Poet, pirate, libertine

Visual biographies of cinema"s greatest stars

How do we even describe the alienated beauty of Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow, Donnie Brasco, Don Juan DeMarco, Captain Jack Sparrow and Sweeney Todd, apart from the prodigious gift of Johnny Depp? How do we even name these great characters in one sentence, except under the heading of his contrary, heat-seeking curiosity, and imagination? If he didn’t exist, we would need at least six other actors to achieve what he has thus far in his career. Few actors this side of Cary Grant are so angelically androgynous and masculine in the same breath. From teen hearth-throb to an accomplished actor who has worked with art house directors such as Emir Kusturica, Terry Gilliam, Roman Polanski, Jim Jarmusch, and John Waters, Depp has built himself a wildly successful and unconventional career.

The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren"t actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, TASCHEN shows you. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstakingly selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life.

All the icons in the second batch of the series were voted for by over 4500 TASCHEN readers in a special online poll!

About the Series:
More bang for your buck! "... a fast-food, high-energy fix on the topic at hand." The New York Times Book Review

About the author:
F. X. Feeney is a screenwriter and critic based in Los Angeles. His film credits include The Big Brass Ring, based on a story by Orson Welles, and Frankenstein Unbound, directed by Roger Corman, while his reviews have appeared in L.A. Weekly and other publications. F. X. has also authored TASCHEN"s Michael Mann and Polanski.

About the editor:
Paul Duncan has edited 50 film books for TASCHEN, including the award-winning The Ingmar Bergman Archives, and authored Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick in the Film Series.