The Biograph Girl Book Reviews

The Biograph Girl by William J. Mann Book Summary

Award-winning author William J. Mann blends fact and fiction in this unconventional novel about the nature of celebrity

The Biograph Girl is Florence Lawrence, who gets her first big break in vaudeville as a tiny tot who can whistle like a man. By 1910 she’s a legendary movie star, pursued by thousands of rabid fans. Just a few short decades later, she’s all but forgotten, reduced to walk-ons at MGM. In 1938 she kills herself by ingesting a lethal dose of ant paste.
 
Fast-forward fifty-nine years. A 107-year-old woman named Flo Bridgewood is discovered in a Catholic nursing home in Buffalo. Could the feisty chain smoker with the red satin bow in her hair be America’s former sweetheart? Florence Lawrence is dead . . . isn’t she? And if not, then whose body is in her grave? That’s what journalist Richard Sheehan wants to find out as he and his identical twin brother, Ben, a documentary filmmaker, decide to cash in on a decades-old mystery. Sharing the stage is Flo herself, whose story is the stuff of Hollywood fantasy.
 
A provocative melding of fact and fiction, The Biograph Girl is about what it means to be a celebrity—then and now.

“Seamlessly combining actual people with fictional characters, Mann presents a wonderfully entertaining look at the ups and downs of the life of a star and of the film world, from its inception to the present day.” —Booklist
 
“A finely detailed and satisfyingly complicated mystery, aided in its allure by several characters simultaneously coming to terms with how they came to be who they are.” —Kirkus Reviews

William J. Mann is best known for his studies of Hollywood and the American film industry, especially Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, named a Notable Book of 2006 by the New York Times, and Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand, published in 2012. He is also the author of Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, for which he won the Lambda Literary Award, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, and How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, which Publishers Weekly described as “like gorging on a chocolate sundae.” He is also the author of six novels.

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The Biograph Girl (William J. Mann) Book Reviews 2024

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