Word: fatefulness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...learn to dance very well-and they showed to brilliant effect whenever he was on a stage. In the sixth grade he played Rip Van Winkle in the school play, and made a hit with all the mothers. He decided he might like to be an actor, if only fate would preserve him from the fertilizer business...
...There. Fate went to considerable trouble to do just that. When Bill was 20 and a second-year student at Pasadena Junior College, he got a chance at the part of Madame Curie's father in a play at the Pasadena Playbox. On opening night a Paramount talent scout, Milt Lewis, went to see the play. He couldn't see Bill for the whiskers, but he liked Bill's voice, and went backstage to see what the rest of him was like. Says Milt: "It was all there." He invited Bill to Paramount next...
...movie contract ($50 a week) but what about a name? "Beedle!" exclaimed a Paramount executive. "It sounds like an insect." Just then his secretary announced that William Holden, a West Coast newsman, was on the wire. That took care of the name, now all Bill needed was a part. Fate got busy again. Over at Columbia, Director Rouben Mamoulian saw Bill's screen test, grabbed him for the title role of Golden Boy, the Clifford Odets play about a young pug who could hit like Marciano and fiddle like Paganini...
...scope, the work is at once all-comprehensive and highly sensitive. It is simultaneously a drama of man against fate, man against man, and man against himself, skillfully woven into story. Yet the perceptive author is never lost in the grandiose scheme. The eye for delineation of habit and idiosyncrasy combine with a dramatist's craftsmanship to engross the reader...
...however, only one aspect of the author's technical skill. By presenting the saga in the form of a fairy tale, the author has freed himself to present his own view of the world, untrammeled by popular prejudice and preconception. To create a hero or to pit man against fate in the world of familiar experience is next to impossible, for the modern reader has long taken for granted the scientific proposition that man makes his own history, no matter how far from his hopes it may appear...