Christina Rice on Ann Dvorak at the LAVA Sunday Salon, November 2013

On the last Sunday of each month , LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather in downtown Los Angeles (noon-2pm), for a loosely structured conversational Salon featuring short presentations and opportunities to meet and connect with one another.

At the November 2013 Salon, author and librarian Christina Rice discussed her 15-year quest to uncover the life and career of Ann Dvorak, an actress who was positioned to be one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but instead countered the powerful studio system -– and suffered the consequences. When Christina Rice checked out a VHS copy of Three on a Match from her local library in 1995, she just expected to enjoy Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart in a snappy 1932 pre-Code film. Instead, she was blindsided by the raw performance of the little-known Ann Dvorak. This encounter would ultimately shape the course of Rice’s adult life, culminating in the publication of the biography Ann Dvorak: Hollywood’s Forgotten Rebel from University Press of Kentucky (2013).

For more about the November Salon, click here.