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Title details for Straight Lady by Chris Enss - Available

Straight Lady

The Life and Times of Margaret Dumont, "The Fifth Marx Brother"

by Chris Enss
Howard Kazanjian
ebook
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On October 20, 1882, future actress Margaret Dumont was born in Brooklyn, New York. A Broadway regular by the 1920s, Dumont found lasting fame once she started appearing with the Marx Brothers. Tall and regal in bearing, her character provided the perfect foil to the wisecracking Groucho Marx in a series of films including A Night at theOpera and Duck Soup. Her character's seemingly obliviousness to insult led to the widespread belief, encouraged by Groucho himself, that Dumont was a humorless person who never got the joke. a belief she contradicted in a 1942 interview. "I'm not a stooge," she said. "I'm a straight lady. There's an art to playing straight. You must build up your man but never top him and never steal the laughs from him. Straight Lady: The Life and Times of Margaret Dumont, "The Fifth Marx Brother" d focuses on the Dumont and her role in the production of the comedy teams' most successful films. Several books have been written about the Marx Brothers as a comedy family and about their individual lives, but there haven't been any books written about Margaret Dumont. This book will appeal to motion picture enthusiasts, Marx Brothers' fans, and film historians.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 1, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781493070732

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781493070732
      • File size: 8072 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      October 1, 2022

      Frequent collaborators Enss and Kazanjian (authors of the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans joint biography The Cowboy and the Se�orita and The Young Duke: The Early Life of John Wayne) offer film buffs an engaging biography of Brooklynite Margaret Dumont, born Daisy Baker (1882-1965). She is most famously remembered as the deadpan comic foil--a stereotypical stately dowager whom Groucho played off of--in seven of the 13 movies by the Marx Brothers. Enss and Kazanjian argue that Dumont's Marx Brothers roles were characterized by the actress's dignity, even as the films poked fun at her age and weight. Dumont, often bedecked in an opera-length necklace, trained in and performed opera before transferring to stage, film, and TV variety shows. She had retired in 1910, after marrying a millionaire industrialist, but when he died during the 1918 flu pandemic, she returned to acting and worked until her death. VERDICT While comedy fans will enjoy the reprised storylines and biographical vignettes, this multileveled work also offers media scholars a deeper look into Marx Brothers films in which Dumont was epochal and reflective of the era's gender standards and mannerisms.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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