Overview

A popular romantic actor with a fan club rivalling that of Ivor Novello, John Stuart was frequently mobbed by his adoring fans. He starred in films by Alfred Hitchcock and G.W. Pabst, played opposite British stars such as Madeleine Carroll, Fay Compton, Gracie Fields, and German actor Conrad Veidt, and was also the first actor to ever speak on screen in Britain. Yet despite a film career lasting six decades and 172 films, his name and achievement are little known today. With access to Stuart's private archive, his surviving films, press cuttings, film reviews, interviews, profiles, features, and gossip columns, his son Jonathan Croall presents a detailed account of an actor who made a significant contribution to the British film industry of the 20th century.

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9781476689548

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Reviews

"""Jonathan Croall [John Stuart 's son] is an outstanding biographer of actors... He has a way of bringing the protagonists of these books to life, clarifying their talents, their progress over the decades, and the changes that those decades can bring. He has a remarkable gift for establishing, or recreating, the media context in which these stars operate, and how this context operates in the world at large. ... His wonderfully readable and extensively illustrated book grows from an amazing amount of research, involving masses of documents and letters left by his father, all of which have enabled him to create a moving study of the man as well as of the actor. A major bonus is the insight it offers into the wider British film culture, that bred the 'silent film idol' who stayed around for nearly six productive decades.""--Brian McFarlane, editor of The Encyclopedia of British Film"

Author Information

Based in Putney in south-west London, Jonathan Croall is an established journalist, theatre and film historian, and author of 25 books, including acclaimed biographies of Sir John Gielgud and Dame Sybil Thorndike, and two books in the Arden Shakespeare series on Hamlet and King Lear. He was formerly an editor at Penguin and Oxford University Press, features editor of the Times Educational Supplement, and program editor at the Old Vic theatre in London.

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