"I think there's a chance here for me to show a subtler side of her, and a subtler side of myself to audiences — at least for those who think all I do is play silly dames," she said.
"He is ludicrously vain, lives ridiculously, is unbelievably snobbish, and lives a life which is completely inappropriate and silly," said Dame Liz Forgan, a former chair of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, who worked alongside Yentob at the BBC in the 1990s.
The wife of a diplomat who served in Egypt and Germany, among other places, and a descendant of the Brown of Brown University, Mrs. Slocum came to be described as Newport's "grande dame" — "that silly name," Ms. Quinn said — after moving full time to the family estate she inherited from her aunt in the 1960s and becoming involved in politics.
Highly readable sequences — in particular, a reframing of the settlement of Jamestown as a war between gay male couples and religious zealots — alternate with bouts of bickering among fictitious scientists and historians with silly names (Dr. Bosco Dripper, Dame Lady Hermia Bledd Wrench, Dr. Israel Jerusalem).
"Kids, families and adult Americans were having a lovely, silly time being made dames and knights by a bearded Welsh man," he writes.
I didn't have time to do all that silly stuff". She was made a Dame of the British Empire in the late 1970s.
After all, at this time of year the country's hippodromes are full of middle-aged men parodying the stereotypical failings of women – silly, bawdy nags – by playing pantomime dames.
To Messrs. Snaps & Brummagem in the High Street I must fly; they have shod a million silly gooses such as I in perfect comfort, whilst Dame Fashion gazes approvingly down upon their handiwork.
When casting Dame Edna Everage as Prince Metternich is the least camp and silly thing in your movie, though, you've probably gone a bit over the top with everything else.
Dame Sybil Thorndike embraced him with, "Oh John, you have been a silly bugger!" and later led him on, saying, "Come along, John darling, they won't boo me!" As the laws changed, so did Gielgud -- to some extent.
