About

Sharon Rich is an author, film historian and lecturer. Her first book was written at age nineteen and published when she turned twenty. Over the years she has also edited or ghost written several books for others, penned Hollywood-related magazine articles and been a contributing editor for an opera magazine. She has lectured about film history to school classes and groups in the US, Canada and the UK.  To date she has written close to twenty books and edited and written over seventy magazines about 1930s singing stars Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. They have been a pet project for her, as she was for many years close friends with Jeanette MacDonald’s older sister, actress Blossom Rock. Rock authorized Rich to write a candid book about her sister’s thwarted love affair with Nelson Eddy. The resulting best-selling book, Sweethearts, blew the lid off the carefully crafted Hollywood PR version of MacDonald and Eddy’s supposedly blissful marriages to others.

Along with interviewing hundreds of people, Rich had access to many collections of private love letters, unpublished memoirs, Nelson Eddy’s personal scrapbooks, diary entries, hundreds of pages of contemporary eyewitness accounts from their fans, FBI files and Jeanette’s unpublished autobiography. Sharon Rich is considered by many to be the leading authority in the world on MacDonald and Eddy.

In 1994 Rich was a guest speaker at the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C. AFI also sponsored the launch party for Sweethearts and reviewed the book in their Preview magazine: “That rarity among star bios, an absorbingly written, exhaustively researched, and fully sourced work.” In 1995 Rich was awarded a Dame of Merit by the Knights of Malta for her contribution to History and Literature.

The hardcover Sweethearts was published by a Penguin/Putnum imprint, and a selection of the Entertainment Book Club. The book has been updated twice since and the updated 2014 20th Anniversary Edition repeatedly returns to Amazon’s Best Seller list several times a year, especially when the MacDonald/Eddy films are screened on Turner Classic Movies. In July 2023, the book hit #1 on the Movie Industry Best Seller list.

 

Rich was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the San Fernando Valley. She now lives in Florida, where she currently is compiling her research for an eventual documentary about MacDonald and Eddy, featuring many videotaped interviews and other source material. Additionally, “Sweethearts” is in development for a feature film biopic. Check the film’s IMDB page for more details.