Customer Reviews

Role of a Lifetime: Four Professional Actors and How They Built Their Careers

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I highly recommend this engaging compilation of mini-biographies! Each of the four chapters gives the reader such interesting insight into the professional life of a consistently working actor who has performed for decades on the edge of the limelight. Role of a Lifetime celebrates actors and their profession while telling four great stories.

Not since Simon Callow's BEING AN ACTOR has a book so thoroughly explored the life, the passion, and the plight of being in the theater.

Simonson has selected a quartet of very talented but lesser-known performers and created insightful, sensitive but unflinching portraits of each. One closes the book having been exposed to the erratic and always challenging life of an actor. Simonson writes with authority but allows the individual personalities to shape each of the sections.

It is a book not just to be read but to be re-read. I hope that it will soon become a staple in acting classes on all levels as well as for the generally curious.

Robert Simonson has taken 4 working actors and takes us on a wonderful journey about their career and lives. The actors he interviewed are Austin Pendleton, Lois Smith, Gloria Foster and Ron Rifkin. While giving us all the necessary biographical statistics, the actors tell us how they built their careers and how they approached various roles. The thing that makes this book so interesting is the fact that these are not celebrities. They are hard working and respected actors in their profession. Anyone interested in acting or theatre should read this book. It is a great read!!!!

Thoroughly enjoyable! This is a book I will definitely read again. The perspectives of four hard-working actors in Role of a Lifetime are analogous to many careers, it's just so much more interesting to read about an individual's decisions, sacrifices, successes, and determination in the realm of stage and screen. Well-written chronicles of four fascinating journeys!