Born the child of vaudevillians, she was on stage by age three. With her casual sex appeal, distinctive cello voice, megawatt smile, luminous saucer eyes, and flawless timing, she came into widespread fame in Warner Bros. musicals and comedies of the 1930s, including Blonde Crazy, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade.Frequent co-star to James Cagney, Clark Gable, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart, friend to Judy Garland, Barbara Stanwyck, and Bette Davis, and wife of Dick Powell and Mike Todd, Joan Blondell was a true Hollywood insider. By the time of her death, she had made nearly 100 films in a career that spanned over fifty years.Privately, she was unerringly loving and generous, while her life was touched by financial, medical, and emotional upheavals. Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes is meticulously researched, expertly weaving the public and private, and features numerous interviews with family, friends, and colleagues.

    Critic Kenneth Tynan once declared, What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. Though many books have tried to unlock the mystique of the Swedish Sphinx by focusing primarily on her personal life, Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy is the first book to pay serious attention to what made her an icon - her twenty-four Hollywood films. As MGM's highest-paid star, Garbo had approval over story, co-star, director, and cinematographer, wielding power that few others could match - yet she was often at odds with the system that made her such a phenomenon. Lavishly illustrated with luminous portraits, film stills, and behind-the-scenes photographs - many previously unpublished - and drawing extensively on interviews, letters, and studio production files, the book chronicles Garbo's stellar, yet turbulent, career. One hundred years after her birth, Garbo's captivating legend endures.

    From their first meeting, where West held out a diamond-covered hand in greeting and lamented her interviewer's lack of jewels, to their farewell, where the star was still gamely offering advice on how to attract men, Mae West and Charlotte Chandler developed a warm rapport that glows on every page of this biography.Actress, playwright, screenwriter, and iconic sex symbol Mae West was born in New York in 1893. She created a scandal -- and a sensation -- on Broadway with her play Sex in 1926. Convicted of obscenity, she was sentenced to ten days in prison. She went to jail a convict and emerged a star. Her next play, Diamond Lil, was a smash, and she would play the role of Diamond Lil in different variations for virtually her entire film career.In Hollywood she played opposite George Raft, Cary Grant (in one of his first starring roles), and W. C. Fields, among others. She was the number one box-office attraction during the 1930s and saved Paramount Studios from bankruptcy. Her films included some notorious one-liners -- which she wrote herself -- that have become part of Hollywood lore: from "too much of a good thing can be wonderful" to "When I'm good, I'm very good. When I'm bad, I'm better." Her risque remarks got her banned from radio for a dozen years, but behind the clever quips was Mae's deep desire, decades before the word "feminism" was in the news, to see women treated equally with men. She saw through the double standard of the time that permitted men to do things that women would be ruined for doing.Her cause was sexual equality, and she was shrewd enough to know that it was perhaps the ultimate battleground, the most difficult cause of all. In addition to her extensive interviews of Mae West, Chandler also spoke with actors and directors who worked with and knew the star, the man with whom she lived for the last twenty-seven years of her life, as well as her closest assistant at the end of her life. Their comments and insights enrich this fascinating book. "She Always Knew How" captures the voice and spirit of this unique actress as no other biography ever has.

    From his early days as a taxi dancer in New York City to his near apotheosis as the ultimate Hollywood heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino (often to his distress) occupied a space squarely at the center of controversy. In this thoughtful retelling of Valentino' s short and tragic life–the first fully documented biography of the star–Emily W. Leider looks at the Great Lover' s life and legacy, and explores the events and issues that made him emblematic of the Jazz Age. Valentino's androgynous sexuality was a lightning rod for fiery and contradictory impulses that ran the gamut from swooning adoration to lashing resentment. He was reviled in the press for being too feminine for a man; yet he also brought to the screen the alluring, savage lover who embodied women's darker, forbidden sexual fantasies.In tandem, Leider explores notions of the outsider in American culture as represented by Valentino's experience as an immigrant who became a celebrity. As the silver screen's first dark-skinned romantic hero, Valentino helped to redefine and broaden American masculine ideals, ultimately coming to represent a graceful masculinity that trumped the deeply ingrained status quo of how a man could look and act.

    In 1917, a fifteen-year-old Bankhead boldly left her established Alabama political family and fled to New York City to sate her relentless need for attention and become a star. Five years later, she crossed the Atlantic, immediately taking her place as a fixture in British society and the most popular actress in London's West End. By the time she returned to America in the 1930s, she was infamous for throwing marathon parties, bedding her favorite costars, and neglecting to keep her escapades a secret from the press. At times, her notoriety distracted her audience from her formidable talent and achievements on stage and dampened the critical re-sponse to her work. As Bankhead herself put it, "they like me to 'Tallulah,' you know -- dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts." Still, her reputation as a wild, witty, over-the-top leading lady persisted until the end of her life at the age of sixty-six.From her friendships with such entertainment luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Estelle Winwood, Billie Holiday, Noël Coward, and Marlene Dietrich, to the intimate details of her family relationships and her string of doomed romances, Joel Lobenthal has captured the private essence of the most public star during theater's golden age. Larger-than-life as she was, friends saw through Bankhead's veneer of humor and high times to the heart of a woman who often felt second-best in her father's eyes, who longed for the children she was unableto bear, and who forced herself into the spotlight to hide her deep-seated insecurities.Drawn from scores of exclusive interviews, as well as previously untapped information from Scotland Yard and the FBI, this is the essential biography of Tallulah Bankhead. Having spent twenty-five years researching Bankhead's life, Joel Lobenthal tells her unadulterated story, as told to him by her closest friends, enemies, lovers, and employees. Several have broken decadelong silences; many have given Lobenthal their final interviews. The result is the story of a woman more complex, more shocking, and yet more nuanced than her notorious legend suggests.

    Illustrated.

    Her childhood is still there to see in "Miracle on 34th Street. "Her adolescence in "Rebel Without a Cause. "Her coming of age? Still playing in "Splendor in the Grass "and "West Side Story" and countless other hit movies. From the moment Natalie Wood made her debut in 1946, playing Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles's ward in "Tomorrow Is Forever" at the age of seven, to her shocking, untimely death in 1981, the decades of her life are marked by movies that-for their moments-summed up America's dreams. Now the acclaimed novelist, biographer, critic and screenwriter Gavin Lambert, whose twenty-year friendship with Natalie Wood began when she wanted to star in the movie adaptation of his novel "Inside Daisy Clover," tells her extraordinary story. He writes about her parents, uncovering secrets that Natalie either didn't know or kept hidden from those closest to her. Here is the young Natalie, from her years as a child actress at the mercy of a driven, controlling stage mother ("Make Mr. Pichel love you," she whispered to the five-year-old Natalie before depositing her unexpectedly on the director's lap), to her awkward adolescence when, suddenly too old for kiddie roles, she was shunted aside, just another freshman at Van Nuys High. Lambert shows us the glamorous movie star in her twenties--"All the Fine Young Cannibals, Gypsy" and" Love with the Proper Stranger," He writes about her marriages, her divorces, her love affairs, her suicide attempt at twenty-six, the birth of her children, her friendships, her struggles as an actress and her tragic death by drowning (she was always terrified of water) at forty-three. For the first time, everyonewho knew Natalie Wood speaks freely-including her husbands Robert Wagner and Richard Gregson, famously private people like Warren Beatty, intimate friends such as playwright Mart Crowley, directors Robert Mulligan and Paul Mazursky, and Leslie Caron, each of whom told the author stories about this remarkable woman who was both life-loving and filled with despair. What we couldn't know-have never been told before-Lambert perceptively uncovers. His book provides the richest portrait we have had of Natalie Wood.

    Miss Crawford rose from being a telephone operator in Kansas City to glamour, glitter, romance and ultimate stardom.

    Louise Brooks left Wichita, Kansas, for New York City at age fifteen and lived the kind of life of which legends are made. From her beginnings as a dancer to her years in Hollywood, Berlin, and beyond, she was hailed and reviled as a new type of woman: independent, intellectually daring, and sexually free. In this widely acclaimed, first and only comprehensive biography, Barry Paris traces Brooks's trajectory from her childhood through her fall into obscurity and subsequent "resurrection" as a brilliant writer and enduring film icon.

    Born into the pleasant middle-class world of Kansas City, Missouri, in 1911, Harlow (nee Harlean Carpenter) was the daughter of a solid, if dull, dentist, whose wife had unfulfilled aspirations to a career in films. The family was hardly prepared for what came next. Jean became a bride at sixteen, was separated at eighteen, a film goddess at twenty, a wife again at twenty-one, and a widow within a few months of the wedding. Her husband, top MGM executive Paul Bern, committed suicide (it was widely and mistakenly believed) out of despair over impotence.Bern's suicide threatened to plunge Jean Harlow into a scandal that might have ended her career. But, driven by her irresistible sparkle, glamour, and sensuality, the young star's fortunes continued to skyrocket in unforgettable films like Red Dust, Dinner at Eight, Bombshell, Reckless, China Seas, and Libeled Lady as she appeared with the likes of Clark Gable, John and Lionel Barrymore, Mary Astor, Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, Spencer Tracy, and William Powell.She married a third time in 1933, was divorced a year later, only to become engaged to her sometime costar William Powell. Noting that the extremely well-paid Blonde Bombshell was perpetually on the ragged edge of bankruptcy, Powell hired a private detective to investigate Harlow's stepfather, Marino Bello, who - it turned out - had long been defrauding her. Despite this and the on-again, off-again engagement to Powell, Harlow seemed unstoppable. Then, in the midst of filming Saratoga in 1937, the twenty-six-year-old Platinum Girl succumbed to kidney failure.In this, the first biography of Harlow since Irving Shulman's sensationalistic and often inaccurate 1964 book, Eve Golden explores the woman behind the legends and the scandals. The world evoked here is at once glamorous, nostalgic, poignant, and tragic. Yet, in its way, the brief life of Jean Harlow is a story of success, of a triumphal struggle with Hollywood and the consequences of rapid fame. Golden's deeply researched narrative is lavishly illustrated with rare film stills, posters, and exclusive photographs from family archives. Harlow emerges not as an oversexed mannequin, but as a vulnerable, hard-working, and tremendously likable woman who molded herself into a remarkable actress. This is an important book about one of Hollywood's most extraordinary personalities.

    She was a leading film personality for more than fifty years, from her beginnings as a dancer in silent films of the 1920s, to her portrayals of working-class shop girls in the Depression thirties, to her Oscar-winning performances in classic films such as Mildred Pierce . Crawford's legacy has become somewhat tarnished in the wake of her daughter Christina's memoir, Mommie Dearest, which tu

    Smith Goes to Washington, Shane, and other classic films was, as the subtitle aptly puts it, "the actress nobody knew." Jean Arthur (1900-91) kept her personal life private, disdained the Hollywood publicity machine, and was called "difficult" because of her perfectionism and remoteness from costars on the movie set. John Oller, a lawyer, tracked down kinsfolk and friends never before interviewed to capture the elusive personality of a free spirit best embodied in her favorite role, Peter Pan. Arthur herself might have appreciated his warm, respectful portrait."...[An] insightful, painstakingly researched analysis of Arthur's life and career raises the curtain on the complex, conflicted person behind the screen persona...Captures the special shine of a unique star who turned out to be a genuine eccentric." -Chicago Tribune

    She made her film debut with Gene Kelly in the classic MGM musical "An American in Paris," created one of the most enduring roles in American musicals as "Gigi," danced with Fred Astaire in "Daddy Long Legs," and starred with Cary Grant in "Father Goose." In "Thank Heaven" (an homage to ?Thank Heaven for Little Girls, ? the song Maurice Chevalier sings about her in "Gigi") Caron shares her remarkable life story. From her childhood with her American mother and French father in occupied France to her early success as a young ballerina; to her meeting Gene Kelly and her years in Hollywood; to her love affairs (including a very funny and very public one with Warren Beatty) and motherhood; to her alcoholism and depression; and finally her recovery and continuing success in film and television, Caron offers an illuminating account of her career. "Thank Heaven" is filled with reminiscences of MGM at the end of its Golden Era, of the great stars with whom Caron worked, and of her own struggles as an actress. This is a sharp, unsentimental, and moving memoir for everyone who loves classic American movies.

    The true origins of her birth, her fairy-tale discovery in Hollywood, and her career struggles at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are revealed for the first time. Garson combined an everywoman quality with grace, charm, and refinement. She won the Academy Award in 1941 for her role in Mrs. Miniver, and for the next decade she reigned as the queen of MGM. Co-star Christopher Plummer remem

    America's sweetheart. But behind the dazzle was a young woman thrown in the star making machine and hoping for personal happiness.