News Archives: 2002

THERE'S steel in Stefanie Powers. There has to be. It's well disguised but it's definitely present - like a razor-sharp sword wrapped in cashmere.

The 59-year-old actress surveys her suite at the Caledonian Hotel but her attention is drawn to the view outside.

"Edinburgh is such a beautiful city," she says as she looks out onto the bottom of Lothian Road. "I'm longing to explore." But will she have the chance? A mere hour after this interview it's back to intensive rehearsals for the lavish production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King And I, which takes up residence at the Playhouse for five weeks.

The woman at the window is still instantly recognisable as Jennifer Hart from the early Eighties featherweight comedy thriller series Hart To Hart, when she was partnered with Robert Wagner.

However, even though she looks at least ten years younger than she is, isn't she a little old to be taking the role of Anna, the widowed English governess who is engaged by the King Of Siam to educate his children?

Age isn't too much of an issue for Powers. She knows that this is the last chance she has at such a role, but it does not seem to bother her a bit.

There's a tradition for strong Annas in this oft-told tale. Its a role that's been played by Deborah Kerr, Virginia McKenna and Jodie Foster in the non-musical movie version, Anna And The King.

"Oh God, I'm in good company!" she laughs. "I don't know about steel but I guess I have inner strength - I think that helps on the stage and on the screen."

Powers has obviously done her preparation for the role and is proud of it. She effortlessly reels off answers to questions that you never ask with the practised ease of a pro trained on the telly treadmill.

"Anna Leonowens was quite an extraordinary lady of her day," begins Powers. "She was somebody who was born into society but married for real passion and love. Her husband was not a very reliable and left her and her young son pretty much destitute.

"She was an educated woman and in those days that was already quite a distinction and it was really a last-ditch effort to become the tutor of the Thai royal family for £20 a year. It was her only way out, she had nothing to go back to in England and there was little else she could do in Singapore - she was in very difficult circumstances."

The parallels are, of course, irresistible. The strong-willed American actress of a certain age with two marriages behind her (the first to actor Gary Lockwood at the age of 21, later to polo-playing millionaire biologist Patrick de la Chesnais, whom she divorced in 1999) forced to make her way in a strange land because her work prospects are better over here.

After all, the twin pillars of American television are youth and beauty. And while Powers certainly has an abundance of the latter, time is not on her side - at least, not in the facile world of the US boob tube.

It's a world she has little time for nowadays and any mention of TV that doesn't involve a fond reminiscence of Hart To Hart draws a bitter response.

"Too much of today's television depends on the dictates of the advertising agencies, because they invent statistics which they then sell to people who buy the time," says Powers. "They feed them a lot of information that is manufactured by the advertising agencies themselves to justify their inflated prices and in many instances it's incorrect.

"That is why we have so much lookalike product on TV - it's the same thing on every channel. The news is on every channel at the same time and theyre all reporting the same story and there are no differences in any of the reports of these stories.

"Now don't tell me there are no other stories happening around the world. There is no difference in anything - everything is simply being dished out to everyone in the hope that the advertisers won't know the difference and simply pay their bills."

It's hardly the sort of articulate tirade that you would expect from someone best-known for her starring role in an inoffensive bit of fluff like Hart To Hart, but the former Mrs H obviously still harbours a grudge about "some genius that took over ABC" who cancelled Hart To Hart in 1984.

She says firmly: "To watch regular commercial television nowadays is a horror. Its a nightmare and its the same with all the big- budget blockbusters that are pushed out like sausages from the major motion picture companies. They cost too much, they look alike, there are very few innovations and it doesnt satisfy you on any level. Its just overproduced sound and images that scramble the brain for 90 minutes."

Powers career started in a very different Hollywood over 40 years ago. She was born Stefania Federkiewicz in California in 1942. Her Polish parents divorced when she was eight, and her father subsequently married five times. At the age of 15 she was employed as an extra for the film version of West Side Story and rehearsed for three months under the instruction of Jerome Robbins. She was dropped from shooting the actual film because of the strict laws governing the employment of minors but she was noticed and won a role in an independent movie. After months of going to screen tests and actors workshops in the studios she was discovered by director Blake Edwards, who cast her in heist thriller Experiment In Terror as Lee Remicks sister. She was then picked up on a contract with Columbia Pictures and made 15 films for the studio over the next five years.

"In those days we did a lot of films," she shrugs, as if the workload was no big deal. She was bought out of her contract at Columbia to play sexy super-spy April Dancer in The Girl From UNCLE. "It was real camp, silly, Pop Art stuff," she says grinning wickedly. "The network didnt understand what we were doing."

They certainly didnt because the show was cancelled after one season. But it becomes apparent that Powers is only really fired up when shes working or talking about work. Her private life is off limits. "Lets just say that Im very happy in my private life," she says firmly and that is the end of that conversation. But her personal relationships still cast an influence over her work today.

In 1972 she was to meet the man who would become perhaps the defining relationship in her life - William Holden.

Holden was the alcoholic leading man of such films as Sunset Boulevard, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Network. Powers was 24 years his junior but the age difference didnt matter. They had both been contract players at Columbia, there was a lot of territory that they did not have to explain to each other. They lived together for nine years and Holden was sober for five of them.

He finally succumbed to his alcoholism in 1981, tripping over in his home and gashing his head open on a table. Two weeks later Natalie Wood, Robert Wagners partner drowned.

Powers and Wagner were still filming their featherweight Nick and Nora Charles antics on Hart To Hart. The double tragedy cemented their friendship but even more importantly it gave Powers a new purpose in life. The William Holden Wildlife Foundation is a 1200-acre animal sanctuary in Kenya that breeds 37 species of game and wildlife, while the education centre educates local people in the need for conservation.

When she talks about it - seriously, passionately - you get the feeling that its the most important thing in Powers life and her own acting career feeds its budget.

"The conservation foundation was pretty much handed down to me by William Holden and so thats not something I took on frivolously," says Powers with a look that suggests that she does nothing frivolously. "Its lifetime commitment." Its a word she tends to use a lot.

Powers splits her time between three homes in Kenya, LA and London although she refers to them as "three commitments, really".

Her 89-year old mother and 91 year-old aunt ("my girls") still live in California; London is a handy base for her theatre work and Kenya, you feel, is where her heart lies.

"People keep asking me: Why are you still working? but its wonderful in this instance that I can combine employment with a musical that is unique among the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein," she enthuses.

"This is the best of the best and its the last opportunity for someone of my generation to play Anna. Its the way I make my living and Im glad to do it because of my commitment to what we do in Kenya. I support all the costs of running our offices in the United States and I make a firm commitment [theres that word again] to anyone who gives me a dollar or a pound that 100 per cent of that goes to work to the foundation.

"I take it a sacred trust that if someone gives me some money that they worked very hard for that all of it goes where they expect it to go."

There's steel in Stefanie Powers alright - and you get the feeling that no-one works harder for their money than her.

The King And I, Playhouse, tomorrow to Saturday May 18 (not Sundays), 7.30pm (Wed & Sat matinees 2.30pm), £30-£7, 0870-606 3424.

There is a dancer at the bar in the studio at Sadlers Wells. In loose black trousers and a white sweater, she stretches her leg languidly, toes to the ceiling, flexing her back along it in a single fluid line. Easing out of the stretch, she shakes her red curls - and becomes Stefanie Powers.

You start struggling with arithmetic. Stefanie Powers? Didn't she play opposite Robert Wagner in Hart to Hart? Wasn't that in 1979? Yet here is a woman with flawless skin and flame-red hair, and though she claims all the dancing in The King and I is playing havoc with her lower back, she looks as supple as a sapling.

Why should a woman, at 59, choose to re-enter the gruelling world of the touring musical - a different town every couple of weeks, a performance every night and two on Saturdays? Powers is fit as a fiddle; she does yoga, Pilates, weights, running, aerobics and plays polo. But with a personal fortune estimated by the New York Times at $10 million, presumably she doesnt have to do this?

"What do you mean, presumably? Anybody can stop at any time, doing whatever they want. If you dont like what you do, then you think about not doing it. If you like what you do, and if its also the way you make your living, why is there any limitation? I have bills too, just like everybody else. Its my job."

I suppose it serves me right for asking. Powers is a powerful woman, not to be probed with oblique questions about retirement. By turns fiery and frosty, she views publicity as a necessary evil. Even when she speaks passionately, she is never personal.

Powers melts a little when we talk about The King and I. She is starring as Mrs Anna in the first 11 weeks of the touring production which launched in Edinburgh at the weekend. She loves it. "Its just a gift, this glorious piece of music," she purrs. "The play within the play, the music within the play, it transports, absolutely."

This lavish production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein original has won a host of Tonys, and Olivier nominations. But the story of Anna Leonowens, the English governess recruited to teach the 67 children of the King of Siam in the 19th century, has been winning hearts ever since the Oscar-winning film with Yul Brynner in 1956. Powers says: "Downstairs in the canteen, theres a fellow who serves everybody. The other day, he said to me, You know, I have every record, tape, CD, video and book that has ever been written or made about Anna Leonowens and the King. I must have seen this 30 times. I never stop crying, I never get bored of the music.

"Its the truth. One of the few artistic movements that ever came out of the United States was the Broadway musical, and this is the quintessential best of the best. Its a privilege to be able to do it, though there is a tremendous sense of responsibility."

Thats not the only weight Powers is carrying. Mrs Annas crinoline weighs a hefty 12 pounds. "The skirt has a mind of its own, its own momentum, its a whole world to learn to negotiate. There is corsetry, which does help to stabilise it a bit, but its quite hard to breathe in. Then Ill have two microphones on, two battery packs. Ill be the Bionic Woman. And in that I have to sing, dance and act simultaneously, and do it all with an English accent of the period."

Nevertheless, in recent years Powers has made a deliberate choice to return to musicals. In the last decade she has appeared in the Broadway hit Applause! and in the short-lived Matador on the West End. "This is where I started," she says. "I started as a dancer who sang. This is my first love."

At 15 and a dancer for legendary choreographer and director Jerome Robbins, she got a part in the film version of West Side Story, but was dropped when someone discovered she was a minor. Undaunted, she went straight into a contract at Columbia Pictures, making 15 movies and learning her craft alongside the greats of old Hollywood, John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Lana Turner and Tallulah Bankhead.

Powers came to fame in her own right in the TV spy spoof The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., but is best known for Hart to Hart, in which she and Robert Wagner were a glamorous crime-busting couple. They reprised the roles for eight TV movies, and revived the chemistry of their partnership on stage for several seasons in the play Love Letters.

"Sure, it was a much-loved show, and how nice for us that it was. When you look at the rate of attrition of most television shows these days, it is a rare piece of luck that you can find something everybody likes to watch, which has a certain amount of longevity. We only did it for five years, so there wasnt that much of it, and yet peoples memory and their attachment to it is very touching for us."

Did she risk getting typecast as Jennifer Hart? "Thats subjective," she flames. "Ive never stopped working, but Ive also never sat and waited for anybody to call me. In many cases people wait to recreate, have another success of the same dimension, and they cease to grow and cease to do other things."

Powers has grown and done other things. When not working, she champions the cause of wildlife conservation projects in various countries. She is currently working with Jaguar motors on a programme to conserve the jaguar cat. And she is president of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation in Kenya which runs breeding programmes for 37 species of African game and teaches up to 10,000 students in its education centre.

The Foundation was the brainchild of Powers and Sunset Boulevard star Holden, with whom she lived for almost a decade until his death in 1981 in an alcohol-related accident. Though she has been married twice - in 1966 to actor Gary Lockwood, and in 1993 to French aristocrat Patrick de la Chesnais, from whom she is now divorced - Holden was her mentor, and the love of her life.

With him she shared a passion for travel, adventure and, ultimately, conservation. "It seems to have slipped everybodys mind these days, and in the meantime, we havent stopped killing species, we havent stopped changing global weather patterns. Its something everyone must continue to participate in."

Powers seems all the happier with a battle to fight. Right now, the battle shes fighting is about ageism. If you dare call it that. "Ageism, if you want to use that term," - her tone suggests I definitely dont - "is a myth perpetrated by the advertising agencies who have some strange concept that in order to create brand loyalty you have to get people when theyre young. Every single survey that has been done in the last ten years has proved that to be as incorrect as any possible statement could be. Its all a nonsense, perpetrated by a hoax.

"So were to decide as a public whether we wish to be led like an animal with a ring in its nose by advertising agencies that make decisions for us. We have the largest ageing population in the history of the world, and the statistics are that within the United States someone is turning 50 years old every eight seconds. So you tell me."

In the world of films and television, Powers has the misfortune to be a smart woman over 50, when the prevailing culture is not only youth obsessed, but is, in the actresss own words "dumb and dumber".

She has been queen of the mini series, and host on the Romance Classics Channel, but she has the brains and the talent do more than that.

Hollywood should take notice - and beware.

The King and I, Playhouse, Edinburgh, until 18 May. In its first year of touring the show will also visit Manchester, Southampton, Plymouth, Bristol, Oxford, Birmingham and Sunderland.

Recollections of Lieutenant Colonel H Hughes RLC
and is included as a tribute to his own memory

"When that chap asked you where you were when Kennedy was shot, he wasn't accusing you of anything!" Those of us old enough to remember the assassination of President Kennedy will no doubt know that old gag. But all of us will easily remember exactly where we were on September 11 last year. For myself, a couple of Army chums and I were having a friendly beer with a delightful old ex-patriot called Rogue Barkus at his Happy Valley home in the shadow of Mount Kenya. We'd had a good day and were looking forward to an equally good night in the Mount Kenya Country Club and a game drive the following morning.

In one corner of his drawing room the television was just bringing the first live pictures of the Twin Towers outrage to us. We sat in disbelief. What we were watching was surreal, monstrous, impossible. Rogue, who had family in New York, contained his anger and shock well, and lifted his telephone to call a neighbour, explaining that she didn't have a television. When his short conversation finished he called over to his wife that 'Stef' was coming down. I hardly heard him, engrossed totally with what was happening in New York.

My sense of the bizarre increased when a few minutes later a very beautiful woman, whose face I knew well, walked into the room. She, too, was in confusion and was clearly thrown by the Army combats. 'What's happening?' she asked, sitting down on the sofa beside us. Her hands fluttered to her mouth as we explained in detail the extent of the tragedy that was still unfolding. The second aircraft had already impacted. We offered words of comfort, for she had friends who worked in the World Trade Centre.

As we sat there quietly talking, I was desperately trying to place her. She looked about thirty, but my mind was running back more years than that. And then I had it - Hart to Hart, the old series that all red-blooded males of my age watched with such admiration. It was Stefanie Powers.

Under different circumstances our meeting would have held more joy. As it was, I quickly realised that we were out of place here, and with a few further words of condolences we departed, stepping out into the blazing sunlight, each of us subdued with his own thoughts. Leaving those in the house to theirs.

Tuesday 11th September 2001 Remembered

Recollections of Lieutenant Colonel H Hughes RLCand is included as a tribute to his own memory

Tuesday 11^th September 2001 Remembered

Recollections of Lieutenant Colonel H Hughes RLC
and is included as a tribute to his own memory