Command performance

Nona Coxhead

Even as a five-year-old, little Lizzie Hobbs was being moulded to fulfil her cockney mother's thwarted dream of stardom and fame - the kind of fame that would some day lead to a Command Performance before the Queen. At her countless auditions, wearing make-up, frills, a huge red bow in her peroxided curls, it was obvious that she was the bizzare product of her mother's ambitions. But then she did have a remarkable voice, a star quality of her very own. And by her twenties, Lizzie had her own BBC show, success on Broadway and in Hollywood and all the glamorous trappings of a world-wide superstar. Yet her private life was a turmoil of failures and frustrations, of helpless imprisonment in her mother's dream. Lizzie had to escape-in the only way possible…