She was very quiet about her own involvement at this time, not wishing her Christian mother to know. In 1957 she left to found her own coven.After her mother’s death in 1964, Valiente became more open about what she was. In her home town of Brighton she was a well-known figure, and often gave interviews to the Evening Argus defending the Craft against ill-informed attacks. But from the 1960s the explosive growth of Wicca made her famous around the world. This led to a backlash, with accusations that she was guilty of, as it were, religious forgery.In response she collaborated with Janet and Stewart Farrax to produce The Witches Bible Compleat (part i 1981, part ii 1984), in which she carefully explained which ritual texts she had written and which she had not. She wrote several other books including An ABC of Witchcraft (1973), Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978) and The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989).Gardner had claimed that his 1939 initiation had been given by “Old Dorothy” Clutterbuck, a wealthy Hampshire woman. In 1980 an American professor alleged that no such person had ever existed.

Valiente investigated and eventually proved, not only that she had been real, but that in 1939 Clutterbuck and Gerald Gardner had lived in the same village.In later life, as the Witchcraft and Pagan revival became a mass movement, she had the strange experience of finding material which she had originally composed for a select few becoming common property. In 1985, whilst browsing amongst stalls at a “Psychics’ and Mystics’ Fayre”, she came across a pile of printed sheets with the title “The Charge of the Goddess”. Seeing her interest, the stallholder started to explain that it was a form of Witches’ credo. She was obliged to say, “I know, I’m Doreen Valiente; I helped to write it.”In 1997 Doreen Valiente spoke to more than a thousand people at the Pagan Federation Conference. As she remarked, when she had first met Gerald Gardner, 45 years previously, she could never have dreamt that one day she would be up in front of so many people.

But the general feeling amongst the audience was that she had done more than anyone else alive to revive the Craft, and they gave her a standing ovation.She left no close relatives, and her principal beneficiary will be the Centre for Pagan Studies, in Surrey.Doreen Dominy, witch: born London January 1922; married 1944 Casimiro Valiente (died 1972); died Brighton, East Sussex 1 September 1999.. BROADCASTERS WHO are freelance thrive (or don’t, on the whole, when dealing with the BBC) on rumour, and about 18 months ago there was a story going round that all BBC producers had received a directive from on high to the effect that, unless they seriously intended to pursue a project with a contributor, they should on no account enter into any sort of correspondence with them. It also keeps track of which sub-menu is being displayed in the variable oldDom to turn off the previously selected menu.The CSSNext comes the Cascading Style sheets to set up the placement and appearance of the menu bar and the sub-menus..menu { font: .8pc helvetica, arial, sans-serif; background-color: #333333; padding: 3px; width: 300px; border: solid 1px white; position: relative; z-index: 20; }.subMenu { font: .8pc/1.3pc helvetica, arial, sans-serif; background- color: #333333; padding: 3px; border: solid 1px white; position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 8px; width: 100px; visibility: hidden; z-index: 10; }Like the JavaScript, the above styles go in the of the document. The idea behind it was, presumably, that any communication, however brief, might encourage the would-be broadcaster to take heart.
I assumed that the rumour had been put about by an aspiring contributor who was feeling particularly victimised, and had become so fed up at never getting a reply to his letters, and so frustrated that the nearest he came to a one-to-one with a producer was listening to his apologetic tones on the voice-mail, that he had concluded that a policy of wholesale omerta was the only possible explanation.Now that a “senior presenter” at the BBC has revealed that his calls are never returned and that it’s hardly surprising that people leave, I realise that this was no mere vengeful canard. This ban on bonhomie and basic good manners extended, so the word went, to never, under any circumstances, acknowledging a script, outline, proposal, letter, note or telephone call. It was not a great Christmas release…”However, she had to raise her eyebrows at the US marketing campaign “The poster was just two head shots. I looked at it and said, `Where’s the wheelchair?’”Dressed in a purple halter-neck top and black jeans – not a bonnet or a bustle in sight – Bonham Carter overturns many preconceptions.

For instance, and this may come as a surprise in such a narcissistic business, she doesn’t take herself too seriously. “A lot of the time when you’re filming, you think, `How absurd, who are we trying to kid?’ The whole thing is total artifice.”She feels less able to be flippant about her treatment by the press; Bonham Carter bears the scars of many a journalistic savaging. She jokes sarcastically that she and the press have such a good relationship that “we’ll have several children together. The problem is that, to your face, journalists are often people you think you can trust. Then, lo and behold, you read their articles and think, `what an idiot I was Come on, develop a bit of misanthropy’ You’d think I’d have learnt that by now.”I’m not immune You do implode with anger and get hurt.

The thing is, actors are in the business of being vulnerable We’re the last people the media should be let loose on. We’re super-sensitive, and yet the Rottweilers are unleashed on us.”Bonham Carter is likely to upset expectations again in her next film, The Fight Club. In David Fincher’s (Se7en) controversial contemporary picture about two friends who have to prove themselves through bare-knuckle fighting, she plays the girlfriend of both Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. (“I lucked out there,” she smiles.) After a screening at the Venice Film Festival last week, one critic commented that Bonham Carter makes “her biggest leap yet away from her familiar roles in period costume dramas.”Nevertheless, she won’t entirely rule out a return to breath-constricting garments. “I’ll get into a corset again if the writing is good,” she admits “There is such a paucity of good writing.