From the Department of Candid UK Actor Memoirs That Have Been Mined for Clickbait Fodder by Entertainment News Sites.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Welcome to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.

Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife Anne or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-five years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place…

3. Patrick Stewart, Making It So (2023). He’s played spacefaring authority Jean-Luc Picard, telepathic civil rights leader Professor Charles Xavier, Captain Ahab, an entire rogues’ gallery of Shakespearean leads, every character in A Christmas Carol, the same Dune warrior that Josh Brolin later played, and the boss from American Dad! Now he’s a memoir writer sharing a lifetime of experiences from growing up poor in West Yorkshire to Picard‘s final season. Writing in a conversational tone as if he and the reader were in adjacent armchairs, Stewart holds forth candidly (often at his own expense) on a wide array of subjects, geeky or otherwise — those he mentioned in the live Q&A we attended in Cincinnati and a plethora he saved for the reading experience:

• His parents’ issues, which may have informed his own
• The joy of moving into a home with an indoor toilet
• His stints as Head Boy, small-town journalist, furniture salesman, and Assistant to the Regional Stage Manager
• The one famous Shakespeare play he’s never done and has never cared for
• The Next Generation episodes he liked most, those he hated doing, and which season dissatisfied him the most
• The very first time a Trek castmate pranked him
• Extreme fanboying at doing the “Chain of Command” two-parter with the revered David Warner
• The one and only time he assaulted a fellow actor (I had to reread that part three times to confirm it wasn’t an imagined sequence)
• His regrets about his adultery in past marriages
• What it’s like to be knighted
• His past several years’ worth of exo-Hollywood “viral” moments, such as his daily pandemic recitations of the Bard’s sonnets, or that time he and Ian McKellen roamed NYC and chanced upon Leonard Nimoy buying a hot dog

…and more, more, more. Dozens of pages cover his years of British stagecraft; several more are devoted to his wife Sunny. If you want to turn the book into a drinking game, swig every time Brian Blessed appears from nowhere. It’s weirdly a lot. Serendipity is funny that way.

4. Brian Cox, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat (2022). Speaking of UK thespians over 75 who grew up working-class, racked up voluminous Shakespearean stage experience, costarred in X2: X-Men United, guest-starred on Frasier, are presently on their third wife, and spent their pandemic free time writing a memoir: now for something completely different!

He’s played billionaire entertainment tyrant Logan Roy, one of Wolverine’s worst enemies, an entire rogues’ gallery of Shakespearean leads, Jason Bourne’s boss, Herman Göring, Leon Trotsky, Hannibal Lecter, Winston Churchill, LBJ, Marlon Brando, celeb lawyer Melvin Belli, and more, more, more. The onetime Fox Teen Choice Award Winner is candid and self-effacing as well, sometimes diplomatic and often gruffly unfiltered, yet likewise cannot possibly cover all the ground he’s trod upon throughout his career. Subjects include but aren’t limited to:

• His parents’ issues, which may have informed his own
• His stints as an acting teacher in Moscow and a bikini wax scheduler
• How he managed filming Braveheart and Rob Roy at the same time.
• Several paragraphs of grievances against Margaret Thatcher
• Why having only a single TV channel growing up was a good thing
• This one time he full-on screamed at a crewman who punched a horse
• This other time Sir Alec Guinness kicked a theater program out of a patron’s hands
• The Royal Family member who felt him up
• The travesty of Troy
• His regrets of his multiple occasions of adultery
• His single encounter with Harvey Weinstein, which was more than enough
• The one and only time he was ever fired from a Hollywood role, a talking lion
• How his Churchill beats Gary Oldman’s Churchill
• His love of weed
• His preference for ’60s Batman comics over Nolan’s trilogy
• His refusal to divulge which X2 costar yelled at Bryan Singer, “You can kiss my black ass!”
• His controversial episode of Urban Myths that was pulled and will never, ever, ever see the light of day
• The Golden Globe he won for Succession
• How the book’s title is partly Albert Finney’s fault

…and so on. If you want to turn the book into a drinking game, swig every time the late Michael Gambon appears from nowhere. He was still alive when this was published, and his merry-prankster ways concerned Cox all the way to the final chapter.

Also, fun trivia in neither book: Cox is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, which means he outranks Sir Patrick Stewart, who’s a “mere” Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

From the Department of Tallest Books in This Year’s Finished Pile (So Far)

5. Michael Allred, Steve Horton and Laura Allred, Bowie: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams (2020). For an icon whose trendsetting theatricality and ever-shifting personae were half his mystique and allure, a graphic-novel biography makes far more sense than a purely textual affair, and the Allreds’ joint resume (Madman, Silver Surfer, etc.) positioned them as ideal visualizers. Intergalactic flights of fancy and hallucinatory interludes alternate with the straightforward story of the artiste whose sensibilities kept him three steps ahead of his contemporaries but didn’t always wait for his friends and collaborators to catch up. A few recreated conversations suffer slight Wiki-transcriptive stiffness, and the narrative jarringly ends post-Ziggy-Stardust and yadda-yaddas his next few decades into single-page splashes (either out of sequelizing intent or because that’s where the authors’ interest in his life ended), but within the space-time continuum cross-section allotted, Bowie’s magic and imagination definitely comes alive. Value-added bonus: the foreword is by Neil Gaiman!

6. Saladin Ahmed, Dave Acosta and Chris O’Halloran, Dragon (2022). Once upon a time, Dracula was an evil hermit who lived in a giant castle and ran afoul of well-dressed nineteenth-century Englishmen as if they were his very first opponents. Or so thousands of versions of the same old story go, which is admittedly odd considering the historical figure that inspired him or was him, Wallachia’s own Vlad the Impaler, lived in the fifteenth century. In this refreshingly less Caucaso-centric take (which works as a prequel to Stoker’s classic, if one feels compelled to square them up) it’s the year 1450 and the creators of Image Comics’ Terrorwar have fired the Harkers. Instead humanity’s defense against the head vampire is an old Muslim soldier of the Ottoman Empire and a young Hungarian nun whose devout prayers have instant effects on the undead. Can the most mismatched duo imaginable in this era set aside their differences and take the beast down? Though the contents of this Kickstarter’d project may seem disproportionate — 100 pages of story plus 64 pages of behind-the-scenes extras — it’s a strikingly illustrated action-horror period-piece with a new look for a played-out monster and an interesting pair of nuanced, complicated leads. I’d love to see more historical team-ups like this.

More to come!