Product Description
This now classic portrait of Douglas Fairbanks--the swashbuckling original King of Hollywood--was first published in 1940. Long out of print and hard to find, Alistair Cooke's posthumous biography was the first serious consideration of the career of the great silent screen star and husband of America's sweetheart, Mary Pickford. Reissued here in a facsimile edition, The Making of a Screen Character treats, step by step, the course of Fairbanks' career, and sheds light on the mysterious ingredients of screen popularity and on the history of motion pictures generally.
Essays by Alistair Cooke.
About the Author
Born Douglas Elton Thomas Ulman in 1883 in Denver, Colorado, Douglas Fairbanks arrived in Hollywood at age 31, an unlikely candidate for the movies. He went on to become one of the best early comedians of the silent screen, as well as its great swashbuckler. He founded the United Artists Corporation along with his wife, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith, and later the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences. In 1939, the star of The Adventures of Zorro died in his sleep of a heart attack.
