Synopsis
The memoirs of the popular Hollywood actor and television star. Malden was able to rise above an impoverished childhood amid the mills of Gary, Indiana to become one of the most accomplished actors of his generation.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-11-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 368 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 23.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
As an actor, Karl Malden has won both an Oscar and an Emmy, in a career that has spanned over fifty years. In this witty, frank, graceful memoir, filled with unforgettable anecdotes of the stage and screen, he writes with uncomplicated directness, insight, and humor of his life as an actor and of the people he worked with in plays like All My Sons and A Streetcar Named Desire, and films such as On the Waterfront, Baby Doll, One-Eyed Jacks, I Confess, Gypsy, Patton, and Nuts. Malden writes with passionate intensity about his childhood and his upbringing, and about the enormous influence his father - a proud, traditional, and authoritarian Serb - had over him, giving him the values that have sustained him throughout a long career. He also writes in fascinating detail of his experiences at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, and of the changes in Hollywood that came with the demise of the moguls like Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Darryl Zanuck.
Industry Reviews
This memoir is a peripatetic selection of Malden's encounters with larger-than-life Broadway figures. For younger readers, Malden is known as the star of The Streets of San Francisco and American Express commercials; but many will remember him for his role as Mitch in the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire and his many theatrical accomplishments. Growing up poor in Gary, Indiana, the son of a Serbian mill worker, Malden had to struggle to realize his dream. But after a stint at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, he headed for New York City, where he was to work with legendary figures like Kazan, Strasberg, and Brando. The 1950s was Broadway's heyday but also the time of blacklisting, and Malden paints a vivid picture here of those times. Moreover, the actor eschews the "down-and-dirty tell-all memoir" so common now to offer his views on the various acting techniques and methods he came upon. Recommended for all collections. Rosellen Brewer, Monterey Bay Area Cooperative Lib. System, Cal.
Moore
Malden's memoir captures the qualities of his best performances: it's intelligent, gritty, unexpectedly joyful and utterly convincing. The well-known character actor he won an Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire and later became the much imitated hard-nosed detective Mike Stone on TV's The Streets of San Francisco was born Mladen Sekulovich in 1913 in the Serbian community of Gary, Indiana. He worked in the steel mills before making the unusual leap to the Goodman Theater in Chicago and, from there, to the New York stage. In the first half of his book, Malden's early struggle to make it as an actor is interposed with his wry memories of the internecine struggles within the famous Group Theatre, among such luminaries as Harold Clurman and future film directors Martin Ritt and Elia Kazan. A brilliant but mercurial Marlon Brando figures prominently in Malden's often uproarious stories of the making of Streetcar (both the play and the film), On the Waterfront and One-Eyed Jacks. Just as entertaining, and as unsentimental, is his advice to a young, stagey Michael Douglas when the two were grinding out episodes of Streets: "When you do s***," Malden told him, "do it fast." Malden, writing here with his screenwriter daughter Carla, comes off as a riveting dinner-table raconteur, one who pauses often to acknowledge his astonishingly patient wife of 58 years. He is, in short, a model of wit and self-deprecating charm in these plain-spoken, extremely entertaining recollections. (Nov.)
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