Tiptop film writing and a bathyspheric exploration of the complex emotional depths of a great actor. Chutkow writes on French film for The New York Times and Vogue. He spent three years interviewing and researching Gerard Depardieu (b. 1948) for this bio which, although it has the subject's input, has not been vetted by him. Though essentially about the raging genius and vast appetites of Depardieu, who by midcareer has made 80 films, this is also among the best books ever written about film acting. Few will be unmoved by Chutkow's emotional charting of young Gerard's speech problems as a seemingly retarded peasant child unable to talk without stuttering and given to long silences. Equally affecting are the accounts of his hard times at school, his youth spent racing about hellbent, his quitting school at 13 and leaving tiny Chateauroux for Paris at 16, where after two years he hulks into an acting class for which he is totally unfitted—aside from his hunger to learn. Soon a doctor finds that Gerard has a hearing impairment which affects both speech and understanding. This doctor and another, and Gerard's new wife, Elisabeth, who is both an actress and a psychologist seven years his senior, train him to read and speak. He becomes a force in his acting class and a torrential speaker, falls into films and finds himself launched on an atomic career, first playing thugs and lowlifes, then more sophisticated bourgeois, winning awards and at last filming Cyrano de Bergerac in Rostand's alexandrines, followed by his huge fit into the role of Columbus for Ridley Scott's 1492. He never researches but rather joins his skin to a character's emotional being. ``My life demands a power of perpetual adaptation,'' says Depardieu, who also rises above a deeply wounding canard by Time magazine which charged him with being a nine-year-old rapist. Much, much more—a descent into the maelstrom not to be missed. (Forty-eight b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: March 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40943-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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