Lancaster wanted no biographies during his lifetime, but National Public Radio commentator Buford managed to get the cooperation of his widow, friends, and colleagues for this work. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

About the Author

Kate Buford has been a regular commentator since 1994 for Morning Edition on National Public Radio in the US. Her interest in Lancaster was first stimulated when she researched and wrote an article on the career for Film Comment magazine. She is the author of Burt Lancaster: An American Life and a biography of the American athlete Jim Thorpe.

Reviews

‘Wonderful’

‘Lancaster is captured in all his complexity … perceptive, engrossing and worthy of its subject’

‘Remarkable’

‘ Wonderful’ ‘ Lancaster is captured in all his complexity … perceptive, engrossing and worthy of its subject’ ‘ Kate Buford has written as fine a showbiz biography as one could possibly expect … a model of its kind’ ‘ Remarkable’

'Wonderful'

'Lancaster is captured in all his complexity ... perceptive, engrossing and worthy of its subject'

'Remarkable'

' Wonderful'

' Lancaster is captured in all his complexity ... perceptive, engrossing and worthy of its subject'

' Kate Buford has written as fine a showbiz biography as one could possibly expect ... a model of its kind'

' Remarkable'

At the height of the Hollywood blacklist, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a letter telling him to "check the moving picture Crimson Pirate because in it Burt Lancaster makes a speech about workers" that "sounds like a commie plug." Lancaster's decades-long political involvement with liberal causes (and his constant run-ins with the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) are a central theme in this well-researched and engaging biography, which also details the artist's acting career, his turns as a producer and his personal life. Buford, a regular commentator on National Public Radio, has constructed a complex portrait of a man who was a noted womanizer, yet also engaged in sex with men; who was kind and generous, yet often resorted to violence in his personal relationships; who was a mainstream "megastar" (who was parodied in Mad magazine) before reinventing himself as a major figure in Italian art films; and who broke from the imprisoning studio system and revolutionized the industry by beginning an independent production company. By carefully contextualizing Lancaster's more than 50-year career--which began in the circus and included such film classics as From Here to Eternity and Elmer Gantry--within the tumultuous political and economic changes of the postwar years, Buford's finely detailed, sensitive biography ranks among the best of its genre. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.