Famous Faces Research Articles

Covert recognition relies on affective valence in developmental prosopagnosia: Evidence from the skin conductance response.

It has traditionally been thought that covert face recognition cannot be observed in developmental cases of prosopagnosia, because the phenomenon is thought to rely on the activation of face representations created during a period of normal processing. Yet, recent studies have provided evidence of covert recognition in some developmental cases, and critically the findings of one study suggest that these individuals might be processing faces on an affective dimension rather than a familiarity dimension. The current study aimed to examine this possibility using a physiological measure of covert recognition, the skin conductance response (SCR). One 61-year-old male with developmental prosopagnosia and 10 age-matched (M = 59.80 years, SD = 4.02) controls (5 men) took part in this study. Participants viewed a set of 15 famous faces intermixed with 30 novel faces, and the SCR was recorded throughout. Although control participants demonstrated an increased SCR for famous faces in comparison with novel faces, t(9) = 2.112, p = .032, d = .382, the same finding was not observed in Patient WS. However, when WS' increase in SCR was correlated with his affective ratings of the celebrities from name cues, a strong negative correlation was observed (r = -.614, n = 34, p = .020). This pattern of findings was interpreted as evidence that WS is covertly processing faces on an affective dimension rather than a familiarity dimension, and fits well with recent neurophysiological findings that support hypotheses for independent processing of cognitive and affective information.

P-1244 - Emotion recognition in tunisian patients with schizophrenia

Context Recognition deficits in facial affect tend to be regarded as a vulnerability marker in schizophrenia. Unlike complex electrophysiological markers, recognition of facial emotions is relatively easy to assess and could be a useful test to identify individuals at risk. Objective To assess the recognition of facial emotions in a Tunisian population, confirming deficit in patients with schizophrenia unlike controls, and to a lesser level in their first-degree relatives. Performance of the designed test, as a vulnerability marker, was discussed. Methodology One test was constructed from photographs of a famous actress face representing the Ekman's six basic emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and surprise. Maximum score was six. The test involves first the recognition of gender. This test has been proposed to three groups: one group of patients with schizophrenia (n = 34), a group of first-degree relatives (n = 27) and a control group (n = 57). Results Recognition deficits of emotions have been found in both patients and their first-degree relatives. Those recognition deficits were absent in the control group regardless of age, sex and educational level. The results also showed that this test is quite specific (77%) and sensitive (84%). Conclusion The findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia and their first-degree relatives are impaired of facial emotion recognition skills when compared with controls. This impairment may be a reflected endophenotype, and the constructed visual test should be used as a screening tool for people at risk of schizophrenia.

Intra-cerebral electrical stimulation of a face-sensitive cortical area causes transient specific impairment in face recognition

Event Abstract Back to Event Intra-cerebral electrical stimulation of a face-sensitive cortical area causes transient specific impairment in face recognition Jacques Jonas1* 1 Université de Lorraine, France We report the first case of transient impairment in face recognition (prosopagnosia) induced by intra-cerebral electrical stimulation. The patient was a 32-year-old right-handed woman (KV) who has medically intractable right occipital epilepsy. She never complained of difficulties in face recognition and present with normal face recognition abilities. Intra-cerebral electrodes were implanted stereotactically to record seizures and to perform focal electrical stimulation in order to define epileptogenic and functional zones. During stimulations of right and left occipito-temporal contacts (biphasic pulse; 50 Hz train of 5 s; from 1 to 1.8 mA), she was asked to name previously correctly recognized famous faces, objects and scenes. Six of seven bipolar stimulations including one common contact (named O7) located within the right inferior occipital gyrus reproducibly induced transient prosopagnosia which completely recovered immediately upon termination of the stimulation. The patient reported a disturbance in perceiving the spatial relationship of facial elements and being unable to perceive the face as a whole. Stimulations at this site never produced visual distortions, deficit in object and scenes recognition or epileptic discharges. Stimulations of all other contacts and electrodes did not elicit prosopagnosia. The brain region of interest was mapped using fMRI and intra-cerebral ERPs by contrasting responses to pictures of faces and objects. The eloquent stimulation site O7 was located exactly within the right occipital face area (rOFA). A N170 face-specific potential was also recorded at the stimulation site reinforcing the functional specificity of this area for face perception. We also found a N170 face-specific potential at an anterior site F6, located at the edge of the right FFA. However, its stimulation did not evoke any prosopagnosia. These findings provide evidences that the right OFA is necessary for normal face perception as part of a bilateral occipito-temporal network of face-sensitive areas. Keywords: face perception, OFA, Electrical Stimulation, Prosopagnosia, N170 Conference: Belgian Brain Council, Liège, Belgium, 27 Oct - 27 Oct, 2012. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Higher Brain Functions in health and disease: cognition and memory Citation: Jonas J (2012). Intra-cerebral electrical stimulation of a face-sensitive cortical area causes transient specific impairment in face recognition. Conference Abstract: Belgian Brain Council. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.210.00093 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 16 Aug 2012; Published Online: 12 Sep 2012. * Correspondence: Dr. Jacques Jonas, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France, jac.jonas@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Jacques Jonas Google Jacques Jonas Google Scholar Jacques Jonas PubMed Jacques Jonas Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

The ‘Double Face' Illusion

We report three experiments intended to characterise aspects of the 'double face' illusion, formed by replicating the eyes and mouth below the originals. Such doubled faces are disturbing to look at. We find there are wide individual differences in the ability to detect that a face has been doubled when presented briefly and masked. These differences appear to relate to perceptual speed, since they correlate with the ability to identify a briefly presented famous face. Doubling has a significant effect on identification, though much less than inversion. In a reaction-time study, participants are faster to decide that a face has been doubled as it is rotated away from upright. The final study shows that normal and doubled faces do not pop out from each other, but reveals a processing overhead of 40-60 ms per doubled face. We offer some speculations as to the cause of the perceptual effects.

Famous people knowledge and the right and left temporal lobes.

It is generally accepted that the anterior temporal lobes support knowledge of famous people. The specific roles of the right and left temporal lobe remain a subject of debate, with some studies suggesting differential roles based on modality (visual versus verbal information) and others category (person knowledge versus general semantics). The present study re-examined performance of semantic dementia patients with predominantly right and predominantly left temporal lobe atrophy on famous face, famous name and general semantic tasks, with the specific aim of testing the hypothesis that the right temporal lobe has a privileged role for person knowledge and the left temporal lobe for general semantic knowledge. Comparisons of performance rankings across tasks showed no evidence to support this hypothesis. By contrast, there was robust evidence from naming, identification and familiarity measures for modality effects: right-sided atrophy being associated with relatively greater impairment for faces and visual tasks and left-sided atrophy for names and verbal tasks. A double dissociation in test scores in two patients reinforced these findings. The data present a challenge for the influential ‘semantic hub’ model, which views the anterior temporal lobes as an area of convergence in which semantic information is represented in amodal form.

Topics in dementia: papers from the WFN-RGACD 2010 meeting. Introduction.

On June 15–18, 2010, the World Federation of Neurology’s Research Group on Aphasia and Cognitive Disorders (WFN-RGACD) held its biannualmeeting in Istanbul, Turkey. Research presented during the meeting covered a wide array of topics in the field of behavioral neurology and represented a clear reflection of creativity and innovative research aimed at deepening our understandingof some of the most fundamental aspects of this field. A large portion of the ongoing investigations presented during the meeting focused on different types of dementia. This special issue of Behavioural Neurology surveys an interesting range of topics in the field of dementia. As a whole, the collection of papers included in this special issue represents some of the trends in dementia research which have been most fruitful in generating innovative findings with direct implications for assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of different patient populations with dementia. Two articles included in this special issue demonstrate the relevance of incorporating some specific tools in the study of dementia. Gorsev Yener and collaborators employed auditory delta evokedand eventrelated oscillations obtained from EEG data to compare patients with Alzheimer disease with healthy controls. Their article demonstrates how electrophysiological data can be exploited to incorporate objective measures that may compliment behavioral and cognitive assessment of patients with dementia. Andreas Hinz applies mathematical modeling centered on graph theory to dissect and further analyze performance on tasks that have been extensively used in dementia: the tower tasks (e.g. Tower of London and Towe of Hanoi). The article provides detail on the mathematical reasoning behind this application of math to cognitive assessment, and offers conclusions as to why graph theory can bring a better understanding neuropsychological performance and could thus help develop new puzzle tests for cognitive assessment. Four articles then explore particular aspects of cognitive functioning in different groups of dementia. Faye Corbette and collaborators offer a novel perspective on the semantic impairment of patients with Alzheimer disease. Their article explores the qualitative changes in semantic performance as disease severity progresses through time. Julie Snowden and her collaborators examine the performance of patients with semantic dementiawith predominantly right and predominantly left temporal lobe atrophy on famous face, famous name, and general semantic tasks. By doing so, they report findings that challenge previously conceived semantic models which have been very influential in the field. Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht and collaborators have investigated the decision making profile of patients with primary progressive aphasia, and compared their performance to that of patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and healthy controls. Their findings in the context of performance in language tasks offer insight into the decision making profile of a type of dementia whose behavioral disturbances are yet to be comprehensively characterized. Finally, Laurie Miller and collaborators provide evidence of differences in the cognitive mechanisms underlying facial emotion pro-

Working memory and amnesia: The role of stimulus novelty

Despite the traditional view that damage to the hippocampus and/or surrounding areas of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) does not impair short-term or working memory (WM), recent research has shown MTL amnesics to be impaired on WM tasks that require maintaining a small amount of information over brief retention intervals (e.g., maintenance of a single face for one second). However, the types of tasks that have demonstrated WM impairments in amnesia tend to have involved novel stimuli. We hypothesized that WM may be impaired in amnesia for tasks that require maintaining novel information, but may be preserved for more familiar material, particularly if the material can be easily rehearsed. To test this hypothesis, patient HC, a 22-year-old developmental amnesic with relatively preserved semantic memory and 20 age and education matched controls performed a delayed match-to-sample task that required maintaining a single famous or non-famous face for 1–8 s, digit span and reading span tasks, and a modified Brown–Peterson task that required maintaining a single high- or low-frequency word or a non-word for 4–8 s. HC's performance was impaired for non-famous faces but preserved for famous faces, impaired for the reading span task but preserved for digit span, and it was impaired for non-words and unfamiliar low-frequency words but preserved for familiar words. These results support the hypothesis that an intact hippocampus is necessary for maintaining a single novel stimulus in WM. However, stimulus familiarity and rehearsal support WM via cortical regions independent of the MTL.

What's Unique about Unique Entities? An fMRI Investigation of the Semantics of Famous Faces and Landmarks

Famous people and artifacts are referred to as "unique entities" (UEs) due to the unique nature of the knowledge we have about them. Past imaging and lesion experiments have indicated that the anterior temporal lobes (ATLs) as having a special role in the processing of UEs. It has remained unclear which attributes of UEs were responsible for the observed effects in imaging experiments. In this study, we investigated what factors of UEs influence brain activity. In a training paradigm, we systematically varied the uniqueness of semantic associations, the presence/absence of a proper name, and the number of semantic associations to determine factors modulating activity in regions subserving the processing of UEs. We found that a conjunction of unique semantic information and proper names modulated activity within a section of the left ATL. Overall, the processing of UEs involved a wider left-hemispheric cortical network. Within these regions, brain activity was significantly affected by the unique semantic attributes especially in the presence of a proper name, but we could not find evidence for an effect of the number of semantic associations. Findings are discussed in regard to current models of ATL function, the neurophysiology of semantics, and social cognitive processing.

Guest Column—Epilogue: Celebrity's Face Book

Celebrity relies on a gaze, a collective or public regard that, in gazing, confers value. Celebrity also demands a face to celebrate—faciality is a sine qua non of “celebrification.” The historian Peter Brown demonstrates inThe Cult of the Saintsthat late antiquity introduced the overriding importance of saints' images, bodies, relics, or tomb sites in a Christian worship that emphasized the mediation of saints between heaven and earth and in place of angels; celebrity had its origins in the woodcut portraits and wayside shrines that proliferated as well as in the professionally wrought iconic images of the saints. Against David Hume's judgment of this phenomenon as “vulgar” and a remnant of pagan folk religion, he argues that the rise of the cult of the saints was as influenced by elites, including Augustine, as by supposedly lesser folk, and that the latter, especially women and the poor, were thus able to participate in a democratizing of culture profoundly indebted to graveside practices that promoted personal relationships, even friendships, with the dead saints and the circulation of their faces in imagery and their body parts as relics (17). Moreover, far from introducing vulgarity into Christian rituals, Brown shows how the cult was imbued with the culture of classical antiquity and with values associated with Athenian democracy and the philosophy of nous, a non-rational intelligence linking us to the divine (48). That we deploy the termcelebrity iconfor such figures as Oprah or Angelina Jolie only underscores the vestiges of public religious ritual that remain embedded in celebrity practices and the nimbus of the sacred that haloes even seemingly debased celebrity discourses.

Functional MRI mapping of category-specific sites associated with naming of famous faces, animals and man-made objects

Category-specific recognition and naming deficits have been observed in a variety of patient populations. However, the category-specific cortices for naming famous faces, animals and man-made objects remain controversial. The present study aimed to study the specific areas involved in naming pictures of these 3 categories using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Functional images were analyzed using statistical parametric mapping and the 3 different contrasts were evaluated using t statistics by comparing the naming tasks to their baselines. The contrast images were entered into a random-effects group level analysis. The results were reported in Montreal Neurological Institute coordinates, and anatomical regions were identified using an automated anatomical labeling method with XJview 8. Naming famous faces caused more activation in the bilateral head of the hippocampus and amygdala with significant left dominance. Bilateral activation of pars triangularis and pars opercularis in the naming of famous faces was also revealed. Naming animals evoked greater responses in the left supplementary motor area, while naming man-made objects evoked more in the left premotor area, left pars orbitalis and right supplementary motor area. The extent of bilateral fusiform gyri activation by naming man-made objects was much larger than that by naming of famous faces or animals. Even in the overlapping sites of activation, some differences among the categories were found for activation in the fusiform gyri. The cortices involved in the naming process vary with the naming of famous faces, animals and man-made objects. This finding suggests that different categories of pictures should be used during intra-operative language mapping to generate a broader map of language function, in order to minimize the incidence of false-negative stimulation and permanent post-operative deficits.

Flashing characters with famous faces improves ERP-based brain–computer interface performance

Currently, the event-related potential (ERP)-based spelling device, often referred to as P300-Speller, is the most commonly used brain–computer interface (BCI) for enhancing communication of patients with impaired speech or motor function. Among numerous improvements, a most central feature has received little attention, namely optimizing the stimulus used for eliciting ERPs. Therefore we compared P300-Speller performance with the standard stimulus (flashing characters) against performance with stimuli known for eliciting particularly strong ERPs due to their psychological salience, i.e. flashing familiar faces transparently superimposed on characters. Our results not only indicate remarkably increased ERPs in response to familiar faces but also improved P300-Speller performance due to a significant reduction of stimulus sequences needed for correct character classification. These findings demonstrate a promising new approach for improving the speed and thus fluency of BCI-enhanced communication with the widely used P300-Speller.

Neural basis of music knowledge: evidence from the dementias

The study of patients with semantic dementia has revealed important insights into the cognitive and neural architecture of semantic memory. Patients with semantic dementia are known to have difficulty understanding the meanings of environmental sounds from an early stage but little is known about their knowledge for famous tunes, which might be preserved in some cases. Patients with semantic dementia (n = 13), Alzheimer's disease (n = 14) as well as matched healthy control participants (n = 20) underwent a battery of tests designed to assess knowledge of famous tunes, environmental sounds and famous faces, as well as volumetric magnetic resonance imaging. As a group, patients with semantic dementia were profoundly impaired in the recognition of everyday environmental sounds and famous tunes with consistent performance across testing modalities, which is suggestive of a central semantic deficit. A few notable individuals (n = 3) with semantic dementia demonstrated clear preservation of knowledge of known melodies and famous people. Defects in auditory semantics were mild in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Voxel-based morphometry of magnetic resonance brain images showed that the recognition of famous tunes correlated with the degree of right anterior temporal lobe atrophy, particularly in the temporal pole. This area was segregated from the region found to be involved in the recognition of everyday sounds but overlapped considerably with the area that was correlated with the recognition of famous faces. The three patients with semantic dementia with sparing of musical knowledge had significantly less atrophy of the right temporal pole in comparison to the other patients in the semantic dementia group. These findings highlight the role of the right temporal pole in the processing of known tunes and faces. Overlap in this region might reflect that having a unique identity is a quality that is common to both melodies and people.

Contribution of a test of famous faces to the diagnosis of cognitive impairment and dementia

Contribution of a test of famous faces to the diagnosis of cognitive impairment and dementia

Spatial-frequency cutoff requirements for pattern recognition in central and peripheral vision

It is well known that object recognition requires spatial frequencies exceeding some critical cutoff value. People with central scotomas who rely on peripheral vision have substantial difficulty with reading and face recognition. Deficiencies of pattern recognition in peripheral vision, might result in higher cutoff requirements, and may contribute to the functional problems of people with central-field loss. Here we asked about differences in spatial-cutoff requirements in central and peripheral vision for letter and face recognition. The stimuli were the 26 letters of the English alphabet and 26 celebrity faces. Each image was blurred using a low-pass filter in the spatial frequency domain. Critical cutoffs (defined as the minimum low-pass filter cutoff yielding 80% accuracy) were obtained by measuring recognition accuracy as a function of cutoff frequency (in cycles per object). Our data showed that critical cutoffs increased from central to peripheral vision by 20% for letter recognition and by 50% for face recognition. We asked whether these differences could be accounted for by central/peripheral differences in the contrast sensitivity function (CSF). We addressed this question by implementing an ideal-observer model which incorporates empirical CSF measurements and tested the model on letter and face recognition. The success of the model indicates that central/peripheral differences in the cutoff requirements for letter and face recognition can be accounted for by the information content of the stimulus limited by the shape of the human CSF, combined with a source of internal noise and followed by an optimal decision rule.

Inconsistent handedness and saccade execution benefit face memory without affecting interhemispheric interaction

Individuals who consistently use their dominant hand for most tasks exhibit poorer memory than individuals whose handedness is relatively inconsistent, but consistent-handers’ memory can be enhanced by making repetitive saccadic eye movements before attempting retrieval. One account of these effects is that inconsistent handedness and saccade execution are associated with increased interhemispheric interaction, which putatively facilitates retrieval. We tested this account by having participants classify faces as famous or novel. Faces were presented in the left and right visual fields simultaneously (bilaterally) or in one field only (unilaterally). As in prior studies, famous faces were classified more quickly and more accurately given bilateral presentation, but novel faces were not. These bilateral gain effects indicate that interhemispheric interaction specifically facilitates famous-face recognition, and therefore larger gains may reflect greater interhemispheric interaction. However, neither inconsistent handedness nor saccade execution increased the size of bilateral gain. Inconsistent handedness and saccade execution (the latter for consistent-handers only) did increase face-classification accuracy, but the increases were not specific to famous-face recognition, and, in fact, were somewhat stronger for novel-face identification. These results extend the beneficial mnemonic effects of inconsistent handedness and saccade execution to faces, but indicate that these benefits are not caused by increased interhemispheric interaction.

N400 modulation by categorical or associative interference in a famous face naming task

It is controversial whether the organization of biographical information relating to known persons is categorical [10] or associative [1]. To shed light on semantic organization, researchers have studied semantic access of proper names using priming or interference paradigms with associated and/or category-specific primes or distractors, in recognition, familiarity or naming tasks. Depending on the task, categorical and/or associative effects have been obtained. In order to disambiguate those conflicting results, in the present event-related potentials (ERP) study, we capitalized on the fact that the N400 component is sensitive to the congruity of a stimulus with the current semantic context. We used an interference paradigm with delayed naming, in which a celebrity face target and a proper name distractor (auditory stimulus) were either associated or belonged to the same category (in the control condition, the face was preceded by a white noise). The results showed an associative interference effect with a more negative N400 component for associated name distractors than in the other conditions. These results are consistent not only with a categorical organization but also with an associative organization of biographical information for people.

Differential Impact of ApoE ε4 on Cortical Activation During Famous Face Recognition in Cognitively Intact Individuals and Patients With Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment

This study explores the neurofunctional correlates of the recognition of famous faces in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and healthy controls depending on the genetic risk factor, Apolipoprotein E (ApoE) ε4. An event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment was conducted while participants discriminated between famous and nonfamous faces. We compared the results of 32 healthy controls [17 ApoE ε4 carriers (E4+); 15 noncarriers (E4-)] with those of 30 patients with aMCI (16 E4+; 14 E4-). Despite comparable task performance, patients with aMCI, E4+ showed significantly less activation in a large cortical network including the left parahippocampal gyrus than patients with aMCI E4-. Furthermore, in the aMCI group, we found significantly reduced activation in the left parahippocampal gyrus and posterior cingulate cortex compared with the control group. Our results show that critical regions of the brain show functional decline associated with major risk factors, such as ApoE ε4 allele and neuropsychological signs of aMCI for the development of Alzheimer disease. Importantly, the ApoE genotype seems to influence cortical activation in patients with aMCI and to a lesser degree in healthy controls as well, who are without any cognitive symptoms.

When family looks strange and strangers look normal: A case of impaired face perception and recognition after stroke

We describe a patient (JS) with impaired recognition and distorted visual perception of faces after an ischemic stroke. Strikingly, JS reports that the faces of family members look distorted, while faces of other people look normal. After neurological and neuropsychological examination, we assessed response accuracy, response times, and skin conductance responses on a face recognition task in which photographs of close family members, celebrities and unfamiliar people were presented. JS' performance was compared to the performance of three healthy control participants. Results indicate that three aspects of face perception appear to be impaired in JS. First, she has impaired recognition of basic emotional expressions. Second, JS has poor recognition of familiar faces in general, but recognition of close family members is disproportionally impaired compared to faces of celebrities. Third, JS perceives faces of family members as distorted. In this paper we consider whether these impairments can be interpreted in terms of previously described disorders of face perception and recent models for face perception.

An event-related brain potential study of explicit face recognition

To determine the time course of face recognition and its links to face-sensitive event-related potential (ERP) components, ERPs elicited by faces of famous individuals and ERPs to non-famous control faces were compared in a task that required explicit judgements of facial identity. As expected, the face-selective N170 component was unaffected by the difference between famous and non-famous faces. In contrast, the occipito-temporal N250 component was linked to face recognition, as it was selectively triggered by famous faces. Importantly, this component was present for famous faces that were judged to be definitely known relative to famous faces that just appeared familiar, demonstrating that it is associated with the explicit identification of a particular face. The N250 is likely to reflect early perceptual stages of face recognition where long-term memory traces of familiar faces in ventral visual cortex are activated by matching on-line face representations. Famous faces also triggered a broadly distributed longer-latency positivity (P600f) that showed a left-hemisphere bias and was larger for definitely known faces, suggesting links between this component and name generation. These results show that successful face recognition is predicted by ERP components over face-specific visual areas that emerge within 230ms after stimulus onset.

Hamlet Without the Prince

Hamlet Without the Prince Christopher Fitz-Simon In all the vexations, triumphs and reversals of my dramatic career at St. Columba’s College—a century-old boys’ school inconveniently situated in the picturesque foothills of the Dublin Mountains—I never imagined that but a few years later I would find myself in the unique and privileged position of observing a fully staged performance of Hamlet in the same location, without its leading player. My kinsman Tyrone Guthrie, a relative of my mother’s, invited me and his niece Julia Butler to the opening night of his production of Hamlet at the Gate Theatre in June 1951. I was sixteen at the time, and living in the Guthrie home, Annaghmakerrig, County Monaghan, where my father was managing the estate as a retirement post. Ronald Ibbs, an English actor who settled in Ireland in the 1940s, played Hamlet. The production was announced as being “in modern dress,” which the Dublin theater columnists snidely attributed to a desire by the management to save money on costumes; in the event, it emerged that the residents of this twentieth-century Danish palace were sumptuously and nostalgically attired—as indeed was customary in all European courts at that time—in the outdated yet expensive habilments of previous generations. Julia and I were at separate boarding schools and an exeat for each of us was achieved following a formal exchange of letters between the director of the production and our respective headmaster and headmistress. Julia’s headmistress was so incensed at the idea of an Elizabethan play being presented in modern dress! that for a moment there was doubt that she would allow her pupil out for the evening; she relented when she learned that she would be introduced to the celebrated Tyrone Guthrie when he called for his niece at Knockrabo School. I had no difficulty in obtaining an exeat from my headmaster, the warden of St. Columba’s. I was at that time entirely stagestruck, but any night out in the city would have been a novelty and an excitement. At 6:30 pm I boarded the [End Page 9] single-decker bus that plied from Kilmashogue Bridge to the city center and arrived in time to recognize several famous faces from the world of stage, screen, and radio edging their way through the Gate’s cramped hallway. There was the truly glamorous Noelle Middleton, the earliest Irish announcer on BBC Television; the man with the face like a clenched fist must certainly be “K,” the soubriquet of Séamus Kelly, the Irish Times theater critic; the exceedingly corpulent gentleman and the lady who made up for it by being as thin as a pikestaff were the earl and countess of Longford who would have leased the Gate to Ronald Ibbs Productions for the run of the play. Then Tony Guthrie arrived with Julia and her friend Sarah Perry. It had been explained as being part of the exeat transaction that he should also deliver these young ladies back to their seat of educational incarceration following the three-hour performance. In the two intermissions, Tony led us across the street to a cafeteria named Rio for coffee and colored cakes—Julia whispered that he didn’t want to get embroiled with autograph seekers in the theater lobby. He asked our opinions of various actors and looked pleased when I said I thought Godfrey Quigley as Horatio was especially good. I had seen the Olivier motion picture of Hamlet that summer and we had read the play in school so I felt supremely knowledgeable. Tony didn’t enquire what we thought of the Ophelia, who was Mrs. Ronald Ibbs, and I sensed that he felt that had he done so I might be forced to say she seemed a little, well, heavy, for the part; had I been asked I would have suggested that she would have made “a fine Gertrude.” However, as Miss Coralie Carmichael was (I thought) a superb Gertrude—as regal and guilt-consumed as Eileen Herlie in the film—any bold suggestion of replacing her with Mrs. Ibbs might have spoiled the composure of the intermission coffee party. After the actors had...