An interesting items about David Hemmings taken from his Telegram obit. There was a lot I didn't know about him
A lauded child soprano for whom Benjamin Britten wrote the boy's role in The Turn Of The Screw, Hemmings became one of the best-known faces of the 1960s after starring in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) - a baffling, beautiful critique of "Swinging London" that many saw as a profound indictment of cultural vacuity; others found vacuity in the film itself.
Hemmings was nine when he first sang for Benjamin Britten. For three years he toured in The Turn Of The Screw, until his voice finally broke during a high aria on stage at the Champs Elysee Theatre in Paris. His understudy had been waiting, in full costume, throughout these three years, and was brought on after a brief interlude; alas, his voice broke three days later.
At the end of the 1960s he left London for a holiday in the Seychelles and ended up working in Australia and New Zealand, making more than 20 films.
At one point he had co-founded a film and finance company called Hemdale, which came up with a scheme for shielding actors and musicians from the predations of the taxman under Harold Wilson's government.
For much of the 1970s, Hemmings was in Los Angeles, working as a director. Among the films he directed were Running Scared (1972); The 14 (1973), for which he won a "Silver Bear" award at the 1973 Berlin Film Festival; and Just a Gigolo (1978), which featured appearances by David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich. Hemmings later turned to directing for television, working on episodes of shows such as The A-Team, Magnum PI and Murder, She Wrote.
and then there is the personal stuff.
