Humphrey Bogart

Humphrey Bogart is a legend and an icon whose magic has not dissipated with time. The wounded tough guy image Bogart molded over the decades of his career still resonates. There is a truth to this image; audiences sense that the world-weariness, the angst, and the vulnerability, which made him an icon of noir as well, were rooted somehow in reality. Even if the spectator knew nothing about his personal life, they believed and still do believe in his performances in cinema classics like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, and The African Queen. 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150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are.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.

Humphrey Bogart is a legend and an icon whose magic has not dissipated with time. The wounded tough guy image Bogart molded over the decades of his career still resonates. There is a truth to this image; audiences sense that the world-weariness, the angst, and the vulnerability, which made him an icon of noir as well, were rooted somehow in reality. Even if the spectator knew nothing about his personal life, they believed and still do believe in his performances in cinema classics like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, and The African Queen. 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.

Alain Silver is the author of The Samurai Film and the coauthor of fifteen other books, including Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and two screenplays. He has written numerous articles for the Los Angeles Times, DGA Magazine, Film Comment, and Photon. He has also produced nine independent features and over fifty soundtrack albums, and is a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America. James Ursini has contributed to various publications including Cinema, Femme Fatales, Mediascene, and Photon. Together, they are the coauthors of eleven books, among them the Film Noir Reader series, Film Noir: An Encyclopedia Reference to the American Style, and The Noir Style. They both live in Santa Monica.

Paul Duncan found himself in the right place at the right time as South Africa came into its own with creative design and decor a few years ago. He was the highly successful editor of Conde Nast House & Garden and has had the opportunity to work with the best local and international photographers - notably Fritz von der Schulenberg - as well as art directors and features writers to capture the outstanding interiors put together by interior designers such as Graham Viney, Stephen Falcke, Stefan Antoni and Boyd Ferguson, architects like Johann Slee and Silvio Rechs and inspired homemakers from Sandton to Graaff Reinet to Plettenberg Bay. Paul Duncan is now Head of Design, Menswear & Homeware at Woolworths and as involved with design and South African innovation as ever, with more books in the pipeline.