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 Theatre Biographies T to Z
See also: Theatre >
Playwrights
Film > Biographies; Directors;
Producers
 A Strange Eventful History
Michael Holroyd
Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were the king and queen of the Victorian stage. In his first major biography for fifteen years, Michael Holroyd explores their public and private lives, showing how their artistic legacy and lines of inheritance came to influence the modern world. A witty, elegant and brilliantly paced tragicomedy, and an absorbing chronicle of two great theatrical families, A Strange Eventful History is a masterwork of the biographer's art. Hardcover, 620 pp. $57.95.
 Sybil Thorndike: A Star of Life
Jonathan Croall
Sybil Thorndike was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century. Loved and admired as a leading actress, she was also an ardent feminist, socialist and pacifist, who fought throughout her life for a better and more peaceful world. With unique access to hundreds of unpublished letters, Jonathan Croall has produced a sympathetic but critical biography of the vicar's daughter who became a theatrical legend. Hardcover, 584 pp. $33.00.
 Ellen Terry
Joy Melville
Ellen Terry rose to fame as an actress in the 19th century, when her stage
partnership with Henry Irving at London's Lyceum Theatre drew capacity
crowds. She was notorious for flaunting the moral code of her day,
marrying three times, and then living with her lover, Edward Godwin,
by whom she had three illegitimate children. A perfectionist on
stage, she was cruelly forced to continue to act beyond a point
she found appropriate in order to earn money to support her children.
As her sight and memory worsened, and her partnership with Irving
ended, her acting career closed. She reinvented herself as a lecturer,
touring Britain and America speaking on Shakespeare's heroines.
Hardcover, 256 pp. $25.95.
 Kurt Weill On Stage: From Berlin to Broadway
Foster Hirsch
In Kurt Weill On Stage, the focus of the biography is on Weill's
career in the United States, but Hirsch's primal aim is to explore the
truth in the comment made by Weill's wife, the unforgettable Lotte Lenya: "There
is no American Weill, there is no German Weill. There is no difference
between them. There is only Weill." Hirsch is able, in this book,
to give the reader a multifaceted portrait of a man who fought critics,
collaborators and prejudice to ensure that his theatrical vision was
executed down to the smallest detail. Softcover, 403 pp. $32.95.
 Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
Merlin Holland
Examining the most sensational trial of the nineteenth century,
Merlin Holland has produced an intimate view of Oscar Wilde and the Queensberry
trial. As a work of legal literature, it ranks with Plato's account of
the trial of Socrates. As the drama unfolds, Wilde's downward spiral
into shame and infamy turns one of the most important episodes of his
biography into a kind of art. Softcover, 340 pp. $19.95.
 Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters
Merlin Holland
How wonderous it would be to have Oscar Wilde narrate the events
of his life, in his own words; alas, he did not write an autobiography. Oscar
Wilde: A Life in Letters is a wonderfully fluent collection of Wilde's
correspondances with friends, family, and many leading political, literary
and artistic figure of the time. What's more, it is perhaps the closest
that we will ever get to an Oscar Wilde self-portrait. Hardcover, 384
pp. $48.95.
 The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
Neil McKenna
Drawing on a wide range of sources, The Secret Life of Oscar
Wilde charts fully for the first time Oscar's astonishing erotic
odyssey through Victorian London's sexual underworld. This dazzlingly
written biography provides an remarkably frank and vivid psychological
portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself to the
cause of love between men. Hardcover, 535 pp. $54.95.
 The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams
Volume I 1920 - 1945
Albert J. Devlin, ed.
Forming a virtual autobiography of the great playwright, this volume
presents 330 letters written to seventy correspondants. HC $52.00.
 The
Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams
Volume II: 1945-1957
Albert J. Devlin & Nancy M. Tischler
Volume I ends with the surprising triumph of The Glass Menagerie. Volume
II extends the correspondence from 1945 to 1957, a time of intense creativity
for Willliams, which saw the production of six major plays. In all there are
nearly 350 letter written to ninety correspondents, wherein we catch a glimpse
of Williams at his most candid, open, reflective, and passionate. Hardcover,
662 pp. $58.00.
 Tennessee Williams Notebooks
Margaret Bradham Thornton
These notebooks, here published for the first time, present by turns a passionate, whimsical, movingly lyrical, self-reflective, and completely uninhibited record of the life of this monumental American genius from 1936 to 1981. In these pages Williams wrote out his most private thoughts; reflected on his plays, stories, and poems; and gave accounts of his social, professional, and sexual encounters. Meticulously edited and annotated by Margaret Bradham Thornton, these notebooks form what is possibly the most spontaneous self-portrait by any writer in American history. Hardcover, 828 pp. $52.95.
 Robert Wilson
Maria Shevtsova
Routledge Performance Practitioners is a series of introductory guides to the key theatre-makers of the last century. Robert Wilson is an American-European director who is also a performer, installation artist, writer, designer of light and much more besides--a crossover polymath who dissolves both generic and geographical boundaries and is a precursor of globalization in the arts. Softcover, 172 pp. $29.99.
 Absolute Wilson: The Biography
Katharina Otto-Bernstein
Absolute Wilson is the intimate portrait of an artistic genius who lives
to defy the norm. It traces the unlikely career of the speech-impaired
child, who became a movement therapist and embraced his disability
in order to create a new form of theatre. Told by the artist himself
and the ones he touched, this book examines Wilson's methods of creating
and working, from his inspiration to the choice of collaborators. Hardcover,
270 pp. $97.00.
 Franco Zeffirelli: Complete Works - Theatre, Opera, Film
Edited by Caterina Napoleone
Produced in full cooperation with Zeffirelli and his family, it explores every aspect of his astonishing achievement in the performing arts. The performance shots of classic stage productions are particularly revealing, each a lasting testament to Zeffirelli’s visual expertise. Even more suggestive are Zeffirelli’s costume sketches, set designs, and technical drawings, which reveal the artist’s mind through the artist’s hand. Both a monument to an artistic genius and a magnificent piece of bookmaking, Franco Zeffirelli: Complete Works is a must-have book for anyone who has beem moved by the works of the master. Hardcover with slipcover, 512 pp. $180.00.
 Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business
Ethan Mordden
In Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business, Ethan Mordden re-creates the lost world of the Follies, a place of long-vanished beauty masterminded by one of the most inventive, ruthless, street-smart, and exacting men ever to fill a theatre on the Great White Way: Florenz Ziegfeld. Hardcover, $36.50.
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