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Editorial Review Product Description
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.
But who, really, is Cloris Leachman?
She's one of the most acclaimed, and unpredictable, actresses of our time. Transforming herself with every role, Cloris Leachman has been dazzling audiences for decades with her unusual gift for both comedy and drama. She's appeared in 11 Broadway plays, 57 films, and 137 television shows and has earned 16 awards and 23 nominations. 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 (where she had to work up the nerve to sing for Rogers and Hammerstein to get the lead in South Pacific) to the television studios of L.A. (where she hopped on producer James Brooks's lap to land the role of Phyllis), Cloris's journey has been filled with laughter and tears, marriage and motherhood, tragedy and triumph.
With surprising candor, she talks about her experiences at the Actor's Studio, her "Peck s bad boy" behavior on the set of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, her work with Mel Brooks and other filmmakers, her return to sitcoms with The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Malcolm in the Middle, and her difficulty shaking off the roles she immerses herself in. She shares wonderfully revealing anecdotes about her co-stars and friends: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Dianne Keaton, Sissy Spacek, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and the Kennedy family. She reveals her source of inspiration behind High Anxiety (giant fake breasts) and The Last Picture Show (a disturbing childhood incident). Finally, she speaks frankly about being a celebrity icon, trying to balance her family, career, and boundless creativity energy. This is the real Cloris Leachman as you've never seen her before. ... Read more Customer Reviews (31) 
Excellent seller
Excellent seller and book in better condition than described. What a deal for 6 cents!
"The One and Only Cloris Leachman"
Cloris Leachman has always been one of my favorite actresses. Here, for the first time, Cloris has written her life story filled with humor, wit, and honesty that the reader can see from the very first paragraph. She wrote "Cloris" with her former husband and father of her five children, George Englund.
In these pages Cloris discusses her early life with a desire to be an actress. She was soon entering beauty pagents, which led to acting auditions, that brought her to roles on early TV shows like "Lassie" and a memorable performance playing Billy Mumy's mother in "The Twilight Zone". After appearing in several Hollywood films Cloris garnered, perhaps, the greatest role of her career playing Phyllis Lindstom on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in 1970 garnering her with a Best Actress Emmy win. It was while doing the "Moore" show that Cloris was cast in "The Last Picture Show" where she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar (it was, and still is, very rare for TV performers to have concurrent success on the big-screen).
Like all of us Cloris has had her share of ups and downs in her life. She discusses the failure of her TV sitcom "Phyllis" that was a spin-off of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", her discovering that her husband, George Englund, was having a torrid affair with Joan Collins, the future Alexis in TV's "Dynasty", and the loss of her son to cocaine.
A better-than-average biogaphy, I enjoyed "Cloris" immensely: I know you will too.
Discombobulated, Meandering Stories
Leachman's life may be filled with interesting stories, but you have to wade through her scattered thinking in order to find them in this messy book. She says at the beginning that she's not going to use the traditional method to tell her life story--and that's an understatement. Though she starts with her early Iowa years, she quickly starts skipping around. Soon the stories don't always make sense and the reader is left wondering why she is so often sidetracked instead of just finishing the story she started.
This woman thinks highly of herself--this autobiography is filled with self-praise and offers little in the way of introspection and humility. She talks about the greats she worked with or befriended, including some surprises (Judy Garland was a neighbor, Marlon Brando played with her kids, she told bedtime stories to Maria Shriver).
She flits through her life experiences, going back and forth from Broadway years to Hollywood to childhood. She has daddy issues that she can't quite explain. She is sexually assaulted a couple of times but seems to think nothing of it and claims that one attempt even helped her later in her career.
If you're looking for insight into her choices you will be unsatisfied--she doesn't seem to have any idea why she did the things she did. She rushes through the movies and TV shows she was part of--not giving much in the way of background stories. Her Phyllis references are few and yet she seems to be a living copy of that character. She admits to angering MTM cast members because of being constantly late and ignoring their feelings, and one has to wonder why this "professional" thinks she doesn't have to follow the rules everyone else abides by. She seems proud of disregarding others feelings, yet she doesn't connect that to the problems that caused others (especially her children).
She only alludes to some of her other TV roles (a couple paragraphs on Facts of Life) and movies. There just aren't enough stories about her work. Some of them are a bit hard to believe as they are told here--they're too glib and compact. She shows up in New York and suddenly is cast as the lead in South Pacific even though she has never sung before anyone before?Katharine Hepburn hears about her and casts her as co-star? There just has to be more to it than what she writes here.
Cloris knows people that it makes no sense for her to know--she became close to the Kennedy family when she was young and has a bizarre story of her then-husband "dating" Jackie Kennedy after the president dies. She has a strange Nancy Reagan story and hosted Elizabeth Taylor for chili. There are a number of things that go unsaid and her stories seem intentionally vague. It raises questions about possible affairs or relations, including her husband's closeness with Marlon Brando.
Her cavalier attitude is both playful and shocking. She doesn't seem to worry about her children's problems, including a drug-addicted son. She claims her divorce changed nothing with her ex-husband, who is credited as co-authoring this book. People die and babies are born with little emotion shown. There is no sense that this woman is in touch with her inner feelings.
The book is a breezy read and has all the elements of a great autobiography, but it is like someone took all the pages and threw them up in the air, then published them in whatever order they landed. In the end Leachman comes across as vacuous, insensitive and hyper. She always needs to be active but there is no reasoning to her choices. It's fun to read her take on her life experiences, but one suspects that if someone else wrote a more objective book there would be quite a different take on who Cloris really is.
Badly written by what I suspect (hope) was a ghost writer.
I was so happy to see Cloris Leachman had written an autobiography. I've been a fan for so many years. So I felt cheated by this poorly written book. Some aspects are belabored, and others are glossed over. A few chapters near the end are literally only a couple of pages long. It's like someone interviewed Cloris and then laid out the notes for the book and decided to just publish them instead of actually letting her tell her own story.
I've seen her on live television enough to know that she's articulate, funny, knowledgeable, and in turns sophisticated and bawdy depending on the occasion. This book is none of those things. It's a thin watery story in which she sounds vapid and superficial, which is so very much less than her rich life and multi-faceted persona deserve.
Definitely worth reading
I've been a huge Cloris fan for many years - when I first started watching TV in college (never watched it
before then!) she was one of the first actors that I "noticed"...every episode of TV she was in was
always so much better because she was in it.Anyhow, I always wondered why she wasn't better known, despite a vast resume.No one I ever mentioned the name to seemed to have heard of her, outside of a very few who were big into
films and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show".I met her in 2001 and she was much the same as Phyllis Lindstrom of "MTMS"...a zany, vivacious person whose zest and lust for life are inexhaustible.I always wondered if she'd
ever do a bio.And finally she did.I read it all in 24 hours, that's how excited I was to read it.
It filled in a few gaps about her pre-Hollywood days in the theater and about her relationship with husband-producer George Englund.There is an abundance of information about George's relationship with Marlon Brando, however, that really should've been left out of the book.The life and death of her son Bryan, I knew about already from various documentaries about her, but I was amazed at how she admitted that she was somewhat of an enabler and that she didn't intervene and get him the help he was needing to overcome his addiction.Her time on "Mary Tyler Moore" doesn't get much coverage, and the only thing she really says about Mary herself is that she was professional and on time and ready to work.What I did not know is that she had a strained relationship with Ed Asner, or that she was so close to Valerie Harper during the series (despite the rivalry of Phyllis and Rhoda!)And her spinoff series "Phyllis" is barely touched upon.She makes no mention of Lisa Gerritsen, who played her unforgettable daughter Bess - possibly because they lost contact after it ended.I was glad to hear her say that she does not equate acting with money.This comes as no surprise to me, given her enormous natural gift for performing.I wish more Hollywood actors had the same attitude.To me, Cloris Leachman represents the last of a group of survivors from a very large fraternity of older actors who learned the craft of acting during the days when quality was still the focus.She is indeed a legend and a unique artist who made mountains and opened up new vistas in rather mundane characters.The fact that she has not succumbed to Hollywood ageism and win major awards late in life speaks for itself.This book tells of just a small part of her life, but anyone who has seen Cloris Leachman on screen and appreciated her performances, should read this book.
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