Synopsis
Movie stardom - how it is won and lost, who got it and who missed out thanks to carelessness or a trick of fate - is the subject of Starring Roles. Often the dramas surrounding the winning and losing of some of Hollywood's greatest roles are more riveting than the stories of the movies themselves, and yet the history of movie stardom is a subject seldom addressed.` Ron Base draws upon two years of research, and dozens of interviews spanning seven decades of movie history, to uncover the dramatic and never-before-told , stories of how.immortality was bestowed on some, while others found themselves con-' signed to for example, how a sleek New York gangster named George Raft handed off immortality to a grumpy, balding character actor named Humphrey Bogart; and how the career of Shirley Temple, the most popular star of the early sound era, was ruined overnight when she was prevented from starring in The Wizard of Oz. Base reveals how Bette Davis almost ended up co-starring in Gone With the Wind with Errol Flynn. He traces the ruinous career choices that saw Marlon Brando reject some of the greatest roles ever offered an actor, and he illuminates the jealous rivalry among three young actors named James Dean, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen. There is the tale of how Robert Redford almost starred in The Graduate, and how Warren Beatty narrowly missed the lead in West Side Story. In these pages, Cary Grant could have been James Bond, Albert Finney was almost Lawrence of Arabia, Tom Selleck should have been Indiana Jones, and either John Travolta or Al Pacino might have been Rambo. Here is an engrossing narrative that will surprise and delight not just film fans who thought they knew the history of Hollywood, but readers in search of dramatic stories of triumph and despair, full of glamorous, colourful characters desperately scrambling for the stuff dreams are made of. The book focuses on movie stardom with countless anecdotes about how some are raised to immortality while other actors are confined to obscurity.
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