My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir
An Academy Award-winning actress and the internationally bestselling author of Out on a Limb delivers her touching, warm, and headline-making memoir. In My Lucky Stars Shirley MacLaine talks candidly and personally about her four decades in Hollywood, especially about the men and women—her "lucky stars"—who touched and challenged her life.\ \ \ Shirley MacLaine's seven bestselling books have all touched on the film business, but she has never dealt with it...
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Through four decades and more than forty films, Shirley MacLaine has been one of Hollywood's brightest stars, dazzling us with remarkable performances in movies such as The Apartment, The Turning Point, and Terms of Endearment. Now the Academy Award-winning actress turned internationally renowned memoirist takes up her pen to write about the subject she knows best - Hollywood. In My Lucky Stars, she looks back over her forty years as an actress to reveal how the land of dreams and its artistic community - the actors, directors, and producers who became her mentors, lovers, antagonists, and friends - shaped her life, her craft, and the woman she's become. She was a small-town girl with old-fashioned values, a Broadway dancer who'd grown up in the disciplined world of ballet. Then Alfred Hitchcock decided to cast an unknown in his movie The Trouble With Harry, and the nineteen-year-old hoofer went from grueling workouts and eight shows a week to the pampered yet bewildering life of a star in a town where the line between fantasy and reality is often blurred. Shirley made a madcap movie with her childhood idols Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis - and witnessed the trauma of their breakup. She was part of Sinatra's Clan and learned to roll with the punches during wildly unpredictable shoots. And in the middle of Two for the Seesaw and My Geisha, she found herself head over heels in love with her complex leading men. Here she writes perceptively of these special people and pays tribute to many other stars she cherishes, among them Jack Lemmon, Elizabeth Taylor, Anthony Hopkins, Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, and Barbra Streisand. The leading actress in some of the most memorable films ever made, nominated six times for an Oscar, Shirley also offers a fascinating glimpse into how she builds her characters - detail by detail - from the outside in. She shares, with sometimes startling candor, highlights of her professional relationship with the demanding genius Bob Fosse; th Publishers Weekly Maclaine's first book to be devoted exclusively to her insights into Hollywood includes reminisces about stars such as Nicholson and Sinatra. (Nov.)
\ Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly\ Maclaine's first book to be devoted exclusively to her insights into Hollywood includes reminisces about stars such as Nicholson and Sinatra. (Nov.)\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalNo UFOs or clairvoyants here; just MacLaine on her long Hollywood career.\ \ \ Ilene CooperMacLaine has taken her readers along on outward and inward journeys over the years, but this time she takes them back in time to look at her career and the celebrities she has met along the way. These luminaries, the "lucky stars" of the title, are the women and men (mostly men) who influenced her both professionally and emotionally, though with MacLaine, the two categories tend to overlap. Some of the personal revelations that come to light here--the accounts of her affairs with Danny Kaye and Robert Mitchum and her probing portrait of Frank Sinatra--have already received much attention in the press, but there's more to this book than gossip. MacLaine does a credible job of weaving her biography with her New Age philosophy, and some of the synergistic events in her life make for compelling reading. Equally interesting is her take on Hollywood, both old and new, and her version of the struggles of the artistic life. The only time MacLaine gets off the track a bit is when she tries her hand at psychoanalysis. All in all, though, this is a perfectly enjoyable star biography, several cuts above the genre's usual output. Let's hope MacLaine's next life will be as interesting as this one.\ \
