Actors & Actresses Books - Page 6

Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent

Anthony Rapp

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Review 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is amazing. It's a great read, easy to follow and really hits at your heart. I would reccommend it to everyone.

Editorial Review:

Anthony Rapp had a special feeling about Jonathan Larson's rock musical Rent as early as his first audition, which won him a starring role as the video artist Mark Cohen. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent opened to thunderous acclaim off-Broadway -- but even as friends and family were celebrating the show's first success, they were also mourning Jonathan Larson's sudden death from an aortic aneurysm. And when Anthony's mom began to lose her battle with cancer, Anthony found himself struggling to balance his life in the theater with his responsibility to his family.

In Without You, Anthony tells of his exhilarating journey with the cast and crew of Rent as well as the intimacies of his personal life behind the curtain. Marked by fledgling love and devastating loss, Without You is an exceptional memoir of the world of theater, the love of a son for his mother, and maturity won far too early.

Me : Stories of My Life

Katharine Hepburn

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Great Read! 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Her life and her stories are so interesting and the way she tells them makes you almost hear her voice while reading the words. Her phrasing is almost like stream of consciousness (not like Virginia Woolf-stream of consciousness, just very fragment-y, incorrect grammar, etc.) I got the feeling that what she allows the reader to learn about is only a small fraction of what she really knows and has experienced in her life, not to mention that the stories are more than likely a little one-sided at times, as if the other person in the story, if you could talk to them, would have a completely different version of the same event. But that's part of the attraction of the book for me.
Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot on Spencer Tracy, and leaves a bunch to the reader's imagination in that department (Spencer was married to someone else the entire time they were a "couple" and she alludes to the fact that they spent time living together; how did this work?). But you definitely pick up on her absolute reverence for the man and their relationship, which is why she doesn't reveal much.
Overall it's a fascinating glimpse inside the workings of one of America's most famous, most talented, most enigmatic actresses with SO many quirks and interesting ideas and beliefs about life.

Editorial Review:

Admired and beloved by movie audiences for over sixty years, four-time Academy Award-winner Katharine Hepburn is an American classic. Now Miss Hepburn breaks her long-kept silence about her private life in this absorbing and provocative memoir.

A NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book of the Year

A Book-of-the-Month-Club Main Selection


From the Paperback edition.

My Life So Far (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))

Jane Fonda

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 194 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

She is one of the most recognizable women of our time. America knows Jane Fonda as an actress and an activist, a feminist and a wife, a workout guru and a role model. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, Fonda reveals that she is so much more. From her youth among Hollywood’s elite and her early film career to the challenges and triumphs of her life today, Jane Fonda reveals intimate details and universal truths that she hopes “can provide a lens through which others can see their lives and how they can live them a little differently.”

Fonda divides her “life so far” into three “acts,” writing about her childhood, first films, and marriage to Roger Vadim in Act One. At once a picture emerges: a child born to the acting legend Henry Fonda and the glamorous society princess Frances Seymour. But these early years are also marked by profound sadness: her mother’s mental illness and suicide when Jane is twelve years old, her father’s emotional distance, and her personal struggle to find her way in the world as a young woman.

By her second act, Fonda lays the foundation for her activism, even as her career takes flight. She highlights her struggle to live consciously and authentically while remaining in the public eye as she recounts her marriages to Tom Hayden and Ted Turner, and examines her controversial and defining involvement with the Vietnam War. As her film career grows, Fonda learns to incorporate her roles into a larger vision of what matters most in her life–and in the process she wins two Academy Awards, for Klute and for Coming Home.

In Fonda’s third act, she is prepared to do the work of a lifetime–to begin living consciously in a way that might inspire others who can learn from her experiences. Surprising, candid, and wonderfully written, Jane Fonda’s My Life So Far is filled with universal insights into the personal struggles of women living full and engaged lives.

Audrey Style

Pamela Clarke Keogh, Hubert de Givenchy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Everyone, it seems, is a fan of Audrey's. She was Gigi, a princess, Holly Golightly, a nun, Maid Marian, even an angel. And we believed her in every role. But Audrey Hepburn was also one of the most admired and emulated women of the twentieth century, who encouraged women to discover and highlight their own strength. By example, she not only changed the way women dress--she forever altered the way they viewed themselves.

But Audrey Hepburn's beauty was more than skin deep. "You know the Audrey you saw onscreen? Audrey was like that in real life, only a million times better," says designer Jeffrey Banks. For the first time, this style biography reveals the details--fashion and otherwise--that contributed so greatly to Audrey's appeal. Drawing on original interviews with Hubert de Givenchy, Gregory Peck, Nancy Reagan, Doris Brynner, and Audrey Wilder, as well as reminiscences of professional friends like Steven Spielberg, Ralph Lauren, noted Hollywood photographer Bob Willoughby, Steven Meisel, and Kevyn Aucoin, Audrey Style brings the Audrey her family and friends loved to life.

With more than ninety color and black-and-white photographs, many of which have never before been published, and original designer sketches from Edith Head, Hubert de Givenchy, Vera Wang, Manolo Blahnik, Alexander McQueen, and others, Audrey Style gives measure to the grace, humor, intelligence, generosity, and inimitable fashion sense that was Audrey Hepburn.

Johnny Depp: The Illustrated Biography

Nick Johnstone

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

WOW!!! WHAT A GREAT JD BIO 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

What a great find, very informative about Johnny's life from start to present. It begins from his beginnings and runs through 2006 so it has tons of info about how he got his start, what he was like as a child, teen years as well as his music passion and his moveis career. Lots of really great pictures as well.

Editorial Review:

As a child, Johnny Depp was an outsider. He found expression through music, and by thirteen he was playing in bands at clubs. He had taken every kind of drug there was by the age of fourteen, and had found himself on the wrong side of the law in petty-crime offences. As an adult he turned to acting, but continued to live by his own rules, confounding and delighting critics and fans alike with his choice of roles. He has only played parts that speak to him ? from Edward Scissorhands to Captain Jack, a colorful array of misfits, outsiders and renegades ? and commits only to films that he believes posses value. And now, with the staggering box-office success of Pirates of the Caribbean, he has achieved a formidable position in Hollywood without compromising along the way. This book traces that extraordinary journey from wild-child rebel to Hollywood mogul. Compelling, charismatic and edgy, Johnny Depp has become one of the world's most bankable stars, but more despite his artistic in

People: Paul Newman (People Tribute the Life of a Movie Legend)

Editors of People Magazine

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Pieces of My Heart CD

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Hearing about the 'Old Hollywood' days 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Hearing about Hollywood in the 40s, to the 90s is so interesting.. and to hear it from the author is even better.. I had no idea that Robert Wagners' life was so exciting. To hear him tell of his love for Barbara Stanwyk and Natalie was wonderful. He is respectful of every woman he has ever been involved with and that makes him a real man to me. I love the audio. I love this book. Thanks, Robert!!

Editorial Review:

A moving, candid, and deeply personal look at the triumphs and tragedies, lovesand heartbreaks of one of Hollywood's most popular and enduring stars.

Handsome, suave, and sophisticated, Robert J. Wagner has starred in more than one hundred films and television series over the past fifty years. In this deeply personal story, he recalls his rise to stardom. He talks candidly about his relationships with some of the greatest stars of the 20th century, including Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, and, for the first time, he shares the details of his two marriages to Natalie Wood. Wagner also offers a fascinating look at Hollywood during the last half of the 20th century.

The Women Who Raised Me: A Memoir

Victoria Rowell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Born as a ward of the state of Maine, the child of an unmarried Yankee blueblood mother and an unknown black father, Victoria Rowell beat the odds. The Women Who Raised Me is the remarkable story of her rise out of the foster care system to attain the American Dream—and of the unlikely series of women who lifted, motivated, and inspired her along the way.

From Agatha Armstead—a black Bostonian who was Victoria's longest-term foster mother and first noticed her spark of creativity and talent—to Esther Brooks, a Paris-trained prima ballerina who would become her first mentor at the Cambridge School of Ballet—The Women Who Raised Me is a loving, vivid portrait of all the women who would help Victoria transition out of foster care and into New York City's wild worlds of ballet, acting, and adulthood. Though Victoria would go on to become an accomplished television and film star, she still carried the burden of loneliness and anxiety, particularly common to those "orphans of the living" who are never adopted. Vividly recalled and candidly told, her story is transfixing, redemptive, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, inspiring.

Actions: The Actor's Thesaurus

Marina Caldarone, Maggie Lloyd-Williams

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Finally!!! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I'm an acting teacher in the theatre department at a university. I've found one of the biggest problems for actors was naming their goal/objective/victory...whatever you want to call it...and coming up with tactics that were compelling and ACTABLE. This book offers a goldmine of ideas for actors. Now, hopefully, they can move on from "convince" and "avoid"!!!



[ASIN:0896762521 Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus]]

Great place to start! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

"Actions" is the perfect size to carry around, and I've found it invaluable in preparing for auditions as well as fleshing out a role. The juice in this book is in the concept of characterizing a theatrical beat in one action word. Since theater is visual, it is critical for an actor to physically demonstrate the inner workings of the character, and this book is a great jumping off point. I did purchase a pocket size thesaurus to use with it, since on several occasions this book did not contain the exact word I was looking for. I've played four widely different roles since acquiring this book, and consider the hours I've spent looking for that perfect "aha!" word well worthwhile. I'm making much more confident acting choices, and I think my characters are more assured, clearly defined and authentic. Highly recommended!

Sinatra in Hollywood

Tom Santopietro

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Editorial Review:

Hollywood legend, Academy Award--winning actor, and recipient of the Golden Globe Award for lifetime achievement in film, Frank Sinatra carved out one of the biggest careers in the history of Hollywood, yet paradoxically his screen legacy has been overshadowed by his extraordinary achievements as a singer and recording artist. Until now.

With the publication of Sinatra in Hollywood, an analytical yet deeply personal look at the screen legend of Frank Sinatra, Sinatra’s standing as a significant, indeed legendary, screen actor has now been placed in full perspective. Examining each of Sinatra’s seventy film appearances in depth, Tom Santopietro traces the arc of his astonishing six-decade run as a film actor, from his rise to stardom in “boy next door” musical films like Anchors Aweigh and On the Town, through his fall from grace with legendary flops like The Kissing Bandit, to the near-mythic comeback with his Oscar-winning performance in From Here to Eternity.

Laced throughout with Sinatra’s own observations on his film work, Sinatra in Hollywood deals head-on with his tumultuous marriages to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow and directly addresses the rumors of Mob involvement in Sinatra’s Hollywood career. Ranging from the specifics of his controversial acting nickname of One Take Charlie to the iconic Rat Pack film Ocean’s Eleven, from the groundbreaking performance in The Manchurian Candidate to the moving and elegiac late-career roles as tough yet vulnerable detectives, the myths and personal foibles are stripped away, placing the focus squarely on the work.

Oftentimes brilliant, occasionally off-kilter, but always compelling, Frank Sinatra, the film icon who registered as nothing less than emblematic of “The American Century,” here receives his full due as the serious artist he was, the actor about whom director Billy Wilder emphatically stated, “Frank Sinatra is beyond talent.”

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