Here is a brisk documentary about Noël Coward, who sailed to New York aged 20 with £17 in his pocket, and by his 30th birthday was the highest-paid author in the western world; in his lifetime he wrote 500 songs and 60 plays – acting in more than 70. At its best, this is an efficient film that does a solid, succinct job of fitting a lot of life into a little over 90 minutes; Coward died aged 73 in 1973. But in some ways this feels like a Wikipedia entry read out loud, never quite getting under the skin of a complicated man.
Coward grew up poor in the suburbs of London, aided and abetted on to the stage as a child by his adoring mother, Violet, who seems to have indulged her son’s precocious show-offy streak. Violet was a genteel woman who had fallen on hard times, and kept a boarding house. Coward once said he wanted to become as rich and successful as quickly as possible “to get mother out of that damned kitchen”. Even after his first big sensation in 1920s London with The Vortex, he lived at home with his mum and dad.
