Mae West

In terms of celebrity icons, few attained the highest levels of fame and controversy as rapidly as Mae West. Labeled a "pornographer" by censorship boards, she was also one of 1930s Hollywood's most lucrative box-office draws (causing "Variety" in 1933 to label the star "as hot an issue as Hitler"). Nicknamed by critic George Jean Nathan "the Statue of Libido" and paid homage to in the title song of Cole Porter's musical Anything Goes, her voluptuous image and signature platinum blond air became recognizable worldwide and for decades beyond her prime years of fame in the 1930s.

In fact, even by the 1960s when the Beatles wanted to use her image on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, those long-haired icons of a new generation were required to deliver a handwritten plea to the icon (which they dutifully did), since West herself always objected, as she said, to belonging to any "lonely hearts club."In the "Movie Icon Series", people talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren't actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, "Taschen" shows you.

"Movie Icons" is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstaking selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life.More bang for your buck! "...a fast-food, high-energy fix on the topic at hand."

ISBN-13 : 9783822823217
Publisher : Taschen America, LLC
Publication date : 05/01/2008
Author : Paul Duncan (Editor), Kobal Collection (Photographer), Dominique Mainon (Text by (Art/Photo Books))

Meet the Author

Paul Duncan found himself in the right place at the right time as South Africa came into its own with creative design and decor a few years ago. He was the highly successful editor of Conde Nast House & Garden and has had the opportunity to work with the best local and international photographers - notably Fritz von der Schulenberg - as well as art directors and features writers to capture the outstanding interiors put together by interior designers such as Graham Viney, Stephen Falcke, Stefan Antoni and Boyd Ferguson, architects like Johann Slee and Silvio Rechs and inspired homemakers from Sandton to Graaff Reinet to Plettenberg Bay. Paul Duncan is now Head of Design, Menswear & Homeware at Woolworths and as involved with design and South African innovation as ever, with more books in the pipeline.

Alain Silver is the author of The Samurai Film and the coauthor of fifteen other books, including Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and two screenplays. He has written numerous articles for the Los Angeles Times, DGA Magazine, Film Comment, and Photon. He has also produced nine independent features and over fifty soundtrack albums, and is a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America. James Ursini has contributed to various publications including Cinema, Femme Fatales, Mediascene, and Photon. Together, they are the coauthors of eleven books, among them the Film Noir Reader series, Film Noir: An Encyclopedia Reference to the American Style, and The Noir Style. They both live in Santa Monica.