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Hollywood Legends Series

Hollywood Legends is a series of critical biographies focusing on filmmakers and stars from Hollywood’s early years to more recent decades. This series is informed by current scholarship but is intended to appeal to those generally interested in film and the history and culture of cinema in America. Special attention will be given to those subjects who have yet to receive significant biographical attention and to those legends that deserve reconsideration. Books in the series will place Hollywood figures within their cultural context and provide an assessment of their legacies.

Series editor: Carl Rollyson, Independent Scholar

For more information or to submit a proposal, contact acquisitions editor Emily Snyder Bandy.

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James Mason

James Mason (1909–1984) was born to be an actor. He just didn’t know it. A Cambridge graduate with a degree in architecture, he arrived in London at a time when nothing was being built. With few prospects, he ...

Steve Cochran

Steve Cochran (1917–1965) was Hollywood’s ultimate contradiction—an intense, rugged leading man with a con man’s charm, a craftsman’s discipline, and a wild streak that made him both irresistible and dangerous ...

Tall in the Saddle

Tall in the Saddle: The Life of Ben Johnson, Hollywood’s Real Cowboy is the definitive biography of Ben Johnson (1918–1996), the only man to win both an Academy Award and a world rodeo championship. Born o ...

Lauren Bacall

Lauren Bacall (1924–2014), or Betty, as she was known to friends, was one of the last great movie stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Her career spanned seven decades and was one of the longest and m ...

Claudette Colbert

Claudette Colbert’s mixture of beauty, sophistication, wit, and vivacity quickly made her one of the film industry’s most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Though Colbert (1903–1996) beg ...

Too Fast, Too Short

American actress and socialite Diana Barrymore (1921–1960) was a figure often overshadowed by her famous lineage and tragic narrative. In Too Fast, Too Short: The Life of Diana Barrymore, author Jennifer ...

A Girl's Got To Breathe

The actress Teresa Wright (1918–2005) lived a rich, complex, magnificent life against the backdrop of Golden Age Hollywood, Broadway, and television. There was no indication, from her astonishingly difficult—indeed, h ...

Dashing to the End

Born Alfred Reginald John Truscott-Jones, Welsh American actor Ray Milland (1907–1986) appeared in more than 135 theatrical releases between 1929 and 1985 and on radio, television, and the stage, while a ...

Hollywood Madonna

Loretta Young (1913–2000) was an Academy Award–winning actress known for devout Catholicism and her performances in The Farmer's Daughter, The Bishop's Wife, and Come to the Stable, and for her long-running ...

One Tough Dame

By Herbie J Pilato
Foreword by Rupert Macnee
Introduction by Ray Austin
Categories: Biography And Memoir
Series: Hollywood Legends Series

One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg offers a sweeping portrait of the revered performer’s life and career. Deemed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1994, Diana Rigg (1938–2020) i ...