Cirrus@Austlit

'How Errol Flynn, Peter Finch, David Gulpilil and Nicole Kidman crossed the psychic gangway between Sydney and Hollywood' 

''Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.’ William Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution, but the sentiment could have applied to the three McDonagh sisters in 1920s Sydney. Isabel (born in 1899), Phyllis (1900), and Paulette (1901) were the beneficiaries of two intertwined revolutions – modernism and feminism – that encouraged them to develop skills outside the domestic sphere and to become experts in their field. Daringly, they chose filmmaking, the great obsession of the period; and they were very good at it.' (Introduction)

'Archives are the meat and drink of the historian. The pursuit through the archives can be tedious and exhausting: ‘Turn every page’, LBJ biographer Robert Caro exhorts. But it is also thrilling – the intense emotion of finding the lock of hair from a long-dead lover or the torn-up shreds of the letters of a discarded husband; or the ‘a-hah’ moment when a scribbled note provides the final piece of a jigsaw you have been carefully putting together.' (Introduction)

'Inspired by Nellie Melba, Judith Anderson carved out a career on stage and screen'

'Everyone knows Mrs Danvers as a byword for menace in Hitchcock's Rebecca and as a poster girl for lesbians in the movies. But only dedicated fans know her brilliant creator.

'This book tells Judith Anderson's life story for the first time. It recovers her career as one of the great stars of stage and television and an important character actress in film. Born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1897, brought up by a determined single mother, she parlayed her rich, velvety voice and ability to give reality to strong emotional roles into stardom on Broadway in the 1920s. Not a conventional beauty, she was alluring, with her beautiful body, perfect dress sense, and striking, volatile personality. After playing glamorous roles, she was recognised as a Leading Lady of the American Stage under the direction of Guthrie McClintic in Hamlet and co-starring with Laurence Olivier and Maurice Evans in Macbeth. Her reputation as a great actress was confirmed by her landmark performance in 1947 in the ancient Greek Medea, adapted for her by her friend, poet Robinson Jeffers. In a long career, she appeared in Medea again in 1982 at the age of 85, playing the Nurse to fellow-Australian Zoe Caldwell's Medea.

'Ambitious and driven, Anderson toured extensively, made numerous highly praised appearances on television, and, after her unforgettable role as Mrs Danvers, was a sought-after character actress in film, playing her last role as Vulcan High Priestess in Star Trek III at the age of 87. She won many awards and was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1960 and Companion of the Order of Australia just before her death in 1992. She had a stormy private life and two short marriages, which, she remarked, were 'much too long.'' (Publication summary)

'Nowadays every second young person seems to want to be a stand-up comic, an occupation that perfectly represents the ‘gig’ economy in its precariousness and occasional nature. Anne Pender gives us mini-biographies of seven Australians who succeeded, often spectacularly, in the risky business of being a comic long before the idea of a ‘gig’ economy entered the collective mind. Beginning with Carol Raye, Pender relates, in forty or so pages each, the life stories of Barry Humphries, Noeline Brown, Max Gillies, John Clarke, Tony Sheldon, and Denise Scott – in other words, members of the two cohorts who rode the national theatre and television wave from the 1960s to the recent past.' (Introduction)

'Reading Bruce Beresford is enough to make any aspiring filmmaker think twice about following in his footsteps. ‘The Best Film I Never Made’, the title article of this collection of Beresford’s occasional writing over the last fifteen years, says it all. This is the sad, but in its way hilarious, story of his attempt to put together a movie based on the life of James Boswell. He knows from bitter experience that ‘skating on thin ice is the modus operandi of most film producers’; but he is ever optimistic, and his heart is in the project. With shooting only nine days away, however, his mobile rang: ‘Nik Powell was on the phone from Germany. The conversation was brief, just a few seconds – ‘There’s no money. The film’s off.’ The mobiles (supplied by the production office) all stopped working a few minutes later. A day or so later the production office in Shepparton had gone. No one connected with the film could be found.’' (Introduction)

'Simone de Beauvoir noted that you don’t often make new friends after age 60. But Jill and I enjoyed what you could call a late friendship. Jill came to the ANU as a visitor after she retired in 2003 and we immediately fell into an easy friendship. We were born just a year apart – Jill in 1940 and me a year later. We were both country girls, Jill a farm girl from Eyre Peninsula and me a small-town girl from southern Queensland. We had both fled rural life in the late 1950s and been the first in our families to go to university in the early 1960s. When Jill was writing her final book, Our Fathers Cleared the Bush – her memoir of her childhood in that remote corner of South Australia – we found that we shared many experiences, despite the distance between South Australia and Queensland and their different histories.¹ ' (Introduction)

Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars—historians, literary critics, and museologists—trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia’s distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected Australians to a global community of thought. It shows how biography, and the study of life stories, can contribute greatly to our understanding of such patterns of connection and explores how transnationalism can test biography’s limits as an intellectual, professional and commercial practice.' (Publisher's blurb)