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~ Author of 'The Mmm Girl' and 'Wicked Baby'

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Search results for: jeanne eagels

Art Decades 6: Jeanne Eagels and Me

29 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by marina72 in Interviews, Jeanne Eagels, Periodicals

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Art Decades, Jeanne Eagels, Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Jeremy Richey

12342381_10153397097917989_6009439504184830441_nJeremy Richey talks to me about Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed in Issue 6 of Art Decades magazine, which is now available on Amazon for £9.91 in the UK, or $15 in the US.

This latest edition also includes a twenty-page interview with Miranda Lee Richards, and two photo-shoots inspired by her music; a look back at Elvis Presley’s last movie, Change of Habit, and 10cc’s How Dare You; and Marcelline Block’s interviews with author Mikita Brottman, and filmmaker Zach Weintraub.

A portion of this issue’s proceeds will go to Planned Parenthood. If you’d like to subscribe to Art Decades, click here.

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Jeanne Eagels: A Fitzgeraldian Life

17 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by marina72 in Jeanne Eagels, Non-Fiction

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David Marshall James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jeanne Eagels, Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Ted Coy

Jeanne72dpiTarainAnother great review of Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, this time from blogger David Marshall James. He compares Jeanne’s turbulent life to a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was fascinated by her husband, Ted Coy, a retired football star – even depicting Coy in his fiction.

It’s as if F. Scott Fitzgerald penned her life’s story:  Midwest girl with stars in her eyes makes it to Broadway, seizes the role of a lifetime, then declines as dramatically as she has arisen … Authors Eric Woodard and Tara Hanks have expended an exceptional effort in presenting Jeanne Eagels, through the record of her life and her accomplishments, and through the memories of those who knew her.

Liz Smith Loves ‘Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed’

16 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by marina72 in Film, History, Jeanne Eagels, Non-Fiction, Theatre, Updates

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Jeanne Eagels, Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Liz Smith

books2Liz Smith is a legendary columnist whose career began in the 1950s. She has known everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Madonna, and continues to offer her wise and witty opinions on today’s entertainment world. In her regular New York Social Diary column today, she has written an in-depth review of Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed.

The liberties taken with Jeanne’s life were extraordinary.  Now, there is some redress in a new book, Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed by Eric Woodard and Tara Hanks.  And of course, the real story is far more interesting than the exaggerations.

Eagels, who began working on stage as a teenager, was an intense woman and an even more intense actress, one who seemed lit from within, a fire too hot not to cool down and too blazing not to take a toll.  Her great legacy was a staggering four-year run as Sadie Thompson in the stage adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Rain. This role would define her, in ways both positive and negative. There were those who felt that the always highly strung Eagels was driven over the edge, playing this role for such a long time.

She was fiercely independent, intelligent, resistant to authority (she famously fought against joining Actor’s Equity) and subject to substance abuse … A Life Revealed offers a startling look at the actress and her times. Stage work remains hard work, but in Jeanne’s day it was downright grueling. Her climb to the top was long, and once she attained stardom, she intended to keep it … Her films were few, but her strange, unique quality was just as evident on screen, especially in 1929’s The Letter …

I recommend this new book because it is packed with detail and drama, and does bring Jeanne Eagels into 21st century focus as an ambitious, driven woman who often fought the system, but could not defeat her own demons.

Dan Callahan on Jeanne Eagels, and ‘The Letter’

10 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by marina72 in Film, Jeanne Eagels

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Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Dan Callahan, Jeanne Eagels, Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Kim Stanley, The Chiseler, The Letter

Jeanne Eagels, 'The Letter' (1929)

Jeanne Eagels, ‘The Letter’ (1929)

Dan Callahan is an author and film historian, who has published biographies of Barbara Stanwyck and Vanessa Redgrave. (We refer to his Stanwyck bio, The Miracle Woman, in Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed. As an aspiring actress, Barbara was strongly influenced by Jeanne, and saw her most famous stage role in Rain several times.)

On The Chiseler today, Callahan has written about Jeanne, including some interesting thoughts about her penultimate movie role in The Letter (1929), in which she played another of W. Somerset Maugham’s anti-heroines – the murderous Leslie Crosbie.

The Eagels movie of The Letter is a primitive early talkie, seemingly undirected and stiffly acted by the rest of the cast. (It is thought that what is left of it is a work print, which would explain some of its deficiencies, though not all.) But Eagels’s devil-may-care performance is so deeply in some zone of its own that it comes through the ether to grab you by the throat and it won’t let go. There’s a palpable sense of risk to Eagels’s acting here, as if she were pushing herself and about to collapse at any moment. And maybe the film suits what she is doing. After all, some paintings are more at home in caves than in pretty frames on museum walls …

When her husband means to punish her by keeping their marriage going anyway after her confession, for form and for show, she shouts her revenge at him and kills herself with it: ‘I, with all my heart and soul still love the man I killed! Ha, ha! Take that, will you! With all my heart, and all my soul, I still love the man I killed.’ Eagels has sung those words ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ so that they feel like incantations, and then she just nods to herself and The Letter comes to its abrupt end. By contrast, Bette Davis had to be browbeaten by director William Wyler into saying this line to her husband’s face (she had wanted to look away), and she only says it once.

There is little visible technique in Eagels’s performance in The Letter, no distance to her reckless playing, so that when Leslie is flaming out it is clear that she herself is flaming out, and this links Eagels to a later 1950s Method actress like Kim Stanley, another stage star who finally had to retreat because she couldn’t sustain the level of emotional intensity she liked for long.

Writing Jeanne Eagels: Unlocking the Enigma

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by marina72 in Books, Jeanne Eagels, Non-Fiction, Uncategorized, Writing

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Eric Woodard, Jeanne Eagels, Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Laura Wilkinson, Tara Hanks

P1060238sepiaI have written a guest post about the writing of Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed for the website of author Laura Wilkinson. You can read it here.

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