Drowning in Veronica Lake

From under-age Miss Florida to Hollywood icon. From glamorous to anonymous, adored to discarded. Veronica Lake - Dead but not lying down.

Revisit the Golden Age of Hollywood via the sordid underbelly of the film industry in Flaxworks latest production, Drowning in Veronica Lake - a darkly comic tribute to the eponymous 1940’s screen siren.
Trapped somewhere between Paramount and Purgatory the fictional personality of Veronica Lake graces us with a highly theatrical account of her meteoric rise to fame and glamour and equally spectacular decline. Alex Ellis plays the faded star, who has been dead for 40 years but is still optimistic for a comeback.

'This is a bravura performance from Alex Ellis; playful, provocative and poignant'
John Smythe, Theatreview – Wellington, Feb 2011

Veronica Lake was one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars in the 1940’s. At the peak of her brief career she campaigned tirelessly for the US war effort, took tea with Eleanor Roosevelt, piloted her own plane from coast to coast, was famously sued by her own mother and was bankrupted by the IRS before a rapid descent into obscurity, alcoholism and a premature and lonely death as an unknown 50 year old cocktail waitress.

'A Stunning Performance... A fascinating story excellently told and well worth seeing' Ewen Coleman, Dominion Post – Wellington, Feb 2011

Typecast early in her career as the ice cool blonde, the archetypal femme fatale, she was thrust into the limelight at an early age, as Hollywood’s newest sensation. Naïve and unprepared she left in her wake a polarised industry who either loved or loathed her.

In Drowning in Veronica Lake the untangling of the truth about her career, her alcoholism, her fractured family and her five husbands becomes a battle for centre stage - between the romantic view of the world presented by her old movies and the mocking and cynical personality of Veronica Lake.

Event listed by Ruth Green-Cole

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