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Summary
Summary
A poignant, intimate, funny, inspiring memoir--both a coming-of-age story and a meditation on creativity, devotion, and craft--from Bryan Cranston, beloved and acclaimed star of one of history's most successful TV shows, Breaking Bad.
Bryan Cranston landed his first role at seven, when his father cast him in a United Way commercial. Acting was clearly the boy's destiny, until one day his father disappeared. Destiny suddenly took a backseat to survival.
Now, in his riveting memoir, Cranston maps his zigzag journey from abandoned son to beloved star by recalling the many odd parts he's played in real life--paperboy, farmhand, security guard, dating consultant, murder suspect, dock loader, lover, husband, father. Cranston also chronicles his evolution on camera, from soap opera player trying to master the rules of show business to legendary character actor turning in classic performances as Seinfeld dentist Tim Whatley, "a sadist with newer magazines," and Malcolm in the Middle dad Hal Wilkerson, a lovable bumbler in tighty-whities. He also gives an inspiring account of how he prepared, physically and mentally, for the challenging role of President Lyndon Johnson, a tour de force that won him a Tony to go along with his four Emmys.
Of course, Cranston dives deep into the grittiest details of his greatest role, explaining how he searched inward for the personal darkness that would help him create one of the most memorable performances ever captured on screen: Walter White, chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin.
Discussing his life as few men do, describing his art as few actors can, Cranston has much to say about creativity, devotion, and craft, as well as innate talent and its challenges and benefits and proper maintenance. But ultimately A Life in Parts is a story about the joy, the necessity, and the transformative power of simple hard work.
Author Notes
Bryan Cranston was born in Hollywood, California in 1956. He attended Los Angeles Valley College and graduated with an associate degree in police science. He began acting after college and built a successful career which included screenwriting, directing and producer. He acted in the television comedy, Malcom in the Middle and was nominated several times for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He is best known for his role as Walter White in the television series Breaking Bad, winning a Golden Globe and four Satellite Awards. He played Lyndon B. Johnson in the play All the Way, on Broadway, winning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in film Trumbo. In 2016, his memoir A Life in Parts became a New York Times best seller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cranston recalls the highs and the lows of his life, from his early aimless years and his moment of Zen inspiration to be an actor to his acting success on Breaking Bad. Listeners are likely to be fascinated by his growing up in a family of actors and his early career as a police officer. Both his words and tone convey a fitting amount of humbleness and sincerity that are likely to endear listeners all the more. Cranston sprinkles more sobering moments throughout the memoir, including losses, mistakes, and epiphanies, which gives the production depth. As the narrator, it's perfect Cranston, drawing upon his acting skills to determine the right amount of emotional energy in any given passage. Listeners can all but hear the tears starting to trickle when he talks about the loss of loved ones, and he leaves no doubt about how much joy his wife and daughter bring him. A Simon & Schuster hardcover. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
One could be forgiven for being unaware of the soap opera Loving (1983-1995). It's entirely possible to have ignored the mania for Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006), and certainly understandable to have missed the handful of Seinfeld episodes featuring dentist Tim Whatley. But one would have to have been living in a cave on Mars to be oblivious to the cultural phenomenon that is Breaking Bad. As suburban chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White, Cranston took whatever viewers might have thought about him as Loving's nice guy, Doug Donovan, or Malcolm's nerdy dad, Hal, and turned that on its head. As Cranston discusses seminal episodes from his past as an estranged son from a broken home, a rent-a-cop security guard, a Universal Life minister, and a struggling actor, he builds the case that, as an actor, every experience shapes each persona you portray. Cranston fans will delight in the intimate revelations in this substantial memoir from one of Hollywood's most introspective stars. And anyone interested in acting will devour Cranston's savvy advice about honing one's craft and building one's career.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
there are two types of show business star: matte and gloss. Matte stars deaden the light, their recesses best revealed in shadow. Creatures of chiaroscuro, they conquer and retreat, like Garbo, turn chameleonic in company, like Brando, alternating sullen disgruntlement with outright self-sabotage. Beards may be involved. Gloss stars, by contrast, eat up the light like a cat sunbathing on a windowsill. They strut with the room-temperature ease of toddlers showing off to their parents. Think of the peacock thrill of being looked at that John Travolta evinces in "Grease" or Tom Hanks in "Big" or Jennifer Lawrence in anything besides "The Hunger Games." Theirs is an egoless egotism that, by dint of the generosity with which it is offered up, yields audiences the promise of transcended, liberated self. Here, have me. Alan Cumming is the latter. His new book, you gotta GET BIGGER DREAMS: My Life in Stories and Pictures (Rizzoli, $29.95), is a scrapbook of photographs taken by the actor over the years, accompanied by biographical sketches of what he was up to at the time - prose selfies for a kind of Instagram-era memoir. Here is a shot of Glenn Close's "totally smoking ripped back" on the red carpet at the Tonys. Here is Eva Mendes's cleavage at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. Here is a blurry shot of Oprah snapped in the star's tail winds at an Elie Wiesel Foundation dinner in her honor. "Very famous people create whirlwinds," he notes, and kicks his book off with a Force 7 gale : Hurricane Liz, whom he runs into at Carrie Fisher's birthday party and soon has cackling "like a trucker who'd just heard a good fart joke." The book ends, some 250 pages later, with the actor's being barged out of the way by Diana Ross making a beeline for the dance floor at an Oscar party. "The song she was so desperate to dance to was one of her own!" he notes. "Talk about being in the middle of a chain reaction." There is a tradition of stars turning paparazzi - Jeff Bridges has taken beautiful photographs on and off the movie set. There's a tradition, too, of British performers going to Hollywood and returning with their wits intact to write up the experience in best-selling memoirs: David Niven set the bar with "The Moon's a Balloon." Quentin Crisp turned his bone-dry humor into a cottage industry. Cumming has already proved himself a gifted writer with "Not My Father's Son," wringing humor from the hard facts of his upbringing in Scotland, not least his brute of a father, who used to shear him with clippers, like a sheep. Cumming Sr. makes a brief appearance at the start of this book, too, sneering at the little plastic Kodak camera that his son wins in a church raffle: "Get on with that grass" - an instruction to which the rest of the book might be said to raise a puckish middle finger. "I am a sensualist," he writes. "I understand the need to let go." There is a curious innocence to his pictures of drag queens and go-go boys snapped on trawls through the dive bars and strip joints of Lower Manhattan, which he eats up "like a deprived child." What makes Cumming unusual is that the powers of observation that make him a good writer haven't canceled out the instincts for pleasure that propel him out into the world. He has advanced and found a retreat within himself, as all artists must, throwing his own after-party to which we are all luckily invited. Think of this book as the goody bag you get to take home afterward. "I had never seen my name engraved on a dildo before," Cumming writes of his haul from the Fleshbot Awards. "And I had never received an award that I could potentially penetrate myself with, safely at least." It's that "safely" that sets you thinking. He never does get around to finishing his father's lawn. If celebrity is the biggest party the ego can throw, then the example set by Bill Murray takes the principle a step further, asking: Can the ego crash its own party? In the TAO OF BILL MURRAY: Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing (Random House, $26), the Rolling Stone contributing editor Gavin Edwards tracks the mysterious yeti-like sightings of the comedian made by the public for years. The Scandinavian exchange students' party he crashed near St. Andrews Links in 2006, where he ended up washing the dishes. The two-day international conference on biodiversity and conservation Murray dropped in on to talk about sturgeon. The music festival in Austin where he popped up behind the bar in 2010, pouring people tequila regardless of their order. The list goes on: a game of kickball on Roosevelt Island, a snowball fight in upstate New York. Typically, festivities end when Murray slips away with the words "No one will ever believe you." Edwards has saved some of us a lot of work. Murray watchers have been keeping unofficial scrapbooks of this activity for years, and like many of us, the author suspects there is more going on here than the off-duty irrepressibility that has long lightened his forays to the golf course - using spectators' sweaters to polish his balls, for instance - although Edwards includes these, for good measure. "Our modern-day trickster god," he writes, "Bill isn't just being a clown. He has a tao, a way of being, a philosophy of life." Murray's deus ex machina drop-ins are an attempt, in Edwards's formulation, "to make real life more like the movies." He takes careful note of the courses in French and philosophy Murray took at the Sorbonne in the years following his "Ghostbusters" success, where he was exposed to the teachings of the Greek-Armenian thinker George Gurdjieff, who argued that most of us sleepwalk through our waking lives; it is the task of the freethinker to wake us up. There's no record of these wake-up calls ever being unwelcome, although one Williamsburg hipster, disgruntled to find Murray at a Halloween party with the band MGMT, does accuse him of making "poor life choices." The bulk of the activity postdates the end of Murray's second marriage in 2008, but as with his screen performances, the dusting of midlife melancholy adds rather than subtracts from the stories. My favorite has Murray driving a golf cart around the streets of Stockholm with two drunken Swedes singing Cat Stevens's "Father and Son" until they are stopped by the police. "Bill's explanation that he was a golfer proved insufficient," Edwards writes, which may be one of my favorite sentences in any film book this year. There have been greater, weightier testaments to the art of cinema published in 2016 - Edwards's book is no more than a magazine article, really, padded out with a bio of the comedian and a slightly redundant filmography - but for sheer dopamine release, it's hard to beat. Tippi Hedren puts gossips out of their misery early on in her memoir, TIPPI (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99): Barely 37 pages in and here is Alfred Hitchcock, "shorter and even rounder than I was expecting," casting the 32-year-old model in "The Birds" after seeing her in a Sego commercial. What follows has long been the subject of Hollywood rumor and inspired a 2012 TV film, "The Girl," so Hedren's decision to break her silence on her director's "obsessive, often embarrassingly ardent, often cruel behavior" is a significant addition to our current Trump-era conversation on sexual assault. Fixing Hedren with an "unwavering stare" wherever she went on set, Hitchcock instructed her co-stars, "Do not touch The Girl," had her followed and - creepiest of all - had a "life mask" of her face made for his own personal use. "I'm so sorry you have to go through this," Hitchcock's wife, Alma, confides in her at one point. Jay Presson Allen, the writer of her subsequent film with the director, "Marnie," pleads, "Can't you love him just a little?" Finally, after a series of "excruciating" encounters in her dressing room and a fumble in the back of his limo, he summons her to his office and assaults her. "It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly," she writes. "I'll ruin your career," Hitchcock threatens upon being rebuffed, and then proceeds to do just that, denying her opportunities to appear opposite David Niven and Marlon Brando in "Bedtime Story" and in François Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451." But the rest of the book (written with Lindsay Harrison) is not without incident. Hedren marries her manager; the pair grow obsessed with lions, start a small animal sanctuary in their backyard and plow every penny into a film epic starring the beasts . A decade in the making. "Roar" has the scent of genuine insanity, involving multiple trips to the E.R. after the cats attack Hedren's daughter, Melanie Griffith; the cinematographer Jan de Bont (later to direct "Speed"); and Hedren herself, who is mauled by a leopard named Pepper. "I sat on the floor with my eyes tightly closed and held perfectly still while I felt his claws on my right thigh, followed by his sandpaper tongue licking honey off my cheek," she recalls, in slightly more detail than her mauling by Hitchcock. At least Pepper didn't block her from working with Truffaut. Bryan Cranston's memoir, a life in parts (Scribner, $27), suffers from the lopsidedness that afflicts any account of late-breaking fame - Cranston was 51 when he took the role of Walter White in AMC's "Breaking Bad," which made him a global star. But Cranston is a good-enough storyteller, practiced enough in his skills of self-examination, to make those five decades pull their weight. Determined not to repeat the path of his father, an actor who appeared on TV shows and in a movie about killer grasshoppers before succumbing to terminal resentment, young Cranston works as a farmhand, learning the correct way to kill a chicken; he sees a cadaver split open while a trainee for the Los Angeles Police Department; learns how to spot shoppers from thieves while working as a security guard ("Shoppers move quickly. Thieves have a slower pace"); and is motorcycling down the Eastern Seaboard when, seeking refuge from a storm, he reads "Hedda Gabler" in one sitting. As he drifts off to sleep that night, he knows what he wants to do with his life. "I knew how he carried himself. Burdened," he writes of Walter White, upon being sent the script for "Breaking Bad" by the showrunner Vince Gilligan, who remembered Cranston from a small role he'd given him on "The X-Files." He'd also, by that point, appeared in six episodes of "Seinfeld" and seven seasons of "Malcolm in the Middle," and was up against Steve Zahn for the role. As intriguing as the Zahn idea is. it was Cranston's less glitzy résumé - the years spent doing commercials for Excedrin and Preparation H - that was required for the tighty-whitey-wearing chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White: a pinpoint study in frustrated ambition and simmering megalomania, i n White's demented liberation a lusty Gloria in Excelsis Deo for jobbing actors everywhere. Jason Diamond's SEARCHING FOR JOHN HUGHES: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know About Life I Learned From Watching '80s Movies (Morrow/HarperCollins, paper, $15.99) is one of those pop culture bildungsromans in the vein of Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch," wherein a writer enacts an obsessive battle with a pop culture phenomenon that fills his or her sky, before finally realizing the fixation is perilous and parachuting to safety. Growing up Jewish in the Chicago suburbs, beaten by his father, abandoned by his mother, Diamond is by 15 a blue-haired punk with a Jewfro, carving a Dead Kennedys logo into his desk, seeking plaintive escape in films like "Pretty in Pink," "Home Alone" and "The Breakfast Club." "I wanted to live in a John Hughes film. I wanted everything to turn out just right," he says, but wonders, "How many more times could I tell myself there'd be a happy ending?" The reader suffers from a similar curiosity. Diamond, now the sports editor at Rollingstone.com, never gets far enough into his John Hughes obsession to explain it, or why his alienation doesn't express itself in angrier popcultural form - the music of Nine Inch Nails, say, rather than the quirky but well-adjusted world of Hughes. But the sweetness is telling, a sign of the strain to his nature that will eventually win out. He moves to New York, takes a job as a barista, starts an unauthorized biography of Hughes, stalls on Chapter 1 ("He's an artist just screaming to break out," his notes read), before finally returning to old haunts in Chicago, where he succeeds in laying some of his ghosts to rest and opening a crack of daylight between himself and his idol. I'm not sure Diamond gets enough about Hughes into the book - for long swaths, the title rings literally true - but he has successfully negotiated the writer's most important rite of passage: He makes himself matter, first to himself and then to us. A sequel to his previous book, "How to Read Literature Like a Professor," Thomas C. Foster's reading the silver SCREEN: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves (Harper Perennial, paper, $15.99) aims to make you "a better reader of movies. More informed. More aware. More analytical." Despite this lofty aim, the book is written in the pop-professor style of someone anxious to reassure his readers that they will not be left behind at any point: "Films not only have to have chemistry; they're like chemistry. Now, relax, there won't be any lab reports." Foster goes in for so many of these icebreakers, each an implicit expression of the author's confident air of superiority, that you grow a little impatient for the fruits of the wisdom whose brilliance he is so thoughtfully shielding from us. What you get is this: "Movies are motion"; "If you put enough" shots "together in the right order you get a movie"; "Every character has a story"; and "A filmmaker can jump from place to place," but "jumping from time to time is problematic." This last observation is so off the mark you wonder if the author has ever seen a movie: "Citizen Kane"? Flashbacks? Flash-forwards? Elliptical editing? Every now and again, one stumbles through the fog of generalities across a piece of analysis born of simple observation: the way John Ford uses Monument Valley to frame the landscape of the West, for example, or the Escher-like cocoon of alcoves, rooms, elevators and stairwells in Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel." "This is a world very much like the actual world between the wars," Foster writes, citing Ionesco. "Personal freedom is a scarce and fragile commodity." It is telling that Foster is at his best when he forgets his readers entirely. Brian Jay Jones's biography george lucas: a Life (Little, Brown, $32) tells an oft-told tale: how a scrawny, easily bored nerd from Modesto, Calif., resisted the lure of his cooler, more flamboyant filmmaking contemporaries to stun the world with gee-whiz cinema aimed at his inner 6-year-old that reshaped Hollywood overnight. The collective double take over "Star Wars" never gets old, although if it's a definitive reconstruction of the creative spaghetti that fed into the saga you want, then Chris Taylor's masterly "How Star Wars Conquered the Universe" is your book. Jones, who comes to Lucas from a celebrated life of Jim Henson, tells a more straightforward story in definitive detail, although you have to wonder whether Lucas is a good fit for the biographical format: a cautious, withdrawn man, bland in his tastes, his resentment toward his father driving his career-long fight for autonomy from the studios. So much in Lucasland seems born of peeve and pedantry, it's a miracle the films are as ebullient as they are, but then that is the Faustian sacrifice behind "Star Wars": All the fun, humor and adventure in its maker's life are instead up there on the screen. Crisper pleasures await in bresson on BRESSON: Interviews 1943-1983 (New York Review Books, $24.95), edited by Robert Bresson's widow, Mylène, and translated by Anna Moschovakis. This collection of interviews reveals the great French filmmaker's own interview technique to bear more than a passing resemblance to Roger Federer's drop shot. In shuffles a nervous interviewer to take his or her seat, stealing the odd personal observation: The auteur's eyes are blue-green, and he speaks softly. "What was it that drew you to this subject?" he is often asked. It seems innocent enough, but this is Bresson. He thinks, then gently deconstructs the implicit assumptions about cinema contained therein, and rolls the ball back to the interviewer's feet with a smile. "I don't choose my subjects. They choose me," he says. "Films should not have subjects at all. . . . What I'm trying to do is to come up to the edge of saying too little, in order to try to express with silence what other films express with words - the almost imperceptible things that happen on a face, or in a look in someone's eyes." He interviewed much as he made films: by saying very little, with great eloquence. TOM SHONE is the film and TV critic for Newsweek. His book "Tarantino: A Retrospective" will be published in 2017.
Kirkus Review
The star of Breaking Bad debuts with a collection of memories and rumination.Cranston (b. 1956), borrowing his title and organization (sort of) from Jacques famous All the worlds a stage speech innbsp;As You Like It, offers a series of mostly short chapters that focus on the roles hes playedin life, in film and TV, and on the stage. For a celebrity memoir, its unusually humble; the author makes no real mention of Golden Globe and Emmy wins, and he shows a determined effort throughout to credit and praise his co-workers. He mentions, for example, an effective gag on one of hisnbsp;Seinfeldnbsp;appearances came via an electrician. His narrative flows forward chronologically, broken only by abrupt shifts of focus to his various roles. His tells us about his parentsneither, especially the father, would ever qualify for a parenthood prizeand his siblings, who have been successful in their various enterprises despite, like the author, enduring a difficult childhood. (Near the end, he enters group therapy with them.) Occasionally, Cranston pauses to talk about the craft of acting, and a few of his observations sound like takeaways from a performance class (Building a character is like building a house). For the most part, the author stresses how skill and talent are fairly pointless without a lot of hard work and thought about the character and thenbsp;words. He does not downplay his failures (a first marriage did not last); nor does he deny us details about his unmoored years, which included a Kerouacian cross-country journey with his brother. We learn as well about the perils and inconveniences of celebrity, his deep affection for his wife and daughter, and loss (parents, others). He ends with an account of his recent stage performance as Lyndon Johnson. The highs hereand there are manyare meth-less but addictive.nbsp; Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Cranston, Breaking Bad's Walter White (or Malcolm in the Middle's father Hal), pens a literal compilation of the roles he's played throughout his life. We see not only the television actor but also the parts he's assumed in his family (son, father, husband), the odd jobs he's held (farmhand, lifeguard, dating consultant), and other elements that form the man he is today. The book's organization is fragmented with a new role coming every few pages, but it's presented chronologically and narrative threads connect the many roles. A disastrous elementary school role as Professor -Flipnoodle in The Time Machine haunts him decades later as he prepares to play Lyndon B. Johnson on Broadway. His relationship with his alcoholic mother and absentee father influence his marriage and his parenting. Cranston has led an exciting life, but fans of his biggest roles will be disappointed. His focus on Malcolm in the Middle is largely on Hal's shenanigans and it's a good 250 pages into the memoir before we come to Breaking Bad. His Oscar-nominated turn as Dalton Trumbo barely fills a sentence (whereas Seinfeld dentist Tim Whatley is given a whole section). VERDICT Recommended for people who are more interested in the actor's life than a celebrity tell-all.-Terry Bosky, Madison, WI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.