Books
|
Michael has written novels and television adaptations, and is best known for his performing arts biographies. His biography of Sean Connery, in print for 25 years, remains the definitive work on the actor. He is currently at work on a major biography of a music legend. "To me, writing is character study and poetry equally. I don't distinguish types, and a novel is as much a research journey as a biography. The best writing has the potent distillation of language and ideas that defines great poetry." |
ROBERT REDFORD: THE BIOGRAPHYby MICHAEL FEENEY CALLANFor publication Spring 2011Alfred A Knopf will shortly announce the publication of Michael’s long anticipated biography of the legendary actor-director Robert Redford. Simon & Schuster will publish in the UK. Go to amazon.com for details. The long-anticipated biography of Robert Redford Among the most widely admired Hollywood stars of his generation, Redford has appeared onstage and on-screen, in front of and behind the camera, earning Academy, Golden Globe, and a multitude of other awards and nominations for acting, directing, and producing, and for his contributions to the arts. His Sundance Film Festival transformed the world of filmmaking; his films defined a generation. America has come to know him as the Sundance Kid, Bob Woodward, Johnny Hooker, Jay Gatsby, and Roy Hobbs. But only now, with this revelatory biography, do we see the surprising and complex man beneath the Hollywood façade. From Redford’s personal papers—journals, script notes, correspondence—and hundreds of hours of taped interviews, Michael Feeney Callan brings the legendary star into focus. Here is his scattered family background and restless childhood, his rocky start in acting, the death of his son, his star-making relationship with director Sydney Pollack, the creation of Sundance, his political activism, his artistic successes and failures, his friendships and romances. This is a candid, surprising portrait of a man whose iconic roles on-screen (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Natural) and directorial brilliance (Ordinary People, Quiz Show) have both defined and obscured one of the most celebrated, and, until now, least understood, public figures of our time.
Hardback: 496 pages with 32 pages of photographs Publisher: Knopf (Spring, 2011) Hopkins' Land of ShadowsCallan's impressive new biography Reviewed by Dermot Bogler - Sunday Business Post Jan 8 2006[Anthony Hopkins: A Three-act Life, by Michael Feeney Callan, Robson Books, €27.70.]
But in a career lasting over half a century, he has played a leading role in over 90 films and major theatrical productions, where he has brought many of the his unique characteristics to bear. Hopkins' talent as an actor is to make his audience become emotionally involved with his characters, while at the same time not fully liking them. Irish-born Michael Feeney Callan's task as a biographer is slightly similar, in that the highly driven but insecure man who comes across in the book is never especially likeable. Hopkins is amenable, presentable, intelligent and well mannered, but step over into his private life, and the shutters come down and stay down. Callan presents him as a man carrying ghosts as he constantly drives himself forward. Rather like the characters he is fond of playing, Hopkins has always been something of a misfit, standing - as the Greek poet Cavafy phrased it - at a peculiar angle to the universe. Like Athlone's John Broderick, he was born a baker's son in a small town, and was acutely aware of that social position. Classmates from various boarding schools recall him with no particular affection, while teachers recall being frustrated at this deliberate refusal to engage in sport or even drama - indeed, any activity that might draw him into the herd. Cinema was his fantasy, and acting was to prove his way out. Although, long before film, Hopkins made slow progress through acting school and toured small venues in Wales with the Raymond Edwards group, while people - most especially himself - predicted great things for him. Hopkins told his fellow cast members that he had been invited to join the National Theatre in London, and became caught up in this lie until he was forced to admit that the call hadn't come. However, when Laurence Olivier began to restructure the theatre, appointing radical theatre critic Kenneth Tynan as literary manager, he sought out new talent. He quickly recognised Hopkins' ability and the Welsh actor became central in the rejuvenated theatre. Callan's book is especially good in tracing the leap that Hopkins made out of theatre, turning his back firmly on Olivier once the chance arose to break through into film. The base for his first film (The Lion in Winter, made in 1968 with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn, which was filmed in Ardmore Studios in Wicklow) was hardly glamorous. While O'Toole raised hell in Dublin and Hepburn took a romantic cottage nearby, Hopkins and the rest of the cast and crew were holed up in the Glenview Hotel. Hopkins was nervous, with Hepburn guiding him through scenes, making him turn more to the camera. He embraced the new medium, acting in a host of lesser films during a period of his life that saw his marriage break up and many of the demons of his introversion come to the fore. He entered a lunatic spiral of manic heavy drinking that, in the actor's own words, saw him ”standing on the brink of hell... driving over the canyons, blacking out, not knowing where I was going. In the mornings I would wonder did I kill somebody? And would check the front of the car.” When the chance to move to America came, he leapt at it, taking any work he could get, avoiding the English set in Hollywood and drinking in bars alone. What Hollywood really wanted from him was a new Richard Burton. Film by film, Callan painstakingly pieces together Hopkins' slow path through 20 anguished years to gain universal acclaim as an actor. A Three-Act Life brings us right up to 2005 in Hopkins' complex life, and yet the actor remains a sketchy figure, someone who you still don't quite know, or even want to know. This could be the great chameleon quality of the reserved schoolboy who only came alive among his peers when he gave perfect impersonations of every teacher. As an actor, Hopkins has eclipsed the talent of his idol Richard Burton, although one suspects that Burton, for all his own demons, remained the happier man. This is an impressive work by one of Ireland's foremost biographers.
"Impressive work from one of Ireland’s leading biographers” - Dermot Bolger, the Sunday Business Post “This is a serious book ... shrewd, detailed, comprehensive” - the Irish Independent “Meaty .. Callan traces his subjects rebirth, one that led to his present status as one of Britain’s great post-war actors” - the Independent, London “Vividly portrays a hell-raiser tortured by his own demons” - Michael Arditti, the Times Sean Connery
Respected for his political savvy (the “Scotland Forever” tattooed on his arm defines his loyalties), he is also among the most argumentative and litigious of public figures - a fact that doesn’t reduce his colossal fan base. Now in his seventies, he continues to display powerful sex appeal, as compelling today as it was forty years ago alongside Ursula Andress in Dr No. Connery family members, friends and co-stars have contributed to this celebrated, intimate biography, the first and most distinguished work on the actor, which has now been brought fully up to date to include The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Recognised by students of cinema as the definitive book on Connery, Callan’s was the source work referred to and quoted from by Cubby Broccoli in his own published memoir, When the Snow Melts.
“A necessity for Connery and Bond fans” - the Los Angeles Times “Timely and fascinating” - Booklist “Remarkably well documented ... admirable” - Screen International “Easily the best ... The book’s real strength is the author’s impressive grasp of the ambience of the movie business, the deft, assured way he handles his vast knowledge ... every line reveals the love for the subject of the true aficionado” -Ray Comiskey, the Irish Times |
||
|
