Author: Michael G. AnkerichPublisher:
ISBN: 9781629337326
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Book Description
A history of Lucille Ricksen, Eve Southern, Alberta Vaughn and more great ladies.
Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels (hardback)
Author: Michael G. AnkerichPublisher:
ISBN: 9781629337326
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Book Description
A history of Lucille Ricksen, Eve Southern, Alberta Vaughn and more great ladies.
Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels
Author: Michael G. AnkerichPublisher:
ISBN: 9781593936051
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
"We were like dragonflies. We seemed to be suspended effortlessly in the air, but in reality, our wings were beating very, very fast." - Mae Murray "It is worse than folly for persons to imagine that this business is an easy road to money, to contentment, or to that strange quality called happiness." - Bebe Daniels "A girl should realize that a career on the screen demands everything, promising nothing." - Helen Ferguson In Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels, author Michael G. Ankerich examines the lives, careers, and disappointments of 15 silent film actresses, who, despite the odds against them and warnings to stay in their hometowns, came to Hollywood to make names for themselves in the movies. On the screen, these young hopefuls became Agnes Ayres, Olive Borden, Grace Darmond, Elinor Fair, Juanita Hansen, Wanda Hawley, Natalie Joyce, Barbara La Marr, Martha Mansfield, Mae Murray, Mary Nolan, Marie Prevost, Lucille Ricksen, Eve Southern, and Alberta Vaughn. Dangerous Curves follows the precarious routes these young ladies took in their quest for fame and uncovers how some of the top actresses of the silent screen were used, abused, and discarded. Many, unable to let go of the spotlight after it had singed their very souls, came to a stop on that dead-end street, referred to by actress Anna Q. Nilsson as, Hollywood's Heartbreak Lane. Pieced together using contemporary interviews the actresses gave, conversations with friends, relatives, and co-workers, and exhaustive research through scrapbooks, archives, and public records, Dangerous Curves offers an honest, yet compassionate, look at some of the brightest luminaries of the silent screen. The book is illustrated with over 150 photographs.
Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels
Author: Michael G. AnkerichPublisher: BearManor Media
ISBN: 9781629330556
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 528
Book Description
"We were like dragonflies. We seemed to be suspended effortlessly in the air, but in reality, our wings were beating very, very fast." - Mae Murray "It is worse than folly for persons to imagine that this business is an easy road to money, to contentment, or to that strange quality called happiness." - Bebe Daniels "A girl should realize that a career on the screen demands everything, promising nothing." - Helen Ferguson In Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels, author Michael G. Ankerich examines the lives, careers, and disappointments of 15 silent film actresses, who, despite the odds against them and warnings to stay in their hometowns, came to Hollywood to make names for themselves in the movies. On the screen, these young hopefuls became Agnes Ayres, Olive Borden, Grace Darmond, Elinor Fair, Juanita Hansen, Wanda Hawley, Natalie Joyce, Barbara La Marr, Martha Mansfield, Mae Murray, Mary Nolan, Marie Prevost, Lucille Ricksen, Eve Southern, and Alberta Vaughn. Dangerous Curves follows the precarious routes these young ladies took in their quest for fame and uncovers how some of the top actresses of the silent screen were used, abused, and discarded. Many, unable to let go of the spotlight after it had singed their very souls, came to a stop on that dead-end street, referred to by actress Anna Q. Nilsson as, Hollywood's Heartbreak Lane. Pieced together using contemporary interviews the actresses gave, conversations with friends, relatives, and co-workers, and exhaustive research through scrapbooks, archives, and public records, Dangerous Curves offers an honest, yet compassionate, look at some of the brightest luminaries of the silent screen. The book is illustrated with over 150 photographs.
Hairpins and Dead Ends
Author: Michael AnkerichPublisher: BearManor Media
ISBN: 9781629332017
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 488
Book Description
"I've been away so long that nothing matters now. I went home to die, but I wasn't that fortunate." Edwina Booth "He who enters Hollywood leaves self--the real self--behind. It is the land of Let's Pretend, and the hardest acting is done off screen." Herbert Howe, writer "From the peak of fame to the brink of almost hopeless despair--that's my story of Hollywood." Alice Lake You survived Dangerous Curves 'atop Hollywood Heels, Michael G. Ankerich's 2010 book about ill-fated actresses of the silent screen, but are you ready for his companion book, Hairpins and Dead Ends: The Perilous Journeys of 25 Actresses Through Early Hollywood? Hairpins and Dead Ends takes you on a hair-raising rollercoaster ride through a time when Hollywood was surrounded by orange groves, not concrete jungles, and into the intimate lives of 25 beauties, ambitious nobodies who wanted to be somebodies. Several became twinkling stars, while others settled as serial queens, slapstick vamps, bathing beauties, western heroines, and everything in between. While many young hopefuls abandoned their quest for fame and returned home disappointed, here are the stories of women who stayed, often to a bitter and tragic end brought on by drugs, booze, and suicide. Through his meticulous research, that included interviews with relatives of the actresses, Ankerich takes you into the dark side of Tinseltown, a world of dope rings, whorehouses, gin joints, and other gritty hellholes some called home. Lavishly illustrated with over 160 photographs, many from family scrapbooks, Hairpins and Dead Ends uncovers a world that offered passion and imagination, but functioned on illicit love, domineering mothers, desperation, greed, abuse, and discrimination. The screen images of these 25 dazzling beauties were fleeting shadows. Their personal passions and struggles in real life held more drama than any role they clamored to play. These ladies make up the ghosts of Hollywood's past.
The Sound of Silence
Author: Michael G. AnkerichPublisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078646383X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Marion Shilling began her career as a silent film ingenue for MGM and went on to play heroines in Westerns of the 1930s. Stage actress Esther Muir made the transition from Broadway to Hollywood just as talkies became popular. Hugh Allan was a leading man in the last years of the silents only to leave the film business in 1930 because of the uncertainty surrounding his transition to sound films and his disgust with studio politics. These three performers and thirteen others (Barbara Barondess, Thomas Beck, Mary Brian, Pauline Curley, Billie Dove, Edith Fellows, Rose Hobart, William Janney, Marcia Mae Jones, Barbara Kent, Anita Page, Lupita Tovar, and Barbara Weeks) reminisce here about Hollywood and the movie business as it made the transition.
Mae Murray
Author: Michael G. AnkerichPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813136911
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
Mae Murray (1885--1965), popularly known as "the girl with the bee-stung lips," was a fiery presence in silent-era Hollywood. Renowned for her classic beauty and charismatic presence, she rocketed to stardom as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, moving across the country to star in her first film, To Have and to Hold, in 1916. An instant hit with audiences, Murray soon became one of the most famous names in Tinseltown. However, Murray's moment in the spotlight was fleeting. The introduction of talkies, a string of failed marriages, a serious career blunder, and a number of bitter legal battles left the former star in a state of poverty and mental instability that she would never overcome. In this intriguing biography, Michael G. Ankerich traces Murray's career from the footlights of Broadway to the klieg lights of Hollywood, recounting her impressive body of work on the stage and screen and charting her rapid ascent to fame and decline into obscurity. Featuring exclusive interviews with Murray's only son, Daniel, and with actor George Hamilton, whom the actress closely befriended at the end of her life, Ankerich restores this important figure in early film to the limelight.
Olive Thomas
Author: Michelle VogelPublisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786455268
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
Olive Thomas was one of Hollywood's first true movie stars. Born in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, in 1894, she moved to New York at age sixteen and began to pursue an acting career. By 1915, she had landed a job as one of Ziegfeld's famous "Follies" girls. Before long her beauty was discovered by Hollywood, where she quickly became one of the biggest names in motion pictures. Her marriage to film star Jack Pickford further enhanced her popularity. Olive's death by poison on September 10, 1920, created a media circus. This biography begins with Olive's birth, follows her trip to stardom, and covers in detail the circumstances surrounding her mysterious death at age 25. Rare and beautiful photographs and a complete filmography are included.
Broken Silence
Author: Michael G. AnkerichPublisher: McFarland
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
"A Labor of Love...Informative, Insightful Reminiscences"---The Silent Film Monthly --
Mortal Danger
Author: Ann RulePublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982197765
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
Only Ann Rule, the #1 "New York Times"-bestselling true-crime author, could lend her sharp insight into these cases of the spouse, lover, family member, or helpful stranger who is totally trusted--but whose lethally violent nature, though masterfully disguised, can kill. Original.
The Loveliest Woman in America
Author: Bibi GastonPublisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061871257
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Her name was Rosamond Pinchot: hailed as "The Loveliest Woman in America," she was a niece of Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot; cousin to Edie Sedgwick; half sister of Mary Pinchot Meyer, JFK's lover; friend to Eleanor Roosevelt and Elizabeth Arden. At nineteen she was discovered aboard a cruise ship, at twenty-three she married the playboy scion of a political Boston family, but by thirty-three she was dead by her own hand. Seventy years later, her granddaughter, a noted landscape architect, received Rosamond's diaries and embarked on a search to discover the real Rosamond Pinchot. Unearthing what appeared to be a glamorous fairy-tale existence, Bibi Gaston discovers the roots of the ties that bind and break a family, and uncovers the legacy of two great American dynasties torn apart by her grandmother's untimely death. This is a tale of three lives and five generations, mothers and grandmothers, longing, holding on and letting go, men, beauty, diets, and letting beauty slip. This is the story of how we make the most of our brief, beautiful lives.
