The Biograph Girl.The Biograph Girl * William J. Mann William J. Mann is a biographer and Hollywood historian acclaimed for writing what has been called the "definitive" (The Sunday Times, London) life of Katharine Hepburn, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn published in October 2006. * Kensington Books This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of this article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. * $23 In the charming 1998 biography Wisecracker, William J. Mann retold re·told v. Past tense and past participle of retell. the life of gay silent film star Billy Haines, who refused to play it straight and who, when queer scandal struck, brushed off the movies and became a sought-after interior decorator, Now Mann has exhumed Exhumed may refer to:
Back before movie stars had names, Florence Lawrence filled screens and movie magazines and wowed audiences with what critics called her "talented attractions," In 1908 she became the first screen actress to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet star-crossed lovers die as teenagers. [Br. Lit.: Romeo and Juliet] See : Death, Premature Romeo and Juliet archetypal star-crossed lovers. [Br. Lit. ; the following year she signed with Biograph Studios, where she was dubbed the Girl of a Thousand Faces and, eventually, the Biograph Girl, By the time her name began appearing in print, she was the biggest star in the business, But by the late '30s Lawrence was playing bits at MGM MGM in full Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. U.S. corporation and film studio. It was formed when the film distributor Marcus Loew, who bought Metro Pictures in 1920, merged it with the Goldwyn production company in 1924 and with Louis B. Mayer Pictures in 1925. , Destitute and alone, she killed herself in 1938. But, Mann asks, what if Lawrence didn't really die from eating ant paste? In this fictionalized version of her life, Lawrence is discovered still alive in a nursing home in Buffalo, She's 106 years old and full of stories about her days as a child star and movie actress, But she'd rather not talk about the body buried in her grave or why she may have faked her own suicide more than half a century before, Both filmmaker Ben Sheehan and his twin brother, Richard, a gay freelance writer, hope to be the first to untangle Lawrence's life story, and their rivalry provides a cool counterpoint to her mesmerizing mes·mer·ize tr.v. mes·mer·ized, mes·mer·iz·ing, mes·mer·iz·es 1. To spellbind; enthrall: "He could mesmerize an audience by the sheer force of his presence" memories, The novel seamlessly splices together real people (Carl Laemmle, D.W. Griffith) with credible fictional characters, real events with imagined episodes, Mann even infers that Lawrence might have been gay, in love with another actress and, later, with the young woman whose body was mistaken for hers, The Biograph Girl provides not only a good yarn but also an impressively researched piece of film history and a compelling glimpse at early-20th-century America, The result is somewhere between high art and low camp (this is, after all, a book about a dead film actress)--a memorial to a forgotten player who was both the entertainment industry's first star and the first to be undone by it. Pela is the Arizona correspondent for National Public Radio. |
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