Natalie Wood was like looking at the sun. Just staring at her in photographs the luminosity burns out of her. Her daughter Natasha has described her as tough when necessary, but always present and loving. It’s often easy to overshadow Wood’s life and career in the wake of her tragic death at the age of…
Part of the reason I read film books is to have an outsider entice me to check out a movie. Where some of you come here to have me tell you whether a certain film is worth your time or not – and if you value my opinion, I thank you – I defer to…
Whether you’ve watched it once or countless times there’s no getting Casablanca out of your blood. “As Time Goes By,” the La Marseillaise sequence, Bogie and Bergman, Casablanca is the film that cemented the Hollywood style, creating a wealth of imitators for decades to come. So with Casablanca’s familiarity, it’s safe to assume there’s nothing new…
Tippi Hedren says in the introduction to her autobiography that so much has been written about her that it’s high time she set the record straight. Tippi is as succinct a title and encapsulation of the writer behind it as the name implies, for good and ill. It’s unclear whether Hedren keeps things close to…
When I started reading Stephen Michael Shearer’s biography, Beautiful, on actress Hedy Lamarr I had no idea a documentary about the raven-haired starlet was being produced. Bombshell: The Life of Hedy Lamarr recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival to great reviews and I can’t wait to learn even more about the woman oft-considered the most…
I’m kicking off a new year of classic film biographies and you can’t start with an author better than Donald Spoto. The acclaimed Hitchcock biographer has covered nearly every facet of the Master of Suspense’s life and career, including the women he employed. Spoto’s also recounted the lives of Hollywood’s most beautiful women, like Audrey…
J. Randy Taraborelli’s biography of Marilyn Monroe has made a home on my bookshelf for at least three years. After the airing of Lifetime’s surprisingly exemplary adaptation of it – which I reviewed – I figured now was the time to actually crack that binding. There are as many Marilyn Monroe biographies as their are films…
