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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMaggie Smith
Michael Coveney · 353 pages
"No one does glamour, severity, girlish charm or tight-lipped witticism better than Dame Maggie Smith. Michael Coveney's biography shines a light on the life and career of a truly remarkable performer, one whose stage and screen career spans six decades. From her days as a West End star of comedy and revue, Dame Maggie's path would cross with those of the greatest actors, playwrights and directors
Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep
Michael Schulman · 336 pages
The first thoroughly researched biography of Meryl Streep -- the "Iron Lady" of acting, nominated for nineteen Oscars and winner of three -- that explores her beginnings as a young woman of the 1970s grappling with love, feminism, and her astonishing talent.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt · 430 pages
"How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare? Stephen Greenblatt enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life - full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger - could have become the world's greatest playwright. Greenblatt makes inspired connections between an entertainment presented to Queen Elizabeth on a vi
Hamilton: The Revolution
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeremy McCarter · 287 pages
Offers a behind-the-scenes view of Hamilton the musical, detailing the many dramatic episodes in Alexander Hamilton's life.
Shakespeare: The Biography
Peter Ackroyd · 572 pages
Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape--the industry, the animals, even the flow
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
John Lahr · 765 pages
Here, celebrated drama critic John Lahr gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds light on Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even
The Invisible Woman
Claire Tomalin · 352 pages
A portrait of nineteenth-century actress Ellen Ternan, the woman who was the mistress of Charles Dickens, describing her secret relationship with the author.
Shakespeare: The World as Stage
Bill Bryson · 208 pages
William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected a
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Steve Martin · 216 pages
The author shares the stories of his years in stand-up comedy in a humorous memoir that recalls a first job selling guidebooks at Disneyland, his early magic and comedy act, his years of honing his craft, and the sacrifice, discipline, and originality it took to take him to the top.
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
James Knowlson · 872 pages
Damned to Fame follows the reclusive literary giant's life from his birth in Foxrock, a rural suburb of Dublin, in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989. Knowlson brilliantly re-creates Beckett's early years as a struggling author in Paris, his travels through Germany in 1936-37 as the Nazis were consolidating their power, his service in the French Resistance during World War II, and the years of li
James Dean, The Mutant King : A Biography
David Dalton · 361 pages
Oscar Wilde
Richard Ellmann · 680 pages
In this long-awaited biography, Wilde the legendary Victorian--brilliant writer and conversationalist, reckless flouter of social and sexual conventions--is brought to life. More astute and forbearing, yet more fallible than legend has allowed, Wilde is given here the dimensions of a modern hero. The author depicts Wilde's comet-like ascent on the Victorian scene and his equally dramatic sudden ec
Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson · 631 pages
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years -- as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues -- Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industrie
Jim Henson: The Biography
Brian Jay Jones · 585 pages
"For the first time ever-- a comprehensive biography of one of the twentieth century's most innovative creative artists: the incomparable, irreplaceable Jim Henson. He was a gentle dreamer whose genial bearded visage was recognized around the world, but most people got to know him only through the iconic characters he created: Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Miss Piggy, Big Bird. The Muppets mad
Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century
Sam Kashner, Nancy Schoenberger · 500 pages
The definitive story of Hollywood's most famous coupleHe was a tough-guy Welshman softened by the affections of a breathtakingly beautiful woman; she was a modern-day Cleopatra madly in love with her own Mark Antony. For nearly a quarter of a century, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were Hollywood royalty, and their fiery romance—often called "the marriage of the century"—was the most notoriou
Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them
Frank Langella · 370 pages
Rita Hayworth dancing by candlelight in a small Mexican village; Elizabeth Taylor devouring homemade pasta and tenderly wrapping him in her pashmina scarf; streaking for Sir Laurence Olivier in a drafty English castle; terrifying a dozing Jackie Onassis; carrying an unconscious Montgomery Clift to safety on a dark New York City street. Captured forever in a unique memoir, Frank Langella's myriad e
Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland
Gerald Clarke · 528 pages
"Judy Garland. The brightest star of the Hollywood musical and an entertainer of almost magical power. Yet much of what has previously been written about her is either inaccurate or incomplete, and the Garland the world thought it knew was merely a sketch for the astonishing woman Gerald Clarke portrays in Get Happy. Here, more than thirty years after her death, is the real Judy.". "Get Happy is,
Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford
Donald Spoto · 336 pages
Crawford was one of the most incandescent film stars of all time, yet she was also one of the most misunderstood. Spoto goes beyond the popular caricature to give us a three-dimensional portrait of a very human woman, her dazzling career, and her extraordinarily dramatic life and times.
Robert Redford: The Biography
Michael Feeney Callan · 608 pages
Draws on the actor, director, and producer's personal documents to offer insight into his complex life behind his famous roles, discussing the death of his son, his relationship with Sydney Pollack, and his establishment of the Sundance Film Festival.