Marie Lloyd
The One and Only
A century after her death, Marie Lloyd remains a giantess of the English music hall whose turbulent career spanned the Victorian and Edwardian ages and embraced the First World War. She epitomised the cheeky cockney vulgarity of those who trod the boards. She became famous for songs such as The Boy I Love (which she stole from a fellow performer), A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good and My Old Man Said Follow the Van.
She toured America, where she was detained for “moral turpitude”, Australia and South Africa and was banned from the first Royal Command Performance. She married three times, once to a champion jockey several years her junior, and became a victim of domestic violence. When music hall performers went on strike she appeared on the picket lines and when she died, after collapsing on stage, over 100,000 mourners came to her funeral. She built her career on a well-tuned sense of innuendo and was one of the first showbiz superstars, an essentially modern figure – now for the first time the subject of a modern biography.
Praise
“Her life reads like a script EastEnders hacks would die for: family feuds tied to connections with the Turf, pugilists, royal scandals and the bank scam of the century … research and lovely writing resurrects the memory of a big-hearted trouper … A cracking book, well-used pictures, pick it up and laugh and cry. Midge Gillies tops the bill,” Time Out
“A vivid evocation of an era . . . one can almost smell the mixture of smoke, beer, winkles and champagne,” Times Literary Supplement
“There have been several biographies, but Midge Gillies’s is the most wide-ranging and thoroughly researched. It is also (not necessarily the same thing) the best,” Sunday Telegraph.
“Her book is exhaustively researched, tells its triumphant, final tragic story well and vividly evokes a wide range of milieux and events . . . Ms Gillies’ book is a fine piece of social history,” The Oldie
