Norma Shearer

by Gavin Lambert

Drawing on the reminiscences of friends and colleagues, as well as on private archives, this evocative portrait of the great Hollywood star captures the triumphant film career and tragic private life of Norma Shearer

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Film, History, Biography Memoir, Media Tie In

381 pages, Hardcover

First published May 12, 1990

About the author

Gavin Lambert was a British-born screenwriter, novelist and biographer who lived for part of his life in Hollywood. His writing was mainly fiction and nonfiction about the film industry.

Reviews

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer may have have very different backgrounds and
personalities but both had a steely determination to succeed and pull themselves out
of poverty. Norma may have been born into comfort but her father's bad business sense
saw that prosperity disappear, to be replaced with a succession of homes, each one
smaller and dingier than the proceeding ones.
By the time Norma was in her teens, her dynamic mother had left her husband and both
she and Norma were getting work in New York based film studios.
The rumor that Norma had "married the boss" and was able to call the shots couldn't
be further from the truth, according to this book. The marriage (on Irving's side) was
pretty passionless but it wasn't in Norma's nature to have affairs instead they had a
great partnership. Yes, she had wanted the parts in "The Trial of Mary Dugan" and
"The Divorcee" but she had to earn them and prove to Thalberg that she could play them.
And yes, Crawford had wanted both but had been rejected for Mary Dugan as being "too
hard". Being married to Thalberg did keep her out of the argy bargy of having to
compete with other actresses for roles but with Thalberg's death she was left in
reality and she found it increasingly difficult to cope - even though she found a second
husband who worshipped her.
The black cloud hanging over Norma was her sister's mental health issues and the ending
really shocked me. I don't condemn Norma or her family for turning away from the
obvious signs of inherited mental illness that unfortunately ran through both sides of
her family. Norma's thinking that it was something a person could snap themselves
out of was sadly normal thinking back in the 1920s and 30s.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who remembers Norma Shearer today? She was one of the biggest movie stars of her time, and reigned supreme over Hollywood as the wife of wonder boy Irving Thalberg, the inspiration for Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. She’s a fascinating character, and Gavin Lambert is the perfect writer to evoke her life: eminently knowledgeable, he writes with elegance, style, and depth. He also met and knew Shearer, which of course helps him in bringing the reader closer to her, but doesn’t stop him from being as objective as possible. Shearer has left an image of aloof glamour, she was the queen of MGM, but Lambert deftly goes behing her image, and reminds us, for example, of the gauche but extremely ambitious starlet that she was in the twenties. He tells us about her slow but gradual rise to fame, and explains intelligently the central role (among a few other actresses) that she has played in shaping a complex and daring new vision of women on screen. If only for that, for the movies she starred in and that were scandalous but ahead of their time, she should be celebrated as one of the great and most interesting stars of the thirties. Lambert tells all this, and more: the secrets she kept, her complicated relationship with her husband, her tumultuous love life after he passed away. The last part of the biography deals with her disappearance from the screen, and of her irreversible fall into a Norma Desmond-like life. Despite a long-lasting, and happy second marriage, Shearer, consumed by her own image, by her ego and narcissism, by the fading of her beauty, retreated into a lonely world of her own. At the end, after she’s lost her mind, she’s the ghost of herself - the ghost of a movie star, once adored, now forgotten. It’s a poignant epilogue for the life of a woman who, for a moment, had it all.

[Carrie Cytrowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Norma Shearer. This is an excellent book, I read it twice and want to read it again! It's very sad that she is not remembered like Joan Crawford. Norma Shearer was a far better actress then Joan and she was so much more popular back then than anyone. She was the queen of MGM. I really would love it if someone did a movie about her life. I first discovered Norma in The Woman. I watched the movie because Crawford was in it. From the moment Mrs. Shearer came on the screen I was mesmerized . I was hooked from then on , buying all of her movies and impossible to find silent movies. I just adore her. Norma didn't need Irving Thalberg to make it to the top. The woman came from nothing and sky rocketed to the top. I love u Norma Shearer!

[Gatlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lambert was one of the best writers on Hollywood. Reading his biography of Norma Shearer, a.k.a the "Queen of MGM," made me re-examine my previously held low opinion of Shearer's acting abilities; she had a bad rap for a long time. Pauline Kael notoriously loathed her - and the Crawford and Garbo legacies overshadow Norma's. When Shearer retired at 40, she was gone.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve wanted to read about Norma Shearer for a long while. I’ve decide she was crazier and worse at motherhood than Joan Crawford. The book was well researched and written. The only complaint is that the author changed up names and nicknames too often, it would get a bit confusing.

[Graceann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please see my detailed review at Amazon.com Grace's "Norma Shearer" Review"

Please click that the review was helpful to you at Amazon so that my rating continues to climb!

Gavin Lambert wrote the way that I hope I would if I were to take up the art of biography. He shares his research in a way that is completely readable, and I love his approach to his subject. Norma isn't deified, nor is she demonized. Brilliant book.

[Samantha Glasser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norma Shearer was a major star in her day and her marriage to MGM studio head Irving Thalberg gave her power over her roles that made fellow actress Joan Crawford very jealous. Author Gavin Lambert's expert writing makes this biography easy and pleasurable to read. He met Shearer a few times and his recollections of her are interspersed between the chapters. The major flaw of this book is that although it attempts to draw conclusions on Norma and her life, some of the information is conflicted. On one hand she was the penultimate movie star, even going so far as to hide herself in her old age to remain young in the public's memory. She often denied that she worked in silent films because it dated her, even though it was during this era she was most youthful. She was very close with her family, especially her mother, but she stayed distant from her children and her mentally disturbed sister. Although she married after Thalberg died and seemed to love Marti, she called him Irving unapologetically.

Some of the information is dated, such as the listing of Olive Thomas's The Flapper as a lost film. It has since been found and released on DVD. However, this remains the best source of information about Shearer available.

[Lynne M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Norma Shearer was once the Queen of Hollywood, married to one of the most powerful men in the film business and one of the first women onscreen who embodied the "modern woman."

Unfortunately, her films today are not as widely remembered as those of some of her contemporaries like Joan Crawford, Better Davis, or Barbara Stanwyck. She also had some very interesting relationships off-screen, including James Stewart and George Raft. By the early 1940's, she was already losing interest in making films following the death of her husband and was moving onto a different life away from the screen, including a new marriage to a much younger man that sounds like it was a relatively happy life. Reading this book gave a great account of her life and it is very informative, perfect for any fan of classic films.

[Lisa Zacks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to like this book and finish it, but I just couldn't. This book is more like statistics/facts of who Norma worked with, names of movies she was in, places she went, etc. I was overwhelmed with names of people/directors (which the average person won't know or care about). It did not provide the peek into Norma's personal life I was hoping for. The only remotely personal detail revealed was that Norma & Thalberg didn't have sex very often, and there wasn't much to back up that claim (and I've seen it contradicted in other publications). I could only get through half of the book and I got bored. Again, it's a very knowledgable account and timeline of Norma's life, but I didn't learn any new personal information or intimate details.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a superb biography of acting legend Norma Shearer. Everything is covered. We discover her origins and her pathway to Hollywood, her marriage to industry titan Irving Thalberg and her rise as the biggest star at MGM. We also read of her retirement from movies and the decline into the twilight of her life that she so feared.

Lambert had the good fortune to meet with Norma on several occasions, and his work is the richer for it. I particularly enjoyed reading of Norma's life after she retired from films and eventually went into seclusion. All in all, this was a very interesting book about a major player in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

[Barbara Haller · Rating 4 out of 5]

The biography of Norma Shearer. The author certainly did his homework. Sometimes he’s rather harsh, but he did his research, even meeting Norma several times. I have always liked Norma’s work. But she really is the forgotten star. I reawaken this respect when TCM had Norma, as one of their stars of the month. She was spectacular in all her films., understated, beautiful. I wondered how she balanced being a star with being the wive of legendary Irving Thalberg. This book tried to answer that but no one can ever know the real truth.

[bookypuppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a curious book. As many intimate details as there are in it about Norma's marriage to her boss, Irving Thalberg, the marriage still remains a mystery. Additionally, Lambert wrote that although Norma was quite ambitious early in her career, when facing a career decline, she lacked the against-all-odds confidence of her rival, Joan Crawford. Apparently some questions are left unanswered here.

[James Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a ton of insight into the career of one of my favorite actresses of all time, but I suppose that has more to do with her being a private person off-screen than anything else. Interesting tidbits about the relationship between her and her first husband, Irving Thalberg, are perhaps the best things about this book.

[Bookworm Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love old Hollywood. 2nd shearer bio. Great Great book. Very detailed. I didn't know a lot about Athole or what happened to Norma in the end. She's not the most sympathetic character

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Def worth reading if you are a film buff

[Terra · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting biography of an oft-forgotten movie star from Hollywood's Golden Era. It lagged a bit in parts, however is a fairly thorough account of her (somewhat uneventful) life. Isn't it funny that I always imagined her as her Mary Haines character from "The Women" - when in reality, she was quite the opposite.

The author tends to inject personal feelings into his work - and seems to waiver between sympathy and disdain for his subject. I cannot help but wonder if it is due to his feeling slighted by her socially as she became more reclusive during her later years, or if he had some sort of initial prejudice about aging movie queens.

[Anne McMullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! I have read it over and over. Norma Shearer is probably my very favorite actress of the 20's and 30's. Her marriage to Irving Thalberg, one of the top guys at MGM, is what Hollywood was about way back when. Oh, how I wish it were still that way. Some say Norma got all the prime acting jobs because of her marriage to Thalberg, however, she really is an amazing actress. After Irving's early death in 1937, Norma went on to portray Marie Antoinette and won the Academy Award. Lambert really did his reasearch on Norma. It is definitely worth reading - over and over.