From the library of Bryan Forbes
BACALL, Lauren. By Myself. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1979.
8vo. Finely bound in half red morocco over marbled paper covered boards, Spine lettered and panelled in gilt with raised bands with gilt rules, gilt bee block on lower board, top edge gilt, original dust wrapper bound in at rear; fine.
First edition. Inscribed by actress Lauren Bacall to the film director, actor and writer Bryan Forbes "For Brian [sic] - with thanks for the purchase and for the 20 years - love- Betty". With Forbes's bookplate on front end paper. (Lauren Bacall was known as Betty to her close friends).
"Who sat on mountaintops in cars reading books aloud to the canyons? I did.”
One of the most accoladed female stars of the classic Hollywood 'Golden Age', Lauren Bascall (otherwise known as Betty Joan Perske), was christened the greatest female star of 20th Century cinema by the American Film Institute. She first made her name in the 1944 movie, "To Have and Have Not", (an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel), alongside her future husband Humphrey Bogart, a debut that was succeeded by a catalogue of legendary showcases. She starred alongside Marilyn Monroe in "How to Marry a Millionaire", performed in "The Big Sleep" and later in life, Lars Von Trier's highly appaluded "Dogville" but the theatre was a special domain, winning two Tony awards.
With Bogart, she was resigned to the pitfalls of a celebrity union, a romance that her audience found perpetually fascinating, and in a 1970 inerview for The New York Times, she stated; “I think I’ve damn well earned the right to be judged on my own, It’s time I was allowed a life of my own, to be judged and thought of as a person, as me.”
In By Myself, Bascall delves deep into her career in Hollywood, her two marriages and her infamous affair with Sinatra. It's about a girl who grew up in the Bronx, became a New York fashion model and was elevated to the status of a Hollywood dame within which she tried to gain her independene.
The autobiography won the National Book Award in 1980.
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