Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an Academy Award winning English actor, playwright, and composer of popular music. Born in Teddington, Middlesex, England to a middle-class family, he was the second of a family of three sons (the eldest of whom died in 1898 at the age of six) of Arthur Sabin Coward (1856–1937), a clerk, and his wife, Violet Agnes (1863–1954), daughter of Henry Gordon Veitch, captain and surveyor in the Royal Navy. He began performing in the West End at an early age. He was a childhood friend of Hermione Gingold, whose mother warned her against him. A student at the Italia Conti Academy stage school, Coward’s first professional engagement was on 27 January 1911, in the children’s play, The Goldfish. After this appearance, he was sought after for children’s roles by other professional theatres. At the age of fourteen he was the lover of Philip Streatfeild, a society painter who took him in and introduced him to high society, in the form of Mrs. Astley Cooper. She gathered a salon of artists and invited him to live on her property at Hambleton, Rutland, not in the Hall but on the farm, due to his lower social class. Streatfeild died from tuberculosis in 1915.
contours
Round - oblong - like jam -
Terse as virulent hermaphrodites;
Calling across the sodden tw...[read poem]
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Terse as virulent hermaphrodites;
Calling across the sodden tw...
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