Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) rose from the ranks of chorus girl to
become one of Hollywood's most talented leading women--and America's
highest-paid woman in the mid-1940s. Shuttled among foster homes as a
child, she took a number of low-wage jobs while she determinedly made
the connections that landed her in successful Broadway productions.
Stanwyck then acted in a stream of high-quality films from the 1930s
through the 1950s. Directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and
Frank Capra treasured her particular magic. A four-time Academy Award
nominee, winner of three Emmys and a Golden Globe, she was honored with
a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy.
Dan Callahan considers both Stanwyck's life and her art, exploring her
seminal collaborations with Capra in such great films as Ladies of
Leisure, The Miracle Woman, and The Bitter Tea of General Yen; her
Pre-Code movies Night Nurse and Baby Face; and her classic roles in
Stella Dallas, Remember the Night, The Lady Eve, and Double
Indemnity. After making more than eighty films in Hollywood, she
revived her career by turning to television, where her role in the 1960s
series The Big Valley renewed her immense popularity.
Callahan examines Stanwyck's career in relation to the directors she
worked with and the genres she worked in, leading up to her late-career
triumphs in two films directed by Douglas Sirk, All I Desire and
There's Always Tomorrow, and two outrageous westerns, The Furies and
Forty Guns. The book positions Stanwyck where she belongs--at the very
top of her profession--and offers a close, sympathetic reading of her
performances in all their range and complexity.
