Individual Actors & Performers

Daniel Lewis's legacy as a hugely influential choreographer and teacher of modern dance is celebrated in this biography. It showcases the many role...

Punctilious to a fault, Sidney Lumet favored intense rehearsal, which enabled him to bring in most of his films under budget and under schedule. An...

At the height of her celebrity, Madeleine Carroll (1906-1987) was the world's highest-paid actress. She worked alongside such greats as Laurence...

Hollywood studios were once eager to bring stand-up comedy king Richard Pryor's dynamic humor to the big screen--so much so that studio executiv...

On December 31, 1939, nationwide radio audiences listened as 17-year-old Josephine Owaissa Cottle, a Texas schoolgirl, won Gateway to Hollywood'...

Alexander Pantages was 13 when he arrived in the U.S. in the 1880s, after contracting malaria in Panama. He opened his first motion picture th...

Phil Brown, who played Luke Skywalker's uncle in Star Wars, said, In my long life in films, there are ones I'm proud of and those I'm not proud ...

Moviegoers know her as the housekeeper in White Christmas, the nurse in Now, Voyager, and the crotchety choir director in Sister Act. This book, fi...

The all too brief career of film star Olive Borden (1906-1947) is chronicled in this definitive biography. Apprenticing in short slapstick silent c...

Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Mammy in Gone with the Wind, Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz --all were unforgettable characters who played an int...

Previous biographies of American actress Frances Farmer (1913-1970) have downplayed her professional achievements to emphasize her turbulent per...

This is the first book-length study of the 12 films starring African American Renaissance man Paul Robeson (1898-1976). Singer, actor, author, l...

Walter Brennan (1894-1974) was one of the greatest character actors in Hollywood history. He won three Academy Awards and became a national icon st...

Despite being a mediocre actress with less than classic beauty, Theda Bara was one of Hollywood's leading performers in the early years of cinem...

From the obscure 1958 Sonja Henie vehicle Hello London to the 2000 Academy Award winner Gladiator, the screen career of dynamic British actor Ol...

Louis Armstrong was not only a virtuoso musician, singer, composer and actor, but also a dedicated writer who carried a typewriter with him on h...

This is the first study of the life and art of Sydney Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin's brother, a person notable not only for his importance in establ...

Written records of Alonsos work are scarce, yet Toba Singers quest to spotlight his seminal role in the development of the modern ballet canon yiel...

The Arab uprisings that emerged in reaction to unemployment, high inflation, corruption, and the lack of liberty under authoritarian rule in the Mi...