A recognized prodigy at age 10, world famous by age 23, Orson Welles was a triple magician of theater, radio, and film-and by age 25 a promising figure in American politics. President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged him to try a run for the Senate;......

Charles Chaplin\'s Little Tramp is the supreme icon of motion pictures - still recognized and loved throughout the world, more than 90 years since he first burst on the screen. The shabby little figure - with derby hat, too-tight jacket, oversized......

American cinema, as we've known it since The Godfather, would be impossible to reimagine without Al Pacino. As Michael Corleone he breathes life into an American of epic dimension....

In terms of celebrity icons, few attained the highest levels of fame and controversy as rapidly as Mae West. Labeled a \\\"pornographer\\\" by censorship boards, she was also one of 1930s Hollywood\"s most lucrative box-office draws (causing Variety in 1933 to label the star \\\"as hot an issue as Hitler\\\")....

Poet, pirate, libertine Versatile and veracious How do we even describe the alienated beauty of Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow, Donnie Brasco, Don Juan DeMarco, Captain Jack Sparrow and Sweeney Todd, apart from the prodigious gift of Johnny Depp?...

Jack Nicholson was over thirty, and more than a decade into his acting career, when Easy Rider finally made him a star. His reputation as a rebellious anti-hero was furthered by three notorious confrontations in films of the 1970s: Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo\'s Nest....

Why is the only non-American winner of the AFI\'s prestigious Life Achievement Award a Scotsman? Perhaps because Sean Connery\'s career, though international in scope and global in appeal, made him a \"genuine movie star\" without any pretensions or pandering to fashion....

Serious about comedy From gag writer to Oscar winner and beyond Woody Allen began his career writing jokes and scripts, progressed to stand-up and acting, then wrote and directed his first film, Take the Money and Run, in 1969....

Visual biographies of cinema\'s greatest stars Most moviegoers associate Robert De Niro with adjectives like \"intense,\" \"violent,\" \"streetwise,\" and \"brooding.\" It is an image that De Niro has carefully nurtured throughout his career....

A recognized prodigy at age 10, world famous by age 23, Orson Welles was a triple magician of theater, radio, and film-and by age 25 a promising figure in American politics. President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged him to try a run for the Senate; newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst branded him a pariah....

Godfathers of screwball comedy \"The surprising thing about this film was that I succeeded in not going crazy,\" said director Leo McCarey about working with the manic Marx Brothers on Duck Soup....

The top female box-office star of 1954, Grace Kelly\'s status as icon takes in an 11-film, three-year, screen career and a glamorous later life as Princess of Monaco....

James Dean died at the age of 24, yet half a century later his mystique is unfaded. Had luck favored him that fatal evening, he might still be with us, an actor in the same generation as Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Sean Connery....

Elvis Presley would have been the first to laugh at the mad, godlike status he attained after death, but he would have surely identified with the human, gospel-haunted need such adoration rises out of. He shared that need, and courted it. He could sing and move with a spellbinding violence and grace....

Long before he was Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra was a child of the jazz age and its free-wheeling approach to life. In the course of a meteoric rise from singing waiter to the world\'s first pop star, Sinatra relied on his own version of keeping it simple: \"I\'m not one of those complicated, mixed-up cats....