Broadway Bookshelf — Autobiography — Page 3

The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities

(6/12/2012)

The Memory of All That is Katharine Weber’s memoir of her extraordinary family. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Swift, was known both for her own music (she was the first woman to compose the score to a hit Broadway show, Fine and Dandy) and for her ten-year romance with George Gershwin. Their love affair began during Swift’s marriage to James Paul Warburg, the multitalented banker and economist who advised (and feuded with) FDR. Weber creates an intriguing and intimate group portrait of t...

Archaeologies of Presence

(5/31/2012)

The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre

(5/12/2012)

The autobiographical account by one of German theater's great actors of his life in the theater.

Plays and Performance Texts by Women 1880-1930

(5/8/2012)

This groundbreaking anthology, part of theWomen, Theatre and Performanceseries, brings together an extraordinary mix of one-act and full length plays and solo performance texts written by women. Included in the volume are texts by Beatrice Herford, Ruth Draper, Zora Neale Hurston, and G.B. Stern, originally performed across commercial and amateur theaters in Britain and America. Some of the plays have remained unpublished since their original performance – Georgina Weldon'sNot Alone, Clothild...

In Spite of Myself (Paperback edition)

(5/1/2012)

A vibrant, exuberant self-portrait of one of today’s greatest living actors. Christopher Plummer’s magnificent book recounts the wild adventure that is his life, stretching from a privileged childhood in Canada to the glorious, star-studded New York of the fifties to a sensational career in film appearing in some of our most beloved classics. Here are his late nights out with Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Paddy Chayefsky, and Arthur Miller; his affairs and marriages; his collabor...

The Musical That Changed My Life

(4/15/2012)

HOWARD SHERMAN is an arts administrator, advocate and writer. Howard was executive director of the American Theatre Wing from 2003 to 2011. During that time, his varied responsibilities included serving as executive producer and occasional moderator of the television program “Working in the Theatre”; creating and hosting the audio program “Downstage Center”; incorporating SpringboardNYC, the Theatre Intern Group and The Jonathan Larson Grants into ATW’s programming; leading ATW’s ut...

Conducting Business

(4/1/2012)

Conducting an orchestra is something that is seen as well as heard, but it is quite misunderstood when it comes to knowing what this person actually does for a living. This most mysterious of jobs is brought to life for the music lover as well as for the aspiring maestro in a new book by Leonard Slatkin. Drawing on his own experiences on and off the podium, Slatkin brings us into the world of the baton. He tells tales of some of the most fascinating people in the musical world, including Frank ...

Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them

(3/27/2012)

Rita Hayworth dancing by candlelight in a small Mexican village; Elizabeth Taylor devouring homemade pasta and tenderly wrapping him in her pashmina scarf; streaking for Sir Laurence Olivier in a drafty English castle; terrifying a dozing Jackie Onassis; carrying an unconscious Montgomery Clift to safety on a dark New York City street. Captured forever in a unique memoir, Frank Langella's myriad encounters with some of the past century's most famous human beings are profoundly affecting, funn...

An Actress Prepares

(3/14/2012)

"I've been waiting for someone to write this book for years: a thorough-going analysis and reconsideration of American approaches to Stanislavsky from a feminist perspective ... lively, intelligent, and engaging." Phillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter "Theatre people of any gender will be transformed by Rose Malague’s eye-opening study An Actress Prepares. Women performers have long needed this trenchant analysis of the craft of method acting, one that intervenes in its more sexist tendenc...

Henry Irving

(1/1/2012)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1885. Excerpt: ... CLOSING SCENES. DECEMBER 7th.--Mr. Irving's engagement, which began on November ioth, was ended last night. It has filled a period of four weeks and it has been prosperous to the actor and advantageous to the public. The pieces presented were, with two exceptions, those in which Mr. Irving and Miss Terry had been see...

Tales of a Broadway Flack: The Charmed Life of Press Agent Sol Jacobson

(11/1/2011)

All the excitement of Broadway during the glory days of the Great White Way comes to life in Tales of a Broadway Flack, David A. Longs engrossing new biography about Sol Jacobson, press agent for some of Broadways most memorable shows and legendary performers, from Desi Arnaz and Eddie Bracken (Too Many Girls, 1939), Boris Karloff (Arsenic and Old Lace, 1941), Tallulah Bankhead (The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942), to Zero Mostel (Fiddler on the Roof, 1964) with a plethora of shows in between. If you ...

Learning to Live Out Loud: A Memoir

(11/1/2011)

One of Hollywood's most talented and memorable actresses ("The Hustler, Carrie") and three-time Oscar nominee presents an intimate memoir covering her life and career.

Trust Me: A Memoir

(10/1/2011)

"These are memoirs of a kid born in New York City in 1925. His dad, George Senior, was a pianist, composer, and orchestra leader at Proctor's Vaudeville Theatre, and his mother, Helen, played in a classic dance troupe. Hanky-panky ensued. They married, and I soon was the result... I write like I talk. A long time ago I tried making 'talking and telling the truth' one and the same. That isn't just difficult; it means painfully reviewing things you've been led to believe since you were a child. Th...

Drama: An Actor's Education

(9/27/2011)

In this riveting and surprising personal history, John Lithgow shares a backstage view of his own struggle, crisis, and discovery, revealing the early life and career that took place out of the public eye and before he became a nationally known star. Above all, Lithgow’s memoir is a tribute to his most important influence: his father, Arthur Lithgow, who, as an actor, director, producer, and great lover of Shakespeare, brought theater to John’s boyhood. From bedtime stories to Arthur’s ...

Life Is Not a Stage: From Broadway Baby to a Lovely Lady and Beyond

(9/20/2011)

For millions of people around the world, Carol Brady is synonymous with motherhood, but growing up as the youngest of ten children in rural Indiana in the aftermath of the Great Depression, Florence Henderson lived a life quite different from that of the quintessential TV mom she later played on television. Florence's father was a dirt-poor tobacco tenant farmer who was nearly fifty years old when he married Florence's twenty-five-year-old mother, and was nearly seventy when Florence was born....

HAROLD: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain

(9/13/2011)

Was it worth it, this awful struggle to survive, no matter what the cost?" Harold is Hal Holbrook’s affecting memoir of growing up behind disguises, and his lifelong search for himself. Abandoned by his mother and father when he was two, Holbrook and his two sisters each commenced their separate journeys of survival. Raised by his powerful grandfather until his death when Holbrook was twelve, Holbrook spent his childhood at boarding schools, visiting his father in an insane asylum, and hop...

As If: An Autobiography

(6/8/2011)

As If: An Autobiography traces the complex life and career of director, scholar, and theorist Herbert Blau, one of the most innovative voices in the American theater. From his earliest years on the streets of Brooklyn, with gang wars there, to the often embattled, now-legendary Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, the powerfully told story of Blau's first four decades is also a social history, moving from the Great Depression to the cold war, with fallout from "the balance of terror" on what he on...

Patti LuPone: A Memoir

(9/14/2010)

Broadway legend LuPone, a five-time Tony nominee and two-time Tony winner, raises the curtain on her life and career in this engaging memoir. Detailing both her travails and her triumphs, she takes the reader on a guided tour recalling some memorable moments in musical theater. She began in her teens when she and her twin brothers performed on Long Island as the LuPone Trio. On a 1968 scholarship at John Houseman's Juilliard Drama Division, she was "overwhelmed with fear," but then toured with H...

Timesteps: My Musical Comedy Life

(11/23/2009)

In 1975, singer-dancer-choreographer McKechnie was one of the brightest lights on the Great White Way, winning a Tony for her performance in A Chorus Line, and now theatergoers will be elated to see her autobiography shelved in stores only days before A Chorus Line's October Broadway revival. McKechnie's memories of the original musical's creative genesis serve as the centerpiece, and the other chapters are equally compelling. Her story is one of fierce drive and determination. Leaving Detroit a...

Diary of a Mad Playwright: Perilous Adventures on the Road with Mary Martin and Carol Channing

(3/1/2002)

In this wild, humorous tale of the theater world, novelist and playwright Kirkwood ( A Chorus Line ) self-indulgently describes his three-year-long roller-coaster attempt to present his play, Legends! Here are vivid accounts of how Kirkwood found, lost and found again financiers, producers, directors, managers, a cast and supporting crew. Although much of the book's zany action centers on the two feuding actresses--Carol Channing and Mary Martin--who played the major roles of two feuding actress...

An Actor and His Time

(4/1/2000)

John Gielgud tells the story of his life in the theatre, from the time of the great actor/managers like Tree and du Maurier and star actresses like Sarah Bernhardt and his own great aunt Ellen Terry, to his famous partnerships with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson.

Footnotes: A Memoir

(11/6/1997)

Broadway icon Tommy Tune rummages through the packed attic of his eventful life as a nine-time Tony-winning dancer, director, and choreographer for his colorful memoir, Footnotes. Tune brings forth a surprising amount of grit from the glitter and froufrou, plus several startlingly graphic passages. His Texas boyhood amid supportive parents lead to a quick rise in the world of 1970s Broadway, and brought this modern-day Fred Astaire to success at the helm of shows such as Nine, My One and Only, G...

Showtune: A Memoir

(11/1/1996)

This memoir is by the man who created the Broadway hits "Hello Dolly!," "Mame," and "La Cage Aux Folles." The self-described "Mr. Show Business, the razzmatazz musical comedy writer, a cheerful man whose life is dedicated to making people smile and feel good and leave the theater humming a show tune," Jerry Herman takes readers on a sentimental journey, retracing his steps toward big-time success and occasional disappointment. Though Herman relates losing his lover to AIDS, and tells of his own ...

One Hell of a Life

(9/20/1995)

Stapleton (b. 1925) has enjoyed a long career as a character actress and has won every award in sight: Oscar, Tony, Emmy. Her memoir, written with Scovell, covers her starstruck girlhood, her Broadway debut in 1946 and her charter membership in the Actor's Studio and offers insights into her art in such roles as Serafina (The Rose Tattoo). Along the way she talks candidly about her friendship with Marilyn Monroe, her struggle to save Montgomery Clift from self-destruction, the emotional dues she...

My Side: The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon

(5/2/1986)

Ruth Gordon's autobiographical account.

Letters from an Actor

(4/1/1984)

Letters from William Redfield while he was performing in the Gielgud-Burton production of "Hamlet."

Letting My Hair Down

(1/1/1973)

Lorrie Davis's account of two years with the love rock tribe of the musical 'Hair' --from dawning to downing of Aquarius

Memoirs

(2006)

For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves this story. When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the mediathough long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest livi...

Rewrites: A Memoir

(1998)

After serving an apprenticeship under Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers in Los Angeles, Neil Simon returned to New York at age 30 to embark on a career as a playwright. Some 35 years and three dozen plays later, the most successful comedy writer in the history of the American stage is still at it. In Rewrites, Simon reflects on his career, his relationship with his older brother and mentor Danny, and the loss of his wife Joan to cancer. Along the way, he reveals the price he has paid for his achieveme...

Noel Coward Autobiography

(2007)

Noël Coward was one of the most celebrated characters in British theatrical history, with a career that spanned almost sixty years as a writer, actor, producer and director. This volume brings together his three autobiographies: Present Indicative charts his progress from a 'brazen odious little prodigy' to the immense success of Cavalcade in 1931; Future Indefinite deals with the war years, which saw the publication of Blithe Spirit, Present Laughter and In Which We Serve; and Past Conditional...

Up Front... His Strictly Confidential Autobiography

(2006)

Described by Sir Paul McCartney as ‘the man who makes clouds disappear’, Victor Spinetti is one of Britain’s best-loved and most outrageous performers. He became known to the Sixties generation through his comedic roles in the landmark Beatles films and the classic Return of the Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers. His remarkable wit and versatility have earned him fresh popularity with every generation since. A veteran stage actor, writer and director, Spinetti gives us an irresistible a...

Oh What a Circus

(1999)

With wit and candour, Tim Rice describes the gilded path that took him from cricket and comic-obsessed schoolboy to one of the world's best-known lyricists. Along the way he worked as a petrol pump attendant and articled clerk before becoming a management trainee at EMI. But it was his fateful meeting with Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1965 which was to be the turning-point in Tim's career. Immediate fortune didn't follow and it took the album of Jesus Christ Superstar to reach no.1 in the States befor...

Still Untitled, Not Quite Autobiography

(2010)

Actor Ron Moody has enthralled generations with his masterly performance as Fagin in both the stage and film versions of Oliver! - one of the great classics of British theatre and cinema. Planning to become an academic, he first took to the boards when a student at the London School of Economics - writing and performing in student Reviews. But his comedic talent and ability to create a string of eccentric and original characters quickly caught the attention of West End producers, who recognised ...

Hugh Martin: The Boy Next Door

(2010)

Hugh Martin: The Boy Next Door is an enchanting jaunt through the Golden Era of Broadway and the MGM musicals. This firsthand account captures the energy and excitement of those special times, with eyewitness tales of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, and dozens more. Hugh recounts the origins of some of America's most beloved songs, including the perennial favorite, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Martin also reveals some secrets that only he could know: the truth about his ...

Sage-ing While Age-ing

(2008)

So begins bestselling author and award-winning actress Shirley MacLaine, as she invites readers to join her on the most powerful, provocative journey of her life. Over the years, Shirley has firmly established herself as a fearless, iconoclastic thinker and seeker of truth. Now, as she confronts the realities and rewards of growing older, she reflects on the greater understanding of her own place in the universe that her experiences have brought to her. Sparked by the experience of moving int...

Some Sunny Day: My Autobiography

(2009)

A remarkable autobiography of the last great wartime icon, this account depicts the life and times of Dame Vera Lynn. Born Vera Welch on March 20, 1917 in the East End of London, Lynn’s career was set from an early age—along with her father, who also did a “turn,” she sang in Working Men’s Clubs ate the mere age of seven years old. She had a successful radio career with Joe Loss and Charlie Kunz in the 1920s and 30s, but it was with World War II that she became the iconic figure that c...

Act One: An Autobiography

(1989)

With this new edition, the classic best-selling autobiography by the late playwright Moss Hart returns to print in the thirtieth anniversary of its original publication. Issued in tandem with Kitty, the revealing autobiography of his wife, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Act One, is a landmark memoir that incluenced a generation of theatergoers, dramatists, and general book readers everywhere. The book eloquently chronicles Moss Hart's impoverished childhood in the Bronx and Brooklyn and his long, determin...

The Street Where I Live

(1980)

This is a highly personal biography of three great shows: My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Gigi. Warm, witty, loving, often hilarious, and poignant in its affection for a glorious era in the American theater, it is the story of what Mr. Lerner calls "the sundown of wit, eccentricity, and glamour." The author himself, try as he will to keep himself out of his pages, emerges not merely as a great talent, but as a man of laughter and love. His principals, however, are Moss Hart and Fritz Loewe, with a st...

In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

(2008)

A rollicking, rich portrait of a life. And what a life! By one of today’s greatest living actors. He was born a Canadian on a Friday the thirteenth in 1929—the year of the Crash. His boyhood was one of privilege: an ancestor was a Governor General; his great-grandfather Sir John Abbott was Canada’s third prime minister and owned railroads. There were steam yachts, mansions, and a life of Victorian gentility and somewhat cluttered splendor. Plummer tells how “this young bilingual wa...

Home: A Memoir of My Early Year

(2009)

The story of Julie Andrews's early life would make a fine movie. Thanks to her gift for storytelling and delicate sense of nuance, it makes an even more splendid book. As she threads her way from a difficult childhood in war-torn England, she wins our sympathy, only to engulf us in the excitement of a peripatetic career that began when she was only 12. When she sang before the queen in 1948, she became the youngest solo artist ever to participate in a royal command performance. Home, however, is...

Just Me

(2009)

'Well now, prove it, Sheila. As John would say, "Put your money where your mouth is." Be a depressed widow boring the arse off everyone, or get on with life. Your choice.' In The Two of Us Sheila relived her life with John Thaw - years packed with love and family, delight and despair. And then she looked ahead. What next? Gardening, grannying and grumbling, while they all had their pleasures, weren't going to fill the aching void that John had left. 'Live adventurously', a Quaker advice, was hov...

The Legs Are the Last to Go: Aging, Acting, Marrying, and Other Things I Learned the Hard Way

(2009)

It's conventional wisdom that Hollywood has no use for a woman over forty. So it's a good thing that Diahann Carroll—whose winning, sometimes controversial career breached racial barriers—is anything but conventional. Shonda Rhimes, the creator and executive producer of the hit program Grey's Anatomy, developed a role just for her, and a recent show that's touring the United States, The Life and Times of Diahann Carroll, was enthusiastically embraced by the New York Times. And all this since...

Just Lucky I Guess: A Memoir of Sorts

(2007)

Well, hello, Dolly! Carol Channing, one of America's most beloved and enduring theatrical legends, takes on her most challenging role yet: as the author of this funny, ribald, and moving memoir. Known across the nation for her portrayal of the irresistible Dolly Levi, the title character of the Broadway musical phenomenon, Hello, Dolly!, Carol Channing is perhaps the only living theatrical star whose name brings a smile to the face of people in virtually every city and town across America and ...

My Life in Pieces

(2011)

Simon Callow writes with perceptiveness, wit and flair about the remarkable people he has encountered in the course of his career. My Life in Pieces coincides with his latest stage venture, a one-man show called Shakespeare: The Man from Stratford, written by the well-known Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate.

She Ain't Heavy, She's My Mother: A Memoir

(2011)

Gayle Batt is the kind of lady who throws elegant cocktail parties while wearing layers of silk chiffon, dripping pearls, and eight months’ pregnant. She is the kind of woman who says “anyhoo” and calls everyone “Dahlin’” or a special pet name. With hair, makeup, and nails always done to perfection, she triumphs rather than crumbles when infidelity, alcoholism, cancer, or any form of adversity attempts to shatter her family. Endearing and enduring, Gayle is a big-hearted, strong-will...

I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story

(2007)

Everyone knows Marni Nixon...even if they think they don’t. One of the best-loved singing voices in the world, Nixon sang for Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, and Deborah Kerr in The King and I. She made her debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at 17 and continued her career with Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Stephen Sondheim, Rogers and Hammerstein, and many others. Her inspiring autobiography, packed with anecdotes from six decades of perf...

Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood

(2001)

No one is going to accuse Laurents, author of such noted plays and films as Home of the Brave, Rope, West Side Story and The Way We Were, of writing a sentimental, evasive or mindlessly feel-good autobiography. In a jaunty, engrossing style, the 82-year-old discusses the highlights of his 60-year career as a writer, director and producer, the ins and outs of his love life, long-term psychoanalysis and friendships with almost everyone in Hollywood and on Broadway. Laurents is brutally honest abou...

You Can't Do That on Broadway!: A Raisin in the Sun and Other Theatrical Improbabilities

(2004)

The producer of such legendary Broadway shows as A Raisin in the Sun and The Owl and the Pussycat, Rose here checks in autobiographically to show today's producers how much work remains to be done in integrating the American theater. His affectionately garrulous account of his adventures contains many pointed anecdotes about faithless (and sometimes criminal) investors, duplicitous producers, mentally disturbed directors and many other stage and screen fauna who make a producer's life a difficu...

The Phoenix: Noel Coward Diaries

(2000)

Coward's diaries from 1941 to 1969 offer an intimate look at the last 30 years of the life of the popular, sophisticated British playwright and author. While some of the entries are of the "Stayed out until 4 at Mrs. B___'s party" variety, more of them give insight into Coward's well-connected life. Coward knew or met hundreds of people working in the theater, the movies, and the government, and encounters with Vivien Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, King George IV, Winston Churchill and the Queen Mother...

Autobiography: Consisting of Present Indicative, Future Indefinite and The Uncompleted Past Conditional

(1986)

This reissue contains all three instalments of Coward's biography. "Present Indicative", published in 1937, deals with Noel's childhood and early life up to "Cavalcade" in 1931; "Future Indefinite", published in 1954, deals with the War years; also included is the opening to a planned third volume.