A biography of the actress who won an Academy Award in 2002 for her leading role in the motion picture "Monster's Ball" from her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio to her marriage to musician Eric Benet.
A new addition to the series that Serena Williams calls "a fun way to inspire children’s imagination and creativity!" Discover the wonders of fine art with this enchanting read-aloud bedtime book featuring some of the world's iconic paintings! Nurture your child’s creativity as they get ready for bed by reading gentle rhymes accompanied by delightfully curated artworks illustrating the night sky, sleeping animals, and more in this perfect book to end the day. In this collection, your child will journey from sunset to moonrise through artworks by Mary Cassatt, Gustav Klimt, Katsushika Hokusai, and many others. Describe the serene skies in Claude Monet's Stacks of Wheat, imagine the gentle snores of George Stubbs's Sleeping Leopard, and say goodnight to the tranquil moon in Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy. With a calming rhyming scheme and peaceful colors, Bedtime with Art will inspire your budding art lovers' imagination and dreams as they get ready to drift to sleep. . . .
This volume provides readers with a balanced biographical overview of actress Halle Berry. Chapters discuss her early life experiences as a biracial child, her first acting roles, and her rise to stardom as an Oscar winner. The book also discusses Berry's public relationships and divorces, and her experiences as a mother.
Born in Cleveland in 1968, Halley Berry first gained the public’s attention in 1986 as a runner-up in the Miss USA Pageant. When she turned to acting, her career took off with a key role in Spike Lee’s 1991 film Jungle Fever. It wasn’t until 1999, however, with her Golden Globe-winning performance in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, that she began to make a real impact in the film world. In 2001, she was cast in the smash-hit X-Men, and in 2002, she delivered her extraordinary, Oscar-winning performance in Monster’s Ball. Berry next crossed paths with Pierce Brosnan in the James Bond extravaganza Die Another Day. In this book, Daniel O’ Brien gives us a fascinating glimpse of an actress on her way to the top. The author’s most recent books are The Hannibal Files and Cameron Diaz.
In 1955 the beautiful Dorothy Dandridge became the first ever African American to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Performance. In show business since the age of three years, she became Hollywood's first major black female star with the 1954 release of Carmen Jones in which she co-starred with Harry Belafonte. Other major roles were to follow, but her downfall was her terrible taste in men. She married two of them, both treated her badly, the last leaving her nearly bankrupt. Then tragedy struck in the form of her mysterious death which still puzzles many.
The biographies in this series for high school students are both factual and fun to read; length and format are designed to meet educators' requirements and students' interests. This book in the series details the life of actress Halle Berry from childhood through adulthood, shedding light on her family background, her personal and professional influences, and her accomplishments and struggles in an industry where many of the parts she played were written with a white actress in mind. The book includes B&W photos of Berry throughout her career, a timeline, a filmography of film and TV appearances, and a list of major awards and nominations.
Being thought of as 'a beautiful woman' has spared me nothing in life, says Halle Berry. With her extraordinary beauty, wealth, and an Academy Award for Best Actress, it seems as if Berry has it all. Yet her life has been anything but a fairytale. From the pain of an abusive father to the sting of racism from her peers, Berry emerged as a high achiever, beauty queen, and model. As an actor, her beauty often kept her from being considered for meaningful roles, and it took a while for her to achieve the success she deserved. In 2002, Berry's Academy Award–winning performance in the small-budget art film Monster's Ball made history, stirred controversy, and launched her into superstardom. Give your readers a powerful biography of this stellar talent.
Available once again, the definitive biography of the pioneering Black performer—the first nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award—who broke new ground in Hollywood and helped transform American society in the years before Civil Rights movement—a remarkable woman of her time who also transcended it. “An ambitious, rigorously researched account of the long-ignored film star and chanteuse. . . . Bogle has fashioned a resonant history of a bygone era in Hollywood and passionately documented the contribution of one of its most dazzling and complex performers."—New York Times Book Review In the segregated world of 1950s America, few celebrities were as talented, beautiful, glamorous, and ultimately influential as Dorothy Dandridge. Universally admired, she was Hollywood's first full-fledged Black movie star. Film historian Donald Bogle offers a panoramic portrait of Dorothy Dandridge’s extraordinary and ultimately tragic life and career, from her early years as a child performer in Cleveland, to her rise as a nightclub headliner and movie star, to her heartbreaking death at 42. Bogle reveals how this exceptionally talented and intensely ambitious entertainer broke down racial barriers by integrating some of America's hottest nightclubs and broke through Tinseltown’s glass ceiling. Along with her smash appearances at venues such as Harlem’s famed Cotton Club, Dorothy starred in numerous films, making history with her role in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, playing opposite Harry Belafonte. Her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress—the first Oscar nod for a woman of color. But Dorothy’s wealth, fame, and success masked a reality fraught with contradiction and illusion. Struggling to find good roles professionally, uncomfortable with her image as a sex goddess, coping with the aftermath of two unhappy marriages and a string of unfulfilling affairs, and overwhelmed with guilt for her disabled daughter, Dorothy found herself emotionally and financially bankrupt—despair that ended in her untimely death. Woven from extensive research and unique interviews, as magnetic as the woman at its heart, Dorothy Dandridge captures this dazzling entertainer in all her complexity: her strength and vulnerability, her joy and her pain, her trials and her triumphs.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "My Body offers a lucid examination of the mirrors in which its author has seen herself, and her indoctrination into the cult of beauty as defined by powerful men. In its more transcendent passages . . . the author steps beyond the reach of any 'Pygmalion' and becomes a more dangerous kind of beautiful. She becomes a kind of god in her own right: an artist." —Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review A "MOST ANTICIPATED" AND "BEST OF FALL 2021" BOOK FOR * VOGUE * TIME * ESQUIRE * PEOPLE * USA TODAY * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * LOS ANGELES TIMES * SHONDALAND * ALMA * THRILLEST * NYLON * FORTUNE A deeply honest investigation of what it means to be a woman and a commodity from Emily Ratajkowski, the archetypal, multi-hyphenate celebrity of our time Emily Ratajkowski is an acclaimed model and actress, an engaged political progressive, a formidable entrepreneur, a global social media phenomenon, and now, a writer. Rocketing to world fame at age twenty-one, Ratajkowski sparked both praise and furor with the provocative display of her body as an unapologetic statement of feminist empowerment. The subsequent evolution in her thinking about our culture’s commodification of women is the subject of this book. My Body is a profoundly personal exploration of feminism, sexuality, and power, of men's treatment of women and women's rationalizations for accepting that treatment. These essays chronicle moments from Ratajkowski’s life while investigating the culture’s fetishization of girls and female beauty, its obsession with and contempt for women’s sexuality, the perverse dynamics of the fashion and film industries, and the gray area between consent and abuse. Nuanced, fierce, and incisive, My Body marks the debut of a writer brimming with courage and intelligence.