Anthony Perkins: Split Image (Advocate Life Stories)
by Charles Winecoff
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles WinecoffEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-05-01
ISBN: 1555839509
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Advocate Books
Book Reviews of Anthony Perkins: Split Image (Advocate Life Stories)
Book Review: The Essential Anthony Perkins
Summary: 5 Stars
As an actor, Anthony Perkins has always fascinated me. In every role that I ever saw him play, he had this quality about him that made you feel that if you didn't listen to every word he said and watch every movement that he made, you were going to miss something of major importance. It's called stage presence and he had it by the bucketfuls. He was of course most noted for his portrayal of Norman Bates in PSYCHO and he captured that character so well that it was both the blessing and the curse of his career. Already, before Hitchcock's masterpiece, the powers that be behind Perkins' acting career saw him as a replacement for James Dean or as the new Gary Cooper or someone like him. They wrongly saw him as a macho romantic lead but after PSYCHO, they and the movie public only wanted him to play variations of the Norman Bates character. Charles Winecoff, in his revised tenth anniversary edition of his Perkins biography, ANTHONY PERKINS: SPLIT IMAGE captures valiantly both the personal and professional life of a Hollywood icon.
Perkins' acting career didn't begin on the movie screen; it began on the stage. His father was the famed actor, Osgood Perkins, who died during a perfomance at the age of thirty-seven when Anthony was only five. His mother was connected to theater people and saw that he learned his craft as a teenager in summer stock productions. Before his appearance in the movie PSYCHO, he had played the lead in at least two Broadway shows, one of which was as Eugene Gant in Ketti Frings' play LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL based on the Thomas Wolfe novel of the same name. Eugene Gant's sensitive character was one that would have suited Perkins' personality well and if the movie mobuls could have seen that these kinds of roles rather than the romantic lead roles were who Anthony should play, his film career might have taken a happier, more successful turn.
Anthony hadn't been in Hollywood long when he met Tab Hunter and the tongues began to wag concerning both men's sexual preference. Homosexuality in the 1950's and 1960's was not something to be tolerated in an actor's personal life and Anthony was quickly persuaded to not be seen with Tab in public too frequently. (Tab's autobiography indicated as well that he too was told to avoid too much contact with Anthony.) At the time, to make your homosexuality too public would have been a sure-fire way to kill a career before it even got started. Before, and after Tab Hunter, Perkins was linked with other (secretly) gay men, but psycho-analysis was revered at the time, and Anthony yearned to be as straight as so many people wished him to be. Why wouldn't he in the poisonous atmosphere of the time. At around forty, he met and married Berry Berenson and fathered two sons and I think for the rest of his life was convinced that his newly found heterosexuality and his role as husband and father was his salvation; at least that is what he told people.
The many miscastings and the perception of those who handed out the movie roles to Anthony Perkins that America couldn't handle an alternate lifestyle, hurt Perkins' acting career and he tried his hand at directing both plays and films with limited success. One of the reasons pointed out in the book for that limited success was Anthony's lack of confidence in himself. I tend to agree because when you are told constantly that the core of who and what you are is insufficient, that would make you lack confidence in yourself. But, in spite of that, there are enough gems in the theater and film work of Anthony Perkins that has to apoligize to no one and I for one salute him as one of my Hollywood heros.
Summary of Anthony Perkins: Split Image (Advocate Life Stories)
Paramount groomed him to replace the late James Dean and become Hollywood's hottest heartthrob. But his landmark performance as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho killed that-and spawned an image of Anthony Perkins that eerily paralleled his conflicted, fractured off-screen life.
Anthony Perkins: Split Image insightfully and comprehensively documents the life of this great actor, who was forced to act the part of ladies' man while privately struggling with his own homosexuality, and chronicles his complicated search for acceptance.
Newly revised and updated for this tenth anniversary edition, Anthony Perkins: Split Image is both a harrowing look at life in the Hollywood closet and a poignant human drama that will change your vision of Anthony Perkins forever.
"Riveting...With his laser-beam of an eye, Winecoff lights up the hidden corners of Hollywood's golden age, as well as a dark age of homosexuality that needs to be understood by anyone who didn't live through it.It's a page-turner." -James Gavin, author of Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker
"Charles Winecoff is a clever biographer. With his inside, creepy examination of Anthony Perkins, I was mesmerized by a dude I never thought I'd be able to stomach for more than a paragraph. Well done." -E!'s Ted Casablanca
"Anthony Perkins: Split Image is one of the deepest, darkest Hollywood stories ever told." -Robert Hofler, author of The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson
"Told with empathy and a sagacious eye for detail, Winecoff's lively chronicle of one of the screen's more formidable, if underrated, leading men perhaps should have been called Brokeback Hollywood Hills."-Stephen M. Silverman, author of David Lean and Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies
"An important chronicle of a time when gay was still the ultimate taboo, one that Hollywood had especially little use for as it aggressively sold illusion and lies."-Michael Musto, from his Foreword
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