Moving Pictures (1991) is American actress Ali MacGraw’s autobiography. She is best known for her role as Jenny Cavilleri in “Love Story” (1970) with Ryan O’Neal and the 1972 film “The Getaway” playing Carol McCoy with Steve McQueen.
She begins, at 50 years of age, after she bought her first home in Tesuque, New Mexico, where she still lives. It is from this home that she recalls 1967 renting an apartment in New York. Her life drastically changed when she ‘simultaneously’ met film producer Bob Evans and starred as Jenny in “Love Story” – her second movie after “Goodbye Columbus” in 1969. She married Bob and left him two years later to marry Steve McQueen in 1973 – the power couple of the Seventies. Bob Evans went on to produce “The Godfather” in 1972, “Chinatown” in 1974, and “The Great Gatsby” in 1974.
I liked her brief description of working as Diana Vreeland’s assistant at Harper’s Bazaar magazine in New York in 1960 – reminiscent of Meryl Streep’s role in the 2006 film “The Devil Wears Prada” as ‘Mrs. Vreeland swept dramatically by me, throwing her heavy Mainbocher overcoat at me … Oh, she was tough.’ Her life as a child of artistic parents, as a photographer’s stylist, and as a model in the world of fashion – in her hippie Sixties clothes – are interesting pre-cursors of her life in and out of the public eye.
From her hippie days she settled into an ‘almost reclusive life’ with McQueen, giving up her acting career. As she found out, the movie industry loves winners and scorns people ‘whose winning streaks have taken a detour.’
She goes into detail about her married life with McQueen – ‘the man’s man of all times’ but Ali MacGraw’s focus is of her addictions – to alcohol and ‘male dependency.’ Steve McQueen died in 1980 at the age of fifty. By 1986, Ali is at the Betty Ford Clinic undergoing rehab.
Written over 30 years ago, the chapters Fade-Out followed by Fade-In are interesting in their summary of the end of an era which featured two of the American film industry’s icons – Head of Production at Paramount and the King of Cool, and the start of a new era, chapter by chapter in her life of moving pictures.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.
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