New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot opens the gates to 1930s Hollywood’s in her new book “The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century.” The memoir is a portrait of Talbot’s father, ...

It’s hard to recall Lyle Talbot’s face. Reading his daughter Margaret’s story-packed book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father’s Twentieth Century, my mental picture of him kept fading ...

Lyle Talbot began his entertainment career as a member of a touring carnival that also put on theatrical productions. His first real break came when he was hired by a traveling hypnotist named ...

You’ll find an entry on Lyle Talbot (1902-1996) in some movie encyclopedias, but not in others. In the early 1930s, he was under contract to Warner Bros., often playing “weak-willed malefactors.” His ...

THE ENTERTAINER: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century, by Margaret Talbot. Riverhead, 418 pp., $28.95. In "The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century," Margaret Talbot ...

New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot has written a unique memoir of her late father, character actor Lyle Talbot, using him as a symbol to explore the rise of mass entertainment in the 20th century and ...

In “The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father’s Twentieth Century,” New Yorker staff writer Margaret Talbot succeeds at what Hollywood failed to do for her father: She makes him a star. Humphrey ...

I had an odd experience while reading The Entertainer, Margaret Talbot’s wry, wonderful new book about her irrepressible actor father, Lyle, and American entertainment over the course of the 20 th ...