248 results for "Biography"

By Myself and Then Some

Lauren Bacall
The epitome of grace, independence, and wit, Lauren Bacall continues to project an audacious spirit and pursue on-screen excellence. The product of an extraordinary mother and a loving extended family, she produced, with Humphrey Bogart, some of the most electric and memorable scenes in movie history. After tragically losing Bogart, she returned to New York and a brilliant career in the theatre. A two-time Tony winner, she married and later divorced her second love, Jason Robards, and never lost sight of the strength that made her a star. Now, thirty years after the publication of her original National Book Award–winning memoir, Bacall has added new material to her inspiring history. In her own frank and beautiful words, one of our most enduring actresses reveals the remarkable true story of a lifetime so rich with incident and achievement that Hollywood itself would be unable to adequately reproduce it.
HarperCollins 2006-10-31 512 pages

Married to Laughter A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara

Jerry Stiller
From his initial success in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village with Anne Meara, who would be the love of his life, to his serenity-seeking days on Seinfeld and later on The King of Queens, Jerry Stiller has consistently proven himself to be a force in showbiz. In Married to Laughter, he brings us into his world and recounts, in a tone that is laugh-out-loud funny and strikingly honest, his passion for entertainment and working with people such as Ed Sullivan, Mike Nichols, Robin Williams, and Jerry Seinfeld, who were there along the way. At the heart of this tale is Stiller's partnership, both onstage and off, with Anne Meara. He shares the affectionate story of their long-surviving relationship, spotlighting the pleasures and challenges of raising a family in an interfaith show business marriage. Married to Laughter is the story of an actor who never let go of his dreams, but ultimately it is the story of two people who found their place in show business without losing sight of each other.
Simon & Schuster 2001-09-05 336 pages

The Doors A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years

Greil Marcus
A fan from the moment the Doors' first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock & roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour—every hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult of both Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later, it is a new story.
PublicAffairs 2013-04-09 224 pages

Elizabeth Taylor My Love Affair with Jewelry

Elizabeth Taylor
She has mesmerized movie audiences since her debut in National Velvet at the age of twelve, dazzled both men and women with her luminous beauty and iconic presence, displayed shrewd business acumen by creating a line of fragrances with unparalleled success, and her AIDS activism has been a call to arms for people around the world. She is Hollywood's greatest living star and a living legend -- Elizabeth Taylor. One of her greatest passions is jewelry, and over the years she has amassed one of the world's foremost collections. By the time she was in her thirties, Elizabeth Taylor already owned an outstanding set of Burmese rubies and diamonds from Cartier, a fantastic emerald and diamond suite from Bulgari, and the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond, a gift from Richard Burton. That ring was later eclipsed by a subsequent gift from Burton, when he bought a staggering 69.42-carat pear-shaped diamond. Newly named the Taylor-Burton Diamond, it catapulted Elizabeth Taylor into that rarefied pantheon of great jewelry collectors.
Simon & Schuster 2002 239 pages

The Lives of John Lennon

Albert Goldman
The result of six years of research and some 1,200 interviews, this book takes fans deep into Lennon’s secretive world, from his traumatic childhood to his Beatles days to his hidden life with Yoko Ono. While the Lennon of legend enjoyed a gifted and inspired life, the private Lennon lived in torment, poisoning himself with drugs and self-hatred. The Lives of John Lennon exposed for the first time all of his various lives, from idealist to cynic, from ascetic to junkie. It is a lasting tribute to his brilliant achievements and a revelation of the price he paid for them.
A Capella 2001 719 pages

She made me laugh: my friend Nora Ephron

Cohen, Richard M.
“A very personal remembrance of Nora Ephron’s life and loves, and her ups and downs” ( USA TODAY ) by her long-time and dear friend Richard Cohen in a hilarious, blunt, raucous, and poignant recollection of their decades-long friendship. Nora Ephron (1941–2012) was a phenomenal personality, journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and movie director ( Sleepless in Seattle ; You’ve Got Mail ; When Harry Met Sally ; Heartburn ; Julie & Julia ). She wrote a slew of bestsellers ( I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman ; I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections ; Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media ; Crazy Salad : Some Things About Women ). She was celebrated by Hollywood, embraced by literary New York, and adored by legions of fans throughout the world. Award-winning journalist Richard Cohen, wrote this about She Made Me Laugh : “I call this book a third-person memoir. It is about my closest friend, Nora Ephron, and the lives we lived together and how her life got to be bigger until, finally, she wrote her last work, the play, Lucky Guy , about a newspaper columnist dying of cancer while she herself was dying of cancer. I have interviewed many of her other friends—Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Arianna Huffington—but the book is not a name-dropping star turn, but an attempt to capture a remarkable woman who meant so much to so many other women.” With “the nuanced perspective of a confidant” ( The Washington Post ), She Made Me Laugh “is a fine tribute to a fascinating woman” ( Houston Chronicle ): “Nora would be pleased” ( People , “Book of the Week”).
Simon & Schuster 2016-09 299 pages

Goldwyn A Biography

A. Scott Berg
The biography of legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn--from the National Book Award-winning author of "Lindbergh" and "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius". "Moving, funny, compassionate and richly entertaining . . . The book proves worthy of what would be, in context, the highest praise of all: It has The Goldwyn touch".--"The Washington Post Book World". Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Random House Value Publishing 1993-06-08

I'll Never Change My Name An Immigrant's American Dream from Ukraine to the USA to Dancing with the Stars

Valentin Chmerkovskiy
"Val embodies what it means to live the American dream." — Robin Roberts, Good Morning America Valentin Chmerkovskiy, the world championship-winning and beloved Dancing with the Stars ballroom dancer invites fans into his life as never before, sharing the experiences, including the failures and successes, that have shaped him, from his early childhood in Ukraine to growing up as an immigrant in the U.S. to his rise to international fame. Val has captivated viewers of Dancing with the Stars since his first performance in 2011. While DWTS demonstrates Val’s beautiful physicality, this moving memoir illuminates his soul, revealing a deep, thoughtful person who channels his emotions and socially conscious views through his art. The beloved dance champion and choreographer assesses his life and career so far—where he’s come from and where he hopes to go. For the first time, Val looks back at his childhood in Odessa, Ukraine, and his Jewish family’s immigration to the United States—including what it was like to grow up as a stranger desperate to fit into a different culture, how he worked to become a premiere dancer, and, of course, the collaborations and competitions with his brother and fellow DWTS sensation, Maksim "Maks" Chmerkovskiy. Val speaks warmly of his close-knit family and shares intimate and inspiring stories meant to offer hope and motivation not only to fans but to everyone with a dream. Enduring anti-Semitism in their native land, Val’s parents wanted a better life for their children—a desire that led them to leave everything they knew and start again thousands of miles away in a foreign country. It was a gamble that paid off—after years of practice and discipline, Val, along with his older brother Maks, have reached the pinnacle of success. Though he admits he sometimes still feels like an outsider, Val expresses his enduring gratitude for everything that America represents and pays homage to his adopted nation and the opportunities it has afforded him and his family. Inspiring, heartfelt, and compulsively readable—and showcasing sixteen-pages of never-before-seen photographs, as well as a foreword by brother Maks—Val’s memoir is filled with the moments that have moved and shaped him, and is sure to touch readers’ hearts as well.
HarperCollins 2019-02-19 336 pages

Tell It to My Heart How I Lost My S#*t, Conquered My Fear, and Found My Voice

Taylor Dayne,Dave Smitherman
Tell It to My Heart: How I Lost My S#*T, Conquered My Fear, and Found My Voice captures Taylor Dayne's ascent against all odds, and the stories behind the dance soundtrack of our lives. From her early life growing up in a challenging blue-collar Long Island home in the 1960s and 1970s through her years touring as a chart-topping musician through New York, LA, Shanghai, London, Paris, and Tokyo in the 1980s and 1990s, she tells-almost-all about her experiences with renowned talents including Michael Jackson, Elton John, and Whitney Houston. Readers will be immersed in her enduring 30-year career, performing for audiences worldwide, as she raises twins as a single mother by choice. Taylor has a powerful voice, not only as a singer, but as a storyteller as well. Her personal journey is proof that childhood reverie can become reality. The humor, strength, resilience and grace that led her to stardom are woven through the scenes of her book--showing how vulnerability turns out to be strength, and how strength comes from somewhere inside when you least expect it. Tell It to My Heart should be read by fans, musicians, artists, and women of all ages. She inspires us to live our lives with courage--to raise our voices, to take action, to believe in ourselves, and to never give up on our dreams. Taylor describes her memoir: "It's gritty, it's real, and it's truthful. It's about love, which is good even when it doesn't last, and God, who is good, even when it seems like He's being kind of a dick. It's also about friendship, but most of all, it's about the voice which was my salvation. At fifty-fffrrshx, I feel like I'm the closest I've ever been to knowing peace, knowing who I am and what I need. Loving, learning, mentoring and mothering--these are tall tasks that require a strong backbone of authenticity and integrity. I hope this book will inspire readers to do the same."
Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing 2019-02-14 244 pages

Breathing Out

Peggy Lipton,David Dalton,Coco Dalton
Peggy Lipton's overnight success as Julie Barnes on television's hit The Mod Squad made her an instant fashion icon and the "it" girl everyone-from Elvis to Paul McCartney-wanted to date. She was the original and ultimate California girl of the early seventies, complete with stick-straight hair, a laid-back style, and a red convertible. But Lipton was much more: smart and determined to not be just another leggy blonde, she struggled for a way to stay connected to her childhood roots, though her coming of age had not been an easy one. And when she fell in love with Quincy Jones, that wasn't easy, either: their biracial marriage made headlines and changed her life. Lipton's passionate and complicated seventeen-year marriage to Jones plunged her into motherhood and also into periods of confusion and difficulty. Her struggle to keep moving forward in the world while maintaining a rich inner life informed many of her decisions as an adult. When Lipton's marriage to Jones ended, she returned to television, appearing in David Lynch's Twin Peaks as well as in The Vagina Monologues and other stage productions. But her most recent triumph has been her overcoming a surprising diagnosis of colon cancer in 2003. Breathing Out is full of fresh stories of life with the pop culture icons of our times, but is also a much more thoughtful book about life in the limelight, work, motherhood, and marriage. It's a refreshing and real look at the life of an actress who became, in many senses, a woman of her times.
St. Martin's Press 2006-08-08 320 pages

The Book of Joan

Melissa Rivers
Joan Rivers was known all over the world-from the Palace Theater to Buckingham Palace, from the bright lights of Las Vegas to the footlights of Broadway, from the days of talkies to hosting talk shows. But there was only one person who knew Joan intimately, one person who the authorities would call when she got a little out of hand. Her daughter and best friend, Melissa. Joan and Melissa Rivers had one of the most celebrated mother-daughter relationships of all time. If you think Joan said some outrageous things to her audiences as a comedian, you won't believe what she said and did in private. Her love for her daughter knew no bounds-or boundaries, apparently. ('Melissa, I acknowledge that you have boundaries. I just choose to not respect them.') In The Book of Joan- Tales of Mirth, Mischief and Manipulation, Melissa shares stories (like when she was nine months old and her parents delivered her to Johnny Carson as a birthday gift), bon mots ('Missy, is there anything better than seeing a really good-looking couple pushing a baby that looks like a Sasquatch who got caught in a house fire?'), and life lessons from growing up in the Rosenberg-Rivers household ('I can do tips and discounts and figure out the number of gay men in an audience to make it a good show.That's all the math you'll ever need.'). These were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to life in the family that Melissa describes as more Addams than Cleaver.And at the center of it all was a tiny blond force of nature. The Book of Joan is full offunny, poignant and irreverent observations, thoughts, and tales about the woman who raised Melissa and is the reason she considers Valium one of the four basic food groups.
Penguin Books India PVT, Limited 2015-05-27 304 pages

Where Did I Go Right? You're No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead

Bernie Brillstein
Where Did I Go Right? is Brillstein's street-smart, funny, and thoroughly human story of a life in show business. With his trademark wit and candor, he speaks out for the first time about his feud with Mike Ovitz, and how it felt to pass the leadership of his company to his partner, Brad Grey, and no longer be the king. He describes his close relationship with John Belushi and what it was like being alone with Belushi's body as it lay stretched out across two cramped seats in a tiny jet, wrapped up in a body bag on the way to his funeral. He shares stories about Jim Henson and Gilda Radner, about Lorne Michaels and the early days of Saturday Night Live.
Phoenix Books, Incorporated 2008 383 pages

Rembrandt's Eyes

Simon Schama
For Rembrandt as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance; the strutting and mincing; the wardrobe and the face paint; the full repertoire of gesture and grimace; the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes; the belly laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle, and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon; to shake a fist or uncover a breast; how to sin and how to atone; how to commit murder and how to commit suicide. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between. More than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt remains the most deeply loved of all the great masters of painting, his face so familiar to us from the self-portraits painted at every stage in his life, yet still so mysterious. As with Shakespeare, the facts of his life are hard to come by; the Leiden miller's son who briefly found fame in Amsterdam, whose genius was fitfully recognized by his contemporaries, who fell into bankruptcy and died in poverty. So there is probably no other painter whose life has engendered more legends, nor to whom more unlikely pictures have been attributed (a process now undergoing rigorous reversal). "Rembrandt's Eyes," about which Simon Schama has been thinking for more than twenty years, shows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be discovered in his pictures. Though a succession of superbly incisive descriptions and interpretations of Rembrandt'spaintings threaded into his narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly and to think about it afresh. But this book moves far beyond the bounds of conventional biography or art history. With extraordinary imaginative sympathy, Schama conjures up the world in which Rembrandt moved -- its sounds, smells and tastes as well as its politics; the influences on him of the wars of the Protestant United Provinces against Spain, of the extreme Calvinism of his native Leiden, of the demands of patrons and the ambitions of contemporaries; the importance of his beloved Saskia and, after her death (Rembrandt was later forced to sell her grave, so complete was his ruin), of his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels; and, above all, the profound effect on him of the great master of the immediately preceding generation, the Catholic painter from Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens: "the prince of painters and the painter of princes" with whom Rembrandt was obsessed for the first part of his life, and whose career was the shaping force that drove Rembrandt to test the farthest reaches of his own originality. "Rembrandt's Eyes" shows us "why" Rembrandt is such a thrilling painter, so revolutionary in his art, so penetrating of the hearts of those who have looked for three hundred years at his pictures. Above all, Schama's understanding of Rembrandt's mind and the dynamic of his life allows him to re-create Rembrandt's life on the page. Through a combination of scholarship and literary skill, Schama allows us to actually see that life through Rembrandt's own eyes. In overcoming the paucity of conventional historical evidence, it is the most intelligently true biography of Rembrandt that has ever beenwritten, and the most dazzling achievement to date of the art historian whose work has been hailed as "marvelously rich and eloquent" ... "rare, imaginative" ... "provocative" ... "astoundingly learned with verve, humor, and an unflagging sense of delight" ... that of "a master storyteller ... and a master of history."* Quotes from the "New York Times Book Review, Time," the "New York Times, The Independent on Sunday," and "Nature," respectively. "From the Hardcover edition."
Alfred A. Knopf 1999 750 pages

You Gotta Want It

Jake Paul
A humorous, motivational memoir in the vein of Tyler Oakley's Binge and Marcus Butler's Hello Life, from high-energy comedic social media phenomenon Jake Paul. How do you become Vine famous? What is life like when you have millions of followers on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. In this extremely positive, motivational, and often laugh-out-loud memoir, unstoppable Jake Paul pauses long enough from his super-charged life as a nineteen-year-old social media superstar and smiling heartthrob on the Disney Channel series Bizaardvark to share his takes on life, love, fame, and shooting for your dreams. From growing up a regular kid with his brother (and fellow social media star) Logan to his goals and aspirations as he became Vine famous to the bullying and jealousy he experienced to the crazy, creative, behind-the-scenes details of his life in Hollywood as a teen powerhouse, Jake shares the most hysterical and intimate details of his life--all with his signature humor and honesty and you-gotta-want-it attitude that has won him millions of devoted followers.
Simon & Schuster, Limited 2016-11 240 pages