Tallulah: The Life and Times of a Leading Lady

Joel Lobenthal

Aurum, pounds-20

Tallulah, eh? With a name like that Ms Bankhead was hardly likely to spend her best years observing a vow of silence in a convent. And so it proved. The actress, from a patrician southern family, respectively scandalised London, Hollywood and New York with her excesses in a career that started in 1917 and never really ended.

Lobenthal, a devotee of Bankhead, can be excused for putting some emphasis on the actress's career on Broadway and in London's West End. He is gallantly supportive of her acting abilities. But this is to miss the point. Ms Bankhead, my darlings, was a star. Her alcoholism, propensity for cocaine and her bisexuality all conspired to cause her problems, but, perversely, they added to her lustre as a leading lady. Everybody has a Tallulah story, and Lobenthal has most of them.

They range from the witty - "I'm a lesbian; what do you do?" - to the pitifully sad. However, Lobenthal has done his heroine a fine service in recreating her as a force that had to be experienced. Bankhead died of pneumonia in 1968. Most blame a life of excess.

Personally, I wouldn't rule out her insistence on not wearing knickers.

Cary Grant: A Biography

Marc Eliot

Aurum, pounds-20

The publicity for this biography has understandably concentrated on Mr Grant's 11-year "marriage" to Randolph Scott. But there is much of substance in Eliot's work. Grant was one of the most important actors of any era. He broke from the studio system as early as the middle thirties and went freelance. He worked with the great directors - Hitchcock, Hawks, Cukor - in great roles. But, crucially, Eliot finds a viable theme for his tale of the boy born Archibald Leach in Bristol who became the Cary Grant of Hollywood.

Eliot traces Grant's life as a search for fulfilment. This is hardly revolutionary stuff, perhaps, but is wonderfully convincing. Grant always seemed to find happiness just outside his grasp. His bisexuality caused him practical, mundane problems in a Hollywood system that could not publicly countenance homosexuality. His affairs, more seriously, caused him immense personal strain.

Eliot is assured on the film career and intriguing on the back stories and personalities. But he is at his best in trying to corner Grant/Leach, the man.

This is a biography of the highest class: well-written, well-researched but, above all, original and intriguing.

It's Only a Movie: A Personal Biography

Charlotte Chandler

Simon and Schuster, pounds-20

Chandler's niche is to write anecdotal, pleasant reminiscences of the great and the good. Billy Wilder and Groucho Marx have already purred under her tender ministrations. It is now the turn of the greatest of suspense directors.

There is good news and bad. The good news is that Chandler's memoir is fluent, chronological and has time for humorous moments. The bad news is that it never goes within knife range of explaining Hitchcock or his work. Chandler, a friend of the great man, depicts him as some sort of roly-poly funny man.

There is ample evidence to suggest he was not, even in this sanitised version of a life. For example, on page one there is the simple retelling of a Hitchcock line:

"Even sex is embarrassing for a person who looks the way I do." Later, Hitchcock remarks almost casually: "I have always been uncommonly unattractive."

This self-loathing could seep from director to those immediately around, whether it be actors or family, with devastating effects.

This is never explicit in Chandler's biography but it forms the basis of Donald Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius, one of the greatest, most compelling of film biographies. Hitchcock may not emerge from Spoto's book as a hero, but he can command our admiration, our awe and, finally, our pity.

To order these books, for pounds-20 each with free p&p in the UK, call The Herald Bookshop on 0870 429 5806.