Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity is a revealing probe into the life and times of Mario Moreno, Latin America's most famous film star from the 1940s to the 1970s. This book helps to illuminate the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Mexico. Cantinflas (Moreno's film persona) was the most popular movie star in Mexican history. A fast-talking, nonsensical character, he helped Mexicans embrace their rich mestizo identity and cope with the difficulties of modernization. For thirty years he served as a 'weapon of the weak, ' satirizing corrupt officials and pompous elites who victimized Mexico's urban poor.

This is a valuable text for courses on Mexican history and Latin American film.

Cecil Packer was a farm labourer, a factory worker, a shepherd and a devoted family man from Wiltshire who like so many others was sent to France to fight for his country in the First World War, and never returned. Cecil survived both the Gallipoli and Somme campaigns, so for his descendants, his death on the Western Front when his battalion was far from the front line was a mystery as well as a tragedy. Alan Gaunt, whose wife Shirley is Cecil's great-granddaughter, set about researching Cecil's humble but interesting life and finally established the tragic circumstances of his accidental death in December 1916 at the age of 31."This is not the story of a traditional hero in the mould of Nelson or Wellington but that of a village shepherd, a local man who did not come from the nobility or the ranks of the nation's leaders but simply loved his family and died in the service of his country."

Completed before he died, thirty years ago, this is the newly discovered autobiography of one of the most influential comedians of recent times, Marty Feldman. Marty Feldman was one of the most essential creative forces in British comedy embodied also by his close friends and creative partners from Beyond the Fringe (especially Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) and Monty Python (especially John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle). Marty played the fool, often very happily and with tremendous talent and volcanic, anarchic energy, for his entire life. Marty finished, and set aside eYE Marty soon before travelling to Mexico to shoot his final film. He did not know that he would die there, although he certainly felt he might die soon, and was haunted by the notion. The book is exactly as Feldman wrote it, with even the photos inserted where Feldman had noted they should go. Hilarious, deeply charming, aphoristic, ironic, charged throughout with lust for life and filled with scenes of great vanished eras and and portraits of other performers and friends, eYE Marty is the amazing discovery of the story of a man who was at the heart of the British comedy revolution.

This book reinterprets British dramas of the early-nineteenth century through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. Unlike most playwrights of previous generations, the writers of British Romantic dramas generally did not work in the theatre themselves. However, they closely followed the careers of star performers. Even when they did not directly know actors, they had what media theorists have dubbed "para-social interactions" with those stars, interacting with them through the mediation of mass communication, whether as audience members, newspaper and memoir readers, or consumers of prints, porcelain miniatures, and other manifestations of "fan" culture. This study takes an in-depth look at four pairs of performers and playwrights: Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie, Julia Glover and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edmund Kean and Lord Byron, and Eliza O'Neill and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These charismatic performers, knowingly or not, helped to guide the development of a character-based theatre-from the emotion-dominated plays made popular by Baillie to the pinnacle of Romantic drama under Shelley. They shepherded in a new style of writing that had verbal sophistication and engaged meaningfully with the moral issues of the day. They helped to create not just new modes of acting, but new ways of writing that could make use of their extraordinary talents.

This book explores how comedian Stephen Colbert's satiric views of American life have captured the imagination of viewers around the world-and sharpened these individuals' own critical interpretations and opinions on current events. Stephen Colbert may be "just a comedian"-one not all audiences find funny, especially among those who have been mercilessly lampooned by him-but there is no arguing that the condescending, bombastic, and largely ignorant pundit he plays on Comedy Central has brought awareness of current events and political happenings to a substantially larger portion of the American population. The only available biography on Stephen Colbert, this book examines his life story and details how he became one of the most influential people on current American culture. Beginning with coverage of Colbert's childhood, the chapters discuss his education, highlighting his interest in drama; describe his introduction to the world of comedy; review his contributions as a "correspondent" on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; and focus on Colbert's accomplishments and antics as the star of his faux news program that debuted in the fall of 2005, The Colbert Report. Photographs depicting Stephen Colbert liven the text A bibliography supplies additional resources, such as websites and magazine and journal articles

Elizabeth Taylor was one of the major film stars of the twentieth century, embodying all the glamour and allure of Hollywood stardom. Yet her achievements as an actress have often been overshadowed by her beauty and tumultuous life off-screen. To redress this imbalance, Susan Smith offers an illuminating study of Elizabeth Taylor's work in film, exploring her fascinating trajectory from child to adult star. Smith reveals the influence that Taylor's early work exerted over her later career and the ways in which her on-screen identity is profoundly rooted in her association with animals and nature. Smith carefully unpicks what made Taylor such a distinctive and dynamic on-screen performer - from the expressive use she made of her eyes to the dramatic significance of her voice - and considers the importance of certain professional collaborations that Taylor forged during her career, most notably her acting partnership with Montgomery Clift.

This is the story of one boy's journey from an ordinary childhood in a European middle-class family into an alien world of terror and persecution where fear and violence reigned. Millions had to perish before Germany was defeated and the Continent could return to sanity. The Nazis' rise to power had transformed occupied Europe into a hostile environment where life for Jews had become a living hell. Suddenly, old relationships had been swept aside as neighbours and friends had suddenly become enemies and would-be persecutors. Survival now depended on learning new skills and sharpening newly acquired instincts. The margin between freedom and incarceration was often minute. Under such a brutally repressive regime life became dependent on quick thinking and adjustment to every new situation. Living on the razor's edge those instincts soon become second nature, and with it new, hitherto unsuspected abilities to cope. With familiarity and increasing self-confidence it was inevitable that some bravado could also creep in. How else could such escapades as earning money in the epicenter of the Nazi war machine - a German Army HQ in occupied Budapest be explained? . Also described are the realities of life under continuous bombardment, from the air and by artillery, in a city laid waste and under siege where one was continually in danger, hungry and cold. To alleviate that hunger it became necessary to find food from unusual sources such as cutting flesh from army horses killed in the shelling and drinking melted snow. Everything had its uses and was recycled: even shoe polish could be used as a substitute for candles for lighting up a dark cellar in a ruined city where electricity, gas and water supplies as well as all the amenities of modern life were but a distant memory. The siege of Budapest ended with liberation by the Red Army and the realization of the terrible cost in human terms - especially that of Jews - of the Nazi regime.Starting a new life in England and a return to normalcy, concentrating on integration and education; preparing for a worthwhile career in a free and happy environment bring the story full circle. It shows that trauma need not necessarily be injurious but can also have a positive effect that leads to a greater appreciation of life and acts as a stimulant for achievement.Service in the British army, immigration to Israel and serving in the Israeli army as well as creating a family and a career conclude the narrative.Originally this memoir was intended for my children, but as it took shape I felt it could be of interest to the general reader who may wish to look at this cataclysmic era as seen through the eyes of a child.

Henry Irving (1838-1905), the first actor to be knighted, dominated the theatre in Britain and beyond for over a quarter of a century. As an actor, he was strikingly different with his idiosyncratic pronunciation, his somewhat ungainly physique, and his brilliant psychological portrayals of virtue and villainy. He was also the director of spectacular, and commercially driven, entertainments and as the manager of the Lyceum theatre, he controlled every aspect of the performance. First published in 2008, this collection of essays by leading theatre scholars explores each element of Irving's art: his acting, his contribution to the plays he commissioned, his flair for the stage picture, and his ear for incidental music. This book will be of interest to those studying the history of theatre.

Robert Loraine was born in a period when technology exploded into a world whose keyword was Progress. Both he and his lifelong friend George Bernard Shaw believed they were in an evolutionary period of humanity. Born into a theatrical family, he understood its clashes of temperament and competition for the attention of the audience. He was fortunate to be playing in London by age twenty-one, and secured lead roles two years later. Thus, it was incomprehensible to his peers when he volunteered to fight in the Boer War. After his year of service, he heeded his father s advice: first conquer London, and then America. He accepted a contract from Daniel Frohman in New York. Four years of dusty old plots made him yearn for something new, something he found in Shaw s Man and Superman. A two year tour in the role of John Tanner led him to professional and financial success. The lust for something new also led him into pioneer aviation. Visualizing the aeroplane s unlimited potential, he challenged the theory that flight could only take place in calm weather by flying through a raging thunderstorm. Ever of a military mind, he also demonstrated the machine s capacity for scouting in military maneuvers. With political stormclouds closing in again in 1914, Robert volunteered six days before his country declared war on Germany. Dispatched to the Royal Flying Corps, he served all four years of the war, rose to the highest rank of any civilian, and was gravely wounded twice. Robert married at age forty-five, but the compromises of domesticity did not come easily to him. His young wife, Winifred, suffered through the downward spiral of an aging actor. The 1930s brought the Great Depression and he returned to the United States, attempting to make money on Broadway or in Hollywood. When he finally returned to England in November, 1935, he died two days before Christmas."

"Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels" serves as a corrective supplement to the extant, director-centric history of American cinema's most lauded period. In contrast to star studies that showcase disparate performances, this book focuses on a specific time and place - Hollywood in the crucible, formative years from 1968 through 1971 - and offers close analysis of star actors' deterministic influences over nine of the era's most hallowed films. By examining film reviews and 'star press' from the national magazines whose covers they then dominated, Smith-Rowsey shows how three emergent 'Rough Rebels' - Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Elliott Gould - were understood and contextualized as the best possible responses to Hollywood's twin crises of capital and creativity. As a summary, Hoffman, Nicholson, and Gould, as well as their peers and successors, were positioned and received as absurdist, ironic, and dismissive toward women, and these qualities cast a wide shadow over both their films and much Hollywood cinema in the following decades.

Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, born less than a year apart, lived so close to each other that Riefenstahl could see into Dietrich's Berlin flat. Coming of age in the Weimar Republic, both sought fame in Germany's silent film industry. While Dietrich's depiction of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel catapulted her to Hollywood stardom, Riefenstahl-who missed out on the part-insinuated herself into Hitler's inner circle and directed Nazi propaganda films, most famously, Triumph of the Will. Dietrich could never truly go home again, while Riefenstahl was contaminated by her political associations. Moving deftly between two stories never before told together, Karin Wieland contextualises these lives, chronicling revolutions in politics, fame and sexuality on a grand stage.

The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov brings together Chekhov specialists from around the world - theatre practitioners, theorists, historians and archivists - to provide an astonishingly comprehensive assessment of his life, work and legacy. This volume aims to connect East and West; theatre theory and practice. It reconsiders the history of Chekhov's acting method, directing and pedagogy, using the archival documents found across the globe: in Russia, England, America, Germany, Lithuania and Switzerland. It presents Chekhov's legacy and ideas in the framework of interdisciplinary theatre practices and theories, as well as at the crossroads of cultures, in the context of his forays into such areas as Western mime and Asian cosmology. This remarkable Companion, thoughtfully edited by two leading Chekhov scholars, will prove invaluable to students and scholars of theatre, theatre practitioners and theoreticians, and specialists in Slavic and transcultural studies. Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu is Director of Research at the National Center For Scientific Research, and Assistant-Director of Sorbonne-CNRS Institute EUR'ORBEM. She is an historian of theatre and specialist in Russian and Soviet theatre. Yana Meerzon is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa. Her book publications include Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations, co-edited with Professor J. Douglas Clayton, University of Ottawa (Routlegde, 2012).

The New York Times bestseller - a sweeping and heartbreaking Hollywood biography about the passionate, turbulent marriage of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. In 1934, a friend brought fledgling actress Vivien Leigh to see Theatre Royal, where she would first lay eyes on Laurence Olivier in his brilliant performance as Anthony Cavendish. That night, she confided to a friend, he was the man she was going to marry. There was just one problem: she was already married-and so was he. TRULY, MADLY is the biography of a marriage, a love affair that still captivates millions, even decades after both actors' deaths. Vivien and Larry were two of the first truly global celebrities - their fame fueled by the explosive growth of tabloids and television, which helped and hurt them in equal measure. They seemed to have it all and yet, in their own minds, they were doomed, blighted by her long-undiagnosed mental-illness, which transformed their relationship from the stuff of dreams into a living nightmare. Through new research, including exclusive access to previously unpublished correspondence and interviews with their friends and family, author Stephen Galloway takes readers on a bewitching journey. He brilliantly studies their tempestuous liaison, one that took place against the backdrop of two world wars, the Golden Age of Hollywood and the upheavals of the 1960s - as they struggled with love, loss and the ultimate agony of their parting.

This book gives a new view on the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), one of the central, and yet misunderstood, figures who shaped 20th-century theatre, focusing on his least known last phase of work on ancient songs and the craft of the performer. Salata posits Grotowski's work as philosophical practice, and more particularly, as practical research in the phenomenology of being, arguing that Grotowski's departure from theatrical productions (and thus critical consideration) resulted from his uncompromising pursuit of one central problem, "What does it mean to reveal oneself?" - the very question that drove his stage directing work. The book demonstrates that the answer led him through the path of gradually stripping the theatrical phenomenon down to its most elemental aspect, which shows itself through the craft of the performer as a non-representational event. This particular quality released at the heights of the art of the performer is referred to as aliveness, or true liveness in this study in order to shift scholarly focus onto something that has always fascinated great theatre practitioners, including Stanislavski and Grotowski, and of which academic scholarship has limited grasp. Salata's theoretical analysis of aliveness reaches out to phenomenology and a broad range of post-structural philosophy and critical theory, through which Grotowski's project is portrayed as philosophical practice.

Marvelously illustrated with more than 200 rare images from the silent era through the 1970s, this joyous treasure trove features film and televisions most famous actors and actresses celebrating the holidays, big and small, in lavishly produced photographs. Join the stars for festive fun in celebrating a variety of holidays, from New Years to Saint Patricks Day to Christmas and everything in between. Legends such as Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Audrey Hepburn spread holiday cheer throughout the calendar year in iconic, ironic, and illustrious style. These images, taken by legendary stills photographers, hearken back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, when motion picture studios devised elaborate publicity campaigns to promote their stars and to keep their names and faces in front of the movie-going public all year round.

This book discusses affective practices in performance through the study of four contemporary performers - Keith Hennessy, Ilya Noe, Caro Novella, and duskin drum - to suggest a tentative rhetoric of performativity generating political affect and permeating attempts at social justice that are often alterior to discourse. The first part of the book makes a case for the political work done alongside discourse by performers practising with materials that are not-known, in ways that are directly relevant to people carrying out their daily lives. In the second part of the book, four case study chapters circle around figures of irresolvable paradox - hendiadys, enthymeme, anecdote, allegory - that gesture to what is not-known, to study strategies for processes of becoming, knowing and valuing. These figures also shape some elements of these performances that make up a suggested rhetorical stance for performativity.

The Decroux Sourcebook is the first point of reference for any student of the 'hidden master' of twentieth century theatre. This book collates a wealth of key material on Etienne Decroux, including: an English translation of Patrice Pezin's 'Imaginary Interview', in which Decroux discusses mime's place in the theatre. previously unpublished articles by Decroux from France's Bibiotheque Nationale. essays from Decroux's fellow innovators Eugenio Barba and Edward Gordon Craig, explaining the synthesis of theory and practice in his work. Etienne Decroux's pioneering work in physical theatre is here richly illustrated not only by a library of source material, but also with a gallery of images following his life, work and influences. The Decroux Sourcebook is an ideal companion to Thomas Leabhart's Etienne Decroux in the Routledge Performance Practitioners series, offering key primary and secondary resources to those conducting research at all levels.

On screen, they're in love. Off screen, they can't stand each other. Two co-stars with a complex history reunite to film the final season of a beloved paranormal drama in this tension-filled will they won't they romance from the author of How to Fake It in Hollywood. ................................ Lilah Hunter and Shane McCarthy are madly in love - well, their characters are in love on the hit paranormal TV show Intangible. It's been years since Lilah and Shane have actually enjoyed each other's company, especially since Lilah ditched the cast at the end of season five in hopes of becoming a film star. With no such luck, she's back to film the much-hyped ninth and final season. But coming back means facing one of the biggest reasons she left . . . Shane. Their intense romance was strictly behind the scenes during the first season of Intangible, until their fling imploded and started the bad blood between them. Now back on set together for the first time in years, and with the world's eyes on them and their post-show careers on the line, they'll have to grit their teeth and play nice. But with pressure from the studio to keep fans of their love story happy, the show runners make sure that Lilah and Shane's characters can't keep their hands (or lips) off each other. And if they're not careful, they just might get blindsided by one final twist: winding up together after the cameras stop rolling. ................................ Praise for Ava Wilder: 'This empathetic, sexy, utterly radiant book has my whole heart' RACHEL LYNN SOLOMON 'The banter and sexual tension . . . is fire-emoji immaculate' LILLIE VALE 'A fresh, witty, high-emotion story with compelling characters and stylish backdrops . . . The perfect novel for fans of modern, smart romance' SARAH HAYWOOD

Vividly bringing to light the tradition of physical comedy in the French cabaret, cafe-concert, and early French film comedy, this book answers the perplexing question, "Why do the French love Jerry Lewis?" The extraordinary emphasis on nervous pathology in the Parisian cafe-concert, where the genres of the Epileptic Singer and the Idiot Comic took center stage, and where popular comic monologues and songs included "Man with a Tic" and "I'm Neurasthenic," points to a fascinating intersection between medicine and popular culture. The French tradition of comic performance style between 1870 and 1910 nearly exactly duplicates the movements, gestures, tics, grimaces, and speech anomalies found in nineteenth-century hysteria; the characteristics of hysteria became a new aesthetics.
Early French film comedy carried on this tradition of frenetic gesture and gait, as most film performers came from these entertainments and from the circus. Even before Chaplin's films triumphed in France, film comics were instantly recognizable from their pathological gait, just as Jacques Tati would be a half-century later. Comedy, a genre that dominated French cinema until World War I, has often been linked to a mass public for film; the author elucidates this link by proposing a broadly generalized cultural-medical phenomenon as the explanation for the dominance of the comic genre. Comic performance style drew from a group of nervous disorders characterized by the psychological automatism emanating from the "lower faculties" nervous reflex, motor impulses, sensation, and instinct.
Building on her previous work on hysteria, the cabaret, and pathologies of movement in the films of Georges Melies, and drawing on over 400 French films made between 1896 and 1915, the author contributes to a new theory of spectatorship at work in the cabaret, in shows of magnetizers, and in early French film comedy. Jerry Lewis touches a nerve in French cultural memory because, more than any other film comic, he incarnates this tradition of performance style.

The legendary Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) had many identities. He first broke into Hollywood as a fresh-faced young actor in the 1950s, redefined himself as a rebel director with "Easy Rider" in the late 1960s, and became a bad boy outcast for much of the 1970s. He returned in the 1980s with standout performances in films like "Blue Velvet" and "Hoosiers," was one of the great blockbuster baddies of the 1990s, and ended his career as a ubiquitous actor in genre movies.Hopper, however, was much more than just an actor and director: he was also a photographer, a painter, and an art collector--not to mention a longtime hedonist who kicked his addiction to drugs and alcohol and became a poster boy for sobriety."Dennis Hopper: Interviews" covers every decade of his career, featuring conversations from 1957 through to 2009, and not only captures him at the significant points of his tumultuous time in Hollywood but also focuses on the lesser-known aspects of the man. In this fascinating and highly entertaining volume--the first ever collection of Hopper's interviews--he talks in depth about film, photography, art, and his battles with substance abuse and, in one instance, even takes the role of interviewer as he talks with Quentin Tarantino.

Eugenio Barba is one of Europe's leading theatre directors, at the forefront of experimental and group theatre for more than twenty years. Ian Watson provides the most comprehensive and systematic study of Barba's work, including his training methods, dramaturgy, productions and theories, as well as his work at the International School of Theatre Anthropology.