Warm recollections and practical advice from an acclaimed star.
An actor’s secrets for success include showing up on time.
Now 85, Caine (The Elephant to Hollywood, 2010, etc.) melds candid anecdotes and a master class on acting into an upbeat, unpretentious, and star-studded memoir. Born to poor, working-class parents, Maurice Joseph Micklewhite was not destined to become an international film icon. “I am living proof,” he writes, “that, whatever your start in life, you can make it.” Caine attributes his success to hard work, determination, stamina, the influence of his mother’s indomitable spirit, and pure luck. When he began his career in the 1960s, he observes, working-class actors like himself, Sean Connery, and Roger Moore were increasingly able to find roles in plays and screenplays by writers such as John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, and Harold Pinter. Still, he admits that the first decade of his career was difficult. “Success is survival,” he remarks, and “comes from doing.” His Oscar-nominated performance in Alfie, released in 1966, proved a turning point; in the next four years, he made 12 movies, and by 1972, he had major roles in 20. Among at least 100 directors he worked with, he singles out for special praise the fatherly John Huston, coolly distant Brian de Palma, perfectionist Woody Allen, and the brilliant Chris Nolan, who offered him the delectable part of Batman’s butler. Although Caine enjoys the attention and perks of being a star, he cautions actors against acting like divas—e.g., the imperious Laurence Olivier or the pampered Elizabeth Taylor. Treat everyone on the set equally, he advises, and prepare assiduously. “Confidence comes from experience plus preparation,” he writes. Know your character so well “you’re thinking his or her thoughts.” Caine is forthcoming about some low points—e.g., when he tried to self-medicate with alcohol and 80 cigarettes per day until friends, and his beloved wife, intervened. When he stopped being offered major roles in the early 1990s, he thought about retiring from acting but instead decided to reinvent himself as a character actor.
Warm recollections and practical advice from an acclaimed star.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-45119-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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