Bernard F. Dick is professor of communication and English at Fairleigh Dickinson University and is author of many books, including The Musicals of Cole Porter: Broadway, Hollywood, Television; The Golden Age Musicals of Darryl F. Zanuck: The Gentleman Preferred Blondes; That Was Entertainment: The Golden Age of the MGM Musical; The Screen Is Red: Hollywood, Communism, and the Cold War; The President’s Ladies: Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis; Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young; and Forever Mame: The Life of Rosalind Russell, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
Bernard F. Dick has written an elegant, clear-eyed biography of Hollywood's smartest and most self-possessed screen star, a woman who could order a director out of her trailer for going too fast (or too slow) and who hid a will of steel and an exacting need for control behind a glamorous screen presence. The paperback edition of Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty is the latest entry in University Press of Mississippi's admirable Hollywood Legends Series, and like those other books it is at pains to present its subject whole, shunning easy mythmaking and gossip.--Allan R. Ellenberger ""The Hollywoodland Revue""