Overview
Gloria Swanson defined what it meant to be a movie star, but her unforgettable role in Sunset Boulevard overshadowed the true story of her life. Now Stephen Michael Shearer sets the record straight in the first in-depth biography of the film legend. Swanson was Hollywood's first successful glamour queen. Her stardom as an actress in the mid-1920s earned her millions of fans and millions of dollars. Soon she was not only producing her own films, she was choosing her scripts, selecting her leading men, casting her projects, creating her own fashions, guiding her publicity, and living an extravagant and sometimes extraordinary celebrity lifestyle. She also collected a long line of lovers and married men of her choosing. As a devoted and loving mother, she managed a quiet success of raising three children. Perhaps most important, as a keen businesswoman she also was able to extend her career more than sixty years. Her astounding comeback as Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard catapulted her back into the limelight. But it also created her long-misunderstood persona, one that this meticulous biography shows was only part of this independent and unparalleled woman.
Full Product Details
Author: Stephen Michael Shearer ,
Jeanine Basinger ,
Christa Lewis
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Imprint: Tantor Audio
Edition: Unabridged edition
ISBN: 9798228539556
Publication Date: 29 April 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Audio
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Author Information
Stephen Michael Shearer is the author of Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life and Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr. He has written for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and is also a former model and actor, having appeared on stage, television, and in film. Shearer currently resides in Minnesota and New York City. JEANINE BASINGER is the founder of the department of film studies at Wesleyan University and the curator of the cinema archives there. She has written eleven other books on film, including I Do and I Don't; The Star Machine; A Woman's View; Silent Stars, winner of the William K. Everson Film History Award; Anthony Mann; The World War II Combat Film; and American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Filmmaking, the companion book for a ten-part PBS series. She lives in Middletown, Connecticut, Madison, Wisconsin, and Brookings, South Dakota. Christa Lewis and her pseudonym Pippa Jayne have narrated 265 audiobooks between them. Christa is a conservatory trained actor with a smart and funny vibe who can also meet the moment in nonfiction thanks to a seventeen-year stint as a newsreader. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and offers a variety of accents and dialects. Magically, there have been eight AudioFile Earphones Awards in nonfiction/biography and memoir, YA, and fiction-as well as a SOVAS Voice Arts Award, a Sultry Listeners Award, a Listeners Choice Award, and two Audie nominations.
