Book picks similar to
Kay Francis: I Can't Wait to Be Forgotten by Scott O'Brien
biography
non-fiction
hollywood
film
One Lifetime Is Not Enough
Zsa Zsa Gabor - 1991
Reprint. PW.
Steve McQueen
Marshall Terrill - 2001
It chronicles the good with the ugly, revealing the great power McQueen wielded. It features numerous behind-the-scenes stories from some of his (and cinema's) greatest films, including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Sand Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, The Getaway, and Papillon. The book's triumph is the way in which the author explores McQueen in full through his larger-than-life exploits but as important, the lesser known, humanitarian side of the Hollywood legend. It also captures the fundamental essence of what made McQueen cinema's "King of Cool."
Lee Marvin: Point Blank
Dwayne Epstein - 2013
Although Lee Marvin is best known for his icy tough guy roles—such as his chilling titular villain in The ManWho Shot Liberty Valance or the paternal yet brutally realistic platoon leader in The Big Red One—very little is known of his personal life; his family background; his experiences in WWII; his relationship with his father, family, friends, wives; and his ongoing battles with alcoholism, rage, and depression, occasioned by his postwar PTSD. Now, after years of researching and compiling interviews with family members, friends, and colleagues; rare photographs; and illustrative material, Hollywood writer Dwayne Epstein provides a full understanding and appreciation of this acting titan’s place in the Hollywood pantheon in spite of his very real and human struggles.
Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn
Charles Higham - 1975
And she herself tells the deeply moving story of her twenty-five-year love affair with Tracy. Here is a vivid portrait of the most elegant, independent, and tempestuous star to grace the screen. Over a half million copies sold.
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s
Otto Friedrich - 1986
Its cast includes actors, writers, musicians and composers, producers and directors, racketeers and labor leaders, journalists and politicians in the turbulent decade from World War II to Korea.
Grace Kelly: A Life in Pictures
Pierre-Henri Verlhac - 2007
Although her career was brief, she lit up the screen in films like High Society, Rear Window, and The Country Girl, for which she won an Oscar. She was not only a fine actress, great beauty, and icon of American style, but she was also a passionate philanthropist, known for her generosity and kindness. Published on the 25th anniversary of her death, Grace Kelly: A Life in Pictures is the definitive photographic portrait—160 images capturing the early years, film career, royal marriage, and private life of this remarkable woman.
Forever Young : The Life, Loves, and Enduring Faith of a Hollywood Legend ; The Authorized Biography of Loretta Young
Joan Wester Anderson - 2000
The real life and faith journey of Loretta Young -- her strong devotion to her Catholic faith and her passion for helping others in need.
Cary Grant: A Biography
Marc Eliot - 2004
Exploring Grant’s troubled childhood, ambiguous sexuality, and lifelong insecurities, as well as the magical amalgam of characteristics that allowed him to remain Hollywood’s favorite romantic lead for more than thirty-five years, Cary Grant is the definitive examination of every aspect of Grant’s professional and private life and the first biography to reveal the real man behind the movie star.
Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind
Gavin Edwards - 2013
Putting him at the center of a new generation of leading men emerging in the early 1990s— including Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt, Nicolas Cage, and Leonardo DiCaprio—Gavin Edwards traces the Academy Award nominee’s meteoric rise, couches him in an examination of the 1990s, and illuminates his lasting legacy on Hollywood and popular culture itself.
In the Company of Legends
Joan Kramer - 2015
These were recognized as high-quality, definitive film portraits, which revitalized the genre and made it a mainstay of television programming.This is their insiders’ view of the famous and the powerful: Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra, Lew Wasserman, Ronald Reagan, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Jane Fonda, Richard Dreyfuss, Audrey Hepburn, and Bette Davis, among others. Kramer and Heeley’s behind the scenes stories of the productions and the personalities involved are amusing, sometimes moving, often revealing, and have never been told before.
Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait
Kendra Bean - 2013
For more than thirty years, her name alone sold out theaters and cinemas the world over, and she inspired many of the greatest visionaries of her time: Laurence Olivier loved her; Winston Churchill praised her; Christian Dior dressed her.Through both an in-depth narrative and a stunning array of photos, Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait presents the personal story of one of the most celebrated women of the twentieth century, an engrossing tale of success, struggles, and triumphs. It chronicles Leigh’s journey from her birth in India to prominence in British film, winning the most-coveted role in Hollywood history, her celebrated love affair with Laurence Olivier, through to her untimely death at age fifty-three in 1967.Author Kendra Bean is the first Vivien Leigh biographer to delve into the Laurence Olivier Archives, where an invaluable collection of personal letters and documents ranging from interview transcripts to film contracts to medical records shed new insight on Leigh’s story. Illustrated by hundreds of rare and never-before-published images, including those by Leigh’s "official" photographer, Angus McBean, Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait is the first illustrated biography to closely examine the fascinating, troubled, and often misunderstood life of Vivien Leigh: the woman, the actress, the legend.
Frances Farmer: Shadowland
William Arnold - 1978
de Mille as the "screen's outstanding find of 1936" and by Howard Hawks as "the greatest actress I ever worked with"; join the Group Theatre, one of the most important, socially conscious and artistically groundbreaking troupes in U.S. history; and suffer a harrowing, ongoing struggle with mental illness, which kept her in various sanitariums and hospitals from 1943-1950. In 1972, her purported autobiography Will There Really Be a Morning? was published to great critical acclaim. The story might have ended there, but in 1978 Seattle film critic William Arnold published his account of Farmer's life, entitled Shadowland. Arnold claimed to have uncovered previously undisclosed information that Farmer had suffered a transorbital lobotomy at the hands of Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who, with James Watts, had introduced the prefrontal lobotomy to the United States, and who had later "refined" his technique to avoid drilling through the skull, instead resorting to inserting an icepick like device through the eye socket up into the brain to sever the frontal lobes. Arnold's disturbing account, the first time ever anyone had made the lobotomy assertion about Farmer, became the basis for the 1982 feature film Frances starring Jessica Lange.
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr
Michael Seth Starr - 2008
The complete story of the actor's career, including his secret gay life. Raymond Burr (1917-1993) was an enigma. A film noir star regularly known for his villainous roles in movies like Rear Window, he delighted millions of viewers each week with the top-rated shows Perry Mason and Ironside, which ran virtually uninterrupted for 20 years. But Burr was leading a secret gay life at a time in Hollywood when such a lifestyle was akin to career suicide. He invented a tragic biography for himself in which he was mythologized as a heartbroken husband and father. There was even an invented affair with a teenage Natalie Wood, 21 years his junior. He fought for truth as Perry Mason and Robert T. Ironside, yet he couldn't admit his own deception. Burr met his partner, struggling actor Robert Benevides, on the set of Perry Mason, and they remained together for over 35 years until Burr's death. Together, they built a business empire, traveled the world, and shared their passion for orchids and fine wine keeping the true nature of their relationship a secret from all but their closest friends a secret revealed here for the first time in depth.
The Charms of Miss O'Hara: Tales of Gone With the Wind & the Golden Age of Hollywood from Scarlett's Little Sister
Phillip Done - 2014
But fortunately — not her stories. The year before her death, Miss Rutherford invited author Phillip Done to her Beverly Hills home where she shared decades of heartening memories from her fascinating life in the golden age of Hollywood. Like a scene out of Sunset Boulevard, Done wrote it down in this masterful tribute and shrewdly crafted memoir.With never-before-seen photographs from Miss Rutherford's private collection, The Charms of Miss O'Hara takes readers on a guided tour through Ann Rutherford's rich career, including such roles as Polly Benedict in the Andy Hardy pictures, Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, and Carreen in Gone With the Wind. Oft told in Miss Rutherford's sharp and engaging voice, readers will discover delicious behind-the-scenes stories and anecdotes about Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Lana Turner, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, Debbie Reynolds, David Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and many others. Much more than a celebrity memoir, The Charms of Miss O'Hara will delight Gone With the Wind fans and classic movie buffs with valuable life lessons from a movie star.
Lou's on First
Chris Costello - 1981
Starting in the 1930s, Costello attained enormous fame touring the burlesque circuits with straight man Bud Abbott (1895-1974). Their live skits (including "Who's on First?"), radio programs, and films such as One Night in the Tropics, Buck Privates, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and In the Navy made comic history.Behind the scenes, however, Costello faced numerous crises: a bout with rheumatic fever that left him bedridden for months, the drowning death of his young son, and constant haggles with Universal Studios over its reluctance to adequately finance productions of Abbott and Costello films. Lou's on First goes beyond Costello's clownish persona to explore his Pagliacci nature: the private demons behind the happy public face, the heartbreaking moments in an otherwise storybook marriage, the business ventures soured by unscrupulous managers, and the true nature of the breakup of his twenty-one-year partnership with Bud Abbott.