It was rare for Walter Brennan to express more than satisfaction at work well done. But Three Godfathers (March 6, 1936) was something special. With its combination of an unusual director, Richard Bol...
Walter Brennan spent virtually his entire life making motion pictures, perfecting a persona, and embodying a range of characters that he began to observe and imitate during his earliest days on the do...
Michael often spoke of his father and their book discussions. Isaac Foot would visit London nearly every fortnight, Michael recalled, and they would see each other. Michael rarely spoke of anyone else...
Michael had been an all-day walker for much of his life, but at eighty-seven, the rises robbed him of air and he had to stop frequently to tell his anecdotes. Yet he was still taking buses and clatter...
Michael and Jill were connoisseurs of personality, transcending politics. They loved Randolph Churchill, who ran two losing campaigns against Michael in Plymouth and they adored Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs...
In one comic scene, Brennan and Cooper share the same bed, with Brennan’s arm, at one point, draped over Cooper’s. It is tempting to see Lillian Hellman’s hand in such scenes, since she was assigned t...
That was how I met Mrs. Thatcher, Michael said. It must have been 1976, just before she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Michael had just given a speech: I went up to look at it, and ther...
Absalom, Absalom! That novel is an object lesson for biographers because it is about the obsession with knowing what really happened in the past, as well as about the utter futility of ever coming to...
After completing work in December 1950 on Along the Great Divide, Walter Brennan made the first of several appearances on Family Theater, a radio series conceived by Father Patrick Peyton, who convinc...
Unvarnished treatment of real people, especially literary figures, can still invite outrage from critics, while those same literary figures, skewering their family and friends in novel after novel, ta...
The world seemed to turn on Michael’s likes and dislikes—as I learned when I mentioned I was giving a talk about Dr. Johnson at Cambridge. Michael objected to him as though Johnson was just another To...
Michael had an aching need to show the world what Jill had not been able to display herself, much as Thomas Carlyle had done for his late wife Jane and H. G. Wells had done for his Jane after she died...
Walter Brennan was always in demand and gave the lie to the Hollywood cliché that you are only as good as your last picture. He never delivered anything less than a competent performance, but he never...
Second only to the royals in Michael’s gallery of good-for-nothings were, of course, the Tories. John Major occupied a special page in Michael’s book of bad ones. The trouble began when Suraj Paul, a...
Scholars estimate that Boswell spent something like four hundred days in Samuel Johnson’s company. Over a period of three years and ten trips to England, I lived for something like one hundred days wi...
Obviously fond of Jill, Paul remembered a time they were all together in a car arguing, and Jill whispered in Paul’s ear, Michael thinks he can win an argument by how loud he shouts.
March 7: With May Reis, Marilyn in mourning clothes attends the funeral of Arthur Miller’s mother, Augusta, who died of a heart attack. Marilyn offers Arthur Miller her condolences and consoles his fa...
Richard Avedon photographs Marilyn, her torso covered in feathers (her sexual plumage) and wearing high heels, her left leg bent and brought up to her body so that the leg projects outward horizontall...
Be versatile, cunning, and ruthless in his pursuit—in other words, have all the attributes of a good spy.—Erika Ostrovsky, Eye of Dawn: The Rise and Fall of Mata Hari (1978)
A Private Life of Michael Foot is an effort to show how a biographer struggles to tell his own story, even as family and friends cherish differing narratives about that same subject.
Showing 21 to 40 of 368 results