Play Actors

Known as an actor-manager, Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905) took complete responsibility for season after season at London’s Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as representative of English classical theater. Beginning in 1878, author Bram Stoker worked for Irving as a business manager at the Lyceum for much of Irving’s career. Stoker revered Irving, and when he began writing Dracula, Irving was the chief inspiration for the title character.

A deliciously witty and entertaining ""variation"" on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fatalist, written for Milan Kundera's ""private pleasure"" in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the ""heavy Russian irrationality"" fell on Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera explains, he felt...

Audrey Hepburn was not your usual movie star. She was the highest paid actress of her day, yet she never took a formal acting lesson. A child of war, and the daughter of a Fascist sympathizer, she spent her last years helping children of other wars. An Academy Award-winner for her first major film role (Roman Holiday), Hepburn continued her storybook career with such classic movies as Sabrina, Funny Face, The Nun's Story, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Charade, My Fair Lady and Wait until Dark. Her two marriages ended in divorce.

“David Adjmi has written one of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that...

From his agent's phone call offering him the role of Estragon, Lucian Msamati brings brilliantly to life the experience of co-starring with Ben Whishaw in James Macdonald's celebrated production of Waiting for Godot in London's West End. Through rehearsal room highs and lows, workaday laughs and tears, literal stumbles and grumbles, we journey with Lucian, his fellow actors and creatives, and Beckett's play, sharing in the personal and dramaturgical discoveries they make and the inevitable emotional contours of an experience as intense as this one.

From the prize-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch (“A master of the novel as well as the story . . . Effortlessly engaging” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times), a sharp, affecting, masterly new novel about a close-knit theater community in Memphis and one turbulent, transformative...

Clifton Webb was one of those rare motion picture actors who became a major box-office star when he was in his mid-50s. Indeed, his first sound movie was Laura (1944), and his role as Waldo Lydecker in that classic film noir earned him the first of three Oscar nominations. Four years later, Clifton Webb became a household name when he played Lynn Belvedere and poured a bowl of mush onto a baby's head in Sitting Pretty.

“Dimon excels at creating memorable, complex characters.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Salvation, Pennsylvania. The commune located in the small town was advertised as a modern Utopia: a place to live, share, and learn with other like-minded young people. Cate Pendleton’s...

From one of Poland's most acclaimed poets comes a new collection of poems and plays spanning almost five decades and translated for the first time. Encapsulating the prolific work of the poet and playwright Zbigniew Herbert, Reconstruction of the Poet is both a celebration of a profound life...

Yvonne De Carlo, Michael B. Druxman’s one-woman play, is set in 1974 when the actress is at an emotional crossroads. As she contemplates divorcing her husband of 18 years, she remembers the events that have brought her to this point in her life, beginning with a fatherless childhood in Vancouver, BC, and a destitute mother intent on making her daughter a ballet star. She further reminisces about the many men who have passed through her life, including romances with the likes of Howard Hughes and Aly Khan.

Ida Lupino was a trail-blazer. Not only was she one of the most vibrant Hollywood actresses of the 1940s and 1950s, but she was also only the second woman to become a member of the Director's Guild. Michael B. Druxman's one-woman play, Ida: The Last Lupino, joins Ida in 1983 when she is living alone in her decaying Brentwood home as a virtual hermit, lamenting the break-up of her marriage with Howard Duff. Ida: The Last Lupino is a vivid, often witty, portrait of a woman who conquered a man's world.