Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 02/15/2011
ISBN-13: 9780312659066
ISBN-10: 0312659067

British actress Dame Judi Dench, familiar to fans of the TV series As Time Goes By and to some moviegoers as M, candidly outlines her acting career from her first stage role as Ophelia at the Old Vic to more recent Oscar-winning roles in film. Dench delights in her work, and she wryly tells anecdotes about productions and back-stage antics with her colleagues in the engaging voice familiar to her fans. She relates sadder experiences as well--including the death of husband and colleague Michael Williams--but the memoir's total impression is warm, funny, and entertaining. Fans interested in a more traditional biography will want to read John Miller's Judi Dench: With a Crack in Her Voice.

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Publisher: W.W. Norton
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 02/28/2011
ISBN-13: 9780393064667
ISBN-10: 0393064662

Andre Dubus III, whose novel House of Sand and Fog became an Oscar-nominated movie, grew up in a poverty-stricken Massachusetts mill town after his novelist-professor father divorced his mother. Surrounded by violence and substance abuse and subject to bullying, young Andre first escaped into drugs and later learned to fight. His fighting prowess earned some approval from his distant father, but eventually he took up writing as a better form of escape. In this "gritty and gripping" memoir (Publishers Weekly), Dubus pulls no punches in his portrayal of the mean streets where he grew up, though his compassion is evident as he describes his family, his environment, and finally his new relationship with his father near the end of his life.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 03/01/2011
ISBN-13: 9780374277628
ISBN-10: 0374277621

In this elegantly written but deeply disturbing memoir, author Margaux Fragoso describes in detail her 15-year-long relationship with Peter Curran, a pedophile who first approached her when she was seven and he was 51. Fragoso's impoverished home life was highly dysfunctional, with a mentally ill mother and alcoholic father, so Curran's lively and interesting household at first served as a respite--but innocent-seeming hugs soon gave way to serious sexual violations. This "gripping, tragic and unforgettable" account (Kirkus Reviews) ends on a healing and hopeful note after Fragoso's intensive therapy, marriage, and the birth of her own child.

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Publisher: HarperCollins
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 03/15/2011
ISBN-13: 9780061732379
ISBN-10: 0061732370

In the face of the Taliban's oppressive restrictions on women in Afghanistan, Kamila Sediqi started a home dressmaking business to support her family--and ended up creating jobs for 100 other women. Her work serves as a model and inspiration for individual entrepreneurship and continues even now. Author Gayle Tzemach, a former producer for ABC News, tells this "inspiring, uplifting story" (Booklist) of how Kamila's effort--and similar work by others--resisted the Taliban's repression of women. For a similar story about overcoming adversity in the Third World, read William Kamkwamba's The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

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Publisher: Harmony Books
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 04/06/2010
ISBN-13: 9780307461186
ISBN-10: 0307461181

Comedian Carol Burnett won fans in part by making her audience feel she was their personal friend. In this memoir she invites her fans--or friends--to relive her career with her, telling short, vivid vignettes about everything from being fired as an usher, to her subsequent success on Broadway, through game show appearances and the long-running Carol Burnett Show, to life after the show ended. She also recounts personal experiences, some of them poignant but many just as hilarious as her television skits. There's plenty of background material on the show, too, as well as stories about her Hollywood friends. If you're eager for more detail about Burnett's childhood, read her earlier memoir, One More Time.

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Publisher: William Morrow
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 02/01/2000
ISBN-13: 9780688175825
ISBN-10: 0688175821

In this joint memoir Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee tell their personal stories--individually and together--and describe their work as actors and Civil Rights activists. They include details about their private lives, including their marriage, but their story also serves as "a panorama of the 20th-century African American experience" (Publishers Weekly). As children, they knew the effects of racism first-hand, and early in their careers segregation significantly constrained their work. Ultimately they became pioneers in integrating American dramatic arts while retaining very genuine and down to earth personalities, as the conversational style of their memoir reveals.

Publisher: Harmony Books
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 10/06/2009
ISBN-13: 9780307336880
ISBN-10: 0307336883

Early in his career, Clint Eastwood became popular on television as the cowboy Rowdy Yates in the Western serial Rawhide. His current life as a mature actor and movie director hardly resembles that role--except that Rowdy the cowboy and Clint the winner of four Oscars both find motivation in being outsiders. Bestselling biographer Marc Eliot thoroughly explores Eastwood's personal life, but his acting--and more recently directing--work is the real focus of this book, offering a fascinating portrait of one of Hollywood's most enduring and successful stars. If you want still more about his career, read Clint: A Retrospective by Richard Schickel.

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Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 03/01/2004
ISBN-13: 9780807828434
ISBN-10: 0807828432

To many moviegoers, Sidney Poitier's career symbolizes the enormous changes in the way Hollywood films have portrayed African-Americans. Historian Aram Goudsouzian thoroughly and engagingly chronicles these changes as they are reflected in Poitier's life, beginning with his birth as the son of a poor Bahamian farmer. Goudsouzian explains why Poitier's roles and even his acting style were constrained by white expectations--but disparaged by some black activists for remaining within those constraints. He also covers Poitier's personal involvement in political causes. Though it's full of factual detail, this biography "reads like a well-written, highly addictive novel" (Booklist). Poitier has published two memoirs of his own that you might enjoy: This Life and The Measure of a Man.

Table of Contents  First Chapter