Beauty Break: National Book Lovers Day

Curated by Nathaniel R

Clark Gable reading about Rhett Butler. Research!

Today is National Book Lovers Day so we thought we'd celebrate with heavenly creatures getting their book club on. Please enjoy these stars reading (or pretending to read) books for pleasure, or work, or photo-op purposes. Or sometimes as a character in a movie. We love this sort of pic as it's harder and harder in the real world to know what people are reading. You can no longer track what the hot book is by glancing around on the subway -- it's how i discovered lots of great books in the Aughts -- because everyone reads on very private tablets now.

Photo gallery after the jump...

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1947: Agnes Moorehead in "Dark Passage" and "The Lost Moment"

by Nick Taylor

One way to search for great performances outside of Oscar's history books is merely to check in on what the great character actresses of their day were busy doing besides not getting their due. In 1947 just to cite a few examples, You couldn’t go wrong with Mary Astor, warm and sympathetic as the mother of sickly Liz Taylor in Cynthia, and even better at nimbly flipping through the morally compromised history of a saloon-owner afraid her daughter will run away with a dangerous man in Desert Fury. There’s also Elsa Lanchester as the housemaid in The Bishop’s Wife, so piquantly observant in a role that often invites stooging. But if we’re talking supporting actresses, surely the first stop for anyone seeking out the heavies of Classic Hollywood is Agnes Moorehead. Moorehead’s performances n Dark Passage and The Lost Moment were my first stops after completing Oscar’s lineup in preparation for the Smackdown. 

The more famous of Moorehead’s two films in 1947 was Dark Passage, best known as the third of four films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together...

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