- Published: 15 May 2005
- ISBN: 9780091897499
- Imprint: Ebury Press
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 320
- RRP: $22.99
What's My Motivation?
One man'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 story of growing up in 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: $22.99
About the author
Screamingly funny - set to become a classic
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
A real page-turner and a genuinely funny and honest book about the actor's life
Michael Billington, Guardian
Michael writes about disaster, humiliation, rejection and ridicule - the hilarious truth
Nicholas Hytner
Casts an objective eye on the crazy world of the actor with an accuracy that is both chilling and charming
Mike Leigh
Daring, brutal, hilariously candid, Simkins unravels his own profession to show the exhilaration, masochism and madness underneath
Julie Myerson
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
Funny, engaging, perceptive and hugely entertaining
Stephen Fry
