Brief Encounter (1974 film) Brief Encounter (1974 film) Brief Encounter is a 1974 British-Italian television film starring Richard Burton and Sophia Loren, adapted from the play "Still Life" by Noël Coward. The plot of the film is about two strangers, both married to others, who meet in a railway station and find themselves in a brief but intense affair. The material was previously the basis for the David Lean film "Brief Encounter" (1945). Burton was cast at the last moment, after Robert Shaw dropped out. The film had its premiere on U.S. television on 12 November 1974 as part of the "Hallmark Hall of
Noël Coward the children's play "The Goldfish". In "Present Indicative", his first volume of memoirs, Coward wrote: The leading actor-manager Charles Hawtrey, whom the young Coward idolised and from whom he learned a great deal about the theatre, cast him in the children's play "Where the Rainbow Ends". Coward played in the piece in 1911 and 1912 at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End. In 1912 Coward also appeared at the Savoy Theatre in "An Autumn Idyll" (as a dancer in the ballet) and at the London Coliseum in "A Little Fowl Play", by Harold Owen, in which Hawtrey starred. Italia