English Actors

“The Poor Dead K’Ehleyr Show” is a 35-minute odyssey strewn with backstage stories from my journeys through guest-starring as 4 different alien species -- tales that include people like Gene Roddenberry and Michael Westmore -- and then, most saliently, featuring: The Return of K’Ehleyr!

Tommy Jump is an out-of-work stage actor approached by the FBI with the role of a lifetime: Go undercover at a federal prison, impersonate a convicted felon, and befriend a fellow inmate, a disgraced banker named Mitchell Dupree who knows the location of documents that can be used to bring down a ruthless drug cartel...if only he’d tell the FBI where they are.

Are you here because you've been told you have a 'great voice’? Are you pivoting, just starting out or have you been in the industry for a while and hit a wall? Are you feeling a little lost, isolated, or struggling with consistency? You're in the right place. Twenty-two professionals give their best insights on the voice over industry. Bypass years of trial and error and learn from those that have been where you want to be.

Known for writing silences and articulating dreams, in this book Manav sifts through the past, delves into the present and talks about all the creative impulses, writing, directing theatre and acting that have made him who he is. Through his poetry and prose, he creates vignettes of his life, a long-lost love, his interactions with people as he travels, his favourite authors and their writings, almost as if he’s trying to weave a world for the audience as well.

Sheila Hancock looked like she was managing old age. She had weathered and even thrived in widowhood, taking on acting roles that would have been demanding for a woman half her age. She had energy, friends, a devoted family, a lovely home. She could still remember her lines. So why, at 89, having sailed past supposedly disturbing milestones—50, 70 even 80—without a qualm, did she suddenly feel so furious? Shocking diagnoses, Brexit and bereavement seemed to knock her from every quarter. And that was before lockdown.

Told with humor and flair, this is the autobiography of one transsexual's wild ride from boyhood as Alfred Brevard ("Buddy") Crenshaw in rural Tennessee to voluptuous female entertainer in Hollywood. Aleshia Brevard, as she is now known, underwent transitional surgery in Los Angeles in 1962, one of the first such operations in the United States. (The famous sexual surgery pioneer Harry Benjamin himself broke the news to Brevard's parents.)

"I'm the king of the world!" That was the cry from Leonardo DiCaprio as he stood astride the bow in Titanic - the movie that would go on to smash all records, raking in a whopping GBP 1.1 billion worldwide. Now, few Hollywood movers and shakers would dispute that statement as Leo has rocketed to become the highest paid actor in the world, earning an estimated GBP 50 million in 2011 alone.

In Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism, Terri Simone Francis examines how Baker fashioned her celebrity through cinematic reflexivity, an authorial strategy in which she placed herself, her persona, and her character into visual dialogue.

Warren Beatty guarded his privacy even before he became a movie star, when he burst onto the screen in 1961 as the earnestly handsome all-American boy in Splendor in the Grass. When he started acting, Beatty kept secret the fact that actress Shirley MacLaine, already a star, was his older sister. Over time, he has cultivated a mystique, giving few interviews and instructing others not to talk about him. Until now.

In a career that has spanned more than 60 years, Robert Wagner has witnessed the twilight of the Golden Age of Hollywood and the rise of television, becoming a beloved star in both media. During that time he became acquainted, both professionally and socially, with the remarkable women who were the greatest screen personalities of their day. I Loved Her in the Movies is his intimate and revealing account of the charisma of these women on film, why they became stars, and more.

New York Times best-selling author Donald Spoto has brilliantly explored the lives and careers of numerous Hollywood stars and entertainment icons. In Possessed, his subject is the inimitable Joan Crawford, one of the most electrifying divas of the Golden Age of American film. A more thorough, revealing, and sympathetic portrait of the often maligned movie star - most notably lambasted, perhaps, in the scandalous best seller, Mommie Dearest - Possessed is a fascinating study of the real Joan Crawford, a remarkable actress, businesswoman, mother, and lover.

The actors in James Franco’s brilliant debut novel include a McDonald’s drive-thru operator who spends his shift trying on accents; an ex-child star recalling a massive beachside bacchanal; hospital volunteers and Midwestern transplants; a vampire flick starlet who discovers a cryptic book written by a famous actor gone AWOL; and the ghost of River Phoenix. Then there’s Franco himself, who prowls backstage, peering out between the lines - before taking the stage with fascinating meditations on his art, along with nightmarish tales of excess.

When Ashton Kutcher first heard about 50 Cent's nine-figure Vitaminwater windfall in 2007, the actor realized he'd been missing out. He soon followed the rapper's formula - seeking equity instead of cash for endorsement deals - but with a twist: as the first person to top one million Twitter followers, Kutcher leveraged his social reach to accumulate stakes in a vast range of user-hungry tech startups. A decade later, Kutcher is perhaps the brightest in a firmament of star investors from Beyoncé and Jay-Z to Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Anna Nicole Smith and learn about the life of model and actress Anna Nicole Smith.

Take an unforgettable journey with the man George Bernard Shaw called "the only genius to come out of the movie industry" as he moves from his impoverished South London childhood to the heights of Hollywood wealth and fame; from the McCarthy-era investigations to his founding of United Artists to his "reverse migration" back to Europe.

What do you do when actors won't do what you tell them to? Remembering his own awkwardness and terror as a beginning director working with actors who always had their own ideas, director John Badham has a bookload of knowledge to pass along in this inspired and insightful must-listen for cinema fans as well as actors and directors at all levels of their craft.

The second volume of Michael Palin's diaries covers the 1980s, a decade in which the ties that bound the Pythons loosened as they forged their separate careers. After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, they made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

He's one of America's most recognizable and acclaimed actors: a star on Broadway, an Oscar nominee for The Aviator, and the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing, during his 11 years on M*A*S*H. Now Alan Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances.

A young doctor falls in love with the art of acting. Surprising success in Hollywood and rewards from a lucky marriage lead him to repay life with dedicated service in West Africa. The stories relate how the doctor became a doctor, how he stumbled into acting, won an enviable Hollywood career, gained a wonderful family, and suddenly decided to leave his good fortune to provide medical service in a poor country in West Africa.

Charming and classically handsome, John Gilbert (1897-1936) was among the world's most recognizable actors during the silent era. He was a wild, swashbuckling figure on screen and off, and accounts of his life have focused on his high-profile romances with Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, his legendary conflicts with Louis B. Mayer, his four tumultuous marriages, and his swift decline after the introduction of talkies.