Readers have been sharing memorable celebrity encounters, including one involving Sir Laurence Olivier after an overflowing bath at London’s Savoy hotel and another in which Lauren Bacall appeared unexpectedly in a city shop.
Peter B Buckley, of New Ulm, Minnesota, said he and his father were staying at the Savoy in 1961 when the hotel manager arrived to tell them their bath had flooded the suite below.
After discovering where the affected guests had been moved, the pair went to apologise and offer a bottle of champagne. Buckley’s father knocked on the door and greeted the occupant with: “Why, hello Larry.”
The man was Olivier. Buckley said he then learnt that the two men had first met at the same hotel in 1941, during the Second World War.
Lance Dover, of Pretty Beach, recalled his own brush with fame while browsing in the small R.M. Williams shop in the city. He believed he was the only customer until a changing-room door opened and he found himself face to face with Bacall.
“I was, unusually, left speechless as we just nodded to each other,” Dover wrote. Bacall was appearing in Sweet Bird of Youth at the time, while a Rolls-Royce waited outside.
Tom Meakin’s mother’s alleged claim that she had once played hide and seek with John Profumo prompted a sceptical response from another reader, who invoked Mandy Rice-Davies’s famous line: “Well she would say that, wouldn’t she?”
Elsewhere, John Elder, of Annerley in Queensland, turned a political hairstyle into a fish-based joke, saying Pauline Hanson would need to grow the back of her hair before Canberra could claim its first “red mullet”. Until then, he said, “we’ll have to put up with the plain old red snapper.”
Jack Dikian, of Mosman, questioned the wording attributed to Donald Trump after he declared that the United States would officially refer to artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence”. Dikian said he was surprised Trump had not chosen “American Intelligence”.
Lilian Andrew, also of Mosman, remembered her French teacher, Madame Kuhler, introducing pupils in the 1950s to nursery rhymes, the Christmas carol Quittez Pasteurs and La Marseillaise. The teacher admired the pupils’ Oldham accents for producing the French “O” sound and set them the task of repeating: “Don’t let your cocoa go cold.”
Margaret Lorang recalled standing on a balcony and surprising someone who understood her only sentence in Hebrew: “You and I are on the roof.”
