Star: The Life and Times of Warren Beatty
Famously a playboy, Beatty has also been one of the most ambitious and successful stars in Hollywood. Several Beatty films have passed the test of time, from Bonnie and Clyde to Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds (for which he won the best director Oscar), Bugsy, and Bulworth. Few filmgoers realize that along with Orson Welles, Beatty is the only person ever nominated for four Academy Awards for a single film -- and unlike Welles, Beatty did it twice. Biskind shows how Beatty used star power, commercial success, savvy, and charm to bend Hollywood moguls to his will. Beatty's private life has been the subject of gossip for decades, and Star confirms his status as Hollywood's leading man in the bedroom, describing his affairs with Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron and Madonna, among many others. Biskind also explains how Beatty exercised unique control, often hiring screenwriters out of his own pocket, producing, directing, and acting in his own films.
3.4 out of 5 based on 11 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Music, Stage & Screen |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
512 |
| RRP |
£17.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-1847378378 |
| Publisher |
Simon & Schuster |
| |
Famously a playboy, Beatty has also been one of the most ambitious and successful stars in Hollywood. Several Beatty films have passed the test of time, from Bonnie and Clyde to Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds (for which he won the best director Oscar), Bugsy, and Bulworth. Few filmgoers realize that along with Orson Welles, Beatty is the only person ever nominated for four Academy Awards for a single film -- and unlike Welles, Beatty did it twice. Biskind shows how Beatty used star power, commercial success, savvy, and charm to bend Hollywood moguls to his will. Beatty's private life has been the subject of gossip for decades, and Star confirms his status as Hollywood's leading man in the bedroom, describing his affairs with Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron and Madonna, among many others. Biskind also explains how Beatty exercised unique control, often hiring screenwriters out of his own pocket, producing, directing, and acting in his own films.
Reviews
The Los Angeles Times
Lawrence Levi
"[A] totally entertaining, giddily salacious book.. The Beatty depicted here is witty, cunning and freakishly charming, which is hardly news. (You won't believe what he asks Mrs. Douglas MacArthur at her 92nd birthday dinner.) He also comes off as possibly the most exasperating person who ever lived."
07/01/2010
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The Observer
Euan Ferguson
"[A] stunning piece of truth-telling… The ever closed Beatty may hate this book, but it is both impeccable and rollicking, and a not disloyal tribute to a man who had it all and yet, but for himself, could have had so much more."
10/01/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Tim Ecott
"Beatty is famously enigmatic and egotistical, making any biographer’s task a challenge, but Peter Biskind manages to capture the essence of the man with just the right combination of scholarship and salaciousness… Beatty emerges as an extremely intelligent and politically astute man who was hampered by an overweening need to control every aspect of the films in which he appeared."
26/01/2010
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The Sunday Times
Antonia Quirke
"Throughout this huge biography the man remains mysterious. Working him out becomes an agonising game. The book is compelling in the extreme."
10/01/2010
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
"Star is overlong and possibly over-researched. Did we need all the prolix pipsqueakery about the hero’s peccadilloes? Yet it is also thorough and probably definitive. Beatty sits at its centre, a living, beating ego."
25/01/2010
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The Independent
John Walsh
"Biskind ends this long, gossipy, supremely readable book with the melancholy reflection that Beatty did "so much less than someone with his gifts could have done" – so many roles turned down, so many films unmade, so many projects unfinished, so many political possibilities unexplored. The thing he really got round to doing (and completing) successfully was having sex with multitudes of women."
15/01/2010
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The Washington Post
Charles Matthews
"For this biography, Biskind agreed to leave Beatty's current life, as husband to Annette Bening and father to their four children, "off limits." And many of the people who know him best, such as MacLaine and Nicholson, as well as many of most of Beatty's famous ex-lovers, such as Leslie Caron, were "all afflicted with a contagion of silence." Biskind also refuses to psychologize, telling us almost nothing of Beatty's childhood and youth, other than that he remained a virgin until he was "19 and ten months." That leaves a 600-plus-page biography with some rather large biographical gaps."
17/01/2010
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The Daily Mail
Val Hennessy
"Biskind, at great pains to convince us there is much more to his hero than being the superman of seduction, lauds him as 'one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation'... Inevitably, though, Beatty's sex life steals the thunder from his film achievements and Biskind, all too aware of the problem, cannot escape from the fact that Beatty's many bust-ups with film crews, award ceremony spats and on-set megalomania make dull copy compared to the personal stuff."
22/01/2010
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The Guardian
Chris Petit
"This latest biography is predictable in its treatment of Beatty, being neither authorised nor unauthorised and written in the hope of acquiring its subject's blessing. In a typical move, the star has issued a statement dumping on the book. For his part, Biskind demonstrates all the standard phases of dealing with Beatty – infatuation, adulation and manipulation leading to resentment as it dawns that the confidences on offer are as calculated a performance as anything given to camera."
23/01/2010
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The New York Times
Janet Maslin
"The smartest observers quoted in “Star” are weighed down by countless other, less astute ones, who are far more numerous. And some of the subjects that are covered exhaustively by Mr. Biskind have already been well covered… The problem is partly demographic: older readers who care about film already know these stories. And younger ones aren’t apt to be impressed with material culled from the “making of” documentary that comes with the “Bonnie and Clyde” DVD."
06/01/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Anthony Holden
"Biskind keeps telling us how intelligent Beatty is, but fails to produce any evidence. His final paragraph concludes: “He has lived a life inspiring enough to write a book about.” The preceding pages make this the book’s most controversial statement."
09/01/2010
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