VALENTINES DAY SURPRISE THATS ALL HEART AND TRUE LOVE

A #VALENTINESURPRISE .... like no other! Revenge delivered on #ValentinesDay, with #PeterCushing as Arthur Grimsdyke in 'Tales from the Crypt' (1972) . .  below I have posted a screen capture from Peter's 'Poetic Justice' tale from 'Tales from the Crypt' that includes a framed photograph of Grimsdyke's wife, Helen. Despite what many presume, this isn't actually a photograph of Peter Cushing's wife, Helen who sadly passed away on 14 January 1971. . . the film was released on 28th September 1972... This is a stock photograph of another actress. But, Helen did appear in a framed photograph, as Peter's character's wife in Tyburn films, 'The Ghoul' in 1975

PETER AND HELEN CUSHING : ' I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you...' Both Peter and Helen Cushing were True Valentines and inseparable, even after Helen's passing. Here is Helen's short piece she wrote for a magazine back in the early 1960's, about how they met and there love for each other... '

ABOVE: RARE news reel footage of Peter and Helen at a film premier evening in 1959

THE EVANSON TOUCH WITH CUSHING PRICE AND LEE ARTWORK : CUSHING COLLECTING WEDNESDAY

#COLLECTINGCUSHING Wednesday! Andrew Evanson has been busy! Here's his latest set of three individual pieces of artwork, each featuring the face of one of the fearsome three! See if you too can work out the influence of the text or design in the back ground of each portrait? Nice touch! Each would make a fine addition to anyone's Cushing Collection! Andrew has told me... ' I did them on my ipad Pro 12.9' with an apple pencil using Auto Desk Sketchbook Pro. They have been done to match my colour scheme as the intention is to frame them. Obviously, as they are digital, I can easily print them off onto A4 using archival quality paper and inks if people are interested but any larger prints would have to be done through a print firm' ....Thank you Andrew for sending this in today😉

Remembering Today.. the birthday of director Roy Ward Baker, whose work with Peter Cushing includes 'Asylum', 'And Now, The Screaming Starts!'. 'The Vampire Lovers' with Amicus films. 'The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires for Hammer films and 'The Masks of Death' with Peter Cushing for Tyburn films. Starting as a tea boy at the Gainsborough Studios in London in 1934, raising to the role of assistant director with Alfred Hitchcock on 'The Lady Vanishes' by 1939, then onto a career as director in Hollywood, working with Marilyn Monroe...Ward Baker had a very full career that covered just about every genre! Today we remember his birthday and the contribution to not only Peter Cushing's career, but the the world of cinema...

ABOVE AND THE LINK HERE! is for a great feature I put together a few years ago, in which WARD BAKER talks about Peter and the several different films he made with him! 

#THROWBACKTHURSDAY! REPACKAGING THE CLASSICS : HANDS AND FANGS!

#THROWBACKTHURSDAY! REPACKAGING Cushing and Hammer films classic films for new sales and audiences, sometimes throws up the most interesting box designs . . . what do we think of the covers of these two #HAMMERFILM classics: #bridesofdracula and #eviloffrankenstein ???

UPDATE: AN INTERESTING comment on our PCASFACEBOOK FAN PAGE
from ZAK PEARSON who says, :  'I don't know why these companies don't just use the original posters, gorgeous lush hand painted posters already in existence, rather than these very clinical designs?'.

WE ANSWERED: ' . . .Some of the films the media rights, posters, stills actually are not included in the license of having rights to distribute the film. Although many dvd and blu ray distributors flaunt this fact when they include the stills and posters in the extras... in the case of many of Hammers films films, the media rights are owned by a completely different company, to who owns the rights of the actual film . .. and some differ from country and territory . .to use the poster on the cover, would mean an paying extra lolly, so easier and cheaper, to have a new and bespoke design for the release . .'   

#THROWBACKTHURSDAY: WHAT AN INTERESTING, unusual painting and study for artists Sharon Wong to have painted...? I had to share it with you today . . .I have added quote by Peter's late wife, Helen Cushing on her observations about Peter, from the very first time she met him...and fell in love. . . taken from Peter's autobiography, it may have provided the inspiration for the painting perhaps? What do you make this? - Marcus

#THROWBACKTHURSDAY! AND FINALLY, here's a smashing photograph of actress KATE O'MARA, standing outside the WATFORD ODEON CINEMA back in October 1970, posing with  poster of  Hammer films, 'THE VAMPIRE LOVERS', in which she starred with Ingrid Pitt, Peter Cushing and Douglas Wilmer. Good for her!

IF YOU LIKE what you see here at our website, you'll  love our daily themed posts at our PCAS FACEBOOK FAN PAGE.  Just click that blue LINK and click LIKE when you get there, and help us . . Keep The Memory Alive!. The Peter Cushing Appreciation Society website, facebook fan page and youtube channel are managed, edited and written by Marcus Brooks, PCAS coordinator since 1979. PCAS is based in the UK and USA  . .

#TOOCOOL VALENTINE : PETER AND HELEN

#TOOCOOLTUESDAY VALENTINE : Peter and Helen Cushing : ' I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you...'

VALENTINE MONSTER MONDAY : HE'S ALL HEART!

#MONSTERMONDAY.... Peter Cushing's Arthur Grimsdyke, THE Valentine Monster...HAD to be really, didn't it? It's that time of year...Valentine, when we, to paraphrase Monty Python, 'Bring Out OUR Dead; and present you with Peter Cushing's portrayal of his touching performance of his little ol man, who is all heart...YOURS! Tales from Crypt (Amicus 1972) still ranks very high, in your list of Cushing favorites, and always gets the tears a-runnin and the heart a-pumpin! So, where does he weigh on our scales of #MonsterMonday Madness?? Grimsdyke was he a monster OR victim??

CLEAVAGE BRUISED KNEES AND BOLTED DOORS!

COME JOIN US AT OUR FACEBOOK FAN PAGE HERE

ANIMAL FAT, KENSINGTON GORE, KARLOFF, LEE AND A CLAPPERBOARD

#ONSETSATURDAY : MEANWHILE..... YIKES!... on a film set at Bray studios in 1968, Les Bowie Hammer films effects wizard is busy with his team, shooting THIS gory scene scene, not that hard to recognise it really. A mixture of Kensington Gore, liquid soap, animal fat and cornflour slowly slides down a rock...nasty!

LEXI CONROY commented at our FACEBOOK FAN PAGE : I am proud to say that after taking a London hop on hop off bus tour I finally get the joke that Kensington Gore is a real place ;). Incidentally, does the formula for producing KG still survive anywhere?

WE REPLIED: *Name Drop Alert!!* I'll have to look it up...but from my understanding, Hammer make up artist, Roy Ashton told me it happened, just at the time colour film was first being used in the UK. A make up artist, working on location...in 'KENSINGTON'; with a film crew, shooting on colour film discovered, that the usual bottle of 'whatever they used 'in black and white' films wouldn't register true on colour film, so legged it to a local chemist in KENSINGTON, who mixed up a compound that would do the trick OR I presume...that same make up chap, to his horror found he had misplaced or forgot to pack his bottle of blood while on location in KENSINGTON and went to a local chemist...so as the cosmetic blood having been made by a chemist in Kensington, the formula was christened after the town it was made in..etc... 

I have no idea, if the formula still exists, Lexi.  I would guess most buy it in, prepared...though from experience I know some of the movie blood DOES leave a purple-pinky stain on clothing and skin, there are some types you can purchase that does wash out, but more expensive...but that recipe from long ago, I think has long gone with that chemist maybe???

Once when Roy was showing me the contents of one of three make up cases he took to work ( '..one is for beautifying, the other for the other jobs' Roy's words!) ...He giggled when he showed me a tube of German made make up blood called, I think... 'Flix-Blut'. I have no idea why he found this funny?? I still don't...am I missing something?

LEXI HELPFULLY REPLIED: Well, knowing German to a reasonable degree, I can tell you that "Blut" is "blood"...as for "Flix," perhaps that is a corruption of "flicks," i.e., movies, making it "Movie Blood?" The joke escapes me as well...

  

#ONSETSATURDAY TOD MORTEN has written in to ask, 'Did Peter Cushing ever work with Boris Karloff?' Hello Todd and Welcome... no, it's a great shame that Peter never got the opportunity to work with Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, yes...Peter sadly no. Here is a photograph of Lee and Karloff on set during the making of The Curse of the Crimson Altar', one of two films that Lee made with Karloff, the other being Corridors of Blood in 1958. Interestingly, Curse of the Crimson Altar was directed by Vernon Sewell who in the same year, 1968, also directed Peter Cushing in the 'Blood Beast Terror'.

#ONSETSATURDAY I think the one thing. above all else that I always noticed with Christopher Lee's performance as Dracula was ...his grace. Considering, HE considered himself, clumsy with props, having two left feet ...( Alice Lopes!! ) and very, very tall.. he was most impressive in his long black cloak...gliding through the sets at Bray, Elstree and Pinewood. The only other actors I think that had the same poise and elegance when playing Dracula were Jeremy Brett and Frank Langella... you agree??

AND FINALLY, Peter Cushing as General von Spielsdorf and Douglas Wilmer, wait for it . . . as Baron Joachim von Hartog, great name that...on the set of 'THE VAMPIRE LOVERS' at Elstree  film studios, during it's production run from 19th January 1970 until 4th March 1970.

MORE IMAGES, CHART AND STUFF EVERY DAY AT OUR FACEBOOK FAN PAGE UPDATED EVERY DAY!

DRACULA CINEMA POSTER GOES UNDER THE HAMMER

THE NEXT TIME anyone tells you Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Hammer films have had their day...show them this! The BBC 'FLOG IT' television programme, known for selling anything from, well... cinema history , your grandmother, etc..finds out what we all already knew... Peter Cushing + Christopher Lee + Hammer Films = MONEY! There are only FIVE Hammer 1958 DRACULA UK Quad poster in existence . .  . .

PLEASE JOIN US CLICK HERE AND THEN CLICK LIKE!

WHEN VIOLET HELENE BECK MET PETER CUSHING FOR THE FIRST TIME

When Violet Helene Beck...Met Peter Cushing. Mrs Helen Cushing was born, Violet Helene Beck on February the 8th 1905 in St. Petersburg, now Leningrad in the USSR. She was the daughter of a wealthy cotton mill owner and lived a life of luxury with her three sisters and two brothers. When the Russian revolution began in 1917, Helen and her family fled from Russia, settling into England. Fortunately for Helen, she fluently spoke several languages... English, French, Russian, and German,and took a job as a tutor. It was later when taking a job as a chorus girl and an actress, that by chance, in May 1942, she met Peter Cushing, as she was the replacement actress in an ENSA tour of Noel Coward's play, Private Lives.... Upon entering the stage door, she looked up and noticed a man which she described in the fashion:

“From the stage door stepped a vision, and my heart skipped a beat. I had never met him, yet I knew, deep in my deepest heart, we had been together before. Tall and lean, a pale, almost haggard face, with astonishing large, blue eyes: on his head an old grey velvet hat, with a hole between the dents of its crown, a jacket beyond description and repair, spotless white shirt badly frayed at the cuffs and collar, a pair of once dark blue corduroy trousers, most of the nap long since worn away through constant wear, down-at heel shoes of grey suede. Later, I was to discover the soles were as worn down as the heels, and had holes as large as half crowns in their centres, also woollen stockings that have never known the comfort of a darning needle.He walked with a slight limp, using an ash walking-stick, the ferrule now a mere useless ring of metal around its tip, on his back a huge and obviously heavy kit-bag, such as sailors use.

There was an aura about this ‘beloved vagabond’. His hands told me he was either a musician or an artist – they reminded me of those drawn by Albrecht Durer – and when he bent over one of mine to kiss it, a faint and quite delightful waft of tobacco and lavender-water hung upon the air. I knew I would love him for the rest of my days – and beyond.”.... Peter Cushing and Violet Helene Beck married and became Mr and Mrs Cushing on Saturday, April 10th 1943.

Join Us At Our Facebook Fan Page :HERE