Celeste Holm Syndrome
On Character Actors from Hollywood's Golden Age
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
In this essay collection David Lazar looks to our intimate relationships with characters, both well-known and lesser known, from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Veering through considerations of melancholy and wit, sexuality and gender, and the surrealism of comedies of the self in an uncanny world, mixed with his own autobiographical reflections of cinephilia, Lazar creates an alluring hybrid of essay forms as he moves through the movies in his mind. Character actors from the classical era of the 1930s through the 1950s including Thelma Ritter, Oscar Levant, Martin Balsam, Nina Foch, Elizabeth Wilson, Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, and the eponymous Celeste Holm all make appearances in these considerations of how essential character actors were, and remain, to cinema.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Columbia College professor Lazar (I'll Be Your Mirror) celebrates some of classic Hollywood's most acclaimed character actors in this spirited essay collection. He begins by celebrating writer-director Preston Sturges's unofficial stock company of brilliant character actors, including William Demarest, Julius Tannen, and Esther Howard, and elsewhere celebrates the physical comedy of Jack Carson, "king of the double take," and Eric Blore's "supercilious but frustrated" servant characters. However, Lazar goes beyond praise to investigate the nuances of performance, singling out what made these performers successful, and often subversive. In the title essay, Lazar laments the Hollywood trope of the sexy, confident woman passed over by the male lead for a waifish young ingenue, recalling in particular Celeste Holm's standout turn in Gentleman's Agreement (he slyly notes that Holm, deemed too old, at 30, for Gregory Peck in the 1947 film, died at 95 married to her 41-year-old third husband). One of the most resonant essays, "Ma," considers five classic portrayals of mother characters, including Thelma Ritter's in Birdman of Alcatraz and Jane Darwell's in The Grapes of Wrath, alongside reflections on Lazar's mother's death from cancer when he was a young man. Fans of Hollywood's Golden Age will delight in this affecting look at what makes actors truly memorable, even if they're not in the spotlight.
