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Búsqueda… Branch | Book | B GRANT | 1 | Biography Collection | Búsqueda… Desconocido | Búsqueda… No disponible |
Búsqueda… South | Book | B GRANT CARY | 1 | Biography Collection | Búsqueda… Desconocido | Búsqueda… No disponible |
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Resumen
A study of the true story of the man behind the debonair image details the fears and obsessions that have haunted Grant's film career, his childhood, marriages, relationships with women and his only child, and his retreat into privacy.
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Kirkus Review
He has spent most of his career trying to forget his childhood, to erase the poverty of his upbringing by a relentless pursuit of wealth, and to overcome the paralyzing fear of women instilled in him by his doting but mentally unstable mother."" So writes Wansell in this cheesy, nasty-toned biography--which brings to mind the lowest descents of Charles Higham. Despite some new interview-material, virtually everything is over-familiar here--thanks to Lionel Godfrey's 1981 bio, the famous Pauline Kael essay, and Richard Schickel's Cary Grant (1983). There's Grant's unhappy Bristol childhood; his beginnings in vaudeville; the new life in the US--first in bad Broadway musicals, then as a fledgling matinee idol with a name-change. (""He knew that to succeed he had to become someone else. . . ."") Even with movie-stardom, he remained depressed, fussy, stingy, insecure, afraid of women. A first marriage fizzled. There were those rumors (sleazily recycled here) about his roommateship with Randolph Scott. Then came Barbara Hutton--""a woman he could protect, not a small fierce mother to argue with""--but his moodiness and her grandiose lifestyle ruined things. Then came temporary retirement and Betsy Drake: ""He felt free for the first time in his life""--especially after Betsy introduced him to yoga, psychotherapy, and LSD. But then came Sophia Loren (he ""fell in love""), the troubles of a fading career and that aging image. And then came Dyan Cannon, who found herself ""the companion of a persnickety, obsessed man haunted by,"" etc.--with another run-through of the ugly divorce and Grant's preoccupation with his young daughter. The Schickel book, though flawed, at least tries to use this thin psycho-biographical notion to illuminate Grant's film career; Wansell offers only skimpy, sloppy treatment of the movies themselves. The result, then, is the limpest sort of pseudo-psychological celeb bio--tackily conceived, poorly written. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.