"Bathing Beauty: A Novel of Marie Prevost" by Laini Giles

Publisher:[United States] : Sepia Stories Publishing, [2019]

Edition:First edition.

Copyright Date:©2019

ISBN: 9780994734976 

Characteristics: 407 pages

"Bathing Beauty" is Laini Giles' third novel in the the Forgotten Actresses series and is once again a delight to read. It details the life of the silent screen actress Marie Prevost (born 1898) through her life to her death in 1937. Towards the end of her career she was in the process of breaking into sound pictures which were then becoming the big thing in Hollywood, but by this time she was by motion picture standards getting a little on the old side, and was having issues with her weight, alcoholism, and various medical issues such as reoccurring ulcers. As an aside it seems rather strange to me that Hollywood is still after almost a hundred years unwilling to accept people for who they are in the areas of age and appearance.

Ms. Prevost has 120 screen credits to her name according to IMDB, but unfortunately for a good number of these she wasn't given any screen credit, and a number of them were considered to be "shorts". In addition towards the latter part of her career she was given a number of supporting roles, which didn't help her career too much. 

I found this story to be very well written, and engrossing. It was written with style, and the amount of research Ms. Giles had to do (as I have mentioned before in my other reviews of her work) is simply astounding.

Laini Giles' other books in this series are "The Forgotten Flapper: A Novel of Olive Thomas" (reviewed on 2018-02-05), and "The It Girl and Me: A Novel of Clara Bow" (reviewed on 2018-04-23).

I'm very much looking forward to the next instalment in this series,  but so far haven't heard what it will be.