Books for Christmas: Star quality of stage and screen

Christmas is a time of licensed indulgence in illicit pleasures. For book-lovers, this can mean a chance to put down the latest literary novel or historical biography and pick up the gossipy, glossy show-business memoirs and film or TV tie-ins that litter our celebrity culture. Fortunately, alongside the ubiquitous Ulrikas comes a host of new offerings on theatre and cinema that combine substance and sparkle.

Stanley Wells' Shakespeare: For All Time (Macmillan, £30) provides an intelligent and concise introduction to the man, his work and legacy that will appeal to student and theatre-goer alike. Wells examines the facts and legends of Shakespeare's life and is admirably unstuffy about the sexuality of the sonnets. He studies the influence of Shakespeare on the art of the last 400 years and analyses his greatest interpreters. Above all, he demystifies Shakespeare's writing process, showing how, while Keats's wish to know "in what position Shakespeare sat in when he began writing To Be or Not To Be" can never be fulfilled, far more about the Bard's intentions and practices can be deduced than is often acknowledged.

Alec Guinness told Garry O'Connor that he "could not possibly be described as a Shakespearean actor": indeed, his performance as Macbeth was one of the most notorious flops of the Sixties. His enigmatic personality was better suited to contemporary roles on stage, and to the screen, where he remained Britain's finest character actor for almost half a century. In Alec Guinness, The Unknown: A Life (Sidgwick & Jackson, £18.99), O'Connor provides a riveting account of the bisexuality behind the enigma. The revelations of his cruel and vitriolic treatment of his wife, Merula, stand in sad counterpoint to the uxorious endearments of the actor's own writings.

Guinness's bisexuality was first publicised last year by Sheridan Morley in his biography of John Gielgud. As well as being a leading theatre critic, Morley has written over 20 stage and screen biographies. Now, turning the spotlight on himself, he muses at the beginning of Asking For Trouble (Hodder & Stoughton £20) that he may have lived his life "perhaps too often through other people". On the evidence of this richly entertaining and wryly winning memoir, he has maintained an admirable balance. Through his father, Robert, and his grandmother, Gladys Cooper, Morley was born into the thespian purple and he shares a wealth of anecdotes about friends from Noël Coward to Bette Midler.

Aged 10, Morley spent a year touring Australia with his father. An exact contemporary, Barry Humphries, was then growing up in Melbourne with less sympathetic parents – indeed, his mother, whose cultural pretensions were totally at odds with her behaviour, is a clear model for Dame Edna. Melbourne in the Fifties was a corner of England transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere. Ten years later, Humphries made the journey in reverse as he describes in his eloquent and witty memoir, My Life As Me (Michael Joseph, £16.99). In her current self-proclaimed superstardom Dame Edna may have become a caricature of herself, but this aptly styled "cubist" autobiography shows that her creator is his own man.

Tom Stoppard's assertion in his play, Indian Ink, that "biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong" stands as a deterrent to anyone attempting a life of our pre-eminent intellectual playwright. Ira Nadel in Double Act (Methuen, £25) cannot be said to have got Stoppard wrong. He traces his subject's life with exemplary diligence from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia through war-torn Singapore to postwar Britain, paying particular attention to the Jewish heritage that Stoppard himself only uncovered in recent years. But he fails to capture the playwright's spirit, supplying far too many extraneous details, so that his biography plods where it should dance.

Edith Piaf even got her autobiography wrong, but she was so drugged and disorientated at the time that she had some excuse. Moreover, for years she had blurred the distinction between her own story and those of the women in her songs. In A Cry From the Heart (Arcadia, £11.99), Margaret Crosland expertly separates the woman from the myth, giving full weight to both the novelettish aspects of the singer's life (the murder of her manager, Louis Leplée; her passion for the boxer, Marcel Cerdan; her late marriage to the Greek hairdresser, Theo Sarapo) and to the intelligence and musicality that made her France's greatest popular singer.

Baryshnikov: in Black and White (Bloomsbury, £40) provides an exquisite portrait of one of the 20th century's finest dancers. Some 170 photographs by many of the world's top dance photographers reveal the many faces (and torsos and thighs) of Baryshnikov, from fresh-faced teenager through classical virtuoso to mature performer. With a deft introduction by New York critic Joan Acocella, this record of gravity-defying leaps, taut muscles and cherubic smiles shows what made Baryshnikov a master of his art.

The 280 photographs in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (Taschen, £20) are a reminder of the extraordinary visual talent that was polluted by Nazism. These portraits of the men and women who trained for, competed in and watched the 1936 Berlin Olympics have never been bettered. On the page, these stills from Riefenstahl's celebrated film constitute a remarkable testament to the human body, although the lack of a single photograph of the black multi-medal winner, Jesse Owens, sounds a warning of what was to come.

Finally, André de Dienes's Marilyn (Taschen, £135) is a must for any fan with sufficient resources. Dienes met the then Norma Jeane Baker in 1945 when she was an aspiring model and took her on a photographic odyssey of the Midwest. They fell in love, were briefly engaged and remained firm friends until Monroe's death. Meanwhile Dienes charted every stage of the star's transformation. This Taschen two-volume collection which contains Dienes's memoirs, a selection of his photographs and a thousand contact-sized prints supplies both the missing chapter and the last word on the cinema's greatest female icon.