Victoria   Wilson
The first book in Victoria Wilson's two volumes of books on Barbara Stanwyck's life and career.,Frank Capra called her â€œThe greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known.â€ She was one of its most natural, timeless, and underrated stars. 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 1980sâ€”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 marÂ­riage 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 â€œunfunnyâ€ 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, Americaâ€™s most sought-afterâ€” and beautifulâ€”male star. ,Here is the shaping of her career with many of HolÂ­lywoodâ€™s most important directors: among them, Frank Capra, â€œWild Billâ€ William Wellman (â€œWhen you get beauty and brains together,â€ he said, â€œthereâ€™s no stopping the lucky girl who possesses them. The best example I can think of is Barbaraâ€), King Vidor, Cecil B. De Mille, and Preston Sturges, all set against the timesâ€”the Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the unions, the advent of World War IIâ€”and a fast-changing, coming-of-age motion picture industry. ,And here is Stanwyckâ€™s evolution as an actress in the pictures she made from 1929 through the summer of 1940, where Volume One endsâ€”from her first starring movie, The Locked Door (â€œAn all-time low,â€ she said. â€œBy then I was certain that Hollywood and I had nothing in commonâ€); and Ladies of Leisure, the first of her six-picture collaboration with Frank Capra (â€œHe sensed things that you were trying to keep hidden from people. He knew. He just knewâ€), to the scorching Baby Face, and the height of her screen perfection, beginning with Stella Dallas (â€œI was scared to death all the time we were making the picÂ­tureâ€), from Clifford Odetsâ€™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 herselfâ€”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 HollyÂ­woodâ€™sâ€”and Americaâ€™sâ€”most revered screen actresses. ,Writing with the full cooperation of Stanwyckâ€™s family and friends, and drawing on more than two hundred interviews with actors, directors, cameramen, screenÂ­writers, 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 actorâ€™s life and work.,Praise:,â€œWilsonâ€™s book is indeed a monument of research. . . . ,A Life of Barbara Stanwyck, will unquestionably remain the biography of record; beyond Wilsonâ€™s excavation of so much that would otherwise have been lost, her book has a deep sensitivity to the seriousness and subtlety of Stanwyckâ€™s craft. This is the biography not of a Hollywood phenomenon but of a serious artist.â€,(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),â€œWhat you have done is extraordinary. It is an amazing book, brilliantly written, enhancing the whole life, Barbaraâ€™s life, happenings around herâ€”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.â€,(Nancy Sinatra, Sr., Barbara Stanwyckâ€™s closest friend)
Biography,Nonfiction,Culture,Film,History,Media Tie In,Biography Memoir,Autobiography,Memoir,Literature,20th Century
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940