An insightful treat for Andrews' fans.
A warm, entertaining memoir covering the actor’s Hollywood years, from Mary Poppins to That's Life!
In this follow-up to Home: A Memoir of My Early Years (2008), the author devotes equal time to home and work in the period from 1963 to 1986. Her home life was anything but serene. During this period, her marriage to production and costume designer Tony Walton broke up—mostly, writes Andrews, because they were never in the same place at the same time. Their daughter, Emma, co-author of this book, split her time between her parents, and Andrews remarried, this time to director Blake Edwards. His children didn't assimilate easily into the new blended family, and he had a number of problems of his own, including hypochondria, an addiction to prescription pills, a hot temper, and a tendency to be drawn toward “lonely, fragile and usually very pretty young women.” The couple went on to adopt two children from Vietnam while Andrews attempted to deal with an alcoholic mother and stepfather. Meanwhile, she was making movies both successful—notably The Sound of Music—and less so, such as her husband's remake of The Man Who Loved Women. While Andrews is too discreet and canny to settle any scores or burn any bridges with her Hollywood colleagues, and she remains guardedly respectful toward most of her co-workers, she knows how to spin a yarn. Even her experience with the notoriously difficult Alfred Hitchcock comes off as remarkably pleasant, as she describes him explaining which camera lenses would make her look best. Andrews does let loose in her memories of a horrific day during the filming of Hawaii, during which director George Roy Hill seemed to be “getting a slight kick” out of repeated takes of her skirt being set on fire. Entries from the author’s journals add a sense of immediacy, and she ends her account on an up note: “I am profoundly blessed.” That may be true, but it’s also hard not to admire the grit that took her through some taxing personal and professional struggles.
An insightful treat for Andrews' fans.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-34925-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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