Movie Icons

Her beauty has proved timeless - should we be surprised? Equally graceful whether moving or standing still, blessed with a balletic poise, luminous dark eyes, and an exquisite profile a queen might envy, Audrey Hepburn would no doubt have become famous in her youth even if the movies hadn`t found her - simply because no self-respecting camera could resist her. What sets her iconic beauty apart now, for us, more than a decade after she`s quit the stage of this life, is that her physicality is oddly secondary. Her extraordinary good looks merely halo a still-living smile. Издание на английском языке.

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Дата выхода: июль 2009

Ingrid Bergman was born beautiful, but, unusually for one so blessed, she knew that beauty is never enough. She wanted to be great as well. Did any movie star of the classic era demonstrate more ambition? On the stage, she performed Strindberg, Ibsen, Turgenev, Shaw, and O`Neill - some several times. On television she acted in Zweig, Henry James, and Cocteau, and in movies there was Joan of Arc (1948) and a relentless film for Ingmar Bergman, Autumn Sonata (1978). Those stage performances were acclaimed in their time, but they are gone. What is left is a succession of films recording an indelible combination of profoundly female beauty with stolid peasant strength - a tawny sensuality that made her particularly adept at portraying...

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Humphrey Bogart is a legend and an icon whose magic has not dissipated with time. The wounded tough guy image Bogart molded over the decades of his career still resonates. There is a truth to this image; audiences sense that the world-weariness, the angst, and the vulnerability, which made him an icon of noir as well, were rooted somehow in reality. Even if the spectator knew nothing about his personal life, they believed and still do believe in his performances in cinema classics like "Casablanca", "The Maltese Falcon", "High Sierra", "The Big Sleep", "In a Lonely Place", and "The African Queen". Формат: 14,5 см x 20 см.

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Had he not been an actor, Marlon Brando once wrote, he would have become a criminal-specifically, a con artist. Take him at his word. Too many complain that Brando, the greatest actor of his generation, wasted his life in futile rebellions and left far too few masterworks in his wake, especially measured against his potential; but considering his sincere confession of criminal potential, we can be grateful for the little we do have. The actor who starred so unforgettably in A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Last Tango in Paris certainly owes no apologies to posterity. Издание на английском языке.

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

Charles Chaplin`s Little Tramp is the supreme icon of motion pictures - still recognized and loved throughout the world, more than 90 years since he first burst on the screen. The shabby little figure - with derby hat, too-tight jacket, oversized boots and pants, dandified bow tie, and swagger cane - seemed to symbolize the hopes and fears, defeats and optimism of all humanity. Chaplin`s own biography was a rags-to-riches story that saw the product of a destitute childhood in Victorian London become one of Hollywood`s first millionaires and the owner of his own studio before he was 30. His supreme gift was to transform his experience and knowledge of the human lot into comedy, for which his invention and skill have never been surpassed....

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Why is the only non-American winner of the AFI`s prestigious Life Achievement Award a Scotsman? Perhaps because Sean Connery`s career, though international in scope and global in appeal, made him a "genuine movie star" without any pretensions or pandering to fashion. Indisputably, Connery`s incarnation of James Bond catapulted him to stardom and lay the foundation for the most successful franchise in motion picture history. Together Bond and Connery became larger-than-life; but it was Connery, not Bond, whose powerful presence went on to permeate scores of other roles. Connery can be as cool and charismatic as Steve McQueen, as elegant as Cary Grant, or as generous as Frank Sinatra. Said Audrey Hepburn: "There are only two great stars in...

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

Most moviegoers associate actor Robert De Niro with adjectives like intense, violent, streetwise, and brooding. It is an image that De Niro has carefully nurtured over the last fifty years of his career. He used gesture, voice, and, most importantly, his mesmerizing eyes to convey to the audience the disturbing emotions with which he imbued his characters, from his earliest films like "Mean Streets" through classic portraits of violent, disaffected men like Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver" and Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull" to the maniacal father in "Meet the Parents". For in De Niros world, art and reality are often indistinguishable. "Movie Icons" is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of...

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

James Dean died at the age of 24, yet half a century later his mystique is unfaded. Had luck favored him that fatal evening, he might still be with us, an actor in the same generation as Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Sean Connery. His phenomenally charismatic performances in such classics as Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden have immortalized him as a cinematic great. Dean also had serious ambitions of becoming a writer-director, and it is haunting to imagine what he might have done if his life had not been cut short. He remains such icon of gifted youth: even 50 years after his death, we still look at James Dean in full suspense, wondering how he`s going to turn out. Издание на английском,...

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

Marlene Dietrich once said, "I am not a myth." But by referencing the term, Dietrich only reinforces the fact more emphatically. For, using almost any common dictionary definition of that word, Dietrich is a myth. Her image was fashioned by director Josef von Sternberg in films like The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express, and The Scarlet Empress, after which she maintained a Hollywood career that included Destry Rides Again, Rancho Notorious, and an accomplished performance in Billy Wilder`s Witness for the Prosecution. She has been an object of worship to millions throughout the decades, up to and including this jaded, post-modern 21st century. She is the "intellectual`s pin up girl," as author Herman G.Weinberg called her, of filmmakers and...

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Having starred in 44 films and directed 27, Clint Eastwood is a living legend. This book traces the evolution of his star persona from the mysterious gunslingers he played in such Westerns as the Dollars trilogy, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider, and Unforgiven, to the rogue cops and other troubled macho heroes he brought to life in the Dirty Harry films, The Gauntlet, Tightrope, Heartbreak Ridge, and In the Line of Fire. Along the way, Eastwood has also surprised his fans by taking uncharacteristic roles in comedies (Every Which Way But Loose), adventure films (White Hunter, Black Heart), and romantic movies (The Bridges of Madison County). In addition, no book on Eastwood would be complete without a look at some of the most acclaimed...

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

The top female box-office star of 1954, Grace Kelly`s status as icon takes in an 11-film, three-year, screen career and a glamorous later life as Princess of Monaco. More than any other star, she was in three memorable films the quintessential Hitchcock blonde, delineating traits of cool beauty, depths of hidden passion, intelligence, playfulness, and style - in short, the qualities that led biographer James Spada to call her "the pious man`s Marilyn." Yet Grace Kelly also showed her versatility and won her acting honors for playing against type in the title role in the grimly realistic movie "The Country Girl". Grace Kelly was a classic beauty, a public figure, and serious actress representative of an era. "The Movie Icon" series:...

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

He`s the most self-invented man in movies, this side of Charlie Chaplin. Like Chaplin, Cary Grant grew up poor, trained as an acrobat, and brims with confidence, romance, and a spirit of merry larceny - he just has a better tailor. His impeccable timing and light, cat burglar`s touch at stealing women`s hearts were perfect for the jaunty heroics and romantic farce of such classic films as An Affair to Remember, Notorious, His Girl Friday, North by Northwest, Bringing up Baby, and To Catch a Thief. In the end, the role became the man-he had ceased to play "Cary Grant" and simply was Cary Grant. One could wish no man any greater happiness than that.

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

How do we even describe the alienated beauty of Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Ichabod Crane in "Sleepy Hollow", Donnie Brasco, Don Juan DeMarco, Captain Jack Sparrow and Sweeney Todd, apart from the prodigious gift of Johnny Depp? How do we even name these great characters in one sentence, except under the heading of his contrary, heat-seeking curiosity, and imagination? If he didn`t exist, you would need at least six other actors to achieve what he has thus far in his career. Few are so angelically androgynous and masculine in the same breath. From teen hearth-throb to an accomplished actor who has worked with art house directors such as Emir Kusturica, Terry Gilliam, Roman Polanski, Jim Jarmusch, and John Waters, Depp has built himself...

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From birth, Katharine Hepburn seemed destined to become a symbol of the modern woman on stage, on screen, and in the world. Fiercely competitive, private, and independent, Hepburn was one part Olympic athlete Babe Didrikson, one part Amelia Earhart, and two parts Greta Garbo. Although often paired with the greatest actors in Hollywood-Humphrey Bogart (The African Queen); Cary Grant (Bringing Up Baby), James Stewart (The Philadelphia Story), and Spencer Tracy (Adam`s Rib, Woman of the Year) - Hepburn was able to carry her own films like Summertime, Little Women, and Sylvia Scarlett over a stage and screen career that spanned eight decades. Her home was never in Hollywood (where she won four Oscars) or New York but in Connecticut, where...

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In terms of celebrity icons, few attained the highest levels of fame and controversy as rapidly as Mae West. Labeled a "pornographer" by censorship boards, she was also one of 1930s Hollywood`s most lucrative box-office draws (causing Variety in 1933 to label the star "as hot an issue as Hitler"). Nicknamed by critic George Jean Nathan "the Statue of Libido" and paid homage to in the title song of Cole Porter`s musical Anything Goes, her voluptuous image and signature platinum blond air became recognizable worldwide and for decades beyond her prime years of fame in the 1930s. In fact, even by the 1960s when the Beatles wanted to use her image on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper`s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, those long-haired icons of a...

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

The Marx Brothers - Groucho, Chico, Harpo and sometimes Zeppo - spent over 2O years perfecting their comic timing in vaudeville routines and Broadway theatre revues before becoming one of cinema`s most successful comedy teams. They made 13 films together between 1929 and 1949, including Duck Soup (19ЗЗ), A Night at the Opera (1935), and A Day at the Races (1937), and appeared separately in dozens of additional film and television roles. Groucho is immediately recognizable with his big cigar, bushy eyebrows, greasepaint moustache and stooped walk. He would impersonate authority figures in a way that lampooned their pomposity, whether as Captain Jeffrey T.Spaulding, Dr. Hugo Z.Hackenbush or Attorney J.Cheever Loophole, Brother Zeppo...

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A few years before he was an actor, McQueen was a juvenile delinquent. A few years before he was a movie star, McQueen was a towel boy in a brothel. A few years before he commanded $3 million fees and gross points, McQueen raced motorcycles on weekends because he needed the prize money. McQueen`s life was full of emotional contradictions: he was fanatically loyal but unrelentingly paranoid; devoted but faithless; a bastard seeking legitimacy; an early environmentalist and perennial chauvinist; famous worldwide and desperate for anonymity and solitude. An actor schooled in method but grounded outside of any process, he pared away all pretension, imbuing his characters with a vitality that was never just about what he said or how he...

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"Forget everything you think you know about this person," Elia Kazan cautioned, in his autobiography. The icon we cherish under the name Marilyn Monroe was in truth the inspired creation of a smart, voluptuous, star struck and self-motivated fantasist named Norma Jean Mortenson. A pure product of Hollywood, she abides across time as brightly as two other self-inventors, Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant. Few things make an afterlife blaze more mythically than a sexual reputation-ask Cleopatra. Norma Jean paid a huge price to become Marilyn, yet here she is - still setting the bar high for all other would - be goddesses. Издание на английском языке.

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Jack Nicholson was over thirty, and more than a decade into his acting career, when Easy Rider finally made him a star. His reputation as a rebellious anti-hero was furthered by three notorious confrontations in films of the 1970s: Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He has played villains in The Shining and Batman, a hot-headed marine colonel in A Few Good Men, and a ruthless mob boss in The Departed. However, some of his best performances are in less showy roles where his skill is conveyed through subtlety. Jack has often turned down big money parts in order to take riskier roles such as the grim, introverted men in Ironweed, The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, and About Schmidt. Undoubtedly, Nicholson...

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

American cinema, as we`ve known it since The Godfather, would be impossible to reimagine without Al Pacino. As Michael Corleone he breathes life into an American of epic dimension. His characters may explode (Tony Montana in Scarface), or be paragons of calm and cunning (the journalist in The Insider), but his extraordinary eyes do the real talking. As a rival says of Tony Montana, "There is no lying in him," and this is equally true of Pacino. Good or evil, he is at all times a man to be trusted, impossible to ignore, a magnet for our continuing attention. The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren`t actors but were icons. Other people...

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

Elvis Presley would have been the first to laugh at the mad, godlike status he attained after death, but he would have surely identified with the human, gospel-haunted need such adoration rises out of. He shared that need, and courted it. He could sing and move with a spellbinding violence and grace. Yet his nature was also marked by a startling passivity-an eerily contented lack of ambition at his essence that kept him from growing after his first fiery years of success. That early fire still burns, nevertheless, and his mythical figure remains an omnipresent fixture today.

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

Long before he was Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra was a child of the jazz age and its free-wheeling approach to life. In the course of a meteoric rise from singing waiter to the world`s first pop star, Sinatra relied on his own version of keeping it simple: "I`m not one of those complicated, mixed-up cats. I`m not looking for the secret to life or the answer to life. I just go on from day to day taking what comes". As an entertainer Sinatra was both a visionary and a pragmatist, a prototype for the 20th century, who realized in the end that "You only live once, and the way I live, once is enough".

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

Elizabeth Taylor was a "diva" when that word still had meaning, before it was applied to every female celebrity with slightest bit of attitude and style. She was also one of the first actors to be raised to celebrity status by the media for the dramatic conflicts of her personal life as much as for any thespian achievements on the screen. In a time when studios controlled the news that was fed to the media about their valuable "properties," Taylor`s expansive personality and rollercoaster personal life was way too extravagant and exciting to be contained by the spin doctors of Hollywood. Издание на английском, немецком, французском языках.

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Дата выхода: январь 2000

Woody Allen began his career writing jokes and scripts, then progressed to stand-up and acting, and finally wrote and directed his first film, Take the Money and Run, in 1969. This was a screwball comedy that starred Allen as a hapless and self-demeaning schlemiel who bumbles his way through preposterous and hilarious situations. His first serious recognition as a filmmaker came with the Oscar he was awarded for Annie Hall in 1977. Allen progressed from joke comedy to psychological comedy with films like Manhattan, Stardust Memories, and Hannah and Her Sisters. Allens work has also come to reveal the poignant emotional mix of tragicomedy in the charm and fantasy of The Purple Rose of Cairo, the nostalgia of Radio Days, the multiple plots...

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Дата выхода: июль 2009

A recognized prodigy at age 10, world famous by age 23, Orson Welles was a triple magician of theater, radio, and film-and by age 25 a promising figure in American politics. President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged him to try a run for the Senate; newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst branded him a pariah. But by the time he turned 30, Orson Welles` professional success ended irreversibly; from then until the day he died, he endured ridicule and reproach over what many judged his "failure." Few knew how feverishly he had persisted as an independent filmmaker. Now, decades after his death, "new" work keeps emerging, and his reputation as an undefeated genius and creator only grows. Издание на английском языке.

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Дата выхода: январь 2000