What's My Motivation?
Michael Simkins
  • Published: 15 May 2005
  • ISBN: 9780091897499
  • Imprint: Ebury Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

What's My Motivation?

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One actor's search for love, happiness and adulation, rewarded with rejection, ridicule, bad costumes and worse scripts

As a boy, Michael Simkins always wanted to be someone. While his friends were out getting laid and stoned, he was tucked up at home dreaming of his name in lights, of holding an audience rapt, of perhaps becoming a TV heart-throb, or having someone, anyone, ask for his autograph in the supermarket. This is the true story of an obsessive pursuit of acting fame. It is a life marked by occasional hard-fought successes and routine helpings of ritual humiliation: scout hut Gilbert and Sullivan, dodgy rock operas, sewage farm theatre workshop, Christmas panto hell, straight-to-video film flops, leading roles in Crimewatch reconstructions and dressing up as a chicken to advertise TV dinners. It is a hilarious tale of turgid theatre, tights, trusses and tonsil tennis with Timothy Spall.
  • Published: 15 May 2005
  • ISBN: 9780091897499
  • Imprint: Ebury Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Michael Simkins

Michael Simkins trained at RADA. He has appeared in more than 70 plays, stage highlights include A View from the Bridge at the National Theatre as well as musicals Chicago and Mamma Mia. He also directed Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends at the Greenwich Theatre. He has made countless TV appearances - recent credits include Foyle's War and My Family - as well as turns on the silver screen in such films as Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. He has worked with luminaries as diverse as Anthony Perkins, John Malkovich, Michael Gambon and Buster Merryfield. He lives with his actress wife Julia in London.

Also by Michael Simkins

The Rules of Acting
The Last Flannelled Fool
Detour de France
Fatty Batter
See all

Praise for What's My Motivation?

Funny, engaging, perceptive and hugely entertaining

Stephen Fry

Screamingly funny - set to become a classic

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Michael writes about disaster, humiliation, rejection and ridicule - the hilarious truth

Nicholas Hytner

A real page-turner and a genuinely funny and honest book about the actor's life

Michael Billington, Guardian

Daring, brutal, hilariously candid, Simkins unravels his own profession to show the exhilaration, masochism and madness underneath

Julie Myerson

Casts an objective eye on the crazy world of the actor with an accuracy that is both chilling and charming

Mike Leigh

You read the wonderful Michael Simkins with a mixture of horror and delight ... will hold good for as long as people go on taking the undignified risk of dressing up and pretending to be other people

David Hare

Blisteringly funny, self-deprecating account of the ritual humiliations actors undergo

Michael Billington, Guardian

A winningly self-deprecating account...packed with anecdotes, light-hearted in tone and entertaining throughout

Times Literary Supplement
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