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.
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