audiobook Richard Wagner: A Life in Music by Martin Geck in Arts-Photography

Description

Startlingly handsome; witty; fanatically loyal; charming; scary; and intensely sexual; Burt Lancaster was the quintessential becirc;te du cineacute;ma; one of Hollywoods great stars. He was; as well; an intensely private man; and he authorized no biographies in his lifetime. Kate Buford is the first writer to win the cooperation of Lancasters widow; close friends; and colleagues; and her book is a revelation. Here is Lancaster the man; from his teenage years; bolting the Depression-era immigrant neighborhood of East Harlem where he grew up for the life of a circus acrobat -- then the electric New York theater of the 1930s; then the dying days of vaudeville. We see his production company -- Hecht-Hill-Lancaster -- become the biggest independent of the 1950s; a bridge between the studio era and modern filmmaking. With the power he derived from it we see him gain a remarkable degree of control; which he used to become the auteur of his own career. His navigation through the anti-Communist witch-hunts made him an example of a star who tweaked the noses of HUAC and survived. His greatest roles -- in Sweet Smell of Success; Elmer Gantry; Birdman of Alcatraz; The Swimmer; Atlantic City -- kept to the progressive edge that had originated in the tolerant; diverse; reforming principles of his childhood. And in the extraordinary complete roster of his films -- From Here to Eternity; Gunfight at the O.K. Corral; Judgment at Nuremberg; The Leopard; 1900; and Field of Dreams; among many others -- he proved to be both a master of commercial movies that pleased a worldwide audience and an actor who pushed himself beyond stardom into cinematic art. Kate Buford has written a dynamic biography of a passionate and committed star; the first full-scale study of one of the last great unexamined Hollywood lives.