Books loved by Hollywood's golden era stars, from Marilyn Monroe to Audrey Hepburn

Way back before the advent of the Internet and social media, movie stars had to find ways to entertain themselves on set without getting into highly public Twitter spats.

Many celebrities from Hollywood’s golden age were avid bookworms, with the likes of Marilyn Monroe tearing through American classics and Grace Kelly curating a private library in Monaco. Old Hollywood's reading habits have now been documented in new book, The Hollywood Book Club: Reading with the Stars.

While we might be more used to seeing Audrey Hepburn or Marlon Brando bringing literary adaptations to life onscreen, the book by Steven Rea, published thismonth, is a collection of black and white pictures showing stars enjoying some reading time of their own.

From shots of Gregory Peck researching his Oscar-winning role by reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird to Monroe's reading nook filled with Hemingway, Steinbeck and Tolstoy, the full collection comprises of 55 candid shots of Hollywood stars reading.

Described as a “bibliophile-meets-cinephile celebration of the convergence points between these two very different media”, it’s a fascinating insight into what a golden era shelfie may have looked like.

We’ve compiled a list of books that celebrities including Monroe, Kelly, Hepburn, James Dean and more were into to add to your reading list.

Endless books have been written about Monroe and her quotes have been immortalised in low-res Instagram posts, however, she found her inspiration from her vast personal collection of books. In fact, Monroe loved poetry so much that evidence of her own poems surfaced in 2010 when a collection of her personal documents was released. The poems were later released in the book Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe.

Monroe had a huge book collection, with many of her novels put up for auction in 1999 in New York. Monroe was a major fan of landmark American novels, as well as poems, hulking great Euronovels and plays. There were a couple of surprising choices, like the occasional children’s book or pop culture novel.

The star and eventual Princess of Monaco’s love of reading lives on, as Kelly set up a library in Monaco prior to her death in 1982. Kelly, who was Irish American, amassed an immense collection of Irish literature that she later transformed into a private library - which can be visited in Monaco today.

While it initially started off with just her personal collection of books and sheet music, she later began purchasing more titles and today it has over 8,000 Irish works (which include first edition copies of Ulysses and letters from Jonathan Swift). The library was opened to the public in 1984, two years after her death.

Grace Kelly's favourite books and authors

According to the biography Audrey Hepburn: A Charmed Life, Hepburn was an “avid bookworm” and her love of books was strongly influenced by her brother Ian. Speaking to London Evening News, she told them that he was the “original bookworm” and that she fell in love with all of The Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling’s books, as well as books by King Kong creator Edgar Wallace and E. Phillips Oppenheim “before [she] was 13”. The Hollywood Book Club reported that in an interview, it was noted that Hepburn “often reads classical drama, with heavy helpings of Shaw and Shakespeare” while eating.

Her son Luca Dotti revealed that Hepburn was “stunned” by The Diary of Anne Frank and said Hepburn explained, “That child had written a complete account of what I had experienced and felt.”

As with Frank, Hepburn endured the horrors of the World War II occupation and lived just 96km apart. Although Hepburn was not Jewish like Frank, she did live in a basement over the course of the war and her uncle was executed. Dotti claimed that she had memorised passages from the book and Entertainment Tonight claimed Frank’s father Otto specifically asked Hepburn to play the role of his daughter in a film adaptation, but she turned it down. She said, “I was so destroyed by it again, that I said I couldn’t deal with it...In a way she was my soul sister."

The iconic Rebel Without a Cause star left his mark on Hollywood when he passed away in 1955 at the age of 24 because of an auto accident. Dean, who has been previously photographed for Life magazine reading, was known to be an avid writer and reader of literature - naming The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery as one of his favourites. He adored the tales of Billy the Kid and is said to have wanted to portray the cowboy onscreen prior to his death.

The love of the written word runs in Joan’s blood, as her late sister Jackie Collins was a prolific best-selling author. Joan herself has left the silver screen behind and has since penned a number of books, however, she revealed to the Daily Mail that she was an “avid reader and went through five books a week when I was small”. Calling Oliver Twist her favourite book of all time despite it giving her “nightmares” as a child, she also called her sister’s book The Power Trip one of her favourites and said to the Independent that she loves “biographies and autobiographies”.

Acclaimed writer and director Alfred Hitchcock has long been regarded as a legend amongst the screenwriting crowd, however, he derived much of his cinematic work from existing novels. For example, Little White Lies reported that he was close to writer Daphne du Maurier and wound up adapting several of her novels which include Rebecca and The Birds. He did not appear to be impressed by James Fisher and Roger Tory Peterson's The World of Birds above, though.

The Hollywood Book Club: Reading with the Stars by Steven Rea will be released on September 10 and is priced at £11.99.