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Tara Hanks

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

Tara Hanks

Tag Archives: Kim Stanley

Some Kind Of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe

04 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by marina72 in Books, Film, Marilyn Monroe, Non-Fiction

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All About Eve, Amanda Konkle, Audrey Hepburn, Billy Wilder, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Bus Stop, Clash By Night, Don't Bother To Knock, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, George Axelrod, How to Marry a Millionaire, Jack Cole, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Stanley, Let's Make Love, Love Happy, Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, Method Acting, Monkey Business, Niagara, O. Henry's Full House, Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe, Some Like It Hot, The Asphalt Jungle, The Misfits, The Prince And The Showgirl, The Seven Year Itch, We're Not Married

In 1954, Marilyn Monroe was rehearsing ‘Do It Again’ as part of her show for U.S. troops in Korea, when the officer in charge of her tour deemed the Gershwin standard “too suggestive,” and insisted she change the title to ‘Kiss Me Again.’ “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of as a person,” she remarked in her memoir, My Story. “They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts.” Her comment inspired the title (and epigraph) for a new book, Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe by Amanda Konkle, assistant professor of literature and film studies at Georgia Southern University. Continue reading →

Dan Callahan on Jeanne Eagels, and ‘The Letter’

10 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by marina72 in Film, Jeanne Eagels

≈ 2 Comments

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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.

‘Fragments’ Review Goes to Print

05 Saturday Feb 2011

Posted by marina72 in Books, Magazines, Marilyn Monroe, Updates

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Fragments, Kim Stanley, Mad About Marilyn, Marilyn Monroe

I’m a little late in posting this. My review of Fragments, last year’s collection of Marilyn Monroe’s personal writing (which you can also read here), has been published in the December 2010 issue of Mad About Marilyn magazine.

It is an outstanding edition, also featuring an article comparing Marilyn with her peer, actress Kim Stanley, who played Cherie in the original Broadway production of Bus Stop, and a character based on MM in the 1957 movie, The Goddess; and a fascinating interview with Marilyn herself from 1954, in which she lists her most-admired men (including then-husband Joe DiMaggio, and future beau, Arthur Miller.)

As always, if you would like to join the Mad About Marilyn Fan Club, please email Emma: emmadowning@blueyonder.co.uk

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