Gavin Lambert

A major rediscovery - a full-scale biography - of the electrifying Russian-born actress who brought Stanislavksy and Chekhov to American theatre, who was applauded, lionized, adored - a legend of the stage and screen for forty years, and then strangely forgotten. Her shockingly natural approach to acting transformed the theatre of her day. She thrilled Laurette Taylor. The first time Tennessee Williams saw her he knew he wanted to be a playwright ("She was so shatteringly powerful that I couldn't stay in my seat"). Eugene O'Neill said of her that she gave him his "first conception of a modern theatre." She introduced the American stage and its audience to Ibsen's New Woman, a woman hell-bent on independence. It was a role Nazimova embodied offstage as well. When she toured in a repertory of A Doll's House, The Master Builder, and Hedda Gabler from 1907 to 1910, she earned the then unheard-of sum of five million dollars for theatre manager Lee Shubert. Eight years later she went to Hollywood and signed a contract with Metro Pictures (before it was MGM) and became the highest-paid actress in silent pictures, ultimately writing, directing, and producing her own movies (Revelation, Stronger than Death, Billions, Salome). Four years later she formed her own film company. She was the only actress, other than Mae West, to become a movie star at forty, and was the first to cultivate the image of the "foreign" sophisticate, soon to be followed by Pola Negri, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. Gavin Lambert was given exclusive access to her unpublished memoirs, letters, and notes. And now fifty years after her death, eighty years after her ascendancy as a giant figure to the American public, Lambert has brilliantly re-created the life and work of this complex, dark, glamorous, and important figure.

Draws on the author's twenty-year friendship with the acclaimed actress, as well as interviews with family and intimates, to chronicle her life, from child actress to her tragic drowning death at the age of forty-three.

"Here is a portrait of Hollywood screenwriter Ivan Moffat, whose lonely, aristocratic childhood led to a precociously fashionable and sensual life in London's High Bohemia in the late 1930s, service in director George Stevens's World War II film documentary unit, and membership in Hollywood's postwar expatriate community." "Ivan Moffat's pedigree was only the foundation upon which he built his own equally active personal life, populated by the leading artists and personalities of his day - from Aldous Huxley and Dylan Thomas to Preston Sturges, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, and David Selznick." "In 1943 Moffat enlisted in the army and was assigned to George Stevens's unit, started by Eisenhower, which covered the last stage of World War II, from D-day to the fall of Berlin and the liberation of the concentration camps. After the war, Stevens invited Moffat to become an associate producer for his new Hollywood company. Moffat's unofficial credits on the screenplays for A Place in the Sun and Shane and his co-writing credit on Giant led to a successful screenwriting career, and at the same time he became a leading social figure in Hollywood. Moffat had affairs with many women - from a waitress to a duchess, from a stripper to a movie star. The most serious affair of his life was probably with the novelist Caroline Blackwood." "At the center of The Ivan Moffat File is the autobiography that Moffat was working on at the time of his death in 2002, to which Gavin Lambert adds never-before-seen letters, interviews, and screenplays, as well as many anecdotes and his own memories of Moffat."--BOOK JACKET.

"On Cukor is finally being reissued in a revised, updated, and redesigned book, published to coincide with the broadcast of an American Masters film directed by Robert Trachtenberg. For this new edition, Gavin Lambert has rewritten the introduction, added new material from his original taped interviews with Cukor, assembled never-before-published photographs from Cukor's personal collection and updated a complete filmography that includes movies re-shot by Cukor without credit.". "The heart of the book remains intact. In an unusually candid series of taped interviews with Lambert in the early 1970s, one of Hollywood's finest directors shared some revealing and intimate thoughts on his craft. He discussed his most famous films, including What Price Hollywood?, Dinner at Eight, Little Women, David Copperfield, Camille, Holiday, The Women, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, Pat and Mike, The Marrying Kind, It Should Happen to You, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1919, the recently widowed Elva Kay arrives in Hollywood with nothing but an overdose of ambition and an eight-year-old daughter whom she's determined to make a child star. Baby Jewel not only fulfils her mother's wildest dreams, but Elva herself becomes the most glamorous (and ruthless) female tycoon ever to hit Los Angeles.

"Lindsay Anderson was the most original British filmmaker and theatrical director of his generation." "Anderson was, as well, an outspoken and sometimes ferocious critic of British films - and of Britain itself. He was the author of a book on John Ford. And he was one of Gavin Lambert's closest friends for more than fifty years." "Lambert's book begins with his and Anderson's days as movie-struck schoolboys, becoming fast friends, growing up in the shadow of World War II. He shows us their postwar creation of and collaboration on the influential magazine Sequence - a magazine that was produced on love and a shoestring, and which shook up the British film world with its admiration for both Hollywood noir and MGM musicals (at the time unfashionable genres) and its celebration of such directors as Ford, Bunuel, Cocteau, Vigo, and Sturges." "He describes how both men rebelled in opposite directions - Anderson remaining in England, Lambert leaving in 1958 for Los Angeles - and traces their unorthodox paths through the film industry."--Jacket.