Author: Betty Lee Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813145724 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
" She was homely, overweight, and over the hill, but there was a time when Marie Dressler outdrew such cinema sex symbols as Garbo, Dietrich, and Harlow. To movie audiences suffering the hardships of the Great Depression, she was Everywoman, and in the early 1930s her charming mixture of pathos and comedy packed movie theaters everywhere. In the early days of the century, Dressler was constantly in the headlines. She took up the cause of the "ponies" in the chorus lines, earning them better pay and benefits. She played in productions organized to raise money for the women's suffrage movement. And during World War I she claimed she sold more liberty bonds than any other individual in the United States. Dressler was an astute observer of public mood and taste. When she was lucky enough to find work in the newly minted Hollywood talkies, she grabbed the brass ring with fierce enthusiasm, even making three films in the year before her death, when she was so sick she had to rest between scenes on a sofa just out of camera range. The two-hundred-pound actress's remarkable stage presence captivated audiences even though her roles were not Hollywood beauties. She played tough, practical characters such as the old wharf rat in Anna Christie (1930), the waterfront innkeeper in Min and Bill (1931) -- for which she won the Academy Award for best actress -- the aging housekeeper in Emma (1932), and the title role in Tugboat Annie (1933). She spoke honestly to her audiences, and troubled people in the comforting darkness of the Depression-era movie theaters embraced her as one of themselves.
Author: Betty Lee Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 9780813126708 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
The fourth book in the Virginia at War series casts a special light on vital home front matters in Virginia during 1864. Following a year in which only one major battle was fought on Virginia soil, 1864 brought military campaigning to the Old Dominion. For the first time during the Civil War, the majority of Virginia’s forces fought inside the state’s borders. Yet soldiers were a distinct minority among the Virginians affected by the war. In Virginia at War, 1864, scholars explore various aspects of the civilian experience in Virginia including transportation and communication, wartime literature, politics and the press, higher education, patriotic celebrations, and early efforts at reconstruction in Union-occupied Virginia. The volume focuses on the effects of war on the civilian infrastructure as well as efforts to maintain the Confederacy. As in previous volumes, the book concludes with an edited and annotated excerpt of the Judith Brockenbrough McGuire diary.
Author: Matthew Kennedy Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 9780786405206 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
Early in the century, Marie Dressler was hailed as one of America's finest comics, with a 20-year string of Broadway and vaudeville successes including The Lady Slavey, Miss Prinnt, Higgledy Piggledy, The Man in the Moon, and Tillie's Nightmare. She starred with Charlie Chaplin in the first ever feature-length comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance and later in Min and Bill for which she won an Academy Award. A brilliant comedienne in body, timing, inflection and reactions, her talents far exceeded the expectations of slapstick, and her movies earned sums far greater than those of Garbo, or Harlow, or even Gable. This work examines Dressler's life from vaudeville to talkies. Based on extensive research and interviews with Dressler's surviving friends, co-stars and colleagues, including Maureen O'Sullivan, Jackie Cooper and Anita Page, it details her public and personal successes and failures. A listing of her stage appearances, vocal recordings and films is included.
Author: Steven Millhauser Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307763862 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The author of Voices in the Night reveals the mesmerizing journey of an American dreamer as he walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry. “This wonderful, wonder-full book is a fable and phantasmagoria of the sources of our century.” —The New York Times Book Review Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied by two sisters--one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner. As the eponymous Martin's vision becomes bolder and bolder, a sense of doom builds piece-by-hypnotic piece until this mesmerizing journey reaches its bitter-sweet conclusion.
Author: Patrice Petro Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 0813549299 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
With its sharp focus on stardom during the 1920s, Idols of Modernity reveals strong connections and dissonances in matters of storytelling and performance that can be traced both backward and forward, across Europe, Asia, and the United States, from the silent era into the emergence of sound. Bringing together the best new work on cinema and stardom in the 1920s, this illustrated collection showcases the range of complex social, institutional, and aesthetic issues at work in American cinema of this time. Attentive to stardom as an ensemble of texts, contexts, and social phenomena stretching beyond the cinema, major scholars provide careful analysis of the careers of both well-known and now forgotten stars of the silent and early sound era—Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, the Talmadge sisters, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, Greta Garbo, Anna May Wong, Emil Jannings, Al Jolson, Ernest Morrison, Noble Johnson, Evelyn Preer, Lincoln Perry, and Marie Dressler.
Author: Matthew Kennedy Publisher: Terrace Books ISBN: 9780299197704 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
At the dawn of sound, he wrote the story for the Academy Award-winning musical The Broadway Melody and collaborated memorably with Gloria Swanson and Joseph Kennedy for The Trespasser. He excelled at anti-war drama (White Banners, The Dawn Patrol, We Are Not Alone), fantastic Bette Davis weepies (Dark Victory, The Old Maid, The Great Lie), lilting romantic dramas (The Constant Nymph, Claudia), big-budgeted literary adaptations (The Razor's Edge), and even film noir (Nightmare Alley).
Author: Andrew L. Erdman Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801465281 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 323
Book Description
In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879–1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl"—named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona—Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady—and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality. In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.
Author: Stephen Tapert Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 1978808054 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 517
Book Description
Showcasing a dazzling collection of 200 photographs, many of which have never before been seen, this lavishly illustrated book offers a captivating historical, social, and political examination of the first 75 women--from Janet Gaynor to Emma Stone--to have won the coveted and legendary Academy Award for Best Actress.t Actress.
Author: Eileen Whitfield Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 9780813191799 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 488
Book Description
A comprehensive biography of film's first star traces her rise to fame with the growth of the medium, her influence as a partner in United Artists, her relationship with Douglas Fairbanks, and her struggles later in life. UP.
Author: Victoria Sturtevant Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252034287 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 211
Book Description
In this study of Marie Dressler, MGM's most profitable movie star in the early 1930s, Victoria Sturtevant analyzes Dressler's use of her body to challenge Hollywood's standards for leading ladies. At five feet seven inches tall and two hundred pounds, Dressler often played ugly ducklings, old maids, doting mothers, and imperious dowagers. However, her body, her fearless physicality, and her athletic slapstick routines commanded the screen. Sturtevant interprets the meanings of Dressler's body by looking at her vaudeville career, her transgressive representation of an "unruly" yet sexual body in Emma and Christopher Bean, ideas of the body politic in the films Politics and Prosperity, and Dressler as a mythic body in Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie.
Author: Betty Lee
Author: Betty Lee
Author: Matthew Kennedy
Author: Steven Millhauser
Author: Patrice Petro
Author: Matthew Kennedy
Author: Andrew L. Erdman
Author: Stephen Tapert
Author: Eileen Whitfield
Author: Victoria Sturtevant