Patrick McGilligan has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Young Orson.
Young Orson
Summary
For the centennial of his birth, the defining wunderkind of modern entertainment gets his due in a groundbreaking new biography of his early years - from his first forays in theater and radio to the inspiration and making of Citizen Kane.
No American artist or entertainer has enjoyed a more dramatic rise than Orson Welles. In this magisterial biography, Patrick McGilligan brings young Orson into focus as never before. He chronicles Welles' early life growing up in Wisconsin and Illinois, as the son of an alcoholic industrialist and a radical suffragist and classical musician, and the magical early years of his career, including his marriages and affairs, his influential friendships, and his artistic collaborations. The tales of his youthful achievements were so colorful and improbable that Welles, with his air of mischief, was often thought to have made them up. Now, after years of intensive research, McGilligan sorts out fact from fiction and reveals untold, fully documented anecdotes of Welles' first exploits and triumphs, from starring as a teenager on the Gate Theatre stage in Dublin and bullfighting in Seville to his time in the New York theater and his fraught partnership with John Houseman in the Mercury Theatre, and to his arrival in Hollywood and the making of Citizen Kane. Filled with intriguing new insights and startling revelations - including the surprising true origin and meaning of "Rosebud" - Young Orson is a fascinating look at the creative development and influences that shaped this legendary artistic genius.
©2015 Patrick McGilligan (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Funny Man
Summary
A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award-winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front of the camera, too) some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family. The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three years old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh. Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks’ personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks’ psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy. McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman’s life story, from Brooks’s childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television - working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner - to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His audiobook offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind-the-scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced, and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man’s unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success.
©2019 Patrick McGilligan (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers