Mommie Dearest

Mommie Dearest PDF Author:
Publisher: Paramount Pictures
ISBN: 9780792105725
Category : Biographical films
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
The story of the tormented and glamorous star, Joan Crawford, struggling to survive in a cutthroat world, succumbing to a rage leading to alcoholism and child abuse.

Mommie Dearest

Mommie Dearest PDF Author:
Publisher: Paramount Pictures
ISBN: 9780792105725
Category : Biographical films
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
The story of the tormented and glamorous star, Joan Crawford, struggling to survive in a cutthroat world, succumbing to a rage leading to alcoholism and child abuse.

The Films of Joan Crawford

The Films of Joan Crawford PDF Author: Lawrence J. Quirk
Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 9780806500089
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description


Starring Joan Crawford

Starring Joan Crawford PDF Author: Samuel Garza Bernstein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493074466
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Joan Crawford: the name has an enduring fascination. Forty-five years after her death, Crawford remains a familiar icon in pop culture and the entertainment world. Certainly the camp bathos of Mommie Dearest has played a part in her continued relevance. But it is ultimately her work and career themselves that account for her remarkable longevity in the culture. From her first film in 1925, to her rise to stardom in 1928, and on to the hit films she appeared in through the 1960s, she continually molded and remolded herself, crafting an indelible image and ensuring her place in the American pantheon. STARRING JOAN CRAWFORD is a rollicking exploration of the powerful women Joan Crawford vividly brought to life in her films—and the lasting, ever-evolving impact she has had on popular culture.Having carved out a revolutionary path through the entertainment industry while relying on men as little as possible—whether her studio bosses or her many husbands—she created a gallery of strong, assertive women who outsmarted men and refused to conform to gender expectations. In movies like Mildred Pierce, The Damned Don't Cry, Johnny Guitar, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, among many others, she played to win, becoming a lodestar to LGBT audiences, a model of feminist self-determination for women, and an unforgettable icon for everyone.

Not the Girl Next Door

Not the Girl Next Door PDF Author: Charlotte Chandler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471105865
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
As Charlotte Chandler did so well in her previous biographies, she will again draw on the recorded words of Joan Crawford and those who knew her well to paint a rich portrait of the woman and the star. Joan Crawford was born Lucille LeSueur in Texas in 1908. She became a chorus girl in silent films before finding her voice in Possessed(1931) with Clark Gable. Their affair would continue, on and off screen, for many years. Throughout the thirties, Joan continued to earn critical acclaim for her forte of playing career women who never gave up. Her Oscar-winning film Mildred Piercein 1945 began the long-running feud between Joan and Bette Davis, which reached its height with Whatever Happened to Baby Janein 1962. Joan was married four times including once to Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who spoke extensively to Charlotte Chandler for this book. Following her death, Joan's decision to cut her eldest children out of her will prompted her daughter Christina to write the damning bookMommie Dearest which changed Joan's image forever. Charlotte Chandler spent many hours recording interviews with Joan and also those closest to her. What emerges is a subtle portrait of a complex women and a new insight into the legendary actress.

A Woman's View

A Woman's View PDF Author: Jeanine Basinger
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 030783154X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Book Description
Now, Voyager, Stella Dallas, Leaver Her to Heaven, Imitation of Life, Mildred Pierce, Gilda…these are only a few of the hundreds of “women’s films” that poured out of Hollywood during the thirties, forties, and fifties. The films were widely disparate in subject, sentiment, and technique, they nonetheless shared one dual purpose: to provide the audience (of women, primarily) with temporary liberation into a screen dream—of romance, sexuality, luxury, suffering, or even wickedness—and then send it home reminded of, reassured by, and resigned to the fact that no matter what else she might do, a woman’s most important job was…to be a woman. Now, with boundless knowledge and infectious enthusiasm, Jeanine Basinger illuminates the various surprising and subversive ways in which women’s films delivered their message. Basinger examines dozens of films, exploring the seemingly intractable contradictions at the convoluted heart of the woman’s genre—among them, the dilemma of the strong and glamorous woman who cedes her power when she feels it threatening her personal happiness, and the self-abnegating woman whose selflessness is not always as “noble” as it appears. Basinger looks at the stars who played these women and helps us understand the qualities—the right off-screen personae, the right on-screen attitudes, the right faces—that made them personify the woman’s film and equipped them to make believable drama or comedy out of the crackpot plots, the conflicting ideas, and the exaggerations of real behavior that characterize these movies. In each of the films the author discusses—whether melodrama, screwball comedy, musical, film noir, western, or biopic—a woman occupies the center of her particular universe. Her story—in its endless variations of rags to riches, boy meets girl, battle of the sexes, mother love, doomed romance—inevitably sends a highly potent mixed message: Yes, you women belong in your “proper place” (that is, content with the Big Three of the women’s film world—men, marriage, and motherhood), but meanwhile, and paradoxically, see what fun, glamour, and power you can enjoy along the way. A Woman’s View deepens our understanding of the times and circumstances and attitudes out of which these movies were created.

A Portrait of Joan

A Portrait of Joan PDF Author: Joan Crawford
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1787208915
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
One of Hollywood’s greatest stars recalls her fabulous life: at nine, scrubbing floors in a Kansas City school; at twenty, motion picture stardom and marriage to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; in 1945, the Academy Award for her sensational comeback-triumph in Mildred Pierce; and today, a glamorous “double life” as Hollywood star and corporation executive. Richly illustrated with photographs throughout.

Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford PDF Author: Lawrence J. Quirk
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813122546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Based on new interviews, this fresh portrayal of an American film legend retraces her steps from her beginnings in silent films in the 1920s through her Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce and subsequent decline. (Biography)

The Best of Everything

The Best of Everything PDF Author: Rona Jaffe
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593511263
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
"Sixty years later, Jaffe’s classic still strikes a chord, this time eerily prescient regarding so many of the circumstances surrounding sexual harassment that paved the way toward the #MeToo movement." -Buzzfeed When Rona Jaffe’s superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Almost sixty years later, The Best of Everything remains touchingly—and sometimes hilariously—true to the personal and professional struggles women face in the city. There’s Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor’s office; naïve country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; and Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Jaffe follows their adventures with intelligence, sympathy, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.

Joan Crawford, a Biography

Joan Crawford, a Biography PDF Author: Bob Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"Few Hollywood careers have been more fabulous, more scandalous, more dizzyingly from-rags-to-riches and from-triumph-to-tragedy, more glaringly limelit than that of Joan Crawford, born Lucille Fay LeSueur in 1906 (or 1908, according to her press releases) in Texas. Miss Crawford rose from being a telephone operator in Kansas City (under the name Billie Cassin, since her mother had remarried) to a chorus line in Springfield, Missouri. and from there--as if propelled by one high, miraculous kick--came to MGM, fame, glamour, glitter, romance, and ultimate stardom. For many people Joan Crawford was more than a star; she was *the* star, the very symbol of those dazzling movie queens whose faces were more famous throughout the world than those of emperors, dictators or presidents, and whose very appearance could create a riot--as Miss Crawford once did in New York`s Grand Central Terminal. She was a tough, ambitious, gutsy and fiercely competitive person, a complete professional when it came to making movies, a star on or off the stage. Her energy was inexhaustible and legendary, as was her temper, and her marriages were stormy and violent, whether with fellow-star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. or with Pepsi-Cola executive Alfred Steele, who made her Pepsi's ambassador to the world and died leaving her almost penniless. Joan Crawford's love affairs were the stuff of countless gossip columns, as widely publicized as her movies--and seldom indeed has a life been lived more in the limelight of publicity. Yet in this definitive, powerful and dramatic biography, Bob Thomas, dean of Hollywood biographers, has recreated the *real* life of Joan Crawford: her lonely, terrible death; her search for her father (who abandoned her at an early age and reappeared in her life when she was a star); her struggles to reach the top; the scandals that haunted her life (including the rumor that she had appeared in a blue movie and that Louis B. Mayer had paid a king's ransom to buy the negative and destroy it); her tortured relationships with her adopted children; her drinking; and her courageous decision to resume work after Steele's death. Here, at last, is the complete and extraordinary story of Joan Crawford's life, her films, her marriages, her secrets and her loves, in an intimate biography that delineates the character and the personality of the Ultimate Star."--Dust jacket.

The Complete Films of Joan Crawford

The Complete Films of Joan Crawford PDF Author: Lawrence J. Quirk
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806510781
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description