Bulls, balls, bicycles & actors /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Bickford, Charles, 1891-1967.
Imprint:New York : P.S. Eriksson, [1965]
©1965
Description:336 pages ; 22 cm
Language:English
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/2141673
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Varying Form of Title:Bulls, balls, bicycles and actors
Notes:Autobiographical.
Also issued online.
Summary:Charles Bickford's ups and downs on the straw-hat circuit, in vaudeville, on Broadway and as a screen actor have been penned by hand and reveal his bull-headed Irish talent for non-conformity. The accent is on brawling vitality from his Massachusetts childhood to his present eminence at 75. Bickford is probably best-known for his fiery role opposite Garbo in Anna Christie, a film he did not want to make because it was a woman's picture. At this distance, Bickford understandably glosses his early years on the road, and then brings a romantic Gable-Tracy boom-town immediacy to Jobs he held with his best friend...raunchy days selling exterminator fluid, harvesting wheat and bumming the rails. Still, he found his metier at 21 and had a considerable acting background (Laertes in Hamlet, Tybalt in Romeo, and a hundred schlock plays) before he hit Broadway. His first big hit was in a Maxwell Anderson play about hobos. He hit Hollywood like a meteor, was starred in a huge C. B. DeMille epic, followed this with Garbo, then was pushed into trashy scripts because he had offended studio heads. Since then he has had rare starring roles as a fine character actor before he gave up acting in dime-store flicks. Bickford's writing is not without non-book banality and Hollywood posturing; but there is also a fine honest anger which shows through his embarrassment at holding a pen. The title might be retranslated Anger, Manhood, the Stage and Craftsmen.
Other form:Online version: Bickford, Charles, 1889-1967. Bulls, balls, bicycles & actors. New York, P.S. Eriksson [1965]

Regenstein, Bookstacks

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Call Number: PN2287.B6A2
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