Life and Career
She was born Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann in Syracuse, New York. Raised Catholic, she considered becoming a nun. She was given the name Viva by Andy Warhol before the release of her first film but later used her married last name (Auder). She appeared in several of Warhol's films and was a frequent guest at The Factory. Viva was on the phone with Warhol when he was shot by Valerie Solanas.
After she began making films for other directors she also began writing. Her first book, Superstar, was an insider's look at the Factory scene, a partly fictional autobiographical account of her time there. It was distinguished from other "tell-all" memoirs by virtue of her writing, which incorporated various stylistic effects, including the use of taped conversations, arguably one of the first times such a technique had been used in a novel. She also wrote for various publications, including The Village Voice and New York Woman.
Viva incorporated the use of video tapes into her second book The Baby. These tapes were later released by her former husband, video artist Michel Auder, as Chronicles: Family Diary in three parts.
She was the narrator for Carla Bley's 1971 experimental jazz composition Escalator over the Hill.
Read more about this topic: Viva (actress)
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)