Gutsy, vulnerable--and doomed--Barbara Payton blazed across the motion picture stratosphere in record-time, only to collapse in a catastrophic free-fall from which she would never recover.

    In private, she was as reserved and refined as her characters were bold and bawdy. Almost a Method actor in her approach, she took her work seriously. When crew members and audiences laughed, she asked why--as if they were laughing at her--and all her life she remained unsure of her gifts.William V. Madison examines Kahn's film career, including not only her triumphs with Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich, but also her overlooked performances in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother and Judy Berlin, her final film. Her work in television--notably her sitcoms--also comes into focus. New York theater showered her with accolades, but also with remarkably bad luck, culminating in a disastrous outing in On the Twentieth Century that wrecked her reputation on Broadway. Only with her Tony-winning performance in The Sisters Rosensweig, fifteen years later, did Kahn regain her standing.Drawing on new interviews with family, friends, and such colleagues as Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett, Gene Wilder, Harold Prince, and Eileen Brennan, as well as archival press and private writings, Madison uncovers Kahn's lonely childhood and her struggles as a single woman working to provide for her erratic mother. Above all, Madison reveals the paramount importance of music in Kahn's life. A talented singer, she entertained offers for operatic engagements long after she was an established Hollywood star, and she treated each script as a score. As Kahn told one friend, her ambition was "to be the music."

    The result is a picture which both supports and contradicts the charming vagabond persona depicted in Niven’s own bestselling memoirs.While millions throughout his life were enchanted by Niven’s happy-go-lucky charisma and world-class anecdotage, he was in many respects a private figure, haunted by a fear of failure, and a victim of several key tragedies in his personal life. Morley’s biography is a warm, appreciative but perceptive account which captures both sides of one of Hollywood’s most enduringly lovable figures.‘A compassionate account that goes past the blithe persona … yet, there is much humor—the actor’s and his biographer’s—in this notable book’ Publishers Weekly‘Head and shoulders above the average showbiz biography … He understands many of Niven’s deeper feelings’ John Mortimer, Sunday Times‘A well-told story … the darker side as well as the mask of a complex and perhaps desperate character. He was a life-enhancer off-screen as well as on’ The Times‘Shrewd and pleasing; shows how dark Niven’s moon could be’ Alexander Walker, Evening Standard

    James Dean: Little Boy Lost, by Hyams, Joe with Jay Hyams

    The scripts being sent his way were worse and worse. When one script really disappointed, he called the producer to complain about the part. The producer said, "No, no, we don't want you for the lover, we want you for the father." Salvation came in the unlikely form of his old friend Jack Nicholson, who convinced him to give acting one more shot. What followed was not only an incredible personal transformation but also one of the most radical comebacks in film history. Learning to accept his new role both on camera and in his own life, Caine went on to win his second Oscar, be knighted by the queen, and deliver some of his best performances to date. Now he shares the spectacular story of his life, from his humble upbringing in London's poverty-stricken Elephant and Castle, his military service, touching marriage and family life, and lively adventures with friends, to legendary meetings with fellow stars, forays as a restaurateur, and hilarious off-screen encounters from his glittering five-decade career. Caine brings his gift for storytelling and his insider's view to a tale that is funny, warm, and deeply honest.

    Louis. With a theater degree in hand, she was certain everything would fall easily into place. Never mind that she didn’t know a single person in the entertainment industry. She was determined, she was confident, she was ready to work hard. So, what could go wrong?Uh, basically everything. It would be eight long years before she landed her Emmy-nominated role of Pam Beesley on The Office—nearly a decade of failure, struggle, rejection and doubt. The path to professional acting was more competitive than she’d ever imagined. Headshots, agents, classes, auditions . . . there was a lot to learn. And with so many obstacles to navigate, it wasn’t always easy to fight off discouragement. If only she’d had a handbook for the struggling actor. Or, better yet, someone to show her the way—an established actor who could manage her expectations, educate her about the business, and reassure her in those moments of despair.Jenna Fischer wants to be that person for you. With candor and wit, Fischer lays out what it takes to establish yourself in the profession. Based on her own memorable and hilarious experiences, she provides invaluable advice on how to get the right head shot, what to look for in representation, and the importance of getting out there and just doing something. She also provides helpful hints on how to be gutsy and take risks, the tricks to good auditioning and callbacks, and how not to fall for certain scams. (Auditions in a guy’s apartment are probably not legit—or at least not for the kind of part you’re looking for!)Fischer’s inspiring guidance will make you feel like you have a trusted friend who’s made the journey and has now returned to walk beside you, pointing out the pitfalls as you blaze your own path toward the life of a professional actor.

    Abrams, Director of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"The odds of me ever writing a book were approximately... Oh, never mind. My golden companion worries about such things - I don't. I have indeed now written a book - telling my story, in my voice, not his - recognising that our voices and our stories are inextricably intertwined." When Star Wars burst on to the big screen in 1977, an unfailingly polite golden droid called C-3PO captured imaginations around the globe. But C-3PO wasn't an amazing display of animatronics with a unique and unforgettable voiceover. Inside the metal costume was an actor named Anthony Daniels.In this deeply personal memoir, Anthony Daniels recounts his experiences of the epic cinematic adventure that has influenced pop culture for more than 40 years. For the very first time, he candidly describes his most intimate memories as the only actor to appear in every Star Wars film - from his first meeting with George Lucas to the final, emotional days on the set of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.With a foreword by J.J. Abrams and never-before-seen photography, this book is a nostalgic look back at the Skywalker saga as it comes to a close. I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story reveals Anthony Daniels' vulnerability, how he established his role and what he accomplished, and takes readers on a journey that just happens to start in a galaxy far, far away.

    It also shed light on the guarded world of Hollywood and stripped away the façade of Christina's relentless, alcoholic abuser: her adoptive mother, movie star Joan Crawford. Christina was a young girl shown off to the world as a fortunate little princess. But at home, her lonely, controlling, even ruthless mother made her life a nightmare. A fierce battle of wills, their relationship could be characterized as an ultimately successful, for Christina, struggle for independence. She endured and survived, becoming the voice of so many other victims who suffered in silence, and giving them the courage to forge a productive life out of chaos.

    Niv, according to his friends, was much the same off-screen. Both men and women were enchanted by his charisma, humour and joie-de-vivre. In addition to winning an Oscar for Separate Tables (1958), Niven was a polished writer, and published two volumes of lighthearted autobiography: THE MOON'S A BALLOON (1972) and BRING ON THE EMPTY HORSES (1975). Yet behind those twinkling eyes, Niv's life was punctuated by tragedy and he was often deeply unhappy. From the death of his father when Niven was five, to his mother's neglect and the stepfather he loathed, through to the death of his beloved first wife and his volatile and disturbing marriage to his second wife, Hjordis, tragedy and hardship were never far away. Graham Lord, using new material from Niven's private papers, manuscripts, unpublished stories and correspondence, has written a fresh, revealing, funny and poignant portrait of a brave and brilliant man. Fully authorised by Niven's family and drawing from dozens of interviews with stars, from Lauren Bacall to Roger Moore and Sir John Mills, NIV: the Authorised Biography of David Niven is a fitting tribute to one of Hollywood's greatest heroes.

    Ranked by the American Film Institute as one of the top 100 Greatest Love Stories and by the Writers Guild of America as one of the top 100 screenplays of all time, The Princess Bride will continue to resonate with audiences for years to come.Cary Elwes was inspired to share his memories and give fans an unprecedented look into the creation of the film while participating in the twenty-fifth anniversary cast reunion. In As You Wish he has created an enchanting experience; in addition to never-before seen photos and interviews with his fellow cast mates, there are plenty of set secrets, backstage stories, and answers to lingering questions about off-screen romances that have plagued fans for years!With a foreword by Rob Reiner and a limited edition original poster by acclaimed artist Shepard Fairey, As You Wish is a must-have for all fans of this beloved film.

    Ginger is at once a heartwarming personal memoir and an inside look at the heyday of Hollywood. More than 30 photographs.

    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.

    But she has never told the story of her life before fame. Until now.In Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, Julie takes her readers on a warm, moving, and often humorous journey from a difficult upbringing in war-torn Britain to the brink of international stardom in America. Her memoir begins in 1935, when Julie was born to an aspiring vaudevillian mother and a teacher father, and takes readers to 1962, when Walt Disney himself saw her on Broadway and cast her as the world's most famous nanny.Along the way, she weathered the London Blitz of World War II; her parents' painful divorce; her mother's turbulent second marriage to Canadian tenor Ted Andrews, and a childhood spent on radio, in music halls, and giving concert performances all over England. Julie's professional career began at the age of twelve, and in 1948 she became the youngest solo performer ever to participate in a Royal Command Performance before the Queen. When only eighteen, she left home for the United States to make her Broadway debut in The Boy Friend, and thus began her meteoric rise to stardom.Home is filled with numerous anecdotes, including stories of performing in My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison on Broadway and in the West End, and in Camelot with Richard Burton on Broadway; her first marriage to famed set and costume designer Tony Walton, culminating with the birth of their daughter, Emma; and the call from Hollywood and what lay beyond.Julie Andrews' career has flourished over seven decades. From her legendary Broadway performances, to her roles in such iconic films as The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Hawaii, 10, and The Princess Diaries, to her award-winning television appearances, multiple album releases, concert tours, international humanitarian work, best-selling children's books, and championship of literacy, Julie's influence spans generations. Today, she lives with her husband of thirty-eight years, the acclaimed writer/director Blake Edwards; they have five children and seven grandchildren.

    Now, Victoria Wilson gives us the first full-scale life of Barbara Stanwyck, whose astonishing career in movies (eighty-eight in all) spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound, and lasted in television from its infancy in the 1950s through the 1980s—a book that delves deeply into her rich, complex life and explores her extraordinary range of motion pictures, many of them iconic. Here is her work, her world, her Hollywood. We see the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of old New England stock . . . her years in New York as a dancer and Broadway star . . . her fraught mar­riage to Frank Fay, Broadway genius, who influenced a generation of actors and comedians (among them, Jack Benny and Stanwyck herself ) . . . the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with the “unfunny” Marx brother, Zeppo, crucial in shaping the direction of her work, and who, together with his wife, formed a trio that created one of the finest horse-breeding farms in the west; her fairy-tale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, America’s most sought-after— and beautiful—male star. Here is the shaping of her career with many of Hol­lywood’s most important directors: among them, Frank Capra, “Wild Bill” William Wellman (“When you get beauty and brains together,” he said, “there’s no stopping the lucky girl who possesses them. The best example I can think of is Barbara”), King Vidor, Cecil B. De Mille, and Preston Sturges, all set against the times—the Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the unions, the advent of World War II—and a fast-changing, coming-of-age motion picture industry. And here is Stanwyck’s evolution as an actress in the pictures she made from 1929 through the summer of 1940, where Volume One ends—from her first starring movie, The Locked Door (“An all-time low,” she said. “By then I was certain that Hollywood and I had nothing in common”); and Ladies of Leisure, the first of her six-picture collaboration with Frank Capra (“He sensed things that you were trying to keep hidden from people. He knew. He just knew”), to the scorching Baby Face, and the height of her screen perfection, beginning with Stella Dallas (“I was scared to death all the time we were making the pic­ture”), from Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy and the epic Union Pacific to the first of her collaborations with Preston Sturges, who wrote Remember the Night, in which she starred. And at the heart of the book, Stanwyck herself—her strengths, her fears, her frailties, her losses and desires; how she made use of the darkness in her soul in her work and kept it at bay in her private life, and finally, her transformation from shunned outsider to one of Holly­wood’s—and America’s—most revered screen actresses. Writing with the full cooperation of Stanwyck’s family and friends, and drawing on more than two hundred interviews with actors, directors, cameramen, screen­writers, costume designers, et al., as well as making use of letters, journals, and private papers, Victoria Wilson has brought this complex artist brilliantly alive. Her book is a revelation of the actor’s life and work.Praise:“Wilson’s book is indeed a monument of research. . . . A Life of Barbara Stanwyck will unquestionably remain the biography of record; beyond Wilson’s excavation of so much that would otherwise have been lost, her book has a deep sensitivity to the seriousness and subtlety of Stanwyck’s craft. This is the biography not of a Hollywood phenomenon but of a serious artist.”(Geoffrey O'Brien BookForum)"Victoria Wilson's biography of Barbara Stanwyck is monumental in every sense. It is a sweeping and authoritative work, written with verve and with great empathy and relish for her subject. The author loves Barbara Stanwyck, but she is also shrewd about the actress's complexity and human limitations. Wilson knows all the facts, but she is never overwhelmed by them, and, throughout, she is smart about the films and about the history and business of Hollywood in the Golden Age. Not the least of her achievement is leaving the reader eager to read volume two."(Foster Hirsch, author of The Dark Side of the Cinema; A Method to Their Madness and)"I was blown away, absorbed, riveted. What great smooth style, what brilliance, what depth. I collect celebrity biographies and this one is transcendent. This is huge and wonderful and rich. What an achievement!"(Anne Rice)“What you have done is extraordinary. It is an amazing book, brilliantly written, enhancing the whole life, Barbara’s life, happenings around her—people of the industry, people in the theater and in politics. The way you have shown her life to include other situations, all that you interject . . . it makes her life, to me, more historically important. My father fell in love with Barbara after he saw her in Ladies of Leisure. He loved to go to the opera and to the movies and the only star he talked about was Barbara Stanwyck. He used to say she was an incredible actress. And she was. She really was. You have brought her wonderful career magnificently to life, and as her friend, I thank you.”(Nancy Sinatra, Sr., Barbara Stanwyck’s closest friend)

    He was the handsome Academy Award–nominated star of Paper Moon and the classic romance Love Story. She was the beautiful, all-American Charlie’s Angel, whose poster adorned the bedroom walls of teenage boys everywhere. One of the most storied love affairs in Hollywood history, their romance has captivated fans and media alike for more than three decades. In a tragic turn, the world lost Farrah after a tragic battle with cancer in 2009, but in his intimate memoir Both of Us, Ryan brings their relationship to vivid life. Fans of each other from afar, Ryan and Farrah met through her husband, Lee Majors, and fell passionately in love. Soon, however, reality threatened their happiness and they struggled with some serious matters, including the disintegration of Farrah’s marriage; Ryan’s troubled relationship with his daughter, Tatum, and son, Griffin; mismatched career trajectories; and raising their young son, Redmond—all leading Ryan and Farrah to an inevitable split in 1997.  Ryan fought to create a life on his own but never stopped longing for Farrah. Eventually he realized that he had lost his true soul mate. Older and wiser, he and Farrah found their way back to each other and were excited to start a new life together. But their bliss was cut short when Farrah was diagnosed with cancer and passed away just three years later. Ryan’s deep love for Farrah and his devotion to preserving her memory are evident in Both of Us. Drawing on decades’ worth of personal records and keepsakes, he has included never-before-seen photographs, letters exchanged between him and Farrah, and his own diaries, making this a poignant and compelling memento for her fans. Written with candor and emotional honesty, it is a true Hollywood love story.