Madeline Kahn

Download or read book Madeline Kahn written by William V. Madison and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for her Oscar-nominated roles in the smash hits Paper Moon and Blazing Saddles, Madeline Kahn (1942–1999) was one of the most popular comedians of her time—and one of the least understood. In private, she was as reserved and refined as her characters were bold and bawdy. Almost a Method actor in her approach, she took her work seriously. When crew members and audiences laughed, she asked why—as if they were laughing at her—and all her life she remained unsure of her gifts. William V. Madison examines Kahn's film career, including not only her triumphs with Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich, but also her overlooked performances in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother and Judy Berlin, her final film. Her work in television—notably her sitcoms—also comes into focus. New York theater showered her with accolades, but also with remarkably bad luck, culminating in a disastrous outing in On the Twentieth Century that wrecked her reputation on Broadway. Only with her Tony-winning performance in The Sisters Rosensweig, fifteen years later, did Kahn regain her standing. Drawing on new interviews with family, friends, and such colleagues as Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett, Gene Wilder, Harold Prince, and Eileen Brennan, as well as archival press and private writings, Madison uncovers Kahn's lonely childhood and her struggles as a single woman working to provide for her erratic mother. Above all, Madison reveals the paramount importance of music in Kahn's life. A talented singer, she entertained offers for operatic engagements long after she was an established Hollywood star, and she treated each script as a score. As Kahn told one friend, her ambition was “to be the music.”

Download or read book Why are We Reading Ovid's Handbook on Rape? written by Madeleine Kahn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Are We Reading Ovid's Handbook on Rape? raises feminist issues in a way that reminds people why they matter. We eavesdrop on the vivid student characters in their hilarious, frustrating, and thought-provoking efforts to create strong and flexible selves against the background of representations of women in contemporary and classical Western literature. Young women working together in a group make surprising choices about what to learn, and how to go about learning it. Along the way they pose some provocative questions about how well traditional education serves women. Equally engaging is Kahn's own journey as she confronts questions that are fundamental to women, to teachers, to students and to parents: Why do we read? What can we teach? and What does gender have to do with it?

Download or read book Young Frankenstein: A Mel Brooks Book written by Mel Brooks and published by Black Dog & Leventhal. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mel Brooks' own words telling all about the players, the filming, and studio antics during the production of this great comedy classic. The book is alive and teeming with hundreds of photos, original interviews, and hilarious commentary. Young Frankenstein was made with deep respect for the craft and history of cinema-and for the power of a good schwanzstucker joke. This picture-driven book, written by one of the greatest comedy geniuses of all time, takes readers inside the classic film's marvelous creation story via never-before-seen black and white and color photography from the set and contemporary interviews with the cast and crew, most notably, legendary writer-director Mel Brooks. With access to more than 225 behind-the-scenes photos and production stills, and with captions written by Brooks, this book will also rely on interviews with gifted director of photography Gerald Hirschfeld, Academy Award-winning actress Cloris Leachman and veteran producer Michael Gruskoff. Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, comedian, actor, producer, composer and songwriter. Brooks is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies including The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. More recently, he had a smash hit on Broadway with the musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers. An EGOT winner, he received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, the 41st AFI Life Achievement Award in June 2013, and a British Film Institute Fellowship in March 2015. Three of Brooks' classics have appeared on AFI's 100 Years . . . 100 Laughs list. Blazing Saddles at number 6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at number 13. Judd Apatow is one of the most important comic minds of his generation. He wrote and directed the films The 40-Year-Old Virgin (co-written with Steve Carell), Knocked Up, Funny People, and This Is 40, and his producing credits include Superbad, Bridesmaids, and Anchorman. Apatow is the executive producer of HBO's Girls.

Download or read book But Darling, I'm Your Auntie Mame! written by Richard Tyler Jordan and published by Kensington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a close-up look at the many stage productions of the musical and its film adaptation of Patrick Dennis's best-selling novel Auntie Mame, looking at the creation of this legendary fictional character and the impact it had on the lives and careers of such celebrities as Rosalind Russell, Angela Lansbury, and Lucille Ball who took on the role of Mame. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Download or read book Born Yesterday written by Garson Kanin and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2002 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: The vulgar, egotistic junkman Harry Brock has come to a swanky hotel in Washington to make crooked deals with government big-wigs. He has brought with him the charming but dumb ex-chorus girl Billie, whose lack of social graces embarrass

Download or read book Narrative Transvestism written by Madeleine Kahn and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the earliest canonical novels—including Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana and Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa—were written by men who assumed the first-person narrative voice of women. What does it mean for a man to write his "autobiography" as if he were a woman? What did early novelists have to gain from it, in a period when woman's realm was devalued and woman's voice rarely heard in public? How does the male author behind the voice reveal himself to readers, and how do our glimpses of him affect our experience of the novel? Does it matter if the woman he has created is believable as a woman? Why does "she" inevitably rail against the perfidy of men? Kahn maintains that the answers to such questions lie in the nature of "narrative transvestism" -her term for the device through which a male author directs the reader's interpretation by temporarily abandoning himself to a culturally defined female voice and sensibility and then reasserting his male voice. In her innovative readings of key eighteenth-century English novels, Kahn draws upon a range of contemporary critical approaches. Lucid and witty, Narrative Transvestism will serve as a model of analysis for readers interested in issues of gender in narrative, including feminist theorists, students and scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, and critics interested in the applications of psychoanalysis to literature.

Download or read book The Sisters Rosensweig written by Wendy Wasserstein and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1994 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three Jewish middle-aged sisters, originally from Brooklyn, come together in Queen Anne's Gate, London, to celebrate the fifty-fourth birthday of Sara, the eldest, now a brilliant British banker. Divorced, a single mother, Sara no longer sees the necessity for romance. Gorgeous, suburban housewife and mother, is also a talk-show personality. And Pfeni, journalist and travel writer, still hasn't written her serious book on the women of Tajikistan. Pfeni's boyfriend, Geoffrey, director of the hit musical The Scarlet Pimpernel, brings to Sara's house Mervyn, a faux furrier, "the world leader in synthetic animal protective covering". Sara meets Merv and finds that even at fifty-four there are possibilities. An exuberant, heart-warming, contemporary comedy by one of America's best playwrights.