Only her daughter Helena (a love child born to Natalie and the Las Vegas singer Peter Tarkovsky) stayed in the public eye, appearing at the New Cannes Festival to attend the premier of Crude Laverne’s successful come-back movie OLDER WOMAN (Medina Films) – as if, in the fullness of time, and like the great feuds of world geo-politics and ideology, even the old movie-star feuds had to be settled.

*

After 1978, as is well known, Natalie Gorgeous made only one appearance on film, shunning even an invitation from Bakunin to join him in the Far East where the Oscar committee were holding a small dinner in Gorgeous’ honour. Natalie had deserted the celluloid stage, it seemed at least, forever.

It was left to Julian Schroeder, a young German film-maker fresh out of film school, to capture Natalie Gorgeous’ swan-song. Conceived as a final examination-project and made on a minimal budget his LAST TRAIN TO GORGEOUS (Zoetrope 1996) was an epic journey across re-constructing Europe by train. Lasting 7 hours and fifteen minutes in its complete version the film (shot on a mixture of super-8 and low-band video) is both a homily to Natalie and the films she has made and a vision of the new world emerging from the old, an essay on the possibilities of life and love in the 1990’s. Visiting the locations for many of her most famous performances LAST TRAIN TO GORGEOUS also takes in some of the most extraordinary scenes of life in post-nuclear Europe, including documentary footage from the work-camps in Belgrade, the shelters in Coventry and Versailles and the vast unspeakable wreckage of Euro-Disney. With its text by the young Tim Etchells and soundtrack by Laibach in collaboration with the ageing US Composer William Shatner LAST TRAIN TO GORGEOUS is a memorable enough experience for anyone and yet to mention these things at all is to lessen our focus on the film’s final and absolutely focal moments.

Arriving in Sarajevo the film-maker Julian Schroeder seeks out the house of Natalie Gorgeous. It is the moment for which we have been waiting (implicitly and explicitly) the whole seven hours of the film, and it will not disappoint us, however brief this final encounter may be.

Schroeder walks up a frost-bitten and overgrown path, through a series of rusted iron gates, past statues dark with loss and lichen – weeping angels, twisted gargoyles of the late twentieth century. He comes to a door, a heavy wooden door to a house which seems part fairy tale cottage and part fairy tale castle (all this merely glimpsed on the walk to the porch) and the camera is just behind him, carried on the shoulders of his assistant Steve Rogers who has been with Schroeder on the whole trip.