Acting

How many books are there about Shakespeare? A study published in the 1970s claimed a figure of 11,000, and today a search of the British Library catalogue yields 12,554 titles that contain the playwright’s name. But good short introductions to Shakespeare’s life and work are not exactly plentiful. Students and teachers are therefore likely to welcome this up-to-date overview from Paul Edmondson, a Church of England priest who works for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Although Edmondson covers the biographical ground succinctly, as well as discussing the plays and poetry in a style that’s discreetly authoritative, his approach is unconventional. Thus he dwells longer on the early, flawed The Two Gentlemen

Understandably given its bulk, Antony Sher’s Falstaff in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent production of Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays had a long period of gestation before it emerged, fully formed and laughing, from under the covers of a bed also occupied by Prince Hal and a couple of prostitutes. Sher tells the story in diary form, as he did that of his Year of the King (1985), in which he described how his sensational Richard III arrived ‘before his time into this breathing world’. Falstaff was not obvious casting for one who does not profess to be a comic actor. Sher has written that he prefers to forget his

Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-style erotica, what keep the tills ringing are misery memoirs. The shelves are groaning with them. Their titles can vary from the merely toe-curling (Cry Silent Tears) to the queasily exploitative (Please, Daddy, No), but even if the names of the characters vary, all these books share the same basic plot. A child is horribly abused in some way, but eventually manages to break free from its upbringing, like a chick hatching from an egg. Good comes out of bad. They are heart-warming, therapeutic and ruthlessly commercial books that use

In a varied career, the actress Kika Markham has regularly played real-life charcters, including, on television, Mrs Thatcher — piquant casting for a lifelong anti-capitalist — and memorably on the stage, in David Hare’s The Permanent Way. the novelist Nina Bawden, survivor of the Potters Bar rail crash in which her husband, Austen Kark died. Markham’s memoir of her life over 30 years with her actor husband Corin Redgrave focuses on the traumatic period, following his recovery from prostate cancer, when in 2005 he suffered a heart attack, causing significant memory loss until his death five years later from an aneurysm on the brain. It somewhat recalls Bawden’s own exploration

The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via crack pipe — but arranged in a biography their impact is renewed. So grotesque was his upbringing that an early encounter with a dead baby in a shoebox warrants but a single sentence in David Henry’s and Joe Henry’s addictive, frenzied book (Furious Cool, Algonquin Books,£17.99, Spectator Bookshop, £16.19). The authors are fans who have the tendency to swoon, and they hold back from condemning Pryor’s numerous wrong turns (he was a serial wife-beater who fled responsibility wherever he found it). But that hardly matters when there’s so much to

Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled herself on Morticia Addams, and where a lesser celebrity memoirist would go on to say that she eventually played Morticia in a film of The Addams Family, Huston is generous enough not to labour the point. Instead of the usual ghosted drivel, she offers — as she does in her acting — a quirky charm and a reckless honesty. Her story is an interesting one, and is generally well written, sometimes even beautifully so. Her father was the great film director John Huston. Her mother ‘Ricki’, an ex-ballerina and his

Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go at it. By my reckoning Tales from an Actor’s Life (Robson Press, £14.99) is Steven Berkoff’s third volume of autobiographical writings, although I might have missed one or two others along the way. This one, though, is a little out of the ordinary. Written in the third person — he refers throughout to ‘the young actor’ — it tells a number of stories of his formative years ‘in the business’, of auditions failed, of rep tours endured, of disastrous productions walked out of, and of lessons learned, usually far too