Robert Taylor was one of Hollywood's biggest stars for over thirty-years and starred in such classic films as Magnificent Obsession, Camille, A Yank at Oxford, Waterloo Bridge, Johnny Eager, Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe and The Last Hunt. He worked with the cream of Hollywood leading ladies: Irene Dunne, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Lana Turner, Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, who he later married, just to name a few. An open and friendly man who usually tried to avoid controversy, Taylor stepped into it when he became a so-called friendly witness appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the height of the Washington investigations into alleged Communism in Hollywood. It has haunted his reputation to this day. A happy second marriage to actress Ursula Thiess produced two children and gave Taylor a contentment he lacked in his earlier marriage. Author Charles Tranberg takes a fresh look at the actor who was once called, "The man with the perfect profile." This book also takes a fascinating look at the Hollywood Studio system which existed during Taylor's hey-day.

Because of his lengthy screen resume that includes almost eighty appearances in such movies as Camille and Waterloo Bridge, as well as a marriage and divorce to actress Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor was a central figure of Hollywood’s classical era. Despite this, he can be regarded as a “lost” star, an interesting contradiction given the continued success he enjoyed during his lifetime. In Robert Taylor: Male Beauty, Masculinity, and Stardom in Hollywood, author Gillian Kelly investigates the initial construction and subsequent developments of Taylor's star persona across his thirty-five-year career. By examining concepts of male beauty, men as object of the erotic gaze, white American masculinity, and the unusual longevity of a career initially based on looks, Kelly highlights how gender, masculinity, and male stars and the ageing process affected Taylor's career. Placing Taylor within the histories of both Hollywood’s classical era and mid-twentieth-century America, this study positions him firmly within the wider industrial, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts in which he worked. Kelly examines Taylor’s film and television work as well as ephemeral material, such as fan magazines, to assess how his on- and off-screen personas were created and developed over time. Taking a mostly chronological approach, Kelly places Taylor’s persona within specific historical moments in order to show the complex paradox of his image remaining consistently recognizable while also shifting seamlessly within the Hollywood industry. Furthermore, she explores Taylor’s importance to Hollywood cinema by demonstrating how a star persona like his can “fit” so well, and for so long, that it almost becomes invisible and, eventually, almost forgotten.

“860 glittering pages” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times): The first volume of the full-scale astonishing life of one of our greatest screen actresses—her work, her world, her Hollywood through an American century. Frank Capra called her, “The greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known.” Now Victoria Wilson gives us the first volume of the rich, complex life of Barbara Stanwyck, an actress whose career in pictures spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound (eighty-eight motion pictures) and lasted in television from its infancy in the 1950s through the 1980s. Here is Stanwyck, revealed as 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; the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with Zeppo Marx (the “unfunny Marx brother”) who altered the course of Stanwyck’s movie career and with her created one of the finest horse breeding farms in the west; and her fairytale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, America’s most sought-after male star. Here is the shaping of her career through 1940 with many of Hollywood's most important directors, among them Frank Capra, “Wild Bill” William Wellman, George Stevens, John Ford, King Vidor, Cecil B. Demille, Preston Sturges, set against the times—the Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the unions, the advent of World War II, and a fast-changing, coming-of-age motion picture industry. And at the heart of the book, Stanwyck herself—her strengths, her fears, her frailties, losses, and desires—how she made use of the darkness in her soul, transforming herself from shunned outsider into one of Hollywood’s most revered screen actresses. Fifteen years in the making—and written with full access to Stanwyck’s family, friends, colleagues and never-before-seen letters, journals, and photographs. Wilson’s one-of-a-kind biography—“large, thrilling, and sensitive” (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Town & Country)—is an “epic Hollywood narrative” (USA TODAY), “so readable, and as direct as its subject” (The New York Times). With 274 photographs, many published for the first time.

Robert Taylor was a reluctant, yet active, witness to history-Hollywood's, the country's, his own. He was dubbed "The Man With the Perfect Profile." Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood & Communism goes inside the personality to find the flesh-and-blood man underneath. The actor's meteoric rise was credited to his "pretty boy" looks, an image encouraged by MGM when studios owned their actors and created public personas. This, coupled with the sheltered, almost emasculating childhood he had endured, created in him a survivor who rose above family, the studio system, Barbara Stanwyck, and, as what he considered to be a curse, one of the most beautiful male faces in Hollywood history. The book delves into his marriage to Barbara Stanwyck, as well as usually discreet, but intense, love affairs. Beauties such as Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Yvonne DeCarlo fell under his spell. Attention is paid to his second marriage to Ursula Thiess, which brought about his roles as father and husband. Robert Taylor finally found happiness. A reluctant witness to the Second World War and what led up to it, Robert Taylor was a staunch Conservative, subpoenaed before the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on Communism in American Films. He enlisted in the Navy. Afterward, he returned to civilian life, Hollywood, and Barbara. He and his wife had changed. He became a reluctant witness to their relationship's deterioration. He watched Hollywood evolve, ultimately becoming the longest-running contract actor in film history. He was a reluctant witness to the dawn of television; initially he wanted none of it. When he realized he had to go along or by the wayside, he gave in. In later years, he was a reluctant witness again to ever-changing winds of politics. Friends and compatriots who shared his ultra-Conservative views wanted him to stand publicly for shared values. They saw him as the right leader to move their state forward. Yet he was reluctant. Robert Taylor's career spanned nearly the entire history of Hollywood, from early days to beyond the fall of the strict studio system. His life was the American dream, from naive, small-town Nebraska boy to a celluloid heartthrob known around the world. Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood, & Communism tells it all."

"Wishart and the staff of the Center for Great Plains Studies have compiled a wide-ranging (pun intended) encyclopedia of this important region. Their objective was to 'give definition to a region that has traditionally been poorly defined,' and they have

More than 700 films from the classic period of film noir (1940 to 1959) are presented in this exhaustive reference book--such films as The Accused, Among the Living, The Asphalt Jungle, Baby Face Nelson, Bait, The Beat Generation, Crossfire, Dark Passage, I Walk Alone, The Las Vegas Story, The Naked City, Strangers on a Train, White Heat, and The Window. For each film, the following information is provided: the title, release date, main performers, screenwriter(s), director(s), type of noir, thematic content, a rating based on the five-star system, and a plot synopsis that does not reveal the ending.