marie antoinette the portrait of an average woman stefan zweig

Western European Approaches to Illustrated Biography in the 1920s Part I: Stefan Zweig’s Clinical Biography, 1930-1932 Zweig, Thalberg and Shearer in Documents and Biographies.“Objectivity” in the Writing of History, “Authenticity” in the Production of Film.Introduction: In Search of Marie-Antoinette: The Inscrutable Life Worth Scrutinizing The author’s painstaking research makes it clear that all three protagonists strove for historical precision in their characterizations of the eighteenth-century queen and her court, though with different degrees of self-awareness as shapers of a potent twentieth-century myth of “Marie-Antoinette.” Stefan Zweig, author of the best-selling biography Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman (1932), and Claudine West, contributor to the adapted screenplay Marie Antoinette (1934-1936) (Stefan Zweig Center, Salzburg and Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles). The professionals’ research standards and strategic objectives are weighed in the formulation of a new myth at once sensitive to the historical record and suited to the leisure market. The first chapter establishes the core subject as an inquiry into the respective contributions of Zweig, Thalberg, and Shearer in formulating an “objective” or “authentic” image of “Marie-Antoinette.” The three chapters that follow examine in some detail how Zweig pursued research and drafted the psychological biography at his Salzburg home, Thalberg acquired film rights to the best-selling book and fought the censors to preserve the more sensational aspects of the screenplay at the Culver City studio, and Shearer worked closely with a new producer to give the script a strong romantic angle and to perform the character of the queen on the sound stage. In Search of Marie-Antoinette in the 1930s: Stefan Zweig, Irving Thalberg, and Norma Shearer is a scholarly monograph published by Palgrave Macmillan that follows Austrian biographer Stefan Zweig, American producer Irving Thalberg, and Canadian-American actress Norma Shearer as they attempt to uncover personal aspects of Marie-Antoinette’s life at the French court in the late eighteenth century and to dramatize them in biography, cinema, and performance for public consumption during the 1930s. Monograph release: Spring 2019 Now available on

Marie antoinette the portrait of an average woman stefan zweig