An Actor's Life: From First Night to Final Curtain a Theatrical Anthology

247 Pages. Red Cloth with Gold spine lettering and decoration. Dust jacket price 19.99 (British Pound) is unclipped. Unread book. Anyone considering acting as a career would be well advised to read this entertaining anthology by Philip Franks before making a decision. Meanwhile, those who have tried acting --- successfully or otherwise --- and those who have worked with actors, lived with them, or simply watched them from the stalls, will find much that is amusing. For in his selection of poetry and prose Franks runs the whole gamut of the span experiences, from wayward juvenile productions and amateur dramatics to professional acting at its most sublime. We are given graphic accounts of early struggles in the profession from Isadora Duncan and John Osborne, fascinating insights into the craft of acting from Fiona Shaw, and Juliet Stevenson, and some compelling memories of great performers. Kenneth Williams on Laurence Olivier 's Othello, Michael MacLiammoir on the teenage, but already formidable , Orson Welles auditioning in Dublin in 1931 . and Michael Redgrave on falling in love with Edith Evans, his Rosalind in As You Like It. Equally unforgettable are monsters such as the diminutive, demoniacal Edmund Kean; Hollywood's own Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford; and Matita Hunt, affectionately described by Alec Guinness as utterly impossible but easy to forgive. There are memorable literary accounts of mounting or attending plays from the novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, and extracts from Shakespeare's Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and from plays by Chekhov and Pinero, Coward and Stoppard. Songs include Stephen Sondheim's Broadway Baby and Noel Coward 's hilariously dire warning to Mrs. Worthington regarding her daughter. The work of poets ranging from Tennyson to Roger McGough completes this multi-faceted celebration of the routine, the rigours and the rapture of an actor 's life. Contents in Ten Parts: Childhood, Born in a Trunk, Am Dram, Training and Theory, Starting Out, Odd Jobs, Success, Failure, Monsters, and Old Age and Beyond.