When Do I Start Hardcover - 1997

From the publisher

His glittering stage credits include such plays as Golden Boy, All My Sons, and the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He won an Academy Award "RM" in 1951 for the film version of Streetcar and an Emmy in 1984 for the TV movie Fatal Vision. His memorable performances in major film classics such as Patton, Baby Doll, On the Waterfront, and One-Eyed Jacks earned glowing notices, and he endeared himself to television viewers as veteran detective Mike Stone in "The Streets of San Francisco". Yet Karl Malden has had anything but an easy road to fame.

Growing up tough and poor in Gary, Indiana, as the son of a Serbian steelworker, Maiden turned to the mills himself, doing hard, dangerous work to finance his way through acting school. In When Do I Start? he tells of his determined pursuit of Broadway, his involvement with the Group Theater (which brought him to the notice of Elia Kazan and then almost cost him his career during the anticommunist witchhunts of the fifties), his starring roles in two television series, and his rise to movie stardom. Delicious anecdotes about Kazan, Brando, Jessica Tandy, Paul Muni, Vivien Leigh, Montgomery Clift, Michael Douglas, and many others fill the pages of this memoir by a shrewd and witty observer of show business who turns out to be a gifted, natural storyteller.