SYDNEY MEANT FILM WORK A JOB AS A MANNEQUIN— AND A DIAMOND RING

Radio Record, 19 August 1938, Page 9

SYDNEY MEANT FILM WORK A JOB AS A MANNEQUIN— AND A DIAMOND RING

Society to-day does its tap of work as willingly as anyone-and likes it.

K Towards the end of the year Lady Patricia Stanhope (pictured here) is to marry Lieutenant Ian McDonald of the Royal Australian Navy. ° >

Lady Patricia Stanhope interviewed by

JOAN

DONNE

R. HALL was impressed, too. He asked her to take a test, had her smeared with yellow make-up and gaye her a line to speak with large -eyed George Wallace. 4

T IME was when the

English aristocracy sat back in plush chairs and had only to lift a lily white finger to have a dozen servants carry out their smallest behests. It is different nowadays. OUNG aristocrats aren’t so keen on sitting back and letting life go by. They walk out and. grapple with it, conquer it mostly. Society to-day does its tap of work as willingly as anyone-and likes it. One of the most recent of New Zealand blue bloods to, join the ranks of the workers is Lady Patricia Stanhope, daughter of the Harl of Chesterfield, and Mrs. R. Moataa Doughty, of Wellington, who has just returned home from Sydney with a diamong ring on her fourth finger, marriage ahead and experience as a film extra and a mannequin behind. This earl’s daughter, dark and charming, with slim figure and quiet assurance of manner, actually went to Sydney for a six months’ holiday, but a reporter on the "Daily Telegraph" was struck by her good looks and introduced her as a possible film player to Ken Hall, director of Cinesound studios at Bondi.

Thereupon he signed her up as an "extra" in the cast of "Leave It To George," the new Australian comedy which opened in Wellington last week. Then it was that Lady Patricia discovered there is more in film-acting than looking sweet for the cameras. She worked hard-long hours of waiting about and doing the same thing over and

over again, arriving on the set as early as 6.30 o’clock in the morning if the spirit moved the director to start shooting so soon-and at the end of it all found herself just the glimpse of a Person standing behind Gwen Munro in one of the scenes.

"Tiring?" she said in an interview last week In We€llington. "Tt certainly was tiring. Just standing and waiting.’ She smiled at the recollection. "And in the film now, you have to be very quick’ of eye to catch even a shadow of me, for. the merest second." LL in all, though, Lady Patrick found the work interesting, and when the Cinesound film was finished she branched off into a similar line-mannequin for David Jones, the big Sydney department store. It was the time of the spring fashion shows, when the larger firms employ some score of girls. As well as appearing at special viewings, they display the frocks all through the day. In David Jones, one floor is given up to the new spring goods, and the mannequins, working in relays of three and four, move informally among the people. Also very tiring work. ... Nevertheless, the job of mannequin finds plenty of applicants, said Lady Patricia. The girls are better paid than they are in London or Paris, although in Sydney most of them are taken on only at the two changes of season, when the big fashion shows are held. It is not all-the-year-round work, and so is popular with Sydney society girls, . Some attend a school for mannequins, recently started by an Australian woman and very successful. .Here they are taught deportment, the various styles of walking-quick for tweeds, languorous for evening frocks and so on-and the principles of make-up and physical culture. The school is not like an ordinary dancing school, but is more of a club with rooms attractive and (Continued on page 25).

Lady Patricia Stanhope (Continued from page 9.) TRANGELY enough, one thing on which Lady Patricia was not perpared to be dogmatic was the fashions themselves. Mannequins, one discovers, are never very fond of discussing this topic. They see too many frocks of elaborate and advanced styles to be confident of gauging popular trends very much more quickly than anyone else, Besides, Lady Patricia is not so interested lately in mannequining as a job-she’s preparing a trousseau for her marriage toward the end of tke year to Lieutenant Ian Mc: Donald, R.A.N., of H.M.A.S. Voyager. Assuredly, this attractive young society leader spent a crowded six months in the New South Wales capital! To have stormed the defences of two closely-guarded professions, and to have captured also the heart of a young naval officer-that is success indeed, as most of us would like it in our own lives,