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"Motion picture actors and actresses United States Biography."
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I said yes to everything : a memoir
An Academy Award-winning actress and former Vogue \"It Girl\" describes her rise to fame and the subsequent destruction of her career caused by being added to the Hollywood blacklist and how she eventually rebuilt her life and career after being exonerated.
Book
Shining in Shadows
In the 2000s, new technologies transformed the experiences of movie-going and movie-making, giving us the first generation of stars to be just as famous on the computer screen as on the silver screen.
Shining in Shadowsexamines a wide range of Hollywood icons from a turbulent decade for the film industry and for America itself. Perhaps reflecting our own cultural fragmentation and uncertainty, Hollywood's star personas sent mixed messages about Americans' identities and ideals. Disheveled men-children like Will Ferrell and Jack Black shared the multiplex with debonair old-Hollywood standbys like George Clooney and Morgan Freeman. Iconic roles for women ranged from Renee Zellweger's dithering romantics to Tina Fey's neurotic professionals to Hilary Swank's vulnerable boyish characters. And in this age of reality TV and TMZ, stars like Jennifer Aniston and \"Brangelina\" became more famous for their real-life romantic dramas-at the same time that former tabloid fixtures like Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr. reinvented themselves as dependable leading men. With a multigenerational, international cast of stars, this collection presents a fascinating composite portrait of Hollywood stardom today.
eBook
Ernie Kovacs and Early TV Comedy
No detailed description available for \"Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy\".
eBook
American cocktail : a \colored girl\ in the world
This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a fascinating African American woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right place in the most interesting times. Actress, dancer, model, literary critic, psychologist, and free-spirited provocateur, Anita Reynolds was, as her Parisian friends nicknamed her, an \"American cocktail.\".
eBook
A Real American Character
Walter Brennan (1894–1974) was one of the greatest character actors in Hollywood history. He won three Academy Awards and became a national icon starring as Grandpa in The Real McCoys. He appeared in over two hundred motion pictures and became the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting, which celebrated the actor's unique role as the voice of the American Western. His life journey from Swampscott, Massachusetts, to Hollywood, to a twelve thousand-acre cattle ranch in Joseph, Oregon, is one of the great American stories. In the first biography of this epic figure, Carl Rollyson reveals Brennan's consummate mastery of virtually every kind of role while playing against and often stealing scenes from such stars as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne. Rollyson fully explores Brennan's work with Hollywood's greatest directors, such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Fritz Lang. As a father and grandfather, Brennan instilled generations of his family with an outlook on the American Dream that remains a sustaining feature of their lives today. His conservative politics, which grew out of his New England upbringing and his devout Catholicism, receive meticulous attention and a balanced assessment in A Real American Character. Written with the full cooperation of the Brennan family and drawing on material in archives from every region of the United States, this new biography presents an artist and family man who lived and breathed an American idealism that made him the Real McCoy.
eBook
Gloria Swanson
Gloria Swanson: Ready for Her Close-Up shows how a
talented, self-confident actress negotiated a creative path through
seven decades of celebrity. It also illuminates a little-known
chapter in American media history: how the powerful women of early
Hollywood transformed their remarkable careers after their stars
dimmed. This book brings Swanson (1899-1983) back into the
spotlight, revealing her as a complex, creative, entrepreneurial,
and thoroughly modern woman.
Swanson cavorted in slapstick short films with Charlie Chaplin
and Mack Sennett in the 1910s. The popularity of her films with
Cecil B. DeMille helped create the star system. A glamour icon,
Swanson became the most talked-about star in Hollywood, earning
three Academy Award nominations, receiving 10,000 fan letters every
week, and living up to a reputation as Queen of Hollywood. She
bought mansions and penthouses, dressed in fur and feathers, and
flitted through Paris, London, and New York engaging in passionate
love affairs that made headlines and caused scandals.
Frustrated with the studio system, Swanson turned down a
million-dollar-a-year contract. After a wild ride making
unforgettable movies with some of Hollywood's most colorful
characters--including her lover Joseph Kennedy and maverick
director Erich von Stroheim--she was a million dollars in debt.
Without hesitation she went looking for her next challenge,
beginning her long second act.
Swanson became a talented businesswoman who patented inventions
and won fashion awards for her clothing designs; a natural foods
activist decades before it was fashionable; an exhibited sculptor;
and a designer employed by the United Nations. All the while she
continued to act in films, theater, and television at home and
abroad. Though she had one of Hollywood's most famous exit
lines--\"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up\"--the
real Gloria Swanson never looked back.
eBook