Charmed Lives

the flyleaf : Alexander Korda lived a life other men only dream about. The rich, the famous, the beautiful, crowded its pages as if playing roles in one of his own lavish films. Churchill (who secretly wrote film scripts for him), H. G. Wells, Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken, were among his lifelong friends; Olivier, Laughton, Ralph Richardson, Dietrich, Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon (whom he married) among those he brought to stardom. As he rose to power, wealth and fame to become Sir Alexander Korda, one of the most legendary and flamboyant of all film tycoons, making and losing fortunes, engaging in vast and costly enterprises, charming all around him and living in boundless luxury, his two brothers, often unwillingly and quarrelsomely accepting his dominant role, rose with him: Zoltan, mercurial and eccentric, a director of genius whose The Four Feathers and Cry, the Beloved Country are film classics; and Vincent, whom Alex shanghai'd from a career as a painter to be artistic director of his vast new motion picture empire. And while Charmed Lives is 'A Family Romance, as in life, it is Alex who stands at the centre of it. lt was he who led the brothers from a remote Hungarian peasant village into the early silent-film world of Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris and, finally, into the great studios of Hollywood and London as talking pictures swept the world. lt was he who, with his unique flamboyance, brought the British cinema to an unparalleled height of international success and who received the first knighthood for services to the cinema. And it is his story - a story more poignant than those around him could have guessed or his most gifted screen writers could have imagined-that dominated the family's life. For Alex, along with an incredible flair for success, had an equally powerful impulse towards destruction. And this impulse finally prevailed.