Memoirs of a Professional Cad

Name: Memoirs of a Professional Cad
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: George Sanders
ISBN: 9781666199505

Author: George Sanders

Narrator: Liam Gerrard

Unabridged: 4 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/15/2022

Categories: Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Arts & Entertainment

Synopsis

What might we dare to expect from an actor's autobiography, even one from a star as personable as George Sanders? In the case of Memoirs of A Professional Cad, we possibly get more than we deserve. George Sanders undoubtedly led a colorful, glamorous, and even action-packed life, spanning the peak years of Hollywood's golden age. But the greatest joy of his memoirs is how funny they are, and how penetrating their author's wit.

George's early childhood was spent in Tsarist Russia, before he was obliged to flee with his family to England on the eve of the Russian Revolution. George was eventually asked to leave South America following a duel of honor, and was forced to take up acting for a living.

Memoirs of A Professional Cad has much to say about Hollywood and the stars George Sanders worked with and befriended, not to mention the irrepressible Tsa Tsa Gabor who became his wife. But at heart it is less a conventional autobiography, and more a Machiavellian guide to life, and the art of living, from a man who knew a thing or two on the subject.

Memoirs of A Professional Cad stands today as one of the classic Hollywood memoirs, from one of its most original, enduring, and inimitable stars.

About George Sanders

George Sanders was born in St Petersburg in 1906. He left Russia in 1917 with his family, who settled in England and had George educated at Bedales and Brighton College. He made his British film debut in 1929, but it was in 1930's Hollywood that he honed his distinctive, charming-yet-dangerous screen persona-the quintessential cad. Sanders co-starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent (both 1940), and went on to win an Academy Award for his signature role, that of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950). He continued to work in films up until the year of his death in 1972. In the 1940's, Sanders' film-star status was the impetus for his two crime novels, both featuring recognizably Sanders-esque heroes: Crime on My Hands (1944) and Stranger at Home (1946). In 1960 came a third book: his autobiography, fittingly titled Memoirs of A Professional Cad in which the line between fiction and fact is blurred even more convincingly-and wittily-than in the novels. All three works are available as ebooks from Dean Street Press.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffrey

”In the middle of April the Germans took a sombre decision...they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin, in a sealed truck, like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.” Winston Churchill Little did the Germans know they were also ruining the life of Geo......more

Goodreads review by Tosh

You watched "All About Eve" and you love the George Sanders "character" in the film, and you need more of that. Well, this book should satisfy your hunger for Sanders and his slightly jaded way he looks at the world. I 'kind' of loved it, but began to think that in person he may have been a real dra......more

Goodreads review by Margaret H. Willison

If I were a lead in a romantic comedy, I'd mention this book and how badly I want a copy to the leading man in the first act and then, in the final act, it'd be the thing that makes him seek me out again after our third act misunderstanding.......more

Goodreads review by Alvin

A smorgasbord of cocktail party witticisms mixed with showbiz anecdote and personal history. If you're willing to overlook the 1950s-style casual sexism and xenophobia, Sanders' caricature of himself as an impossibly bored, lazy, self-centered, and misanthropic aristocrat is pretty hilarious. His ma......more

Goodreads review by Samantha

I have been a big George Sanders fan ever since I was quite young - yes I found him handsome but it was more than that - his rakish charm, his knowing smile, his confident and intellectual air and, of course, that voice. This book is not just a retelling of his life but part travelogue and his observ......more