Showing titles in Entertainment & Celebrities

As a young boy growing up in the outskirts of Dublin, Gabriel Byrne sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Born to working-class parents and the eldest of six children, he harboured a childhood desire to become a priest. When he was 11 years old, Byrne found himself crossing the Irish Sea to join a seminary in England. Four years later, Byrne had been expelled and he quickly returned to his native city. There he took odd jobs as a messenger boy and a factory labourer to get by.

Nancy Cartwright, the ultimate Simpsons insider, gives voice to the boy immediately recognizable as none other than Bart Simpson. In this memoir, Nancy traces The Simpsons’ rapid rise to wild popularity, offers hilarious anecdotes about cast members and guest stars, and reveals what it’s like to be at the center of an American institution - one that reinvented the sitcom, rocked the TV networks to the core, and forever changed the face of television.

Bon: The Last Highway is the original, forensic, unflinching and masterful biography Bon Scott has so richly deserved and music fans around the world have been waiting for. The legend of the man known around the world simply as 'Bon' only grows with each passing year - in death the AC/DC icon has become a god to millions of people - but how much of his story is myth or pure fabrication, and how much of the real man do we know?

In this moving collection of thought-provoking essays infused with her unique wisdom and deep humor, Union tells astonishingly personal and true stories about power, color, gender, feminism, and fame. Union tackles a range of experiences, including bullying, beauty standards and competition between women in Hollywood, growing up in white California suburbia and then spending summers with her Black relatives in Nebraska, coping with crushes, puberty, and the divorce of her parents.

In his first book, David Jason told us about himself from his early years training as an electrician through to making it as one of Britain's actors. This autumn, in a follow-up autobiography, he tells us about the many other lives he has lived - his characters. From Del Boy to Granville, Pop Larkin to Frost, he takes us behind the scenes and under the skins of some of the best loved acts of his career. And in the process he reflects on how those characters changed his life, too.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Spectacles, the hilarious, creative and incredibly moving memoir from much loved comedian, writer and presenter Sue Perkins. When I began writing this book, I went home to see if my mum had kept some of my stuff. What I found was that she hadn't kept some of it. She had kept all of it - every bus ticket, postcard, school report....

Rising to the Surface traces Lenny Henry's career through the '80s and '90s. The 16-year-old who won a talent competition now has to navigate his way through the seas of professional comedy, learning his craft through sheer graft and hard work. We follow Lenny through a period of great creativity—prize-winning TV programmes, summer seasons across Britain, the starring role in a Hollywood film, stand-up gigs in New York and a gala wedding to Dawn French. But with each rise, there is a fall, the most traumatic being the death of his mother.

One of my dad’s favorite jokes about getting older was: “I went out for coffee when I was twenty-one and when I got back I was fifty-eight!” I get what he meant now. Time flies. My first book, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a "B" Movie Actor, was published back in 2001 and it chronicles the adventures of a “mid-grade, kind of hammy actor" (my words), cutting his teeth on exploitation movies far removed from mainstream Hollywood. This next book, an “Act II” if you will, could be considered my “maturing years” in show business, when I began to say “no” more often and gravitated toward self-generated material. Taking stock in the overall quality of my life, I fled Los Angeles and moved to a remote part of Oregon to renew, regroup and reload. If that sounds tame, the journey from Evil Dead to Spider-Man to Burn Notice was long, with plenty of adventures/mishaps along the way. I never pictured myself hovering above Baghdad in a Blackhawk helicopter, facing a pack of wild dogs in Bulgaria, or playing an aging Elvis Presley with cancer on his penis - how can you predict this stuff? The sheer lunacy of show business is part of the fun for me and I hope you'll come along for the ride.

Let Love Rule covers a vast canvas stretching from Manhattan's Upper East Side, Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, Los Angeles's Baldwin Hills, Beverly Hills, and finally to France, England and Germany. It's the story of a wildly creative kid who, despite tough struggles at school and extreme tension at home, finds salvation in music. We see him grow as a musician and ultimately a master songwriter, producer and performer.

Superstar comedian and Hollywood box-office star Kevin Hart turns his immense talent to the written word by writing some words. Some of those words include: the, a, for, above, and even even. Put them together and you have the funniest, most heartfelt, and most inspirational memoir on survival, success, and the importance of believing in yourself since Old Yeller.

Jason Byrne is 17. With his leaving cert under his belt but no idea what to do next, who better to ask for advice than his dad, Paddy? There’s a (very) short stint studying accountancy (he was asked to leave); a FÁS course with juvenile offenders to become a waiter that leads to an apprenticeship in Jury’s (he was the only one not in prison), and a job in a lighting warehouse (it ended with a collapsed lung). But no matter what the problem, Paddy Byrne is always ready with a wise word: ‘Sure, that’s life, son. Just don't tell your mother.’

Maximum Volume offers a glimpse into the mind, the music, and the man behind the sound of the Beatles. George Martin's working-class childhood and musical influences profoundly shaped his early career in the BBC's Classical Music department and as head of the EMI Group's Parlophone Records. Out of them flowed the genius behind his seven years producing the Beatles' incredible body of work, including such albums as Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road.

The incredible, frank and moving autobiography by the Prince of F***ing Darkness! Has there ever been a more extraordinary rock-star story than Ozzy Osbourne's? Born into a life so poor that the whole family slept in one room, Ozzy endured a tough upbringing. Music was his salvation, and his band Black Sabbath went on to change the music scene forever.

A fascinating new book charting the life and career of Sex Pistols legend Glen Matlock through the lens of thirty of his most formative songs - from the ones that influenced him as a child to the ones he wrote and played on as a star. Sharing insider tales of the Sex Pistols' earliest gigs and stormiest reunions, as well as their most idiosyncratic inter-band dynamics, Triggers offers a vivid insight into the ultimate icons of punk.

The autobiography of the man who brought the theme park concept to Britain and created some of the world's most thrilling rides and attractions. He talks about his early beginnings in the theater, circus, and magical cabaret, his time working on some of the most incredible special effects in the James Bond films.

Yearbook is a collection of true stories that I desperately hope are just funny at worst, and life-changingly amazing at best. (I understand that it's likely the former, which is a fancy 'book' way of saying 'the first one.') I talk about my grandparents, doing stand-up comedy as a teenager, bar mitzvahs and Jewish summer camp, and tell way more stories about doing drugs than my mother would like. I also talk about some of my adventures in Los Angeles, and surely say things about other famous people that will create a wildly awkward conversation for me at a party one day.

A new, definitive biography of the iconic and mysterious singer, Warhol superstar, Velvet Underground collaborator: influential solo artist Nico.

For 10 years Geordie Greig was among a very small group of friends who regularly met Lucian Freud for breakfast at Clarke’s restaurant on Kensington Church Street. Over tea and the morning papers, Freud would recount stories of his past and discuss art. It was, in effect, Freud’s private salon.

Blue Collar Comedy star Bill Engvall is just a guy. He's been one his whole life. He can't help it; he was born that way. And that makes him an expert on the subject. Engvall has been making people laugh professionally for more than 20 years, and along with Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, and Ron White, is a founding member of the superstar Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

Desolation is the story of Lamb of God’s lead guitarist and co-lyricist Mark Morton's lifelong quest for clarity and self-acceptance, and shows how the pressures of career success and personal battles eventually came into conflict with Morton's dedication to the creative process. Intertwined with addiction, self-destruction, and the path to eventual surrender and recovery, Morton also reveals the greatest personal tragedy of his life: the death of his two-day old daughter, plunging Morton further into hopelessness.