Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1965
Director
Cast
visit London
London: Flights: Heathrow Airport; Gatwick Airport
Warrington Hotel, 93 Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, London W9 (tube: Maida Vale or Warwick Avenue, Bakerloo Line)
Bunny Lake Is Missing location: Laurence Olivier comforts Carol Lynley: Warrington Hotel, Maida Vale, London W9
Otto Preminger’s weird black comedy-mystery, with a wonderful cast of eccentrics, filmed on location around London. Plans for a remake with Reese Witherspoon, fell through when she backed out of the project, but it seems to going ahead again with Joe Carnahan directing.
Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) tries to track down the missing – but possibly imaginary – daughter Bunny of possibly batty Ann Lake (Carol Lynley).
Lynley’s flat, where Noel Coward is the grossly lubricious landlord, was just off Trafalgar Square but has since been demolished.
Bunny Lake Is Missing location: the ‘Little People’s Garden School’: Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, London NW3
‘The Little People’s Garden School’, from which Bunny disappears, is still there, however. It’s South Hampstead High School, 5 Netherhall Gardens, near Finchley Road, Hampstead, NW3.
Bunny Lake Is Missing location: Laurence Olivier comforts Carol Lynley: Warrington Hotel, Maida Vale, London W9
The glorious art nouveau pub, to which Newhouse takes the distraught Ann for a drink, is the remarkable Warrington Hotel, 93 Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale (tube: Maida Vale, Bakerloo Line). Overblown crimson and gilt, the Warrington could be the anteroom of a Parisian bordello, and rumours persist that, indeed, you could once have been ‘entertained’ in its private rooms. Certainly, music hall star Marie Lloyd enjoyed quaffing Champers in the theatrical ambience.
The Warrington’s upstairs dining room has recently been renovated to house Gordon Ramsay’s new restaurant. The story goes that the famously volatile TV chef was in the area to view the closed Crocker’s Folly (a magnificent pub, itself a film location for Warren Beatty’s Reds and Oliver Parker’s The Importance of Being Earnest), stopped by the Warrington for a drink, and promptly bought that instead.
Bunny Lake Is Missing location: the grand Hampstead home: Cannon Hall, Cannon Place, Hampstead, London NW3
Don’t be fooled by the ‘Frognal End, NW3’ street signs – there’s no such place. The mansion belonging to Ann’s brother, Stephen (2001’s astronaut Keir Dullea), where the mystery is finally unravelled, is Cannon Hall, 14 Cannon Place at Squire’s Mount tucked away off East Heath Road, NW3, just off Hampstead Heath, once the home of actor-manager Gerald du Maurier – father of Daphne, author of Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, The Birds and Don’t Look Now (tube: Hampstead, Northern Line).
