I have recently been struck by the power of coincidence. Last night my companion and I watched “Dracula AD 1972” with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing rerere-reprising their roles with
flared accomplices. Dracula’s hip apprentice was cunningly named Jimmy Alucard an anagram that took Van Helsing several minutes with a pen and paper to figure out. This ne’er do well’s dastardly plan was to raise his master in order to re-wreak revenge on the Helsing house. Their first target was Jessica, van Helsing’s granddaughter played appallingly badly by Stephanie Beacham (although my companion pointed out her bosoms certainly earned their equity cards). She was so annoying that quite frankly I wanted to bite her by the end. Cushing did close the film by stating, quite pointedly I thought, that the whole thing was FINALLY over. This aside, the coincidence we noticed was that Alucard’s lair was located in the very same street in Chelsea in which my companion and I lodged a few weeks ago. We recognised both the view from the front door and the layout of the interior.
While ln Amsterdam my companion (who, among other things, is fascinated by houses and their inhabitants) was browsing through a book on famous addresses in London. Initially she was looking for that very same sister’s house in Chelsea but, failing to find it, she decided to look in the index for ‘Dracula’. There she found Bram Stoker’s house in St Leonard’s Terrace. Laurence Olivier lived a few doors down. I decided to hunt out connections between the two actors and soon discovered on IMDb that Cushing played Osric to Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948. A few weeks ago I was invited to put one of my films on the same site. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1537248/
Anagrams of Peter Cunshing and Laurence Olivier’s names are respectively:
Spectre hug-in
And
Lance our evil ire
