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Theatre Biographies T to Z

See also: Theatre > Playwrights
Film > Biographies; Directors; Producers

A Strange Eventful HistoryA 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	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 With unique access to hundreds of unpublished letters, Jonathan Croall has produced a sympathetic but critical biography of the vicar's daughter who became a theatrical legend.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 TerryEllen 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.


Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton TravisCentury Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis

Lauren Redniss
Fourteen years old and the youngest in the Ziegfeld Follies, Doris Eaton made critics swoon. When she was born in 1904, the average American could expect to live 47 years. The blue-eyed child was destined to fill more than two of these life spans. She was named three weeks before New York City Mayor George McClellan dubbed the bowtie of between 42nd and 47th, from Broadway to Seventh Avenue, "Times Square". It was there, on the new Amsterdam theatre stage, that she made her debut as a chorus girl in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. For her 100th birthday she was back on the same stage, leading a conga line of a dozen dancers. Before receiving her honorary doctorate at age 101, she had starred in silent and talking pictures, performed for presidents and princesses, bantered with Babe Ruth, offended Henry Ford, outlived six siblings, wrote a newspaper column, hosted a TV show, earned a Phi Betta Kappa degree in history (at 88), raised turkeys, and raced horses. And that's just for starters. Hardcover, 187 pp. $44.95.


The Diaries of Kenneth TynanThe Diaries of Kenneth Tynan
John Lahr
Irreverent, indiscreet, wildly funny, sad, shocking, and inspiring, the legendary diaries of Kenneth Tynan are above all compelling literature. For over three decades, on both sides of the Atlantic, Tynan was at the epicentre of the film worlds. These diaries bear superb witness to the fame he courted and the price he paid for it. Softcover, 439 pp. $21.95.


Enchantress of NationsEnchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot: Soprano, Muse and Lover
Michael Steen
Enchantress of Nations is a portrait of Pauline Viardot, one of music's most magnetic, colourful and brilliant female stars - but also a picturesque biography of tumultuous, artistic, ever-changing 19th-century Europe. Hardcover, 539 pp. $40.00.

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Theatre Biographies are listed alphabetically by last name.
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Kurt Weill On Stage: From Berlin to BroadwayKurt 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 MarquessIrish 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 LettersOscar 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 WildeThe 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.


Selected Letters of Tennessee WilliamsThe 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 WilliamsThe 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 NotebooksTennessee 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 WilsonRobert 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 BiographyAbsolute 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.


Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show BusinessZiegfeld: 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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Last modified December 28, 2009.
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