Early Life and Career
Born to an upwardly mobile family in Streatham, a southwest London suburb, his parents were publicans and owners of the Crown & Sceptre, a large coaching inn at the top of Streatham Hill. Educated at Mill Hill School, Hartnell read Modern Languages at Magdalene College, Cambridge, but left Cambridge without a degree. More interested in performing, and designing productions, for the university Footlights, Hartnell was noticed by the London press as the designer of a Footlights production which transferred to the Dalys Theatre in London. Having unsuccessfully worked for two London designers, including Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, whom he sued for copying his designs without a credit, he opened his own business at 10 Bruton Street, Mayfair in 1923 with the help of his father and sister Phyllis.
Read more about this topic: Norman Hartnell
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death—the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.”
—Walter Pater 1839–1894, British writer, educator. originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine (Aug. 1878)
“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)