The Idols of Silence
Stars of the Cinema Before the Talkies
Edited by Anthony Slide
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The Idols of Silence will prove a joy to all those with an interest in or a remembrance of silent films. For the general reader, the book offers essays on some thirteen personalities of the silent screen, including Henry B. Walthall, Olga Petrova, Alice Terry, Ralph Graves, and Bebe Daniels, together with a section on the fan magazines of the silent era -- Photoplay, Motion Picture Classic, and Motion Picture Magazine -- and their writers and editors. For the film scholar, The Idols of Silence offers bibliographic listings of books and magazine articles on more than one hundred stars, from Mignon Anderson to Clara Kimball Young. No other publication offers the reader such a wealth of references. For those who enjoy looking at pictures, there are included more than two hundred portraits and scene stills, showing great stars such as Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, Buster Keaton, and Rudolph Valentino, and screen classics like The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, and Ben-Hur. Forgotten players such as Jean Paige and Louise Glaum rub shoulders with stars such as Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, and Lillian Gish, whose careers were still at their height at the time of writing, in this delightful volume of nostalgia and scholarship. In the compilation of this volume, the author interviewed many screen personalities from the silent era, including Priscilla Bonner, Jetta Goudal, Ben Lyon, and Billie Rhodes, plus Adele Whitely Fletcher and Ruth Waterbury, two fan-magazine writers whose careers spanned the years from the twenties to the time of writing. These interviews, together extensive research at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ library and the Library of Congress have produced a volume of lasting value on the silent cinema.
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> On a related topic:
Silent Film Performers (2012)
An Annotated Bibliography of Published, Unpublished and Archival Sources for More Than 350 Actors and Actresses
by Roy Liebman
Subject: Silent Cinema
Eighty Silent Film Stars (2012)
Biographies and Filmographies of the Obscure to the Well Known
Subject: Silent Cinema
From Silents to Sound (2009)
A Biographical Encyclopedia of Performers Who Made the Transition to Talking Pictures
by Roy Liebman
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Strong, Silent Type (2003)
Over 100 Screen Cowboys, 1903–1930
by Buck Rainey
Subject: Silent Cinema
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