This is the April 1932 issue of
PHOTOPLAY(“The News Magazine of the Screen”). Its cover features actress Norma Shearer. The cover article is “Do You Want a Brand-New
Personality?”
There are numerous other articles
and features in this issue, including “The New Pickfair (home of Mary Pickford
and Douglas Fairbanks),” “Dancers in the Dark,” “Studio Rambles,” “The Greatest
Battle in the Long History of Films!” “Talullah [Bankhead],” “He Borrowed a
Name,” “30 Girls in a Race for Stardom,” and much more!
There are full-page advertisements for new movies,
including “Tarzan the Ape Man,” “The Miracle Man,” “Alias the Doctor,” “After
Tomorrow,” and “Impatient Maiden.” There
are also reviews of current movies.
Stars featured in full-page
photos include Dolores
Del Rio, Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, Evelyn Crawford, Ruth Chatterton,
Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, Sylvia Sidney, and Talullah Bankhead.
There are many vintage
advertisements (including a two-page ad for Lux Toilet Soap “starring” Betty Compson, Mary Boland and Nance O’Neil), but the biggest is a full-page ad for Coca-Cola “starring” Jean Harlow!
Among the stars featured are Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Robert Montgomery,
Evelyn Brent, Marie Dressler, Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels, Marlene Dietrich,
Charles Bickford, Colleen Moore, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Lupe Velez, Adrienne
Ames, June Clyde, Madge Evans, Anita Page, Bette Davis, Elissa Landi, Miriam
Hopkins, Frances Dee, Nils Asther, Mae Clarke, James Cagney, Lon Chaney, Jr.,
Tom Mix, Lionel Barrymore, Betty Boop,
and more!
This issue has 140 pages and
measures approximately 8.5 x 11.5 inches.
Edith
Norma Shearer (August 11, 1902 –
June 12, 1983) was a Canadian-American actress who was active in films from
1919 through 1942. Shearer often played spunky, sexually liberated women. She
appeared in adaptations of Noël Coward, Eugene O'Neill, and William Shakespeare.
Shearer was the first five-time Academy Award acting nominee, was nominated six
times in all, and won one for Best Actress for The Divorcee (1930).
Reviewing Shearer's work, Mick
LaSalle called her a feminist pioneer, or "the exemplar of sophisticated
modern womanhood and ... the first American film actress to make it chic and
acceptable to be single and not a virgin on screen."
Photoplay was one of the first
American film (another name for photoplay) fan magazines. It was founded in
1911. For most of its run, Photoplay was published by Macfadden Publications.
In 1921 Photoplay established what is considered the first significant annual movie
award. The magazine ceased publication in 1980.