Édith Piaf's life in La Vie en Rose: a modern biopic

This inquisitiveness has its healthy and less than healthy aspects. It is certainly natural to want to know, in the case of an individual one admires greatly, about the source of his or her gifts or even genius. Certain figures continue to generate apparently inexhaustible interest—Shakespeare, Mozart, Lincoln and others. New books appear each year on the subject of such lives.

On the other hand, we live at a time of diminished opportunities for masses of people. The possibility of their leading fulfilling or semi-fulfilling lives is dwindling. A vast, unprecedented social and financial gap has opened up between “ordinary” people and “celebrities.” (See, for example, a film like Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist (1953), in which Edmond O’Brien and Lupino meet on a bus tour of film stars’ homes in Beverly Hills. The homes are large and well-appointed, but they are houses on a street, without high walls, gates or guard dogs.) A sometimes morbid fascination has developed, cultivated by the mass media, in the doings of the rich and famous; this fascination, as we have noted before, may contain explosive dosages of envy and resentment.

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