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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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