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Title: Hollywood Beauty: Linda Darnell and the American Dream by Ronald L. Davis ISBN: 0-8061-3330-9 Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great read on a star not mentioned enough...
Comment: This was the only bio I could find on Linda Darnell and I must say, it was worth the money. The author's honest depiction and narrative of this actress is wonderfully written. I highly recommend this insightful biography!
Rating: 5
Summary: The Curse of Beauty
Comment: I always liked Linda Darnell. My mother had told me about her when I was in my early teens, saw some of her films, and was quite taken by her. She wasn't a great actress, but she certainly wasn't a bad one, either. But when you look like that, who cares? Linda, born Monetta Eloyse Darnell in Texas, was blessed, or cursed, with a strikingly beautiful face. Pushed by her volatile, ambitious mother, Linda was signed to a contract at 20th Century Fox at the age of 15. Touted as Fox's "Glory Girl", she was featured in several films as a decorative brunette. With her lovely "Latin" looks (her grandfather actually was part Cherokee) and voluptuous figure, she adorned the screen in films such as "The Mask of Zorro" and "Blood and Sand", playing "good girls". When her box-office appeal started to wane, she was still barely over 20 years old. Her personal problems began to mount, dealing with her overbearing mother, a mounting drinking problem that began when she was married to her first husband, (who was some twenty-odd years older), and the fact that she could not bear children. Ms. Darnell's career picked up, however, when she started playing gorgeous "bad girls" in films such as "Fallen Angel", "Hangover Square", and the overblown costume epic "Forever Amber", in which she played an upwardly mobile woman of ill repute. Her best role, as the golddigger with a tender heart in Joseph Mankiewicz's "A Letter to Three Wives", came in 1949, but from then on it was pretty much downhill. Ms. Darnell's personal life became a series of unhappy marriages, exploitative relationships, a spotty career, alcoholism, and ultimately ended in a spectacularly awful way: she was horribly burned in a house fire in 1965, with 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 90% of her body,lingered for about 33 hours, and died, aged 41.
The book is a quick, albeit depressing read. Ronald Davis, also a native Texan, writes with compassion for his subject. Several interviews with her siblings, friends, and adopted daughter give a sympathetic portrayal of the "Fallen Angel". To put it in a nutshell, Ms. Darnell wasn't tough enough to handle the ups and downs of show business. Her tale isn't the first nor the last about the cruel world of showbiz, but it just seems even more depressing, when one thinks of the beauty with the face of a Madonna, going downhill at such a young age, and dying so horribly. I may add that there are eerie foreshadowings of her demise in three of her best known films. In "Hangover Square", she is strangled by Laird Cregar, who places her body on a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Day; in "Anna and the King of Siam", Linda, playing the runaway concubine Tuptim, is burned at the stake; and in "Forever Amber", she bears witness to the Great Fire of London. Creepy, isn't it?
Just a word of warning: Don't read this book if you're depressed!
Rating: 5
Summary: hollywood beauty-linda darnell
Comment: One of those books you don't want to put down- sensitively written the author follows Darnell's career and personal life-highlighting how much the beauriful Darnell was liked by her contemporaries in the movie world. A must to add to any library.
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Title: Peekaboo : The Story of Veronica Lake by Jeff Lenburg ISBN: 0595192394 Publisher: Backinprint.Com Pub. Date: 08 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Ida Lupino: A Biography by William Donati ISBN: 0813109825 Publisher: University Press of Kentucky Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew by John Oller ISBN: 0879102780 Publisher: Limelight Editions Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Ava Gardner: Beautiful, Wild, Innocent by Gilles Dagneau, Sandra Eiko Tokunaga ISBN: 8873014968 Publisher: Gremese Editore Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Alice Faye: A Life Beyond the Silver Screen by Jane Lenz Elder ISBN: 1578062101 Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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