1:08:02
is actually based on fact.
1:08:04
Some factions claim
it is a legitimate basis.
1:08:07
Certainly, the character of Christine Daae
1:08:09
was drawn from a real opera favourite
in Paris of the 1870s -
1:08:13
the Swedish singer Christine Nilsson.
1:08:15
As a 13-year-old, Nilsson
had been brought to the attention
1:08:19
of a singing teacher
named Madame Valerius,
1:08:22
who as Mamma Valerius was created
Christine's guardian in Leroux's novel.
1:08:26
Nilsson is a character in Edith Wharton's
novel The Age of Innocence,
1:08:30
and is portrayed
in Martin Scorsese's recent film,
1:08:33
singing Marguerite
in Gounod's Faust, of course.
1:08:37
Gaston Leroux was born in Paris in 1868.
1:08:40
He became a lawyer
in middle-class fashion,
1:08:43
but soon became a reporter
for the newspaper Le Matin,
1:08:46
covering a crime beat.
1:08:48
He witnessed
five executions by guillotine,
1:08:50
which made him adamantly opposed
to capital punishment.
1:08:53
His journalistic beat
took him around the world
1:08:56
to Russia, Asia, Africa and the Mideast.
1:08:59
He is said to have stood
in Mount Vesuvius during an eruption.
1:09:04
In 1901 his first novel was published.
1:09:07
In all he wrote 33 books, of which only
Phantom has become a standard today,
1:09:11
though The Mystery of the Yellow Room -
1:09:13
which introduced his detective hero
Joseph Rouletabille
1:09:17
in a seminal
locked-room murder mystery -
1:09:19
still enjoys a firm reputation
among armchair detectives.
1:09:23
Rouletabille, sort of
a Gallic Sherlock Holmes,
1:09:26
appeared in a total
of seven novels by Leroux.
1:09:29
Yellow Room has been filmed five times.
1:09:31
Balaoo, published
the year after Phantom in 1911,
1:09:35
features Dr Coriolis
turning an ape into a semi-human.
1:09:38
Complications ensue when his creature
falls in love with his daughter, Madeleine.
1:09:43
Yet another take
on the Beauty and the Beast fable.
1:09:46
In a 1913 French motion picture,
1:09:48
Madeleine was portrayed
by Madeleine Grandjean,
1:09:52
believed to be Leroux's daughter,
who was an actress named Madeleine.
1:09:56
In America, Balaoo was the basis for the
lost Fox silent horror movie The Wizard,