A snarky, muckraking, indulgent treat for film buffs.
A British stand-up comedian turned journalist scrutinizes four celebrated, heavy-drinking actors.
Sellers’ blackly humorous biography chronicles the bawdy, outrageous reputations of “four of the greatest boozers that ever walked—or staggered—into a pub. It’s a “celebratory catalogue of their miscreant deeds” that thankfully incorporates notes of humor and revelation, since these conditions not only stalled their careers but cost them their livelihoods. Welsh actor Richard Burton, once one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, claimed apathy (and a stream of cinematic “drivel”) as his primary reason for drinking, that life offstage was too much of a sobering reversal to handle without alcohol. Irishman Richard Harris abused alcohol for most of his life while achieving fame in the film adaptation of Camelot (1967), then more recently as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series. Despite winning major acclaim in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Peter O’Toole’s heavy drinking and public brawling sabotaged his career. After some resulting major surgery, his ability to garner film roles was stunted further. British actor Oliver Reed, the most notorious of the “hellraisers,” died amid a legendary drinking binge in Malta during the filming of Gladiator (1999). Sellers delivers decades of debauched history and insider Hollywood information on his subjects, from the “The Plastered Fifties” to “The Pickled Nineties.” Chain-smoking Burton was prone to rages and a voracious sexual appetite; Harris’ domineering personality and days-long drinking binges often trumped his notoriety; O’Toole, saddled with eccentricities and a failing marriage, befriended Burton in a union that Elizabeth Taylor quickly squashed; and Reed’s dour public image suffered even more after his penchant for “showing his cock in public” emerged. Of the four, only O’Toole endures, “the last surviving British reprobate” who “knows he’s been living on borrowed time for years, watching all his drinking pals from the 60s [sic] go under turf one by one.”
A snarky, muckraking, indulgent treat for film buffs.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-55399-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
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