In Spite of Myself (Abridged) In Spite of Myself (Abridged)

In Spite of Myself (Abridged‪)‬

    • 4.8 • 6 Ratings
    • $19.99

    • $19.99

Publisher Description

A rollicking, rich portrait of a life. And what a life! By one of our greatest actors.

Plummer tells how “this young bilingual wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten, tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big bad world of theatre, not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down,” and writes of his early acting days as an eighteen-year-old playing the lead in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

We see his glorious New York of the fifties, where life began at midnight, with the likes of Arthur Miller, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Paddy Chayefsky, and how Plummer’s own Broadway world developed and swept him along through the last Golden Age the American Theatre would ever remember . . . how the sublime Ruth Chatterton (“she might have been created by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis”) introduced him to the right people in New York . . . how Miss Eva Le Gallienne gave Plummer his Broadway debut at twenty-five in The Starcross Story (“It opened and closed in one night! One solitary night! But what a night!”).

He writes about his film career: The Sound of Music (affectionately dubbed “S&M”) . . . Inside Daisy Clover, which brought him together with the beautiful Natalie Wood . . . John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (Plummer was Rudyard Kipling). He tells the story of accepting Sir Laurence Olivier’s invitation to join the National Theatre Company, playing in Amphytron directed by Olivier himself (“a great actor but lousy director”), and writes about falling deeply in love with and eventually marrying a young actress and dancer, Elaine Taylor—to this day, his “one true strength.”

Seamlessly written, with stories that make us laugh out loud and that make real the fascinating, complex, exuberant adventure that is the actor’s (at least this actor’s) life.

GENRE
Biographies & Memoirs
NARRATOR
CP
Christopher Plummer
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
16:37
hr min
RELEASED
2013
August 13
PUBLISHER
Random House Audio
SIZE
520.4
MB

Customer Reviews

Broadwaybossman ,

A mandatory read for any Theatre aficionado

This book was, for me, one of the finest autobiographies I have ever read about the theatre profession. It was a parallel in its excellence to Moss Hart’s “Act One”and John Lithgow’s “Drama An Actor’s Education.”

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