Book to Screen - Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

When actress, Gloria Grahame knew she was dying, she refused medical treatment and called her former lover. Peter Turner welcomed her into his eclectic larger-than-life working class family home with his parents to care for her.

So began the sad six days in which Gloria lay dying upstairs in my parents' house while I defied her wishes and contacted her eldest children, Tim and Paulette, from her second and third marriages, and let them know they needed to come as soon as possible.

Now, Peter Turner's memoir of their time together (both the romance and her illness) has been adapted into a film: Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool.

Gloria's career was coming to an end when she met Peter. He was 26 years old living in a London boarding house. She was nearly 30 years his senior and living downstairs. Not the expected place for a glamorous, Oscar-winning actress. A friendship developed and quickly became love. They later moved to Gloria's Manhattan apartment. After a while, Peter felt Gloria was hiding something from him. He wasn't sure if it was an affair, but he knew it the relationship was over, so he returned to England. Then the phone call came.

One of the movie's producers, Barbara Broccoli, was a driving force behind the adaptation.

"I have wanted to make this film for over 20 years," Broccoli begins, "It is very meaningful to me. I knew Gloria and Peter when they were together."

"Obviously, when Gloria died it was devastating, and Peter was bereft," Broccoli continues. "But then quite sometime later he showed us this manuscript and said that he had sent it off to a publisher. It was such a moving, simple, beautiful memoir."

Early reports say her determination paid off. Rotten Tomato's Tomatometer rates the movie 95%, describing it as a weepie and a winner. Both Annette Bening (playing Gloria) and Jamie Bell (Peter Turner) received praise for their roles. One review even said that Jamie has now found a period and part for him as an adult actor. We first met Jamie Bell as the aspiring dancer in industrial, working class Billy Elliott.

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool opened in the U.K. on November 16 and will open in the U.S. on December 26. Or you can read the original story, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool.

Read more by Bianca Smith