{"id":618853,"date":"2026-09-17T11:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T11:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/618853\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T11:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T11:40:10","slug":"he-wanted-to-maintain-an-illusion-of-agelessness-the-secret-life-of-outrageous-showman-liberace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/618853\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;He wanted to maintain an illusion of agelessness&#8217;: The secret life of outrageous showman Liberace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"Paragraph-styles__ParagraphStyled-sc-ffb5f5ba-0 fqhmpl\">The actor who portrays Liberace in the play, revered British Shakespearean Simon Russell Beale, tells the BBC that Liberace made a significant &#8220;gamble&#8221; by taking the case to court \u2013 had he lost, his career could have been ruined. But Beale also observes that the &#8220;specific lie that Liberace told&#8221; under oath, when he insisted that he was &#8220;against the practice [of homosexuality] because it offends convention and it offends society&#8221;, was &#8220;merely part of [his] continuum of lying&#8221; \u2013 or at least being evasive about \u2013 his sexuality. As it transpired, the court ruled in Liberace&#8217;s favour and awarded him \u00a38,000 in damages \u2013 the equivalent to \u00a3167,000 ($225,000) today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The actor who portrays Liberace in the play, revered British Shakespearean Simon Russell Beale, tells the BBC that&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618854,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-618853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}