Bücher von Charlotte Chandler

SHE ALWAYS KNEW HOW: MAE WEST A PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY

NOT THE GIRL NEXT DOOR: JOAN CRAWFORD A PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY

"It's Only a Movie is the best book ever written about my father. It really is amazing." -Patricia HitchcockNorth by Northwest. Psycho. Rear Window. The Birds. Vertigo. When it comes to murder and mayhem, shock and suspense, the films of Alfred Hitchcock can not be surpassed. For this book, Charlotte Chandler interviewed Hitchcock, his wife, daughter, film crew members, and many of the stars who appeared in his films, including Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, Cary Grant, Tippi Hedren and James Stewart.Throughout the book, Chandler shares Hitchcock's wit and wisdom. When actors took themselves too seriously, he would remind them, "it's only a movie." Chandler introduces us to the real Hitchcock, a devoted family man and notorious practical joker, who made suspenseful thrillers mixed with subtle humor and tacit eroticism.

INGRID: INGRID BERGMAN A PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY

Noted film biographer Charlotte Chandler interviewed Bette Davis extensively in the last decade of her life resulting in a biography in which the great actress speaks for herself. Chandler also spoke with directors actors and others who knew and worked with Davis and includes brief synopses of all of her theatrical films.ÞHere are some more examples of Bette''s wit to be found within these pages:Þ I''m the one who didn''t get the man which is the more interesting character on the screen but in real life sometimes I wish I could just have been the girl who got the man and kept him. I got four husbands and several lovers but I didn''t keep any of them. I was invited to the White House but no man stayed to share my white cottage. Þ My favorite actor with whom I never played professionally or personally was Laurence Olivier. I admired everything about him. He was a great actor and he was my dream man. Literally and figuratively. Larry was my fantasy lover the perfect man or at least I thought he would be. He was not only beautiful but intelligent.

In this fascinating new biography of screen legend Joan Crawford, Charlotte Chandler draws on exclusive and remarkably candid interviews with Crawford herself and with others who knew her, including first husband Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Crawford's daughter Cathy. As a result, this biography is fresh and revealing, a brand-new look at one of Hollywood's most acclaimed stars. Joan Crawford was born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, in 1908 (as she always insisted, though other sources disagreed). Her father abandoned the family, and her mother soon remarried; Lucille was now known as Billie Cassin. Young Billie loved to dance and achieved her early success in silent films playing a dancer. Her breakthrough role came in Our Dancing Daughters. Soon married to Hollywood royalty, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (who called her "e;Billie"e;), she was a star in her own right, playing opposite John Barrymore and a stellar cast in M-G-M's Grand Hotel. Crawford was cast opposite another young star, Clark Gable, in several films. They would sometimes play lovers on screen -- and off as well. After her marriage to Fairbanks broke up, Crawford married actor Franchot Tone. That marriage soon began to show strains, and Crawford was sometimes seen riding with Spencer Tracy, who gave her a horse she named Secret. Crawford left M-G-M for Warners, and around the time she married her third husband, Phillip Terry, she won her Oscar for best actress (one of three times she was nominated) in Mildred Pierce. But by the 1950s the film roles dried up. Crawford and Terry had divorced, and Crawford married her fourth husband, Pepsi-Cola executive Alfred Steele. In 1962, she and longtime cinematic rival Bette Davis staged a brief comeback in the macabre but commercial What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Following Steele's death, Crawford became a director of Pepsi- Cola while she continued raising her four adopted children. Although her daughter Christina would publish the scathing memoir Mommie Dearest after Crawford's death, Chandler offers a contrasting portrait of Crawford, drawing in part on reminiscences of younger daughter Cathy among others. Not the Girl Next Door is perhaps Charlotte Chandler's finest Hollywood biography yet, an intimate portrait of a great star who was beautiful, talented, glamorous, and surprisingly vulnerable.