Life, career, the best films of a fantastic actress..

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Victoria Wilson’s gargantuan biography of Barbara Stanwyck manages to fill 860 glittering pages of text with only the first half of Stanwyck’s story. It ends after “Stella Dallas” (1937) but before “The Lady Eve” (1941) is even a twinkle in Preston Sturges’s eye. And it ends with a cliffhanger, creating eager anticipation for Ms. Wilson’s concluding volume. What kind of Parkinson’s law, about how work expands to fill available time, can possibly have expanded the Stanwyck story to these proportions?

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One answer: “A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940” is not about the actress alone. It’s bigger and splashier. Stanwyck knew the most notable directors, writers, actors, studio chiefs and Broadway impresarios of her day, and Ms. Wilson is interested in all of them. A remarkable array of still photographs present supporting characters like Florenz Ziegfeld, Annie Oakley, Clark Gable and Zeppo Marx, all of whom have their places in this account. An even more startling collection of movie ads and posters tells a riveting tale of sexism (about “Baby Face”: “You’ve never seen anything like this frank, man-to-man story of a man-to-man girl!”), even as they chronicle Stanwyck’s career. And each of her two marriages, to the vaudeville maestro Frank Fay and the pretty-boy heartthrob Robert Taylor, could fill a book alone.

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So could the rough-and-tumble childhood of Ruby Stevens, the name by which Stanwyck is known for the first 80 pages of this biography. She was the last child of parents who had three much older daughters. When the mother died, the father could not raise his two youngest children, Malcolm and Ruby (about 6 and 4 years old). They lived with foster parents, and Ruby also traveled with her sister Millie, who became a vaudeville star. From an early age, Ruby had big ambition and a smart-talking style.

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Ruby becomes a chorus girl and learns many tricks of that trade. She tried to teach Mae Clarke (an early friend, eventually known for having a grapefruit shoved into her face by James Cagney in “The Public Enemy”) how to nudge a date into buying her a coat. When Clarke lost the coat by refusing to let the date into her room, Ruby could not believe her pal’s stupidity. The biggest hustler in these early pages is Lucille LeSueur, whose tactics supposedly included spilling water on Jake Shubert’s lap and then wiping it up very attentively.

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BEST MOVIES

The Two Mrs. Carrolls

Dir. by Peter Godfrey (1947), starring Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck & Alexis Smith