First TIFF2012 celebrity sighting: Conrad Black

TIFF has not even started and already there are sightings of celebrity types around Toronto.

This very morning, for example, Conrad Black, the author of  Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, was in the audience of Hyde Park on the Hudson, a movie that stars Bill Murray as FDR.

After the press screening, which TIFF organizes for journalists and film critics covering the festival, and after I introduced myself as being a writer at Maclean’s, Black asked me what I thought of the film. I told him and then preceded with an anecdote: “I was hoping that a story my mother always tells about the first time the Queen Mum ever ate a hot dog—she came at it like one would eat a sandwich or a hamburger, rather than the more pedestrian approach of eating a hot dog straight on—would be portrayed in the film.”

Then Black told me an anecdote of his own about a mother, the Queen Mother to be precise. She once told him that one of the most harrowing moments leading up to the Second World War took place when she rode in the back of President Roosevelt’s car, just before the picnic at Hyde Park. The scene is portrayed in the film exactly as described to Black by the Queen Mum.

We’ll watch for his review in the National Post.