Acteurs

Pour les 60 ans de l'actrice, Françoise Piazza signe la première biographie de l’incandescente Marie Trintignant, inoubliable actrice d’Alain Corneau, Chabrol, Deville ou encore Salvadori, disparue à seulement 41 ans en 2003.

Si Laurel et Hardy sont devenus le duo comique le plus célèbre du cinéma, leur vie privée, en revanche, demeure méconnue. Qui se cachait derrière le masque des deux compères ? La biographie complète et illustrée de deux vedettes dont le succès planétaire avait envahi la vie privée.

Il y a 50 ans, à l'âge de 47 ans, disparaissait Judy Garland, célèbre interprète de Over The Rainbow et mère de Liza Minelli. Un des plus grands mythes hollywoodiens, raconté par le biographe des stars Bertrand Tessier.

Depuis Les Valseuses, Gérard Depardieu s’est construit une filmographie de premiers plan, en collaboration avec les plus grands noms. Pourtant, rien ne prédestinait ce jeune Castelroussin à un tel parcours… Retour sur la trajectoire de cet acteur hors norme.

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.

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.

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.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy both passed away in the 1950s, yet their films still have the power to reduce audiences old and new to helpless laughter. There has been no comprehensive account of their lives and work, until now. The roots of their comic greatness lay in 19th century variety theatre. Lancashire-born Stan Laurel was steeped in the traditions of the music hall, and found himself touring the USA in the 1910s as Charlie Chaplin’s understudy. American Oliver Hardy had established himself as a ‘fat funny man’ by the time he and Laurel were first paired in 1927.