Biographies

Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets & Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake) – Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema’s
pre-eminent figures. Now, in this definitive career-length interview, he reflects on all that has gone into the making of his unique body of work.

‘Fascinating . . . filled with lively historical digressions.’ New York Times ‘Best True Crime of 2022’

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England.

In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that the had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France – and disappeared without a trace. He was never seen or heard from again. No body was ever found.

Le Prince’s family were convinced Edison had stolen Louis’s work, and so they sued the most famous inventor in the world. By the time the lawsuit was over, Le Prince’s own son was dead under suspicious circumstances – and modern Hollywood was being born.

The Innocence of Memories is an important addition to the oeuvre of Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk. Comprised of the screenplay of the acclaimed film by Grant Gee from 2015 (by the same name), a transcript of the author and filmmaker in conversation, and captivating colour stills, it is an essential volume for understanding Pamuk’s work.

Drawing on the themes from Pamuk’s best-selling books, The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul and The Black Book, this book is both an accompaniment to the author’s previous publications and a wonderfully revelatory exploration of Orhan Pamuk’s key ideas about art, love, and memory.

In Directing Herbert White James Franco writes about making a film of Frank Bidart’s poem, Herbert White. Though the main character, Herbert White, is a necrophiliac and a killer, the poem – and the film – are an expression of life’s isolation and loneliness. A poem became a film.

In the rest of book, Franco uses poems to express what he feels about film: about acting; about the actors he admires – James Dean, Marlon Brando, Sean Penn; about the cult of celebrity and his struggles with it; about his teenage years in Palo Alto, and about mortality prompted by the death of his father.

Roeg began as a cameraman, working for such masters as Francois Truffaut and David Lean. His explosive debut as a director with Performance, established an approach to film-making that was unconventional and ever-changing, creating works such as Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, Insignificance, and, more recently, Puffball.

Having now reached eighty years of age, Roeg has decided to pass on to the next generations, the wealth of wisdom and experience he has garnered over fifty years of film-making.

Sean Connery’s personification of secret agent James Bond invigorated Britain and its cinema, allowing a cash-strapped, morale-sapped country in decline to fancy itself still a player on the world stage. But while Bond would make Connery the first actor to command a million dollar-plus fee, the man himself was forever pouring scorn on the fantasies audiences found it increasingly hard to separate him from.

From her days as a youthful minx at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to her post-studio reign as America’s lustiest middle-aged movie queen, Taylor has defined the very essence of Hollywood stardom. Marching through the decades swathed in mink, discarding husbands nearly as frequently as she changed her diamond necklaces, Taylor dominated the headlines as no other star before or since. From America’s sweetheart to America’s homewrecker and then back again, she uncannily reflected (and at times predicted) the always shifting cultural zeitgeist. How to Be a Movie Star is a different kind of book about Elizabeth Taylor: an intimate look at a girl who grew up with fame, who learned early – and well – how to be famous.

John Ford’s many classic movies – among them Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – earned him worldwide praise and renown. Now Joseph McBride presents us with the definitive account of the man’s myriad complexities and contradictions, tracing Ford’s life from his modest beginnings as ‘Bull’ Feeney, the nearsighted football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Maine, to his recognition, after a long, controversial, and much-decorated career, as America’s national myth-maker. This deeply insightful and impeccably documented narrative is the epic tribute that Ford’s stature merits.

Multi-Oscar-winning and still amazingly prolific, Woody Allen remains one of the truly great figures in American humour and American cinema. This career-length interview with Stig Bjorkman - editor of a similar volume on one of Allen's own heroes, Ingmar Bergman - traces the path of his career, his motivations and inspirations, and of course his nigh-legendary anxieties. Newly updated, the book contains discussion of such recent Allen triumphs as Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, and Sweet and Lowdown.

Funny, touching and real, this second collection of Alan Bennett’s classic work for television from the late 1970s and early 1980s is full of fine observations of life as it is lived. Often imitated but never equalled, Bennett’s work is a masterclass in how to write for the small screen and gives as much enjoyment in the reading as it did in the viewing.

The television plays included in this volume are Our Winnie, All Day on the Sands, One Fine Day, Marks, Say Something Happened, Rolling Home and Intensive Care. This volume also contains a new general introduction by Alan Bennett.

Alan Bennett is the acknowledged master of the television play. This vintage collection of his work from the 1970s illustrates his skill and mastery of the medium from the beginning. Perceptive, poignant, truthful and very funny, the work here gives as much enjoyment in the reading as it did in the viewing, and provides a welcome addition to the Bennett canon.

Rudolph Valentino was the silver-screen legend who for ever changed America’s idea of the leading man: a frightened young fellow who became the cinematic sex-god of his day. In this definitive retelling of Valentino’s short and tragic life – the first fully documented biography of the star – Emily W. Leider looks at the Great Lover’s life and legacy, and explores the events and issues that made him emblematic of his time. Valentino was reviled in the press for being too ‘feminine’ a man; yet he also brought to the screen the alluring, savage lover who embodied women’s darker, forbidden sexual fantasies. In tandem, Leider explores Valentino’s experience as an immigrant who became a celebrity: the silver screen’s first dark-skinned romantic hero.