A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940

Fifteen years in the making, the first volume of the full-scale astonishing life of one of our greatest screen actresses whose career in pictures spanned four decades beginning with the coming of soundthe first to delve deeply into Stanwycks rich, complex life and to explore her extraordinary range of eighty-eight motion pictures, many of them iconic; her work, her world, her Hollywood through an American century.

Frank Capra called her The greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known. She was one of its most natural, timeless, and underrated stars. Now, Victoria Wilson gives us the first full-scale life of Barbara Stanwyck, whose astonishing career in movies (eighty-eight in all) spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound, and lasted in television from its infancy in the 1950s through the 1980sa book that delves deeply into her rich, complex life and explores her extraordinary range of motion pictures, many of them iconic. Here is her work, her world, her Hollywood.

We see the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of old New England stock . . . her years in New York as a dancer and Broadway star . . . her fraught marriage to Frank Fay, Broadway genius, who influenced a generation of actors and comedians (among them, Jack Benny and Stanwyck herself ) . . . the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with the unfunny Marx brother, Zeppo, crucial in shaping the direction of her work, and who, together with his wife, formed a trio that created one of the finest horse-breeding farms in the west; her fairy-tale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, Americas most sought-after and beautifulmale star.

Here is the shaping of her career with many of Hollywoods most important directors: among them, Frank Capra, Wild Bill William Wellman (When you get beauty and brains together, he said, theres no stopping the lucky girl who possesses them. The best example I can think of is Barbara), King Vidor, Cecil B. De Mille, and Preston Sturges, all set against the timesthe Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the unions, the advent of World War IIand a fast-changing, coming-of-age motion picture industry.

And here is Stanwycks evolution as an actress in the pictures she made from 1929 through the summer of 1940, where Volume One endsfrom her first starring movie, The Locked Door (An all-time low, she said. By then I was certain that Hollywood and I had nothing in common); and Ladies of Leisure, the first of her six-picture collaboration with Frank Capra (He sensed things that you were trying to keep hidden from people. He knew. He just knew), to the scorching Baby Face, and the height of her screen perfection, beginning with Stella Dallas (I was scared to death all the time we were making the picture), from Clifford Odetss Golden Boy and the epic Union Pacific to the first of her collaborations with Preston Sturges, who wrote Remember the Night, in which she starred.

And at the heart of the book, Stanwyck herselfher strengths, her fears, her frailties, her losses and desires; how she made use of the darkness in her soul in her work and kept it at bay in her private life, and finally, her transformation from shunned outsider to one of Hollywoodsand Americasmost revered screen actresses.

Writing with the full cooperation of Stanwycks family and friends, and drawing on more than two hundred interviews with actors, directors, cameramen, screenwriters, costume designers, et al., as well as making use of letters, journals, and private papers, Victoria Wilson has brought this complex artist brilliantly alive. Her book is a revelation of the actors life and work.