By Anne W. Semmes
A classic film with a charmed life is on its way to the Greenwich Library’s Friends Friday Films on March 20 – The Fallen Idol. It’s a thriller featuring child actor, Bobby Henrey, now grown up as Robert Henrey having lived for decades in Greenwich. The film is set in London in 1948, when Bobby was age 8, with its story, “A butler…falls under suspicion when a mysterious death occurs…with the only witness being an impressionable young boy…” Movie goers will be treated post film to a Q&A with Robert Henrey. Now 86, with a life spent in finance, he continues to write books after publishing his 2013 memoir, aptly titled Through Grown-Up Eyes: Living with Childhood Fame.
How this movie came to be is a story – credit Grahame Greene for the tale, and an entranced British director Carol Reed determined to find just the right young boy for the plot. The year is 1947 in London with the city recovering from WWII, and a book being read “A Village in Piccadilly” written by Bobby Henrey’ s literary parents on living through the Blitz in London with its few fetching photos of young Bobby. Long story short, with auditions ongoing for that young boy, Bobby’s photos are discovered, his parents contacted, and as his family roots are deep in Normandy, Bobby is expected to have that French twist to his talk needed for the plot set in a “French speaking embassy” in London.
Bobby Henrey becoming an actor
Bobby is chosen – an only child, he has been solely under his parent’s tutelage, homeschooled during the Blitz with all other children deported to the countryside. Was he asked if he wished to be involved in the film? “The idea that my opinion would’ve been asked – that’s fantasy,” remarked Henrey with some humor in a meetup at Coffee for Good in Greenwich. With the filming taking place across some six months, he told of becoming “more engaged…There we were in the streets of London with a camera crew and with these arc lights and reflectors …I love to know how things work…I had a greater understanding of what was happening.” But at the beginning, of the story line, “I obviously didn’t have a clue.”
Luckily Bobby had a director keen to work with him to get every scene right. “Carol Reed was a perfectionist, and he would go over and over again until he had it just the way he wanted it… Even though I was a little kid, it was very much like a job. You showed up at whatever time it was in the morning…It went on most of the day because as you know, the little kid is really part almost of every shot in the film… And people often ask me, ‘How was it being with the other actors?’ And my memory was it was a job for them and we were all working.”
Henrey’s memoir touches on a challenging scene with the need for him to smile as he is looking down from an elegant staircase. “So, apparently it was difficult to get me to smile,” he told. “I don’t know why. I was bloody minded or something. So, Carol Reed had a magician come in and do tricks, and eventually I smile.” He noted this episode as “one of the legends” of the film.
Bobby Henrey’s curious childhood
There’s a line in Henrey’s book that speaks to his acting experience – “Sown within me was an intense desire to assert my own personality.” “That’s an interesting and complex issue,” he noted. “In a normal family, you have several children, you realize how different children are, one from the other. But if you’re brought up as an only child your parents don’t have that experience. And so, they have all kinds of expectations of you. And I think it’s fairly normal to rebel, and I felt pretty rebellious… I think it was just a desire to assert myself.”
He also addressed his “curious childhood where we had this pokey little apartment in London in Mayfair of all places. And then we had this lovely ramshackle house in Normandy with my French grandmother, and that was freedom. So, my childhood was a contrast between freedom and constraint, my parents – God bless them – symbolized the constraint, and my French grandmother symbolized the freedom.”
The Fallen Idol starring famed actor Ralph Richardson and French actress Michèle Morgan, and Bobby Henrey would be named Best British Film of the year in 1948. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director (Carol Reed) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Graham Greene), plus a Golden Globe Award. And at a Royal Command Performance in London Bobby would be chosen to present a bouquet to Queen Elizabeth. And over the decades The Fallen Idol would regain the limelight. In 2001 a remastering of the film by the British Fim Institute brought Henrey to London to answer questions on stage. He’d arrived as a grownup viewer looking through the child’s lens.
Ongoing fame of Fallen Idol
In 2006 The Fallen Idol was shown at the Film Forum in New York City with articles appearing in the New York Times and the Guardian in the UK. In 2011 Henrey was blown away by a movie producer describing Henrey’s performance in the British newspaper Daily Telegraph, as “the greatest unpolished child performance of all time.” A year later in 2012 producer Martin Scorsese would choose The Fallen Idol as one of the ten best films featuring children, with a memorable and spot-on description – “A uniquely frank picture about a boy negotiating his way through the adult universe.”
Henrey did give acting another try soon after The Fallen Idol, on a film set in Austria called The Wonder Kid. “It was not a success. But it was a very exciting thing for a little kid in the post-war period to get on a train with my mother and travel through Switzerland into Austria, particularly when Austria was still under occupation by the allied forces.” That experience he said, “Sowed within me this love of travel, this love of adventure that I’ve had all my life… I’ve loved living in foreign countries.”
Bobby Henrey would leave films behind, be sent to boarding school, then graduate to Oxford where he met his to-be wife Lizette. And the two would make their way to Greenwich. Before this reporter met up with Henrey, he and wife had just returned from Portugal and Spain traveling with son and grandchildren.
And yes, his career in finance has taken Henrey around the world. But his home base of Greenwich has included his becoming a deacon at St. Catherine of Siena Church and having served as an interfaith chaplain at Greenwich Hospital. To register to view The Fallen Idol on Friday, March 20, visit https://greenwichlibrary.libcal.com/event/14667788
Note also, on March 15 Robert Henrey will be addressing “Matteo Ricci: The First to bring Christianity to China” at the Sunday Forum of Christ Church Greenwich at 11:15 am.
