Javascript is not enabled in your browser. Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site.

Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser

Billie Whitelaw...Who He?: An Autobiography

by Billie Whitelaw

Overview
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Related Subjects

Overview

Billie Whitelaw has been one of Laurence Olivier's leading ladies; she has worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Albert Finney, Peter Sellers, and other greats; she has appeared in films that include The Sleeping Tiger, Miracle in Soho, Make Mine Mink, The Krays, and The Omen (in which she played the notoriously evil nanny); most of all, she was the longtime muse of the great playwright Samuel Beckett, with whom she worked closely for twenty-five years. In this likable, clear-eyed memoir Whitelaw traces the arc of her extraordinary career - a career that transported her from an underprivileged childhood in Coventry to the brightest lights of stage and screen, though she never even dreamed of becoming an actress. With candor, humor, and generous detail, she reveals what it was like to work with the most accomplished and up-and-coming directors, playwrights, and fellow actors of her time. She gives us an intimate view of the day-to-day workings of the mind of Beckett as he devised his unique, intense theatrical style in plays like Footfalls, Play, and Happy Days.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

British actress Whitelaw, born in Coventry in 1932, tells harrowing stories of surviving the Nazi blitz. In hopes of finding a cure for her stuttering, she became a radio actress and went on to join Joan Littlewood's acting group, eventually ending up working for Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre. This outspoken, at times sentimental and heartrending memoir goes on to discuss the great names of the British acting community from the 1950s through the '90s-from Alfred Hitchcock to Albert Finney to Kenneth Tynan-but concentrates on Whitelaw's work with Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Starting with Play in 1963, she would work with Beckett until his death in 1989. In later years she would also star in Beckett's Not I, Footfalls, Happy Days and Rockaby, which the playwright wrote especially for her. She also bares her soul about her personal life: her two marriages, the birth of her son and the trauma of almost losing him to meningitis. Because she worked so closely with Beckett, who also directed her in several of his plays, this is an invaluable guide for the Beckett actor or director. (May)

Jack Helbig

Best known in the U.S. for her work in Samuel Beckett's enigmatic later short plays (many of them written expressly for her), Whitelaw had a long and varied career before she became Beckett's favorite English-speaking actress. Working with Britain's leading theatrical lights--Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, etc.--Whitelaw appeared in plays, films, and BBC-TV shows. She recounts her remarkable, busy life in a literate, readable, surprisingly gossip-free autobiography that starts with her traumatic childhood during the blitz in the 1940s and ends in the early 1990s with her "new" postacting life as a college lecturer on Beckett. Whitelaw is most vivid when she describes her most difficult moments--the wartime bombings, her father's early death, her son's battle with meningitis, and the many trials she endured while making Beckett's spare, demanding plays live and breath. Meanwhile, her lighter, less focused moments--for example, her remarks in four "intermissions" on noteworthy writers, directors, and actors she has known--will greatly amuse film and theater aficionados.

Kirkus Reviews

A pungent memoir by British actress Whitelaw, the preeminent interpreter of Samuel Beckett's female roles.

You can practically smell the fat frying in Whitelaw's descriptions of the cholesterol-heavy "tea" (bread soaked in roasting pan juices) served during her 1930s childhood in northern England and feel the grit in her mouth as she recalls eating dirt with a teaspoon ("I like the taste"). Her accounts of her parents' troubled relationship and her own failed first marriage are notable for their lack of whining; her portrait of her second husband is loving but unsentimental. What will most interest readers, however, are her detailed descriptions of her work with Beckett. The playwright was so impressed with Whitelaw's performance in the 1963 British production of Play that he insisted she be given the lead in the Royal Court Theatre's 1972 production of Not I; he went on to write Footfalls (1976) and Rockaby (1981) for her and to direct her in a 1979 revival of Happy Days. The actress freely admits she is no intellectual: "I am practically illiterate. . . . I never read plays unless I have to perform in them." Yet she made a visceral connection with Beckett's writings, which many theatergoers consider dauntingly obscure. "I found so much of myself in Not I," she recalls. "Somewhere in there were my entrails under a microscope." Her instinctual approach, which involved intense discussions with Beckett about pace and feeling, almost none about meaning, makes for riveting reading. Chapters on her non-Beckett career are less interesting, though she makes some sharp comments about Laurence Olivier's overly revered acting style ("technically brilliant, but I could find no real emotional involvement") and controversial drama critic Kenneth Tynan ("for all his revolutionary left-wing views, he looked a bit of a toff").

Too specialized for the general reader, perhaps, but Beckett lovers will cherish Whitelaw's intimate revelations about his personality and working methods.