Stanwyck

Barbara Stanwyck thrilled millions in scene after scene, picture after picture, over a six-decade career that took her from an impoverished childhood in the streets of Brooklyn to the pinnacle of Golden Age Hollywood. At once tough and vulnerable, straight-talking but emotionally elusive, she electrified every production in which she appeared, from Hollywood B-flicks to such classics as Stella Dallas, Double Indemnity, and television's The Thorn Birds. She was an early role model for women dissatisfied with the standard Hollywood heroine, and a tantalizing challenge to men who wanted more. Her honesty and authenticity resonate even more powerfully today - but her complete story has never before been told. Axel Madsen's Stanwyck is the first authoritative life of this fascinating and notoriously private star, who until now has eluded biographers. Madsen first interviewed Stanwyck in 1969 and over the years has exhaustively researched her life and career and interviewed scores of important sources, many of whom felt free to talk candidly only after her death in 1990. In this penetrating, sensitive portrait, Madsen traces the orphaned Stanwyck from her childhood in a succession of foster homes and her gritty days as a Ziegfeld chorus girl, to triumph in Hollywood at its zenith, through her lonely final years. He examines Stanwyck's two famous marriages - the divergent career trajectories and violence that destroyed the first, to Broadway star Frank Fay, and the troubled sexual dynamics at the heart of her celebrated union with Robert Taylor, probing for the first time rumors of Taylor's homosexuality and the widespread belief that Stanwyck was bisexual. And with sympathy and insight he explores the depths of Stanwyck's obsession with Taylor years after their devastating breakup, and her decades-long estrangement from her son. Barbara Stanwyck is one of America's most riveting screen icons, an endlessly intriguing enigma. Now, at last, with Stanwyck, Axel Madsen takes fans to the heart of the mystery, to reveal the complex, indomitable woman beneath the facade.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.