Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood's Golden Age (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781496200457)

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

In this essay collection David Lazar looks to our intimate relationships with characters, both well-known and lesser known, from Hollywood's Golden Age. Veering through considerations of melancholy and wit, sexuality and gender, and the surrealism of comedies of the self in an uncanny world, mixed with his own autobiographical reflections of cinephilia, Lazar creates an alluring hybrid of essay forms as he moves through the movies in his mind. Character actors from the classical era of the 1930s through the 1950s including Thelma Ritter, Oscar Levant, Martin Balsam, Nina Foch, Elizabeth Wilson, Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, and the eponymous Celeste Holm all make appearances in these considerations of how essential character actors were, and remain, to cinema.

Author: David Lazar
ISBN-10: 1496200454
ISBN-13: 9781496200457
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 10/01/2020
Pages: 168
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.41lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.39d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2020
Publishers Weekly 08/10/2020