Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Elsa Lanchester

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Acting’s just waiting for a custard pie. That’s all.” —Katharine Hepburn

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Elsa Lanchester on the set of Bride of Frankenstein, 1935
On her maternal instincts:
“I held a baby once. It felt like a bag of hot snakes.”

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“The only reason they come to see me is that I know life is great — and they know I know it.”
—Clark Gable

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“You know what you can do with this.” -Myrna Loy to her movie studio when they sent her a letter reprimanding her for speaking out on behalf of German Jews. Her activism resulted in a loss of revenue for the studio when Hitler banned Loy’s movies in Germany.
“You know what you can do with this.”
—Myrna Loy to MGM when they sent her a letter reprimanding her for speaking out on behalf of German Jews. Her call against Jew-hatred resulted in a loss of revenue for the studio when Hitler banned Loy’s movies in Germany.

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Barbara Stanwyck’s Secrets

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Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Dallas, '37.
Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Dallas, ’37.

The new Barbara Stanwyck biography, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel True, 1907 – 1940 by Victoria Wilson, is, with appendix, footnotes, index and acknowledgements, over 1,000 pages long.

And it is just volume one.

This first, full scale bio of Barbara Stanwyck is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) study of Hollywood’s greatest actress. Born in Brooklyn—of course—Ruby Davis had an astonishing Hollywood career that spanned four decades, from the beginning of the sound era of the late 1920’s, through Hollywood’s Golden Age, and right into television.

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