Cloris »

Cloris Leachman is an award-winning star of stage, screen, and television. Recently she won her ninth Emmy, the most ever earned by an actor, and became a great-grandmother, an event that has given her an interesting new perspective on life.

George Englund is a producer, director, and writer. He is also the author of The Way It's Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando. He currently lives in California.

She received two Emmy Awards as the irrepressible Phyllis on The Mary Tyler Moor Show...she won an Oscar for her supporting role as a frustrated housewife in The Last Picture Show...she delighted audiences with her deliciously villainous turns as Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein and Nurse Diesel in High Anxiety...and she earned even more award nominations playing a hard-drinking grandmother in Spanglish.

Now, for the first time, the incomparable Cloris Leachman reflects on her amazing life and illustrious career...From her hometown in Des Moines, Iowa, (where she first saw Katharine Hepburn perform on stage, never imagining they would one day do Shakespeare together) to the bright lights of Broadway and the television studios of L.A., Cloris's journey has been filled with laughter and tears, marriage and motherhood, tragedy and triumph. Along the way, she shares wonderfully revealing anecdotes about Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Dianne Keaton, Sissy Spacek, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, the Kennedy family, and many more. Funny, frank, brilliant, and altogether human, this is the real Cloris Leachman as you've never seen her before.

"Funny, gimlet-eyed and unpretentious-someone get this woman a talk show." -Kirkus Reviews

"She lives what she preaches." -Library Journal

Rosellen Brewer - Library Journal

Leachman has won an Oscar (The Last Picture Show) and nine Emmy Awards, placed third in the Miss America Pageant, and raised five children. Despite years as Phyllis on TV's The Mary Tyler Moore Show and memorable roles in films, she's probably now best known for her comedic turn on Dancing with the Stars, in her eighties, no less. The devil-may-care, unpredictable persona she exhibited there seems to embody the real Leachman. She shares her career and marriage highs and lows (her ex-husband is coauthor and the love of her life, though they are not together) and dishes on actors and lovers (e.g., Brando, Gene Hackman, Bobby Darin) in an entertaining though distracted way. She studied at the Actors Studio but came up with her own philosophy, "Acting is make-believe... Have fun" and "Don't be afraid you're going to make a fool of yourself." She lives what she preaches. Recommended for all public libraries and acting collections.