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A beloved film comedienne who worked alongside the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and dozens of others, Thelma Todd was a rare Golden Age star who successfully crossed over from silent films to talkies. This authoritative new biography traces Todd s life from a vivacious little girl who tried to assuage her parents grief over her brother s death, to an aspiring teacher turned reluctant beauty queen, to an outspoken movie starlet and restaurateur. Increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood, in 1934 Todd opened Thelma Todd s Sidewalk Cafe, a hot spot that attracted fans, tourists, and celebrities. Despite success in film and business, privately the beautiful actress was having a difficult year receiving disturbing threats from a stranger known as the Ace and having her home ransacked when she was found dead in a garage near her cafe.An inquest concluded that her death, at age just twenty-nine, was accidental, but in a thorough new investigation that draws on interviews, photographs, documents, and extortion notes much of these not previously available to the public Michelle Morgan offers a compelling new theory, suggesting the sequence of events on the night of her death and arguing what many people have long suspected: that Thelma was murdered. But by whom? The suspects include Thelma s movie-director lover, her would-be-gangster ex-husband, and the thugs who were pressuring her to install gaming tables in her popular cafe including a new, never-before-named mobster. This fresh examination on the eightieth anniversary of the star's death is sure to interest any fan of Thelma Todd, of Hollywood's Golden Age, or of gripping real-life murder mysteries." (less)

A beloved film comedienne who worked alongside the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and dozens of others, Thelma Todd was a rare Golden Age star who successfully crossed over from silent films to talkies. This authoritative new biography (…more)