He spent the war years entertaining the troops and writing patriotic songs and films, but as the war wound down he finally turned his attention to the movie version of Blithe Spirit. Hollywood was interested in making a film of Blithe Spirit, but Coward had been disappointed that censorship had dimmed the sparkle of the American film adaptations of his plays Private Lives and Design for Living. But Arcati actually manages to summon the spirit of Charles's volatile first wife Elvira, and Elvira refuses to go back where she came from, bringing comic havoc to Charles's staid life with his current wife. For the skeptical Charles, his wife, and another couple, the séance is just entertainment. Charles Condomine is a mystery novelist who invites quirky medium Madame Arcati to conduct a séance at his home as research for a book he's writing. ![]() No playwright was better at fast-paced verbal wit than Coward, and Blithe Spirit was just the kind of escapist entertainment that war-weary audiences craved. In July the play opened in London, and by November it was also playing to great success on Broadway. He had taken refuge at a picturesque resort on the Welsh coast, and after a few false starts sat down and wrote the play in a feverish few days. ![]() In began in early May of 1941, when the German Blitzkreig air attack had been hammering England for months, and Coward's London office and flat had been destroyed. Written in less than a week during some of the darkest days of World War II, Noel Coward's lighthearted ghost story Blithe Spiritwas a huge success on the London stage, running for nearly two thousand performances, a record-breaking run that it held for three decades.
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