You talkin’ to me? / 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. Using gesture, voice, and, most importantly, his mesmerizing eyes, he conveys the disturbing emotions with which he imbues all his characters, from his earliest films like Mean Streets through classic portraits of violent, disaffected men like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Jake La Motta in Raging Bull–even in comic roles like the maniacal father in Meet the Parents. De Niro’s journey from alienated teen through conflicted stardom and finally to committed activist replicates the trajectory of many of his characters, who also travel from the depths of despair to some form of redemption, no matter how unconventional. For in De Niro’s world, art and reality are often indistinguishable.

The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren’t actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, TASCHEN shows you. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstaking selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life. All the icons in the second batch of the series were voted for by over 4.500 TASCHEN readers in a special online poll!

Paul Duncan has edited 40 film books for TASCHEN, and authored Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick in the Film Series.

James Ursini has co-written and co-edited eleven books with Alain Silver; Ursini and Silver are considered two of the foremost authorities on the subject of film noir. Among Ursini’s most notable works is the successful Film Noir Reader series. He has also contributed articles to various film magazines and has supplied the DVD commentary for numerous classic film noirs. He has a doctorate in motion pictures and has lectured on filmmaking at colleges in the Los Angeles area.