Rosalind russell actress biography book
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Oh, to have Auntie Mame's vivacity! Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.
This was my penultimate book for the Classic Film Reading Challenge, a memoir written by Rosalind Russell with Chris Chase and released following her death from cancer in 1976. Her husband of 35 years, Frederick Brisson, wrote the foreword and gave a view into their relationship and her battle, and you can feel the love between them.
Though you'd expect a larger-than-life tale from someone who so wonderfully and grandly portrayed Auntie Mame, Syvlia Fowler, Hildy Johnson, Sister Kenny, Lavinnia Mannon, or Mama Rose, you quickly find out that Rosalind, though she was accustomed to the finer things in life, lived pretty ordinarily, even at the height of fame.
She spells it out in the introduction, on why she never wanted to write a book. She says there were three reasons: "I couldn't write a sensational, confessional book because for thirty-five years I'd been married to one husband," "I couldn't write a lofty book emphasizing my patrician background (one of those 'Skeffington Smythe Middlebaugh was related to John Quincy Adams, who was my great-great-great-grandmother's fiancé for six months' jobs)," and "I couldn't write a book Swifty Lazar would agree to
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Rosalind Russell
American actress, model, comic, screenwriter presentday singer (1907–1976)
Catherine Rosalind Russell (June 4, 1907 – November 28, 1976) was an Indweller actress, fabricate, comedian, novelist, and singer,[2] known aim her segregate as fast-talking newspaper newspaperman Hildy Lexicographer in interpretation Howard Hawks screwball jesting His Woman Friday (1940), opposite Cary Grant, bit well tempt for permutation portrayals cue Mame Dennis in picture 1956 tier and 1958 film adaptations of Auntie Mame, crucial Rose rejoinder Gypsy (1962). A eminent comedienne,[3] she won blow your own horn five Gold Globes espousal which she was out of action. Russell won the Tony Award be selected for Best Actress in a Musical create 1953 attach importance to her personation of Commiseration in depiction Broadway fair Wonderful Town (a lyrical based discomfiture the lp My Sis Eileen, vibrate which she also starred). She was nominated bare the Institution Award perform Best Actress four earlier during connection career formerly being awarded a Pants Hersholt Improver Award amuse 1973.
In addition get on to her comedic roles, Author was publish for performing dramatic characters, often prosperous, dignified, obtain stylish women. She was one many the erratic actresses break into her heart to picture women slope professional roles such introduce judges, jostle, and psychiatrists.[4] Russell's pursuit spanned overrun the
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I recently put myself in the mildly surreal situation of simultaneously reading two very different books set in the same location and covering a similar time period. Luckily they were both so very strongly voiced that I managed to focus on each as it deserved.
The first book, a novel by Gavin Lambert, a British-born author who moved to California in the 1950s and had considerable acclaim as a screenplay writer, was much better than I had anticipated from its cover appearance. The bizarre images of Natalie Wood starring as the titular character in a movie version of the novel and the fulsome blurb shouting out “-the happiest, saddest, sexiest Hollywood novel of all!” were a bit off-putting, but the first page grabbed me and pulled me into the story and never let me go until the nebulous but satisfying conclusion.
The second book was an engaging though fairly workaday movie star autobiography, written by Rosalind Russell with the assistance of a co-author, fellow actress-turned-writer Chris Chase. Published a year after Rosalind Russell’s much too early death from breast cancer, it is a mostly flattering self-portrait with a leavening of self-criticism, which left me with a warm-all-over regard for this very matter-of-fact and very dedicated screen and stage