Warren Beatty

Description by OLDIES.com:

Warren Beatty guarded his privacy even before he became a movie star, when he burst onto the screen in 1961 as the earnestly handsome all-American boy in Splendor In The Grass. When he started acting, Beatty kept secret the fact that actress Shirley MacLaine, already a star, was his older sister. Over time, he has cultivated a mystique, giving few interviews and instructing others not to talk about him, until now.

Warren Beatty: A Private Man gives a new understanding of the enigmatic star who embodies the American dream. Lauded biographer Suzanne Finstad (her most recent work Natasha: The Biography Of Natalie Wood) paints a rich, fascinating portrait of the secretive film legend taking us back to the "unrealized genius" parents who molded him and his sister while tracing the family influences and events in Beatty past that inspired movies such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Love Affair, and Bulworth, and led to his political activism, culminating in a near-bid for the White House. Finstad also gets to the truth of Beatty the lover, setting the record straight on his many storied relationships and his struggle to attain happiness and his marriage to actress Annette Bening.

Through years of groundbreaking research, Suzanne Finstad gained unprecedented access to Beatty's family, close friends, and film colleagues, including such luminaries in the arts and politics as Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Leslie Carson, Robert Towne, Mike Nichols, and Senators John McCain, George McGovern, and Gary Hart. Weaving hundreds of these candid interviews, photographs from private albums, personal letters, diaries, and the previously unpublished papers of the late Natalie Wood and mentors such as directors Elia Kazan and George Stevens, playwrights Clifford Odets and William Inge and agent Charles Feldman, Warren Beatty: A Private Man unveils the real Beatty-a complex, sensitive visionary torn between the "fairly puritanical, football-playing boy" from Virginia and his Hollywood playboy image.