â860 glittering pagesâ (Janet Maslin, The New York Times): The first volume of the full-scale astonishing life of one of our greatest screen actressesâher work, her world, her Hollywood through an American century.
Frank Capra called her, âThe greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known.â Now Victoria Wilson gives us the first volume of the rich, complex life of Barbara Stanwyck, an actress whose career in pictures spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound (eighty-eight motion pictures) and lasted in television from its infancy in the 1950s through the 1980s. Here is Stanwyck, revealed as the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of old New England stock; her years in New York as a dancer and Broadway star; her fraught marriage to Frank Fay, Broadway genius; the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with Zeppo Marx (the âunfunny Marx brotherâ) who altered the course of Stanwyckâs movie career and with her created one of the finest horse breeding farms in the west; and her fairytale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, Americaâs most sought-after male star.
Here is the shaping of her career through 1940 with many of Hollywood's most important directors, among them Frank Capra, âWild Billâ William Wellman, George Stevens, John Ford, King Vidor, Cecil B. Demille, Preston Sturges, set against the timesâthe Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the unions, the advent of World War II, and a fast-changing, coming-of-age motion picture industry.
And at the heart of the book, Stanwyck herselfâher strengths, her fears, her frailties, losses, and desiresâhow she made use of the darkness in her soul, transforming herself from shunned outsider into one of Hollywoodâs most revered screen actresses.
Fifteen years in the makingâand written with full access to Stanwyckâs family, friends, colleagues and never-before-seen letters, journals, and photographs. Wilsonâs one-of-a-kind biographyââlarge, thrilling, and sensitiveâ (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Town & Country)âis an âepic Hollywood narrativeâ (USA TODAY), âso readable, and as direct as its subjectâ (The New York Times). With 274 photographs, many published for the first time.