Joy
- 352pages
- 13 heures de lecture
This first novel draws on Marsha Hunt's experience of growing up black in America, of the music business and of finding fame in a white-dominated world.
Marsha Hunt Livres
Cette artiste d'origine américaine possède un esprit créatif aux multiples facettes, excellant en tant que chanteuse, actrice et écrivaine. Ses expériences formatrices durant les années 1960 tumultueuses ont ouvert la voie à un voyage international qui a considérablement façonné son développement artistique. S'étant établie sur la scène théâtrale londonienne animée, elle a forgé une carrière distinguée s'étendant sur quinze ans dans la musique rock, ainsi que de nombreux travaux à la radio, au théâtre et au cinéma. Son engagement envers les arts du spectacle est encore démontré par ses mandats importants au sein de compagnies de théâtre renommées, perfectionnant sa maîtrise interprétative et dramatique.
Ernestine Hunt was to spend 50 years in mental institutions before her granddaughter Marsha Hunt discovered she was still alive. In an effort to find answers to the mysteries of her grandmother's past Marsha turned over secrets and inconsistencies that others might have prefered to remain hidden.
Like Venus Fading
- 291pages
- 11 heures de lecture
A great rollercoaster rags-to-riches-to-rags tale about the first black Hollywood sex goddess.Like Elvis, like Marilyn, the first black film superstar didn’t die tragically, but lives among us still, changed out of all recognition...Propelled out of Depression-era poverty by the ambition of her mother and her own talents, young Irene O’Brien finds she attracts attention easily – both welcome (she is talent-spotted from Mississippi to Harlem to Hollywood) and unwelcome (at six, a fat, over-friendly storekeeper gets altogether too excited when she sits on his lap...)She blazes a trail no other black performer has taken before and becomes an international sex symbol in the 1950s – ‘the black Monroe’. Fame and fortune come running: she is the first black woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress. But happiness eludes her: her celebrity marriage never works; her daughter is autistic; and the studios soon tire of her as she ages.Her descent into drunkenness and derangement ends with her very mysterious ‘death’ in the mid-1960s at the age of forty-three. But, beaten but not bowed, Venus Johnson rises from the ashes of Irene O’Brien to tell her tale and live out her days in tranquillity...
