Lazy Sunday and Colman in colour

Mr E and mini me were out and about somewhere this afternoon, sitting in the sun at a cafe, sipping ice tea and eating calamari.

Junior played handball today, injured his leg and was resting on the couch, surrounded by cats…

As for me, I was holed up in my room until the end of the afternoon while awaiting the results of my Corona test that I took this morning. Turns out it’s negative and all I have is a bad cold. Such a relief! Now I don’t have to worry about Mr Esther (who has asthma) getting Covid from me.

While lazing away in my bed this Sunday afternoon, I re-watched a little Bridgerton season 2, which I have really enjoyed. Looking at Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) and his lush brown hair and beautiful brown eyes (I LOVE brown eyes) made me think of Ronald Colman (yes, I know, yet again, he’s never far from my thoughts these days…) and I wished so badly that there would be more Ronald Colman in colour pictures and films out there. He had brown eyes and lush brown hair too, although I have never actually seen him with lush brown hair in colour.

Ronald Colman seems to exist almost only in black and white. The few glimpses of him in colour, from late in his career when he was in his fifties and sixties, are already fascinating, but not really clear enough. He only made three colour films and even candids of him are all black and white.

I took some screenshots from his first colour movie, Kismet from 1944, when he was 53 but the quality isn’t great and there’s so much make up messing with the Colman look. However, it is the first glimpse in colour of his warm brown eyes. For most of the movie I don’t really like his look but Colman in that black outfit, salt and pepper hair and with those warm deeply brown eyes is quite something. He should’ve looked like that throughout the whole movie and not just at the end.

His warm brown eyes are also seen in his last two films that he filmed in his mid sixties. His final film from 1957 was called The Story of Mankind (a bit of a weird one where he advocates against the devil at a tribunal to keep humanity alive) and shows some of his brown eyes, but never quite close-up enough…

The sun does shine nicely into his brown eyes in a cameo in the 1956 David Niven version of Around the World in 80 Days but he’s very much in costume there and the moments we see him are over all too soon.

I have searched for other Colman in colour images but there just isn’t much out there. There’s one with his wife Benita, also from the early 1950s, I think.

But mostly I only find colourized pictures of old black and white photos.

Especially the first two photos give a bit of an idea of how heart-stoppingly handsome and charismatic he must have looked in real life / colour. The dark hair and warm brown eyes certainly contributed to that. I wish he’d been able to do far more in colour. A girl can dream on a lazy Sunday afternoon and evening…