Books like Norma Shearer by Gavin Lambert

A motivational guide for movie stars, focusing on their personal growth and life lessons.

An intimate biography that explores the professional and personal intersections of Sondra Locke’s career with the motion‑picture industry, featuring insights from her collaborations with legendary director Clint Eastwood.

An intimate biography of Marilyn Monroe, written by her lifelong friend and former actor Ted Jordan, unveiling the woman behind the Hollywood icon.

"Gene Kelly was a complex person, and this biography of the star as a multi-dimensional man is the first to become available since he died in 1996. Working from new research and interviews with people who knew and worked closely with the celebrated dancer, choreographer, and director, author Alvin Yudkoff draws a portrait of an awe-inspiring yet flawed artist who was dedicated to his craft, innovative and exacting, and also fiercely competitive and controlling.". "This story also follows Gene's relationships, and explores his uniqueness as a performer who came to Hollywood and changed the ways that dance would be integrated into the film musical. Here is a book for every lover of dance, fan of the classic Hollywood musicals, and admirer of the phenomenon that was Gene Kelly."--BOOK JACKET.

"There really was a Hollywood, a place of fashionable men and gorgeous women and the all-powerful studio system that allowed them to defy the conventions that governed the rest of the country. Clark Gable arrived there after a rough-and-tumble youth, and his breezy, big- boned, everyman persona quickly made him the town's "King." He was a gambler among gamblers, a heavy drinker in the days when everyone drank seemingly all the time, and a lover to legions of the most attractive women in the most glamorous business in the world.". "In this biography, Warren G. Harris gives us a portrait of one of the most memorable actors in the history of motion pictures, as well as a sure sense of the milieu and the times of mid-century Hollywood. More than anything else, one is struck by the romance of the era - the glamour and the excess, the playfulness and the lust. The people who were Gable's intimates are legends in their own right: Loretta Young, Marion Davies, David O. Selznick, Jean Harlow, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Spencer Tracy, Grace Kelly, and the list goes on and on." "Clark Gable reveals newly uncovered information about Gables's illegitimate daughter, his relationship with Joan Crawford, and his great love for Carole Lombard, his third wife."--BOOK JACKET.

One from the heart, and about as personal as celebrity bios get, as Quirk limns his friend Norma Shearer, who was his uncle James Quirk's love while he was editor-publisher of Photoplay (1914-1932). Despite this closeness to his subject, Quirk writes warmly but unworshipfully, always giving Shearer's performances the compliment of honest opinion. A Scot-English Canadian from Montreal, Shearer was first trained as a pianist, then won a beauty contest (despite poor teeth and a cast in her eye) and slipped into acting. She, her sister Athole, and mother Edith dumped their despairing failure of a dad/husband and took off for N.Y. to find stage careers for the two girls. In later life Norma was always attracted to father figures, men who made up for her father's weaknesses. Thus, after many small parts and starring roles in a string of middling features, she married Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder in charge of production at MGM, and her career took off with the choicest roles in town. Many critics found her a chilly actress, seeing her features as serenely unclouded. Quirk sees her as unique and glamorous, with intrinsic class and a compelling aura, ""an individual stamp, a shimmering radiance, and a poised self-containment"" unmatched by actresses in the late 1980's. Viewers and readers who saw her recent revival on PBS, especially in Noel Coward's Private Lives with Robert Montgomery, may agree with Quirk about Norma's great inner spark and comedic charm. When Thalberg died, the highly sexed, 36-year-old widow inherited a large block of MGM stock and kept herself in top pictures until retiring, like Garbo, at 42. As ""the First Lady of the Screen,"" she had her vanity and high-strung moments, and had many, perhaps physically unconsummated, affairs with much younger actors, including bisexual Tyrone Power. At 42, she married a very young ski instructor and lived happily ever after--almost. Her last years, in her 80's, reduced her to a blind vegetable. The Return of Norma Shearer. See it!