Great Stars

"She could look demure while behaving like an empress. Blonde, with eyes like pearls too big for her head, she was very striking, but marginally pretty and certainly not beautiful ... But it was her edge that made her memorable-her upstart superiority, her reluctance to pretend deference to others." Bette Davis was the commanding figure of the great era of Hollywood stardom, with a drive and energy that put her contemporaries in the shade. She played queens, jezebels, and bitches; she could out-talk any male costar; she warred with her studio, Warner Bros., worked like a demon, got through four husbands, was nominated for seven Oscars, and-no matter what-never gave up fighting. This is her story, from the acclaimed film critic David Thomson.

"Cooper was heroic, of course, in his own mind as much as in his scripts. He was manly, tall, ruggedly handsome. He was a man for a fight." On screen Gary Cooper was the ultimate all-American hero: lean, laconic, and masculine, a lone sheriff battling his enemies in High Noon, or a tough individualist in The Fountainhead. Off-screen he bedded a host of leading ladies and carefully honed his image, making hundreds of movies and winning two Oscars in the process. The acclaimed film writer David Thomson explores the career and the contradictions of "Coop," the star who lived the dream in the golden age of Hollywood.

"Look, I'm hardly pretty, he seems to say. I sound like gravel; I look rough and tough; and, honest, I don't give you the soft, foolish answers the pretty boys will give you. You may not like what I say, but you better believe it." He became a legend as "Bogie," the world-weary, wisecracking outsider, but in reality, Humphrey Bogart was plagued by doubts and demons. He was born upper-class, yet made his name playing mavericks, drank with the Rat Pack, and met four wives on set-including his great love, Lauren Bacall, yet always mistrusted stardom. Here David Thomson, one of film's most provocative writers, reveals the man behind cinema's greatest icon.

"Ingrid Bergman was far more than just a sweet, virtuous, 'natural' Swedish girl-she was a dark sensualist over whom many men might go mad. Her very gaze delivered a climate of adult romantic expectation." Adored by millions for her luminous beauty and elegance, at the height of her career Bergman commanded a love that has hardly ever been matched, until her marriage fell apart and created an international scandal. Here the renowned film writer David Thomson gives his own unique take on a woman who was constantly driven by her passions and by her need to act, even if it meant sacrificing everything.