Gloria Swanson: Ready for her Close-Up
Tricia Welsch
University Press of Mississippi
Hollywood Legends Series
ISBN 978-1-61703-749-8, hardback, $35
A biography of "the Queen Of Hollywood" and her decades of successes and comebacks in film, art, fashion, and journalism
Most people remember Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, the mad silent film queen in Sunset Boulevard who hungered for her return to the spotlight. Though she had one of Hollywood's most famous exit lines-âAll right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close upâ-the real Gloria Swanson never looked back. She had many lives, from silent film star to pioneer in television, fashion, and theater.
Gloria Swanson: Ready for Her Close-Up (University Press of Mississippi) is the story of a talented, self-confident actress who negotiated a creative path through seven decades of celebrity. Author Tricia Welsch brings Swanson back into the spotlight, revealing her as a complex, creative, entrepreneurial, and thoroughly modern woman.
The popularity of her films with Cecil B. DeMille helped create the star system. With incredible rapidity, Swanson became the most talked-about star in Hollywood, earning three Academy Award nominations, receiving 10,000 fan letters every week, and living up to a reputation as Queen of Hollywood.
Frustrated with the studio system, Swanson left Paramount's gilded cage, turning down a million-dollar-a-year contract to star in her own pictures. After a wild ride making unforgettable movies with some of Hollywood's most colorful characters-including her lover Joseph Kennedy and maverick director Erich von Stroheim-she was a million dollars in debt. Without hesitation she went looking for her next challenge, beginning her long second act.
Swanson became a talented businesswoman who patented inventions and won fashion awards for her clothing designs; a natural foods activist decades before it was fashionable; an exhibited sculptor; and a designer employed by the United Nations. All the while she continued to act in films, theater, and television at home and abroad. Keeping herself in the public eye through a mixture of relentless, canny self-promotion and anticipation of media trends, Gloria Swanson both shaped and illustrated her era, and is long overdue for her close up.
Gloria Swanson: Ready for Her Close-Up is full-length portrait of Gloria Swanson that represents close to a decade of primary research using Swanson's private papers and archival film screenings as well as information gleaned from the author's interview with her only surviving daughter. The book also features over 70 black and white photographs from Swanson's life and career.
Tricia Welsch, Brunswick, Maine, is associate professor on the Marvin H. Green, Jr., Fund and chair of the film studies program at Bowdoin College. Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Film Quarterly, Film Criticism, the Journal of Film and Video, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Griffithiana, and Genre.