Sun-Herald (Sydney, NSW : 1953 - 1954), Sunday 2 May 1954, page 71


LIMELIGHT

I-MBpiilii

Grand Old Lady of the London stage, Ada Reeve, celebrated her eightieth birthday by lighting her usual cigar and signing a contract with the Players

Theatre.

No motion picture musical star today is idolised as Sydney worshipped Ada de-cades ago. The original Tivoli paid her £500 a week. In the old town's night-life she flitted from champagne parties at Paris House to midnight sausagesand mashed at the "Cafe de Fairfax", the coffee-stall outside the "Herald" office.

In near-oblivion Ada was running a milk bar for Hugh D. Mcintosh in Piccadilly Circus until the blitz. When theatres re-opened she scored in a lucky engagement as a Cockney flowergirl in J. B. Priestley's "They Came To A City".

Not one critic, who raved about Ada as a wartime discovery, remembered her as London's musical comedy queen from a previous generation.

. * Those

shaggy characters you see walking with obvious

gentlemen among the stately slums of Macleay Street are not drifters demanding the price of a drink. They are well-known Sydney actors sprouting beards for "Long John Silver and the gentry are actors, too, but out-of-work, begging Grant Taylor, Guy Dollman and Lloyd Burrell to put in a word for them with the producers when shooting starts to-morrow.

* *

There is a spot of legal brother for Robert Newton. Waiting for him when he returns to America from Australia is a Superior Court writ claiming 300,000 dollars for allegedly walking out on a British- production of "Trilby." He was cast as Svengali at £2750 sterling a week, opposite Hildegarde Neff Trilby. The producers declare he stepped off the set after three weeks and wouldn't go back.