Writers On Movie Actors
This is a book about the unsung heroes of popular culture: the character actors, the ones whose faces you always remember and whose names you invariably forget. Tough guys who never make it like Dan Buryea or Warren Oates; fat criminal masterminds like Sydney Greenstreet; Dana Andrews, the emotionless mask; Thelma Ritter, always the female working-class chorus; impossibly good girls like Doris Day. Many of them were second leads, doomed to play professional villains, judges, bookies, winos or matrons; lived-in and weary or smiling and innocent faces that provoke John Updike, Greil Marcus, Charles Simic, Geoffrey O'Brien, Patti Smith and the editors themselves into brilliant pieces of writing. A book full of autobiography, film buffery and Americana.
