This book is a window into the world of Danny Dyer - and he's seen more of the world than most so he's got one or two things to say about it. Tackling such vital questions as 'Where have all the old school boozers gone?' 'Are there such things as ghosts?' and 'Am I middle class?' Danny shares his unique take on life with characteristic honesty and humour and reveals why it is that: * What goes around comes around - he learnt the hard way * You can take the boy out of the East End but you can't take the East End out of the boy * Harold Pinter is a diamond geezer * He told the media training expert to do one * Science can prove that West Ham are the best football club in the world * Him and Joanne are like a team - he's Paul Gascoigne, she's David Batty * The human race isn't evolved enough for Twitter So, hold on to your titfer, it's gonna be a bumpy ride!

The first full length academic study of Hepburn's star persona and films featuring reseach into the experience of British women who have admired her in the 1950s, 1960s and the 1990s. Examines the historical specificity of discourses of feminity circulating around Hepburn and her female fans, suggesting that the flexibility of Hepburn's image has contributed to her enduring appeal. Makes a significant contribution to the growing field of star studies. Argues that class and gender are siginifcant factors in the relatonship between stars and audiences. -- .

Funny yet down-to-earth, honest yet full of exaggeration, actor Walter Matthau (1920-2000) will always occupy a place in America's heart as one of the great comic talents of his generation. Born Walter Matuschanskayasky into Jewish tenements on New York's Lower East Side, he was a child actor in New York Yiddish theater, and later a World War II Air Force radioman-gunner. He paid dues for ten years on Broadway, in summer stock, and on television before landing his film debut The Kentuckian in 1955. By the time of his 1968 casting as cantankerous but lovable slob Oscar Madison in the film version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, Matthau had won major Hollywood stardom. Based on dozens of interviews and extensive research, this book covers the breadth of his often-complicated personal life and multi-faceted career, including his unforgettable performances in such films as The Fortune Cookie, A Guide for the Married Man, Plaza Suite, Charley Varrick, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Sunshine Boys, The Bad News Bears, California Suite, and Grumpy Old Men.

Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics is a landmark celebration of the remarkable life and career of a country music and pop culture legend.

As told by Dolly Parton in her own inimitable words, explore the songs that have defined her journey. Illustrated throughout with previously unpublished images from Dolly Parton's personal and business archives.

Mining over 60 years of songwriting, Dolly Parton highlights 150 of her songs and brings readers behind the lyrics.

• Packed with never-before-seen photographs and classic memorabilia
• Explores personal stories, candid insights, and myriad memories behind the songs

Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics reveals the stories and memories that have made Dolly a beloved icon across generations, genders, and social and international boundaries.

Containing rare photos and memorabilia from Parton's archives, this book is a show-stopping must-have for every Dolly Parton fan.

• Learn the history behind classic Parton songs like "Jolene," "9 to 5," "I Will Always Love You," and more.
• The perfect gift for Dolly Parton fans (everyone loves Dolly!) as well as lovers of music history and country

Add it to the shelf with books like Coat of Many Colors by Dolly Parton, The Beatles Anthology by The Beatles, and Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen.

Paris has always exerted a magnetic force on artists; it has historically offered safety to those escaping oppressive regimes in Europe and farther afield. In recent years it has welcomed performers, artists and intellectuals from all over the world, offering strategies for the practice of theatre in a new Europe of ever-shifting boundaries. This book, once again available in paperback, examines the creation and development of communities of actors, directors, designers and playwrights in Paris over the past thirty years. It shows how the willingness of the city to welcome international influences has enriched its creative life. Many of the most important trends and new developments in the art of theatre have been the direct result of the creative combination of influences from all over the world. This study demonstrates how the pioneering work of Brook, Boal, Mnouchkine, Lecoq and many others has been able to draw on this vibrant, multi-cultural mix, in turn creating new work that has enriched theatre's potential to enlarge our thinking and our imagination. -- .

Vividly bringing to light the tradition of physical comedy in the French cabaret, cafe-concert, and early French film comedy, this book answers the perplexing question, "Why do the French love Jerry Lewis?" The extraordinary emphasis on nervous pathology in the Parisian cafe-concert, where the genres of the Epileptic Singer and the Idiot Comic took center stage, and where popular comic monologues and songs included "Man with a Tic" and "I'm Neurasthenic," points to a fascinating intersection between medicine and popular culture. The French tradition of comic performance style between 1870 and 1910 nearly exactly duplicates the movements, gestures, tics, grimaces, and speech anomalies found in nineteenth-century hysteria; the characteristics of hysteria became a new aesthetics.
Early French film comedy carried on this tradition of frenetic gesture and gait, as most film performers came from these entertainments and from the circus. Even before Chaplin's films triumphed in France, film comics were instantly recognizable from their pathological gait, just as Jacques Tati would be a half-century later. Comedy, a genre that dominated French cinema until World War I, has often been linked to a mass public for film; the author elucidates this link by proposing a broadly generalized cultural-medical phenomenon as the explanation for the dominance of the comic genre. Comic performance style drew from a group of nervous disorders characterized by the psychological automatism emanating from the "lower faculties" nervous reflex, motor impulses, sensation, and instinct.
Building on her previous work on hysteria, the cabaret, and pathologies of movement in the films of Georges Melies, and drawing on over 400 French films made between 1896 and 1915, the author contributes to a new theory of spectatorship at work in the cabaret, in shows of magnetizers, and in early French film comedy. Jerry Lewis touches a nerve in French cultural memory because, more than any other film comic, he incarnates this tradition of performance style.

James Bawden: Seeing the way people behave when they're around you, is it still fun being Cary Grant? Cary Grant: I don't like to disappoint people. Because he's a completely made-up character and I'm playing a part. It's a part I've been playing a long time, but no way am I really Cary Grant. A friend told me once, "I always wanted to be Cary Grant." And I said, "So did I." -- from the bookIn Conversations with Classic Film Stars, retired journalists James Bawden and Ron Miller present an astonishing collection of rare interviews with the greatest celebrities of Hollywood's golden age. Conducted over the course of more than fifty years, they recount intimate conversations with some of the most famous leading men and women of the era, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joseph Cotten, Cary Grant, Gloria Swanson, Joan Fontaine, Loretta Young, Kirk Douglas, and many more. Each interview takes readers behind the scenes with some of cinema's most iconic stars. The actors convey unforgettable stories, from Maureen O'Hara discussing Charles Laughton's request that she change her last name, to Bob Hope candidly commenting on the presidential honors bestowed upon him. Humorous, enlightening, and poignant, Conversations with Classic Film Stars is essential reading for anyone who loves classic movies.

Since the turn of the century, Sherlock Holmes has captured the imagination of readers, and, after his move to both television and movies, generations of viewers. While Holmes has been portrayed by many distinguished actors, few have done it with the class, humor, and aplomb that Peter Cushing brought to the role. Written by noted British film journalist Tony Earnshaw, An Actor and a Rare One: Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes follows the career of Peter Cushing, one of England's finest actors, as he worked his way up from regional theater to the role of the world's most famous consulting detective. This book details Cushing's career as Holmes through anecdotes and reminiscences as told by his colleagues and Cushing himself. A fascinating, often humorous behind-the-scenes look at one of the century's great actors in one of the century's greatest roles.

Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity is a revealing probe into the life and times of Mario Moreno, Latin America's most famous film star from the 1940s to the 1970s. This book helps to illuminate the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Mexico. Cantinflas (Moreno's film persona) was the most popular movie star in Mexican history. A fast-talking, nonsensical character, he helped Mexicans embrace their rich mestizo identity and cope with the difficulties of modernization. For thirty years he served as a 'weapon of the weak, ' satirizing corrupt officials and pompous elites who victimized Mexico's urban poor.

This is a valuable text for courses on Mexican history and Latin American film.

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier's insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier's intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator's engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.

The is the tale of a cheeky little sod from Salford called Jason growing up surrounded by his properly funny and most definitely shameless family and his discovery that being funny might actually get him somewhere. Other than detention, mugged, dumped or sacked that is. It's about being part of a big, northern, working-class family forever struggling with money, but never short on laughs or misadventures, who show that when the chips are down what really matters is sticking together.

Mans here to help you help yourself. Real talk. One thing you've got to know about advice: there are two types. Sometimes the people who give the most advice to others are the last people you should be listening to. They just love the sound of their own voice. No matter what the problem is, they'll just say: 'Believe in yourself, you can do anything.' And then ... well, then there's the kind of advice that's just the truth. That's the sort of advice you might get from this book, and I'll warn you sometimes the truth ain't pretty. In these pages I'm gonna tell you some of my story and show you how you can change yours: how to survive school, how to get a job, how to deal with family, friends, love and PAIN. How to live your own life, not someone else's.

Over 40 years ago, millions of kids ran home from school every day to catch the adventures of vampire Barnabas Collins and his family of werewolves, witches and other creatures.
Dark Shadows remains one of the most popular cult TV shows of all time. "Barnabas & Company" tells the tale of the marvelous actors and actresses who came together in a tiny studio in New York City to make magic. Through the performers' own words, read about the paths that led them to the fictional haunted hamlet of Collinsport, Maine and beyond.
Learn about the show and the actors that inspired the 2012 Tim Burton-Johnny Depp major motion picture "Dark Shadows." Included are updated chapters on Jonathan Frid, Kate Jackson, David Selby and interviews with Humbert Allen Astredo, Betsy Durkin, Robert Rodan, Jerry Lacy, Lara Parker, Denise Nickerson, Conard Fowkes, Addison Powell, Christopher Pennock and more

During the course of a career that began in the late 1940s, Lenny Bruce challenged the sanctity of organized religion and other societal and political conventions he widened the boundaries of free speech. Critic Ralph Gleason said, So many taboos have been lifted and so many comics have rushed through the doors Lenny opened. He utterly changed the world of comedy."Although Bruce died when he was only forty, his influence on the worlds of comedy, jazz, and satire are incalculable. How to Talk Dirty and Influence People remains a brilliant existential account of his life and the forces that made him the most important and controversial entertainer in history.

Let the games begin and may the biggest ego win This book dishes the dirt with stories of every word uttered, letter written, or fist swung from the cantankerous stars' first calamitous encounters to their deathbed declarations. Tiffs include: Madonna vs. Sandra Bernhard; Johnny Carson vs. Joan Rivers; Elton John vs. David Bowie; and Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford. Exposing the shocking tactics of the most bitter rivals in the entertainment industry and the vindictive, unseen ire of stars, this book reveals Hollywood with all its claws bared.

Jim Morrison, in all his sensitivity and bombast blast into stardom in the late 1960s as the lead singer of The Doors. Were the beams of his star manipulated and mastered by sinister forces while he stood by rejecting authority? Did the turmoil inside the poet drive him into the spotlight only to leave him questioning its validity while secretly reaching for the hand of all he'd rejected? Michael J Bollinger examines the singers rise and fall and delves into Jim Morrison's search for what awaited him beyond deaths door.