Some years ago when I was a member thereof, the Vancouver Welsh Men’s choir * received an enquiry from a film production company in town to shoot a made for TV movie ‘Mrs Delafield Wants to Marry’. The location was the very picturesque and locally much loved Anglican St. Francis-in-the-Wood heritage church in West Vancouver. Could we supply five singers willing to be in the movie? The quintet would be costumed as monks and required to perform a Gregorian chant. ** Is the Pope Catholic? I was quick to volunteer. Another volunteer knew a Gregorian chant and went about teaching it to the other four of us.
With the chant in memory and well rehearsed we showed up for the very early call on the morning of the appointed late Fall day eager to demonstrate our stuff. None of us having had any experience with the movie industry, we soon discovered that not only do they typically start the day very early, they finish it very late. On the plus side, they do however cater the entire cast and film crew very well indeed, all day long.
Very professional makeup artists soon went to work quickly changing us from Welsh choristers to Gregorian monks give or take. We were then outfitted with monk robes by the props department. Thus converted so to speak, we felt and looked appropriately pious as we waited for our scene to come up for filming. We waited and we waited, we even waited to wait which, we also discovered, is the norm in the movie business as indeed it is in show business in general including for public performing choral groups. The ethnic Vancouver Welsh Men’s choir, the classical symphonic choral masterworks centric Vancouver Bach choir another of my past gigs and the Great American Songbook oriented vocal jazz and swing centric choir Chorisma, my current passion. (Free recordings at www.chorisma.bandcamp.com.) All of these choristers no strangers to waiting to perform.
It happened there had been an unseasonably low overnight temperature with a very hard frost that Fall morning with both solid ice and frost glistening everywhere thus given the heating was off, making for a very cold church interior. Since the movie had been set in and scored for our colorful Fall, or Autumn if you will, on-site writers had to change the dialogue on the fly to one more in keeping with the unexpected outdoors winter evoking scenario. We waited some more while they made the changes.
Just before noon and with it the presentation of more very acceptable and generously proportioned foodstuffs along with endless soft drinks, an announcement was made over the PA system that our leading lady Miss Hepburn was en-route from her downtown hotel and would be arriving soon. There was an immediate and palpable murmuring of anticipation and excitement. It took a while in my case for this news to sink in. Did they say Miss Hepburn? Surely not THE Miss Hepburn?
A cab soon arrived and in walked Katherine Hepburn. Yes THE Katherine Hepburn then in the latter part of her brilliant sixty plus years movie career. To the surprise and delight of us ‘monks’ we and our chant were to be featured in a scene with the fabled star. Before we performed Kate came over, introduced herself to each one of us and chatted with us for quite some time, a gracious and class act indeed.
They eventually ran our scene and very quickly and satisfactorily had the Gregorian chant ‘in the can’ as they say, in one take. I wondered if they would even use it but indeed they did. With the film perhaps a little too obviously made for TV, Katherine or ‘Kate’ if you will, played Mrs Delafield. Some time after it was released I had a letter from a friend living in the Canary Islands no less, who I had not seen in about 30 years. He had been watching television and had seen someone singing whist playing the part of a monk who was he said, the splitting image of me! Could it in fact have been me he queried?
On the anecdotal opportunities ‘circuit’, I do sometimes, recipients dependent and just for fun, let it be known that like Spencer Tracy, I was in a movie with Katherine Hepburn. Certainly I never thought I would be able to say that. We were not paid as individuals however the movie company made a generous donation to the Vancouver Welsh Men’s Choir and we five ‘monks’ enjoyed a very unlikely and unique experience.
* See my story Broadway Beckons November 7, 2021.
* * Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in the Latin of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th centuries, with later additions and redactions. So there!