Elaine Stritch: a personality polished to a furious shine

I interviewed Elaine Stritch six years ago, when she was still in residence at the Carlyle hotel, her New York home of many years and, like a butler in a farce, the perfect foil to her eccentricity. It was a hot day and she wore tiny white tennis shorts, speaking as if everyone around her was deaf. "Get it right!" she said to the waiter, and later to herself, in relation to some story about her career. Her persona was polished to a furious shine.

At 82, Stritch still had years of performing ahead of her, mostly at the Carlyle, where she did her final show last year before retiring to her native Michigan. As a young woman in the 1940s, she went to New York to become an actor, understudying for Ethel Merman, inadvertently turning down an affair with Marlon Brando, and working her way to the heart of Broadway, where she eventually became that rarest of things: Sondheim's darling.