Author: Michael Freedland Publisher: Pub Overstock Unlimited Incorporated ISBN: 9780863699726 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
Al Jolson, star of the world's first talking picture and self-proclaimed world's greatest entertainer, blazed many trails through show business. He was also the first to appear on American television and the first to release a long-playing record in Britain.
Author: Herbert G. Goldman Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 456
Book Description
With a sure eye for the revealing anecdote, Goldman chronicles each step of Al Jolson's colorful life: his early struggles with his brother, Harry, on the vaudeville and burlesque circuit; his rise to stardom on Broadway, which prompted a Variety writer to proclaim, "The Shuberts may run the Winter Garden, but Al Jolson owns it"; his glory at the pinnacle of national fame, which came with his appearances in the movies The Jazz Singer (the first "talking picture") and The Singing Fool; his subsequent decline and brief resurgence after the film biography The Jolson Story was released in 1946; and his final round of appearances in 1950, entertaining American troops in Korea just before his death. Goldman explores the complexities of the Jolson personality, as revealed in his four stormy marriages and his relations with his family, business associates, friends, and enemies.
Author: Larry Harmon Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061967750 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
The Man Behind the Nose is the autobiography of the man who was Bozo. For 50 years Larry Harmon was the face—and the nose—of Bozo the Clown, the most well-known, beloved clown of them all, the precursor for every successful modern-day harlequin to come, from Ronald McDonald to Krusty. A warm, surprising, and endlessly entertaining life story filled to the brim with “Assassins, Astronauts, Cannibals, and Other Stupendous Tales,” The Man Behind the Nose is a rollicking ride through the world of a true American icon in greasepaint.
Author: Michael Freedland Publisher: ISBN: 9780349113333 Category : Actors and actresses Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
The Irish writer Clare Boylan has been publishing compelling and captivating work for over twenty years. Though she is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, she remains one of the most original and exciting short-story writers of our time. Like Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, and her compatriot William Trevor, her stories are universal. Hers is an imagination that is able, magically and marvelously, to transform everyday experience into something quite unexpected. As perceptive as Colette, as darkly witty as Dorothy Parker, she waves a flag for the dispossessed and the marginalized and gleefully pulls love from behind its romantic facade. She makes the reader laugh out loud while at the same time compelling an uncomfortable self-examination. Plumbing the inner workings of marriage, aging, family dynamics, and the cost of love, her richly sardonic humor and acutely merciless observations may seem gentle, but look again, for they are edged with razors. Celebrating twenty years of rare accomplishment, The Collected Stories introduces American readers to a luminous and unforgettable writer of short fiction.
Author: Victoria Wilson Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1439194068 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 1056
Book Description
“860 glittering pages” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times): The first volume of the full-scale astonishing life of one of our greatest screen actresses—her work, her world, her Hollywood through an American century. Frank Capra called her, “The greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known.” Now Victoria Wilson gives us the first volume of the rich, complex life of Barbara Stanwyck, an actress whose career in pictures spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound (eighty-eight motion pictures) and lasted in television from its infancy in the 1950s through the 1980s. Here is Stanwyck, revealed as 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; the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with Zeppo Marx (the “unfunny Marx brother”) who altered the course of Stanwyck’s movie career and with her created one of the finest horse breeding farms in the west; and her fairytale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, America’s most sought-after male star. Here is the shaping of her career through 1940 with many of Hollywood's most important directors, among them Frank Capra, “Wild Bill” William Wellman, George Stevens, John Ford, King Vidor, Cecil B. Demille, Preston Sturges, 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 at the heart of the book, Stanwyck herself—her strengths, her fears, her frailties, losses, and desires—how she made use of the darkness in her soul, transforming herself from shunned outsider into one of Hollywood’s most revered screen actresses. Fifteen years in the making—and written with full access to Stanwyck’s family, friends, colleagues and never-before-seen letters, journals, and photographs. Wilson’s one-of-a-kind biography—“large, thrilling, and sensitive” (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Town & Country)—is an “epic Hollywood narrative” (USA TODAY), “so readable, and as direct as its subject” (The New York Times). With 274 photographs, many published for the first time.
Author: Jeanine Basinger Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 1101874074 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 657
Book Description
Irresistible and authoritative, The Movie Musical! is an in-depth look at the singing, dancing, happy-making world of Hollywood musicals, beautifully illustrated in color and black-and-white--an essential text for anyone who's ever laughed, cried, or sung along at the movies. Leading film historian Jeanine Basinger reveals, with her trademark wit and zest, the whole story of the Hollywood musical--in the most telling, most incisive, most detailed, most gorgeously illustrated book of her long and remarkable career. From Fred Astaire, whom she adores, to La La Land, which she deplores, Basinger examines a dazzling array of stars, strategies, talents, and innovations in the history of musical cinema. Whether analyzing a classic Gene Kelly routine, relishing a Nelson-Jeanette operetta, or touting a dynamic hip hop number (in the underrated Idlewild), she is a canny and charismatic guide to the many ways that song and dance have been seen--and heard--on film. With extensive portraits of everyone from Al Jolson, the Jazz Singer; to Doris Day, whose iconic sunniness has overshadowed her dramatic talents; from Deanna Durbin, that lovable teen-star of the '30s and '40s; to Shirley T. and Judy G.; from Bing to Frank to Elvis; from Ann Miller to Ann-Margret; from Disney to Chicago . . . focusing on many beloved, iconic films (Top Hat; Singin' in the Rain; Meet Me in St. Louis; The Sound of Music) as well as unduly obscure gems (Eddie Cantor's Whoopee!; Murder at the Vanities; Sun Valley Serenade; One from the Heart), this book is astute, informative, and pure pleasure to read.
Author: Michael Alexander Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691116532 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
By the 1920s, Jews were--by all economic, political, and cultural measures of the day--making it in America. But as these children of immigrants took their places in American society, many deliberately identified with groups that remained excluded. Despite their success, Jews embraced resistance more than acculturation, preferring marginal status to assimilation. The stories of Al Jolson, Felix Frankfurter, and Arnold Rothstein are told together to explore this paradox in the psychology of American Jewry. All three Jews were born in the 1880s, grew up around American Jewish ghettos, married gentile women, entered the middle class, and rose to national fame. All three also became heroes to the American Jewish community for their association with events that galvanized the country and defined the Jazz Age. Rothstein allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series--an accusation this book disputes. Frankfurter defended the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Jolson brought jazz music to Hollywood for the first talking film, The Jazz Singer, and regularly impersonated African Americans in blackface. Each of these men represented a version of the American outsider, and American Jews celebrated them for it. Michael Alexander's gracefully written account profoundly complicates the history of immigrants in America. It challenges charges that anti-Semitism exclusively or even mostly explains Jews' feelings of marginality, while it calls for a general rethinking of positions that have assumed an immigrant quest for inclusion into the white American mainstream. Rather, Alexander argues that Jewish outsider status stemmed from the group identity Jews brought with them to this country in the form of the theology of exile. Jazz Age Jews shows that most Jews felt culturally obliged to mark themselves as different--and believed that doing so made them both better Jews and better Americans.
Author: James Fisher Publisher: Greenwood ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Provides a sketch of the life and a comprehensive record of the career of "The World's Greatest Entertainer" (c.1886-1950). Following a 37- page biography and an 8-page chronology, are chapters devoted to Jolson's stage, film, recording, and broadcast career. Each of these chapters contains annotated entries for Jolson's performances. A bibliography includes entries for books, periodicals, and newspaper articles. Appendices list stage shows based on Jolson's life, along with newsreels, cartoons, awards, and endorsements related to his career. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Author: Michael Freedland
Author: Herbert G. Goldman
Author: Doug McClelland
Author: Larry Harmon
Author: Robert Oberfirst
Author: Michael Freedland
Author: Victoria Wilson
Author: Jeanine Basinger
Author: Michael Alexander
Author: James Fisher