Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood's Golden Age

In this essay collection David Lazar looks to our intimate relationships with characters, both well-known and lesser known, from Hollywood's Golden Age. Veering through considerations of melancholy and wit, sexuality and gender, and the surrealism of comedies of the self in an uncanny world, mixed with his own autobiographical reflections of cinephilia, Lazar creates an alluring hybrid of essay forms as he moves through the movies in his mind. Character actors from the classical era of the 1930s through the 1950s including Thelma Ritter, Oscar Levant, Martin Balsam, Nina Foch, Elizabeth Wilson, Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, and the eponymous Celeste Holm all make appearances in these considerations of how essential character actors were, and remain, to cinema.


Author: David Lazar
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 10/01/2020
Pages: 168
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.41lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.39d
ISBN13: 9781496200457
ISBN10: 1496200454
BISAC Categories:
- Performing Arts | Film | History & Criticism
- Biography & Autobiography | General

About the Author
David Lazar is a professor at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of several books, including I'll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms (Nebraska, 2017), Who's Afraid of Helen of Troy? An Essay on Love, and Occasional Desire: Essays (Nebraska, 2013). He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika.