Customer Reviews

Mercedes McCambridge: A Biography and Filmography

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This is a very well written, wonderful biography of an incredible actress's life and career. Mr. Lackmann made the Academy Award winning, Tony nominated actress, Mercedes McCambridge, live again in this book, which covers her career on the radio (Big Sister, Lights Out, Inner Sanctum Mysteries, I Love A Mystery, Bulldog Drummong, Guiding Light, Studio One, etc) in films (All The King's Men, Giant, Suddenly Last Summer, Angel Baby, The Exorcist) on television (Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Magnum PI, etc.), and on the stage (The Hasty Heart, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks, Lost In Yonkers), as well as her fantastically melodramatic personal life, which seems to be more like faction than an actual life. Included are McCambridge's unusual childhood in Chicago with her two larger-than-life, highly dramatic Irish/American parents, her caeers beginnings on radio when she was in her late teens, her two marriages to two self-centered men, her two miscarriages, two suicide attempts, two divorces and the tracic death of her only child, John Lawrence, who murdered his wife and two daughters and then killed himself. The book also covers McCambridge's close relationships with such varied famous folk as Marlebe Dietrich, Orson Welles (who called her "the world's greatest living radio actress"), John Huston, twice U.S. presidential candidate Adai Stevenson, impressario Billy Rose, and many others. Anyone who would like to be taken behind the scenes with a show business legend will not be able to put this book down once they began to read it. Lackmann's book also contains 72 great photographs and a detailed career record of her numerous and diversified radio, film, TV, and stage performances. I highly recommend Ron Lackmann's biography of the unforgetable actress Mercedes McCambridge to anyone interested in show business and in reading about the amazing personal life and career of a truly great actress!!!