Peter Underwood - Life's a Drag!: Danny La Rue & The Drag Scene

1974, Danny La Rue, Drag queen, English, Peter Underwood,

Full title: "Life's a Drag!: Danny La Rue & The Drag Scene" by Peter Underwood.

"Life's A Drag! — an evocative title for a very contemporary and compelling book. While it is true that there have been forms of drag, both private and public, since earliest times, as a form of modern entertainment drag in recent years has developed into a phenomenon which is now a world-wide multi-million pound entertainment industry in itself.

This penetrating study, giving a depth background of the world drag scene however, primarily a book about one drag artist — the hugely-successful Danny La Rue, himself a veritable Industry of Drag and unquestionably the highest-paid performer of his type in the world."

Strangely no one has previously written a book about Danny la Rue, probably because he is a very private person despite his huge public persona. To write this work, Peter Underwood, the well-established author of the highly-successful biography of Boris Karloff (and many other books on the occult and the paranormal), researched widely and interviewed nearly seventy people close to the drag star — people who have worked with Danny la Rue both on and off stage over many years.

The result is this absorbing story of a unique star which intimately surveys the life and work of the Irish Danny la Rue. He started on the stage in a village hall, later joined the Navy at 17 and became in turn a window dresser, chorus boy and then left the stage to work in a shop, returning to the theatre and the chorus to become a dancer and drag artist in an all-male show (which he left because he couldn't stand it). He was eventually spotted in a small revue at London's Irving Theatre and offered his big chance in cabaret at Bond Street's Churchill Club."

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Photo via flickr.com.