Robyn E. Kenealy - Roddy's Film Companion

Roddy's Film Companion

For the last three years Kenealy has been working on Roddy's Film Companion, a semi-fictional/biographical comic about the life of the actor Roddy McDowall, whose most well-known role was playing Cornelius in Planet of the Apes (1968 film). Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Joseph Mankiewicz and Darryl Zanuck also feature in the comics. However, Roddy's Film Companion is not so much concerned with presenting an accurate portrait of Roddy McDowall's life, but rather with interrogating the limits of 'truth' and 'reality' in biographies through fictionalization. As Kenealy writes on her website, "Roddy's Film Companion is a one half semi-fictional biography comic of child star cum character actor Roddy McDowall (whom you might remember from such films as How Green Was My Valley (film) and Planet of the Apes) and one half a musing on the phenomenon of celebrity itself, as applied to both author and subject." The first issue, released in 2006, is set while Roddy was filming the Darryl Zanuck production of Cleopatra (1963 film). In late 2008 she started uploading Roddy's Film Companion to the internet. Issue 1 is now available on-line.