 | The Search for Sam Goldwyn Subjects: PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Direction & Production.; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts.; Motion picture producers and directors; Sam Goldwyn's career spanned almost the entire history of Hollywood. He made his first film, The Squaw Man , in 1913, and he died in 1974 at the age of ninety-one. In the many years between, he produced an enormous number of films--including such classics as Wuthering Heights, Street Scene, Arrowsmith, Dodsworth, The Little Foxes, and The Best Years of Our Lives --and worked with many luminaries--Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, Laurence Olivier, George Balanchine, Lillian Hellman, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Eddie Cantor, Busby Berkeley, Danny Kaye, Merle Oberon, and Bob Hope among them. When Samuel Goldfisch was born in the Warsaw ghetto, he was penniless; when Sam Goldwyn died in Los Angeles, he was worth an estimated $19 million. The Search for Sam Goldwyn locates the real Sam Goldwyn and shatters the "hostile conspiracy of silence" that protected his legend. In writing Goldwyn's story, Carol Easton has given us a fine examination of "the civilization known as Hollywood" and how Goldwyn himself shaped that culture. Carol Evelyn Easton was an American biographer. She was born in San Francisco and raised in Hollywood. She studied theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles and worked as a freelance writer for years before deciding to write a biography. Her books focused on creative people in the arts. The first biography was Straight Ahead: The Story of Stan Kenton (1973), followed by The Search for Sam Goldwyn (1976), Jacqueline du Pre: A Biography (1989), and No Intermissions: The Life of Agnes de Mille (1996), which was named a New York Times Notable Book (1996). Carol Easton died at her home in Venice, California on June 17, 2021. She was 87. (Bowker Author Biography) |
