IN SPITE OF MYSELF A Memoir

Light shelfwear to DJ and boards. Small crease to back DJ; Nicely INSCRIBED to "David and Arlene" by Plummer with black marker on title page: "Oh. Forever I always miss you & you know why! " The famous actor lived in Weston, CT for the last years of his life, not far from where the Complete Traveller is located. ; B&W Photographs; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 648 pages

From Publisher:

Plummer tells how "this young bilingual wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten, tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big bad world of theatre, not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down," and writes of his early acting days as an eighteen-year-old playing the lead in Shakespeare's Cymbeline.

We see his glorious New York of the fifties, where life began at midnight, with the likes of Arthur Miller, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Paddy Chayefsky, and how Plummer's own Broadway world developed and swept him along through the last Golden Age the American Theatre would ever remember . . . how the sublime Ruth Chatterton ("she might have been created by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis") introduced him to the right people in New York . . . how Miss Eva Le Gallienne gave Plummer his Broadway debut at twenty-five in The Starcross Story ("It opened and closed in one night One solitary night But what a night ").

He writes about his film career: The Sound of Music (affectionately dubbed "S&M") . . . Inside Daisy Clover, which brought him together with the beautiful Natalie Wood . . . John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King (Plummer was Rudyard Kipling). He tells the story of accepting Sir Laurence Olivier's invitation to join the National Theatre Company, playing in Amphytron directed by Olivier himself ("a great actor but lousy director"), and writes about falling deeply in love with and eventually marrying a young actress and dancer, Elaine Taylor--to this day, his "one true strength."

Seamlessly written, with stories that make us laugh out loud and that make real the fascinating, complex, exuberant adventure that is the actor's (at least this actor's) life.

Product Info

ISBN: 0679421629

ISBN-13: 9780679421627

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Year: 2008

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

CompleteTravellerAntiquarianBookstore

Address: 1 Chelsea Court Westport, Connecticut

Website: https://www.ctrarebooks.com

Country: United States