Bogart - Softcover

Sperber, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688161057 ISBN 13: 9780688161057

Publisher: It Books, 1998

Synopsis

Ann Sperber and Eric Lax offer therevealing, intimate, definitive biography of the legendary Humphrey Bogart,detailing the arc and span of his personal and professional life—a story oftoil, tragedy, and triumph. Sperber and Lax exploreBogie’s abusive childhood and the three unsuccessful marriages that precededthe lasting love he found with Lauren Bacall, and plumb the depths of hisarduous career working as Warner Brothers’ go-to drudge actor for thirteenyears of B-list films before rising to stardom and ultimately achieving hisplace amongst Hollywood royalty. The Los Angeles Times calls Bogart "animmediate triumph . . . so rich in its research, so compelling in its writing, itis an absorbing human story of the motion picture business in the age ofHumphrey Bogart."

About this title

Review:

It's the season of battling Bogarts: two biographies, each worthwhile for different reasons. If you want a leisurely, formidably well-documented account of Humphrey Bogart's legendary screen career and four marriages (including a happy final one to Lauren Bacall), this is it. A. M. Sperber conducted some 200 interviews with people who knew the actor before his death in 1994; Eric Lax draws on her seven years of research to create a nuanced, in-depth, elegantly written portrait of the man recently dubbed Hollywood's greatest star by Premiere magazine.

From the Back Cover:

He was a top box-office draw in his day, an Oscar-winning actor, a principled man of rare conviction, and--long after his death--a cult figure revered by moviegoers who weren't even born while he was making his movies. But over the years, Humphrey Bogart has remained an enigma, despite what we have learned of him from wife Lauren Bacall's own fond memories and from the various biographies that have appeared over the years since his death in 1957.

With Bogart, this wonderful enigma is brought under the light as never before. Although authors Ann M. Sperber and Eric Lax never met, Bogart is a unique collaboration, combining the strengths of two prize-winning biographers. Sperber, the author of the New York Times best-selling Pulitzer-Prize finalist Murrow: His Life and Times (1986), spent seven years before her death in 1994 amassing a vast archive of original research on the life and times of Humphrey Bogart, including more than 200 interviews she conducted with people who had known and worked with him, including Katharine Hepburn and John Huston. Eric Lax, whose Woody Allen was a national bestseller in 1991, took over the project after Sperber's death and spent two years completing it. The result is the definitive portrait of the actor who merged his screen anti-heroism with his own staunch personal integrity in a manner new to Hollywood, fashioning a persona as timely today, forty years after his death, as it was during his own life.

About this edition

• Publisher: It Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0688161057
• ISBN 13: 9780688161057
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 688