Download or read book Eleonora Duse written by Helen Sheehy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new biography, the first in two decades, of the legendary actress who inspired Anton Chekhov, popularized Henrik Ibsen, and spurred Stanislavski to create a new theory of acting based on her art and to invoke her name at every rehearsal. Writers loved her and wrote plays for her. She be-friended Rainer Maria Rilke and inspired the young James Joyce, who kept a portrait of her on his desk. Her greatest love, the poet d’Annunzio, made her the heroine of his novel Il fuoco (The Flame). She radically changed the art of acting: in a duel between the past and the future, she vanquished her rival, Sarah Bernhardt. Chekhov said of her, “I’ve never seen anything like it. Looking at Duse, I realized why the Russian theatre is such a bore.” Charlie Chaplin called her “the finest thing I have seen on the stage.” Gloria Swanson and Lillian Gish watched her perform with adoring attention, John Barrymore with awe. Shaw said she “touches you straight on the very heart.” When asked about her acting, Duse responded that, quite simply, it came from life. Except for one short film, Duse’s art has been lost. Despite dozens of books about her, her story is muffled by legend and myth. The sentimental image that prevails is of a misty, tragic heroine victimized by men, by life; an artist of unearthly purity, without ambition. Now Helen Sheehy, author of the much admired biography of Eva Le Gallienne, gives us a different Duse—a woman of strength and resolve, a woman who knew pain but could also inflict it. “Life is hard,” she said, “one must wound or be wounded.” She wanted to reveal on the stage the truth about women’s lives and she wanted her art to endure. Drawing on newly discovered material, including Duse’s own memoir, and unpublished letters and notes, Sheehy brings us to an understanding of the great actress’s unique ways of working: Duse acting out of her sense of her character’s inner life, Duse anticipating the bold aspects of modernism and performing with a sexual freedom that shocked and thrilled audiences. She edited her characters’ lines to bare skeletons, asked for the simplest sets and costumes. Where other actresses used hysterics onstage, Duse used stillness. Sheehy writes about the Duse that the actress herself tried to hide—tracing her life from her childhood as a performing member of a family of actors touring their repertory of drama and commedia dell’arte through Italy. We follow her through her twenties and through the next four decades of commissioning and directing plays, running her own company, and illuminating a series of great roles that included Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Marguerite in Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias, Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Hedda in his Hedda Gabler. When she thought her beauty was fading at fifty-one, she gave up the stage, only to return to the theatre in her early sixties; she traveled to America and enchanted audiences across the country. She died as she was born—on tour. Sheehy’s illuminating book brings us as close as we have ever been to the woman and the artist.

Download or read book Eleonora Duse written by Helen Sheehy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2003 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the life of actress Eleonora Duse, discussing how she changed the art of acting and how she inspired writers, poets, and artists.

Download or read book Playing to the Gods written by Peter Rader and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting story of the rivalry between the two most renowned actresses of the nineteenth century: legendary Sarah Bernhardt, whose eccentricity on and off the stage made her the original diva, and mystical Eleonora Duse, who broke all the rules to popularize the natural style of acting we celebrate today. Audiences across Europe and the Americas clamored to see the divine Sarah Bernhardt swoon—and she gave them their money’s worth. The world’s first superstar, she traveled with a chimpanzee named Darwin and a pet alligator that drank champagne, shamelessly supplementing her income by endorsing everything from aperitifs to beef bouillon, and spreading rumors that she slept in a coffin to better understand the macabre heroines she played. Eleonora Duse shied away from the spotlight. Born to a penniless family of itinerant troubadours, she disappeared into the characters she portrayed—channeling their spirits, she claimed. Her new, empathetic style of acting revolutionized the theater—and earned her the ire of Sarah Bernhardt in what would become the most tumultuous theatrical showdown of the nineteenth century. Bernhardt and Duse seduced each other’s lovers, stole one another’s favorite playwrights, and took to the world’s stages to outperform their rival in her most iconic roles. A scandalous, enormously entertaining history full of high drama and low blows, Playing to the Gods is the perfect “book for all of us who binge-watched Feud” (Daniel de Visé, author of Andy & Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show).

Download or read book Eva Le Gallienne written by Helen Sheehy and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1996 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary life of one of the great actors of the 20th century is viewed in this complex biography, including her protean career and courageous and controversial private life. The actress was dazzling on stage, touring at 18 with Ethel Barrymore and a major Broadway star at 21. The actress profoundly influenced the American theatre in her pioneering role as founder and head of the Civic Repertory Theatre (it became the model for Off Broadway) where she produced, directed, and starred in some 40 plays. 110 photos.

Download or read book The Mystic in the Theatre Eleonora Duse written by Eva Le Gallienne and published by [New York] : Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This book was released on 1966 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Flame of Life written by Gabriele D'Annunzio and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gabriele d'Annunzio, born Gaetano Rapagnetta (1863-1938) was an Italian poet, writer, novelist, dramatist, womanizer and daredevil who went on to have a controversial role in politics as figure-head of the Italian Fascist movement and mentor of Benito Mussolini. His literary works included: "The Child of Pleasure," "The Intruder," "The MAidens of the Rocks," and "The Flame of Life" ("Il Fuoco").

Download or read book Secrets of Acting Shakespeare written by Patrick Tucker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrets of Acting Shakespeare isn't a book that gently instructs. It's a passionate, yes-you-can designed to prove that anybody can act Shakespeare. By explaining how Elizabethan actors had only their own lines and not entire playscripts, Patrick Tucker shows how much these plays work by ear. Secrets of Acting Shakespeare is a book for actors trained and amateur, as well as for anyone curious about how the Elizabethan theater worked.

Download or read book The Story of My Life written by Dame Ellen Terry and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Life of Eleonora Duse written by Emil Alphons Rheinhardt and published by New York : B. Blom. This book was released on 1969 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Playing Sick written by Meredith Conti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian-era society as critically as witnessing or suffering from illness. The prevalence of illness narratives within late nineteenth-century popular culture was made manifest on the period’s British and American stages, where theatrical embodiments of illness were indisputable staples of actors’ repertoires. Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine reconstructs how actors embodied three of the era’s most provocative illnesses: tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness. In placing performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Meredith Conti analyzes how such depictions confirmed or resisted salient constructions of diseases and the diseased. Conti’s case studies, which range from Eleonora Duse’s portrayal of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier to Henry Irving’s performance of senile dementia in King Lear, help to illuminate the interdependence of medical science and theatre in constructing nineteenth-century illness narratives. Through reconstructing these performances, Conti isolates from the period’s acting practices a lexicon of embodied illness: a flexible set of physical and vocal techniques that performers employed to theatricalize the sick body. In an age when medical science encouraged a gradual decentering of the patient from their own diagnosis and treatment, late nineteenth-century performances of illness symbolically restored the sick to positions of visibility and consequence.

Download or read book My Mortal Enemy written by Willa Cather and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1926, this book is Willa Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of domestic happiness. As a young woman, Myra Henshawe gave up a fortune to marry for love--a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherwordly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.

Download or read book Sonnets to Duse written by Sara Teasdale and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Gioconda written by Gabriele D'Annunzio and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Famous Women written by Joseph Adelman and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Eleonora Duse written by Jeanne Bordeux and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Life and Acting written by Jack Garfein and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jack Garfein's book is a touching reminder of our early attempts at creating theater without artifice. It is good to know that he is still working hard at it."---Ben Gazzara --

Download or read book Living My Life written by Emma Goldman and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1970-01-01 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autobiography of the early radical leader and her participation in communist, anarchist, and feminist activities