The Star Dressing Room: Portrait of an Actor

THE STAR DRESSING ROOM: Portrait of An Actor is Alan Shayne's affectionate, often uproarious new memoir that takes us back to Broadway's golden age.

Fans of beloved theatre memoirs in the vein of Moss Hart's Act One and Helene Hanff's Underfoot in Show Business are sure to relate to Alan, the perennially broke young actor as he's repeatedly upstaged in acting class by an incredibly arrogant aspiring young performer named Marlon Brando. With great wit, he relives the terror of being an understudy who's never sung or danced on Broadway-but needs to go on for Ricardo Montalban at the last minute opposite the legendary Lena Horne.

THE STAR DRESSING ROOM book is filled with his delightful anecdotes about show business legends of the 1940s and 1950s including Brando, Lena Horne, Gertrude Lawrence, Katharine Cornell, Charlton Heston, Maureen Stapleton, Ricardo Montalban, Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler, Burgess Meredith, Miriam Hopkins, Jack Palance, Martita Hunt, Maurice Evans, Dolores del Rio, Raymond Massey, and Luise Rainer. Greta Garbo, Mary Martin, Lotte Lenya, Elaine Stritch, and Anne Bancroft make cameo appearances.

ALAN SHAYNE was the President of Warner Brothers Television for many years, shepherding hit shows including Alice, Night Court, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Wonder Woman, Growing Pains, and The Dukes of Hazard. He began his career as an actor on Broadway and became awell-known casting director of TV and films such as All the President's Men. He produced TV specials and, after leaving Warners, received an Emmy nomination for producing the mini-series The Bourne Identity.THE STAR DRESSING ROOM is his third memoir. Shayne's dual autobiography with his husband Norman Sunshine, DOUBLE LIFE: A LOVE STORY was published to great acclaim in 2011. Published in 2020, THE RAIN MUST PASS recounts his experiences as a teenager in New England. Alan connects on Cape Cod with a man twice his age in the summer of 1941 and learns more about himself than he ever imagined possible. Shayne and Sunshine also collaborated on the children's Christmas story, THE MINSTREL TREE in 2001. Shayne's mystery/romance novel, FINDING SYLVIA set in Hollywood, Connecticut and around the world, was published in October 2017. He now lives in Palm Beach.