Cary Grant: A Celebration

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During Cary Grant's long life a great deal of testimony accumulated. Even early in the search for him, it can be established that he had a dark side and a light side. The source of Cary's art, argues Schickel, lay in his ability to colour his comedy with malice and self-absorption. The reverse was true also - he seemed easily able to get a laugh even in the midst of dramatic tension. This most private of men was an open actor, a performer willing to try anything to make a scene work. It is perhaps because he was able so artfully to reveal so much of himself in this way that he revealed almost nothing of himself under direct questioning.

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About the author (1998)

Richard Warren Schickel was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 10, 1933. He received a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1955. He became a noted film critic, Hollywood historian, and prolific author and documentarian. He reviewed films for Life magazine from 1965 until it closed in 1972, then wrote for Time until 2010 and later for the blog Truthdig.com. He wrote 37 books on movies and filmmakers and wrote or directed more than 30 documentaries including The Men Who Made the Movies. He wrote biographies of Woody Allen, Marlon Brando, James Cagney, Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Lena Horne, and Elia Kazan. He also wrote a memoir entitled Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip: Movies, Memory, and World War II. He died from complications of dementia on February 19, 2017 at the age of 84.

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