News of books published in time to be packed into suitcases and read over the summer include a new title and the paperback editions of existing works of autobiography and near autobiography and biography.
In An Actor's Life for Me? actress Zoe Cunningham shares her advice and experience on having an acting career without going to drama school.
Providing tips and wisdom from Cunningham along with interviews from actors, directors and agents, the book covers getting experience, auditioning and taking on roles on stage and screen.
“The bottom line is that most people unnecessarily take the long, complicated and expensive road to finding success as an actor,” explained the author. “Believe me, it is a road fraught with demoralization and rejection – but it doesn’t have to be this way. Believe it or not, there’s a blueprint you can follow. If you have the drive and are willing to put the work in, the method I share will help anyone make it big with unexpected ease.”
Cunningham trained via private classes and part-time courses at RADA, The Actors Centre and the salon:collective.
In Wrights & Wrongs: My Life in Dance, Peter Wright shares his experience of ballet, commercial theatre and television and thoughts on the world of dance.
Peter Wright has been a dancer, choreographer, teacher, producer and director in the theatre as well as in television for over 70 years. Birmingham Royal Ballet, the company he created, has performed his Swan Lake for 35 years and The Sleeping Beauty for over 30. His stagings of The Nutcracker have been seen at Covent Garden and in Birmingham over 3 decades.
Written with Dancing Times regular contributor Paul Arrowsmith, the book has a foreword by the Japanese born ballet dancer Miyako Yoshida who received an OBE for her services to dance.
Rosalind A Biography of Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine is available in paperback from late summer.
Written by Angela Thirlwell, the book is a look at Shakespeare’s character Rosalind revealing her influence on drama, fiction and art and her appearance in works of sexual politics, autobiography, art history and filmography.
This fictional biography has interviews with Juliet Rylance, Sally Scott, Janet Suzman, Juliet Stevenson, Michelle Terry and Blanche McIntyre amongst others.
Part dream-memoir, part criticism and part autobiography, Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term has poet Glyn Maxwell waking up in a strange village with no knowledge as to how he got there.
Maxwell feels compelled to teach, an endeavour in which he is assisted initially by Keats and later by Byron, the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, Yeats and the War Poets amongst others.
Written by Glyn Maxwell, Drinks With Dead Poets is a partial work of fiction in which the words of real life characters are taken from their letters, diaries, journals or essays.
Glyn Maxwell is one of Britain’s major poets. His books include Pluto, Hide Now, The Sugar Mile, The Nerve and One Thousand Nights and Counting. He writes for the stage and his opera libretti include The Lion’s Face, The Firework Maker’s Daughter and Seven Angels and Nothing.
An Actor’s Life For Me? is published by Urbane Publications.
Wrights and Wrongs is available in paperback from 30 June; it is published by Oberon Books.
Rosalind A Biography of Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine and Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term are published on 1 September by Oberon Books.