In places, it is downright nightmarish: one sequence features a winged harpy with withered breasts devouring its former mistress (voiced by the late Angela Lansbury). With the titular horned heroine portrayed by Mia Farrow, Alan Arkin playing inept wizard Shmendrick and a young Jeff Bridges as noble Prince Lir, the movie is bewitching and strange – a midnight-black fairytale voiced by some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
November 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of a star-packed Rankin/Bass animated adaption of the story of a lonely unicorn who goes looking for others of her kind. The Last Unicorn, which Beagle conceived on an artist’s retreat in Connecticut in 1962, has sold more than six million copies and has been translated into 25 languages. That is thanks to The Last Unicorn –a bestseller on publication in 1968 and arguably up there with The Lord of the Rings, Narnia and Harry Potter in the fantasy pantheon. Nobody at that dinner could have known but Beagle’s voice would resonate almost as loudly as Miller’s across the decades. I just knew I felt sorry for her and I liked her.” “Later, he came out with some book or other describing his own troubles during the marriage. And I didn’t know anything.”īeagle was struck at how dismissive Miller was of Monroe. There was something about her – you couldn’t not like her. One particular evening, were Arthur Miller and his new wife, Marilyn Monroe. At weekends, Untermeyer would invite auspicious guests to dinner and have Beagle sit in. A smart working-class kid from Brooklyn, he’d been adopted “in the literary sense” by poet Louis Untermeyer. Beagle, best known today as author of timeless fantasy classic The Last Unicorn, was a teenager at the time.
“Whatever it was she was wearing, she smelled wonderful,” he says. What Peter S Beagle remembers most clearly about dinner with Marilyn Monroe was how glamorous she seemed – and how lost.
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