British journalist Jenkins adds to the mystery of the elusive actor in this respectful, not very gossipy, unauthorized biography. Though not yet 40, and though he's been featured in only ten or so films, Daniel Day-Lewis has already established himself as a star of amazing depth and range. Jenkins relies largely on interviews with Day-Lewis's half-brother, his nanny, and his teachers, as well as the few previously published interviews with the striking-looking but demure Englishman. Day-Lewis boasts quite a fancy pedigree. His father, Cecil Day-Lewis, was the poet laureate, a translator, and a mystery novelist (as Nicholas Blake); his mother, Cecil's second wife, Jill, is the daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, the head of production at Ealing Studios during the heyday of British filmmaking. Jill is also an actor of note, though she abandoned her career to raise her two children. A comfortable childhood was darkened only by Daniel's father's death when the boy was 15. Daniel's tendency to befriend lower-class toughs and mimic their ways led to his first bit role as a hooligan in Sunday, Bloody Sunday. He studied Method acting at Bristol Old Vic, where he began preparing for roles with grueling immersion into character, and made a name for himself onstage. But but it wasn't until 1985 that Day-Lewis made a splash with his widely disparate portrayals of a gay London punk in My Beautiful Laundrette and the upper-class prig in A Room with a View. His shape-shifting has persisted with roles as a Czech Don Juan, an early American frontiersman, an Irish political prisoner, and the crippled writer Christy Brown in My Left Foot, for which he won the 1989 Best Actor Oscar. Jenkins inflates his prose at times, and indulges in not a few show-biz clichÇs. But it's a serviceable job nonetheless, a fine tribute to a talent in full bloom.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13044-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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