Design for Mural Decoration - 'Theres Always Juliet'

Squadron Leader Laurence Irving, OBE, was the grandson of the Victorian actor Henry Irving and son of the actors H. B. Irving and Dorothea Baird. After at Wellington College he studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Royal Academy School under Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. In 1928 he went to Hollywood with Douglas Fairbanks to be his Art Director on The Iron Mask (1929). He then worked on several films in Hollywood and Broadway plays before returning to London in the mid 1930s. During World War II he served in the Intelligence Department of the Air Ministry and ended the war as a Squadron Leader. After the war he was invited by J Arthur Rank to produce and design the film adaptation of Sheidan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1947). He wrote a definitive biography of Henry Irving and published two volumes of autobiography; Designed for the Movies: the Memoirs of Laurence Irving and Great Interruption: An Autobiography 1938-45. The present work is a set design for John Van Druten’s There’s Always Juliet. The comedy was produced by Gilbert Miller and stared Edna Best and Herbert Marshall. It opened on Broadway 1932.