The Last of Sheila (1973) on Netflix
Producer Clinton Greene gathers six acquaintances for a week aboard his yacht, a year after his wife Sheila died in a hit-and-run. Every guest receives a secret to keep hidden.
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- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.2/1010,387 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
The gossip columnist Sheila Greene is struck and killed by a car one night as she walks home from a party. A year later her husband Clinton Greene, a movie producer, gathers six acquaintances for a week aboard his yacht in the Mediterranean: the actress Alice Wood and her manager husband Anthony, the talent agent Christine, the screenwriter Tom Parkman with his wife Lee, and the director Philip Dexter. All of them except Lee were at Clinton's house on the night Sheila died. Clinton likes elaborate parlor games, and he announces one for the trip, the Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game. Each guest is handed an index card bearing a secret to keep hidden, and each port brings a clue that sends them ashore hunting proof of who holds which secret.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Last of Sheila (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sue Mengers, the real talent agent Dyan Cannon's character Christine was based on, turned down the part when Herbert Ross offered it, saying too many of her own clients were out of work. She then pitched her client Cannon for the role instead.
- Raquel Welch announced she was suing director Herbert Ross for assault and battery over an incident in her dressing room, and said she fled to London during the shoot "to escape physical harm". She later returned to Nice for her final scenes, with a bodyguard.
- The shoot went badly: according to Dyan Cannon, the first cameraman was fired and the yacht sank, forcing early scenes to be reshot.
- The film grew out of elaborate real-life scavenger hunts that Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins staged in Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s for show-business friends including Lee Remick and George Segal. Director Herb Ross and his wife Nora Kaye joined in.
- Rian Johnson cited The Last of Sheila as an inspiration for his 2019 film Knives Out and its 2022 sequel Glass Onion, which includes Stephen Sondheim's last film appearance.
- Raquel Welch said her starlet and Ian McShane's manager-husband were based on Ann-Margret and Roger Smith, but Stephen Sondheim said the pair were actually based on Welch and her then-husband Patrick Curtis.
- Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim won the 1974 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture from the Mystery Writers of America for the screenplay. They tried to collaborate two more times, on The Chorus Girl Murder Case and Crime and Variations, but neither project was made.
