English Actors

It almost goes without saying that nobody occupies a place in pop culture that remotely resembles the one in which William Shatner finds himself. As an actor who has been about as critically acclaimed as he has been lampooned, Shatner seems to relish every aspect of his image, whether he's making fun of himself and others on a celebrity roast or appearing in humorous commercials as a spokesman for Priceline.com.

These recollections cover the time from the very early 1960s until after my last significant acting role. After that I pulled a disappearing act and became a regular bloke for the most part. The transition from child/youth actor through to adult is notoriously difficult, some have succeeded, some spectacularly so. Some have stumbled along and sadly, some have fallen. I chose to take a break, which I’m still on. I’ve been the subject of many 'where are they now?' articles and musings. Well, I’m here now, writing this.

Owen Gleiberman has spent his life watching movies-first at the drive-in, where his parents took him to see wildly inappropriate adult fare like Rosemary's Baby when he was a wide-eyed 9 year old, then as a possessed cinemaniac who became a film critic right out of college. In Movie Freak, his enthrallingly candid, funny, and eye-opening memoir, Gleiberman captures what it's like to live life through the movies, existing in thrall to a virtual reality that becomes, over time, more real than reality itself.

Rod Taylor: An Aussie in Hollywood is the first full-length biography of this pioneering Australian film star. It's the thrilling story of a working-class Sydney boy who went to Hollywood, took on the Americans at their own game on their own turf in one of the toughest industries there is - and won. It's also the story of a talented actor who was almost brought down by the demons of alcohol and ego, but who ultimately overcame them to triumph.

At the age of two, Mimi began working as a child actress, sharing the screen with the some of the legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood: Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, John Wayne, Loretta Young, Jane Wyman, Dorothy McGuire and many, many more. This is a tale of the kid-actors filming on the sound stages of 1950s Hollywood, kid-actors playing their parts in a very adult world, learning hard lessons with sometimes life-altering consequences.

Elizabeth Taylor was born to become a legend. By the time she was a young teenager, she was already making news and attracting attention. Taylor would go onto star in movies such as A Place in the Sun, Butterfield 8, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Cleopatra, where she played opposite Richard Burton. Her affair with Burton caused a worldwide scandal, and the movie almost ruined 20th Century Fox. Taylor and Burton were married and divorced twice, with the world watching their every scandalous move.

Ousted by the Solar System Exchange in favor of an Artificial Intelligence, Greg Body has turned to space exploration. Hiring a team of highly talented personnel, he’s going to take on the Lloyd’s of London odds and colonize the star L98-59. Long-distance telescopes have rated the system as having a “medium probability” of containing an Earth-like world. Greg has decided to take his chances as a post-Singularity Earth has become overcrowded.

I wanted to get together as much information as possible in this book. It's a book with answers to many questions that a candidate actor may have. A manual book that enlightens and gives you all the necessary knowledge to prepare and make you fully equipped in order to begin your journey as an actor. All the structure has been made and has been filtered, so you will be able to work on your own and with partners as well.

Created as a primer for the beginning actor, To Be or Wanna Be takes you on a journey that reveals the path to becoming a successful actor, as well as how to avoid the pitfalls of the starving artist. Beginning with the simple, yet important distinctions of how to take control of your career, and through personal anecdotes of how he discovered them, Sean Pratt guides you toward the more complex and powerful concepts that will make all the difference in your future success as an actor.

Part backstage tour, part travelogue, part social commentary, Letters from Backstage recounts Michael Kostroff’s adventures touring with the road companies of The Producers and Les Miserables. Trekking through more than 20 American cities large and small, here is the story of an actor’s dream come true and the bizarre things that happened along the way—not to mention personal anecdotes about celebrities, including Mel Brooks, Susan Stroman, Jason Alexander, and Martin Short!

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.

When she got hired to drive for the Saudi royal family vacationing in Beverly Hills, Larson thought she’d been handed the golden ticket. Each day the royal women spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery and mega-shopping sprees on Rodeo Drive. But Driving the Saudis also reveals how Larson grew to understand the complicated nuances of a society whose strict customs remain intact even across.

Veteran character actor Nick Searcy takes you through his wide-ranging career, from both sides of the camera as an actor and director, to guest-hosting for Rush Limbaugh, managing a professional wrestler, costarring in the hit show Justified—and somehow continuing to work in Hollywood even after he went to Washington DC on January 6, 2021.

A lively and colorful biography of Hollywood's first superagent - one of the most outrageous showbiz characters of the 1960s and 1970s, whose clients included Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Faye Dunaway, Michael Caine, and Candice Bergen. Before Sue Mengers hit the scene in the mid-1960s, talent agents remained quietly in the background. But staying in the background was not possible for Mengers.

Hollywood Madonna explores the full saga of Loretta Young's professional and personal life. She made her film debut at age four, became a star at fifteen, and many awards and accolades later, made her final television movie at age seventy-six. This biography withholds none of the details of her affair with Clark Gable and the daughter that powerful love produced. Bernard F. Dick places Young's affair in the proper context of the time and the choices available to women in 1935.

Moviegoers know her as the housekeeper in White Christmas, the nurse in Now, Voyager, and the crotchety choir director in Sister Act. This audiobook, filled with never-published behind-the-scenes stories from Broadway and Hollywood, chronicles the life of a complicated woman who brought an assortment of unforgettable nurses, nuns, and housekeepers to life on screen and stage.

Covering more than 30 years of Reagan's film and television work, Marc Eliot sheds new light on Reagan's bachelor life, his two marriages, and his two runs as the president of SAG. It also examines his personal relationship with superagent Lew Wasserman, the crucial player who helped develop Reagan's movie-star persona, which would prove essential to his eventually becoming President of the United States.

As he did in his bestselling biographies of Jimmy Stewart and Clint Eastwood, acclaimed Hollywood biographer Marc Eliot digs deep beneath the myth in this revealing look at the most legendary Western film hero of all time; the man with the distinctive voice, walk, and demeanor who was an inspiration to many and a symbol of American masculinity, power, and patriotism.

Beauchamp writes about the pictures Kennedy produced, the stars he made - and destroyed - and the men who did his bidding. She also writes about the Hollywood titans in his midst: William Randolph Hearst, Cecille B. DeMille, and David Sarnoff, whose collaboration with Kennedy resulted in the formation of RKO Studios.

Helen Gibson was a woman willing to try anything. Advertised as “The Most Daring Actress in Pictures,” Helen emerged in the early days of the twentieth-century silent film scene as a rodeo rider, producer, performer and stunt double for iconic stars of the era. Her exploits were as dangerous as they were glamorous, featured in hundreds of films and serials—yet her legacy was quickly overshadowed by the increasingly hypermasculine and male-dominated evolution of action films in the decades that would follow her.