felt out of place until she found refuge in the Windsor Rep at the Theatre Royal, where she played an attendant fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1946. After leaving school, she joined the Windsor company for two years in 1949, meeting there her life-long companion, Hugh Cruttwell, a former teacher turned stage manager, 14 years her senior, whom she married in 1953, and who became a much-loved and influential principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1965.

Without any formal training, McEwan went straight from Windsor to the West End, making her debut in Who Goes There? by John Deighton (Vaudeville, 1951), followed by an 18-month run in For Better, For Worse… (Comedy, 1952) and with Dirk Bogarde in Summertime, a light comedy by Ugo Betti (Apollo, 1955).

Summertime was directed by Peter Hall and had a chaotic pre-West End tour, Bogarde’s fans mobbing the stage door every night and in effect driving him away from the theatre for good; McEwan told Bogarde’s biographer, John Coldstream, how he was both deeply encouraging to her and deeply conflicted over his heartthrob star status.

Within a year she made her Stratford debut as the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost and played opposite Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, replacing Joan Plowright as Jean Rice when the play moved from the Royal Court to the Palace. Like Ian Holm and Diana Rigg, she was a key agent of change in the transition from the summer Stratford festival – playing Olivia, Marina and Hero in the 1958 season – to Peter Hall’s new Royal Shakespeare Company; at Stratford in 1961, she played Beatrice to Christopher Plummer’s Benedick and Ophelia to Ian Bannen’s Hamlet.

Kittenish and playful, with a wonderful gift for suggesting hurt innocence with an air of enchanted distraction, she was a superb Lady Teazle in a 1962 Haymarket production of The School for Scandal, also starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, that went to Broadway in early 1963, her New York debut.

She returned to tour in the first, disastrous, production of Joe Orton’s Loot, with Kenneth Williams, in 1965, and then joined Olivier’s National at the Old Vic, where parts over the next five years included Raymonde Chandebise in Jacques Charon’s landmark production of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, Alice in Strindberg’s Dance of Death (with Olivier and Robert Stephens), Queen Anne in Brecht’s Edward II, Victoria (“a needle-sharp gold digger” said one reviewer) in Somerset Maugham’s Home and Beauty, Millamant, and Vittoria Corombona in The White Devil.

Back in the West End, she formed a classy quartet, alongside Pat Heywood, Albert Finney and Denholm Elliott, in Peter Nichols’s Chez Nous at the Globe (1974), and gave a delightful impression of a well-trained, coquettish poodle as the leisured whore in Noël Coward’s broken-backed adaptation of Feydeau, Look After Lulu, at Chichester and the Haymarket.

In the 1980s, she made sporadic appearances at the National, now on the South Bank, winning two Evening Standard awards for her fresh and youthful Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (“Men are all Bavarians,” she exclaimed on exiting, creating a brand new malapropism for “barbarians”) and her hilariously acidulous Lady Wishfort; and was a founder member of Ray Cooney’s Theatre of Comedy at the Shaftesbury theatre.

Geraldine McEwan: mischievously witty, from Mrs Malaprop to Miss Marple

In the latter part of her stage career, she seemed to cut loose in ever more adventurous directions, perhaps through her friendship with Kenneth Branagh, who had become very close to Cruttwell while studying at Rada. She was a surprise casting as the mother of a psychotic son who starts behaving like a wolf, played by Will Patton, in Sam Shepard’s merciless domestic drama, A Lie of the Mind, at the Royal Court in 1987. And in 1988 she directed As You Like It for Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, Branagh playing Touchstone as an Edwardian music-hall comedian.

The following year she directed Christopher Hampton’s under-rated Treats at the Hampstead theatre and, in 1998, formed a fantastical nonagenarian double act with Richard Briers in a Royal Court revival, directed by Simon McBurney, of Ionesco’s tragic farce The Chairs, her grey hair bunched on one side like superannuated candy floss.

She was a brilliant but controversial Judith Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever (1999), directed as a piece of Gothic absurdism at the Savoy by Declan Donnellan; McEwan tiptoed through the thunderclaps and lightning like a glinting harridan, a tipsy bacchanalian with a waspish lust and highly cultivated lack of concern (“My husband’s not dead; he’s upstairs.”)

Other television successes included Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990), playing Jeanette Winterson’s mother, and an adaptation of Nina Bawden’s tale of evacuees in Wales, Carrie’s War (2004). Her occasional movie appearances included Cliff Owen’s The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1975), two of Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptations – Henry V (1989) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) – as well as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); Peter Mullan’s devastating critique of an Irish Catholic education, The Magdalene Sisters (2002), in which she played cruel, cold-hearted Sister Bridget; and Vanity Fair (2004).

McEwan was rumoured to have turned down both being appointed OBE and a damehood, but never confirmed this.

Hugh died in 2002. She is survived by their two children, Greg and Claudia, and seven grandchildren.

• Geraldine McEwan (McKeown), actor, born 9 May 1932; died 30 January 2015