Dudley Moore: The Authorized Biography
by Barbra Paskin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Barbra PaskinEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-04-01
ISBN: 1893224171
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: New Millennium Entertainment (CA)
Book Reviews of Dudley Moore: The Authorized Biography
Book Review: The way up from down -- and back again: a frank revelation
Summary: 5 Stars
Biographer Barbra Paskin's look into the life of comic actor-and serious musician-Dudley Moore bears sad testament to every allegory on record about "the tears of a (highly successful) clown." At 452 pages (hard cover edition), Ms. Paskin's chronicle is detailed, to say the least, replete with excerpts from Moore's diaries and photo collections, as well as relatively incisive commentary from some of the major women in his perennially ill-fated love life. Professional colleagues and personal friends (there seems little gap between the two) offer their recollections and insights as well, with Moore's great capacity for long-standing friendship, generosity, professionalism, and musicianship becoming eminently apparent. If Moore was dealt less than auspicious circumstances at birth (a club foot and a mother who was emotionally remote), he received almost miraculous compensation in adulthood in a career which seemed to take flight of its own accord. Show business dues-paying as we know it is virtually absent from Moore's professional biography, which begins upon his graduation from Oxford in 1960 with the revue "Beyond The Fringe", and moves at a dizzyingly non-stop pace through nearly four decades of recordings (both comedy and jazz), TV series and commercials, films and documentaries, film and stage scores, the occasional co-authorship of screenplays and, more recently, a return to both the theatrical and the concert stage. Many an artist would kill for such a densely-packed engagement calendar. Yet satisfaction with this success seems increasingly to elude Moore, whose haunting, ever-present inner turmoil about hearth-and-home-and-mother-and the lack of same, in meaningful terms-continues its steady erosion of his thoughts, his private life and, eventually, of his career itself. For all of his high-profile rise to, and fall from, the good graces of the entertainment industry-appalling character and judgment flaws within his romantic relationships notwithstanding-Dudley Moore emerges here as a likeable, troubled, moody man of great intelligence, talent, aspiration, and sensitivity who, as the years progressed, made increasingly bad choices, both professionally as well as personally. Paskin writes: "It has been Dudley's burden in life that he has never known in which direction to travel, save that he has never really wanted to follow only one path..." And there, but for the grace of God, go all of us. It's heartening to know we're not pioneers on the oft-troubled and fragmented travels of the human heart and psyche from one end of life to the other. In this book we find that, true to yet another allegory, Mr. Moore is to a great extent EveryMan-and disarmingly willing to own up to the fact. He's a lot like many of us, only more so (no pun intended).
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