Perhaps readers today are more interested in Barbara Stanwyck than in Winston Churchill. She certainly aroused my interest, growing up an incipient feminist in the 1950s, when she stood out from the usual glamour girls pictured in my mother’s magazines, though I doubt if any of her twenty-two movies of the 1950s ever penetrated to my little Queensland country town. And she came sharply to my attention more recently in a scene from her 1950 film, The Furies, where her character, in a jealous rage, takes out the eye of our own Judith Anderson with a pair of well-aimed scissors. In her movies, as in her life, she was always a force to be reckoned with.

Like many theatre and movie stars of the period, Stanwyck’s single-minded professional career followed a deprived childhood. Her mother died in 1911, when Barbara (then Ruby Stevens) was four years old, and her father disappeared soon after. She and her six-year-old brother never had a real home, shuffled between their much older sisters, who had few resources to spare. Ruby followed her sister Millie into a revue chorus. Not particularly pretty, she made it into the Zeigfeld Follies by sheer energy and determination, and onto Broadway in 1926. After being recruited as one of three chorus girls in The Noose, her part was gradually expanded in rehearsals until she was given a final heart-rending speech that saved the play and displayed to perfection the ‘rough poignancy’ she continued to portray throughout her career.

Ruby was lucky in the men she encountered in her early career. The Noose was written and staged by Willard Mack, whose major successes were produced by the legendary king of Broadway, David Belasco. Mack introduced Ruby to Belasco, who gave her a new name and advised her to improve her walk by studying the animals in the zoo. The following year she was taken up by innovative producer–director Arthur Hopkins to star in Burlesque, which played for a year and a total of 372 performances, before going on a lengthy tour.

In the middle of this tour Stanwyck married Frank Fay, one of America’s best-loved comedians, a three-time divorcé sixteen years her senior. They soon moved to Hollywood, where Fay was contracted to Warner Brothers. Stanwyck got her first movie roles with Warner through Fay’s influence; but a sympathetic collaboration with young director Frank Capra in Ladies of Leisure (1930), The Miracle Woman (1931), Forbidden (1932), and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) launched her on a career that quickly eclipsed that of her husband.

‘In her movies, as in her life, she was always a force to be reckoned with.’

Stanwyck’s natural style, combined with a throaty voice and sexy androgynous looks (and that panther stride she learned at the zoo), suited the times, and gave her the flexibility to survive through decades of changes in fashion and taste. Over the next thirty-eight years she made eighty-five films, before turning to television in the early 1960s, where, among many performances, she earned an Emmy for her role in The Thorn Birds.

Victoria Wilson’s well-named Steel-True 1907–1940 takes us through Stanwyck’s life to 1940, when she made her first movie with Fred MacMurray, with whom she later played her greatest role in Double Indemnity (1944). Wilson, who is a vice-president and senior editor at Knopf, has been working on Stanwyck’s biography for fifteen years. She has interviewed everyone who knew Stanwyck and is still alive, including her estranged adopted son, Dion. She and her researchers have combed every archive, every magazine, every biography of contemporaries. She has provided detailed storylines and analyses of every movie, biographies of every director and co-star, and capsule accounts of politics (Stanwyck was a rock-rib Republican).

The result is, unfortunately, overkill. Surprisingly for someone who has been an editor for many years, Wilson seems to think that the facts make the story; and when the facts often come from dubious fan magazines and studio publicity, the reader has the feeling of wading through marshmallows and longs for a pithy overview. This is often provided by the reserved, straight-talking Stanwyck, who can sum up in a few concise words a point that Wilson has belaboured for a hundred pages.

The most interesting, and the most original, parts of the book concern Stanwyck’s personal life. The basic facts are well known – the neglected childhood, the rise from hoofer to star, the marriage to Frank Fay which descended into drunken violence, their adoption of Dion and his subsequent banishment to military school at the age of six, her marriage to rising star Robert Taylor after her divorce from Fay; these have been covered in the several (shorter) biographies that have preceded Steel-True. But Wilson has dug up relatives and friends who have put meat on the stories of childhood and early struggles. She also offers fascinating glimpses of the lives of successful young Hollywood stars in the 1930s.

Where the book falls down is in the exhaustive – and exhausting – account of all thirty-six movies Stanwyck made between 1927 and 1940. Most are forgettable and can easily be looked up online. A few brilliant examples could more readily have conveyed her unique style. As a contributor on the fansite NitrateVille put it, ‘The book needed a big, mean editor, one with a bad attitude and a razor sharp blue pencil … How ironic is that?’

Andrew Klevan’s Barbara Stanwyck is like a drink of cold water after the excesses of Steel-True. As part of the British Film Institute’s Film Stars series, it is, of course, focused on Stanwyck’s work, asking the question, ‘What makes her a star?’ Klevan divides his 147 pages (including bibliography, filmography, and index) chronologically into the five attributes that he considers elevate her to stardom: responsiveness, multiplicity, tonal finesse, restraint, and silences. He analyses nine films in all, looking in greater depth at Stella Dallas (1937) and Double Indemnity. As the book is aimed at scholars as well as serious fans, Klevan, university lecturer in Film Studies and Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, draws the reader throughout into a thoughtful conversation with other commentators; but his point of view is clear and convincing. The secret of Stanwyck’s stardom and her continuing relevance is, he concludes, her ability to give ambivalent and ambiguous characters a distinct and potent reality.

So which book to read? Wilson for the (half)-life and Klevan for deeper interpretation. But in both the source of her magnetism remains elusive. Perhaps that is what a star is. I doubt if another thousand words from Wilson will solve the enigma of this formidably talented actress.