Kendalls Tau

Comedic film actress Kay Kendall, born to a theatrical family in Northern England, came of age in London during the Blitz. After starring in Britain's biggest cinematic disaster, she found stardom in 1953 with her brilliant performance in the low-budget film, Genevieve. She scored success after success with her light comic style in movies such as Doctor in the House, The Reluctant Debutante, and the Gene Kelly musical Les Girls. Kendall's private life was even more colorful than the plots of her films as she embarked on a series of affairs with minor royalty, costars, directors, producers, and married men. In 1954 she fell in love with her married Constant Husband costar Rex Harrison and accompanied him to New York, where he was starring on Broadway in My Fair Lady. It was there that Kendall was diagnosed with myelocytic leukemia. Her life took a romantic and tragic turn as Harrison divorced his wife and married Kendall. He agreed with their doctor that she was never to know of her diagnosis, and for the next two years the couple lived a hectic, glamorous life together as Kendall's health failed. She died in London at the age of 32, shortly after completing the filming of Once More with Feeling!, her husband by her side. The Brief, Madcap Life of Kay Kendall was written with the cooperation of Kendall's sister Kim and includes interviews with many of her costars, relatives and friends. A complete filmography and numerous rare photographs complete this first-ever biography of Britain's most glamorous comic star.

Degas is renowned for his masterful studies of the human body - powerfully rendered paintings of dancers, jockeys, washerwomen and bathers. It is less well known, however, that he also produced challenging and varied landscapes at almost every phase of his career - from his early travels in Italy, to his association with the Impressionist movement, and into his final decades. Remarkably, Degas chose the subject of landscape for his only one-person show in 1892. This lavishly illustrated book by Richard Kendall is the first to deal with Degas' landscapes, relating them to his other work and to his evolving views of art. Kendall demolishes the myth of Degas' indifference to the landscape itself and to the painters of landscape art. He traces Degas' first experiments in watercolour, oil and etching; his progress as a painter of equestrian scenes and pastel seascapes in the 1860s; and his association with Pissarro, Cassatt and Gauguin and rivalry with Monet and Cezanne in the middle of his career. Kendall provides a detailed examination of Degas' audacious colour monotypes from the early 1890s, showing how they reveal the artist's engagement with contemporary colour printing, his interest in Japanese art, his involvement with symbolism and his affinity for contemporary philosophy and literature. He concludes by discussing the last flowering of Degas' landscape activity - the little-known series of paintings produced at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme in the late 1890s - and with the help of photographic evidence proves that these pictures relate directly to surviving streets and buildings, often in radical and innovative ways. Handsomely illustrated with many previously unpublished works, this bookdemonstrates that Degas had an affectionate, original and complex relationship with the landscape, a relationship that has profound implications for his more familiar repertoire of subjects.