Shelley II: The Middle Of My Century

Description for SHELLEY II: THE MIDDLE OF MY CENTURY by Shelley Winters:

SHELLEY II is the most uproariously entertaining show business autobiography since Shelley Winters' first book, SHELLEY: ALSO KNOWN AS SHIRLEY. Picking up where she left off, America's most irrepressible star takes us on a wild ride through the Hollywood of the 1950s and early 1960s, with side trips to Broadway, the Actors Studio, and around the world.

Returning to America from Italy in 1954, Shelley is devastated by the scandalous breakup of her marriage to Vittorio Gassman---but not for long. In the years that follow, we see Shelley triumph as an actress---and follow her through passionate love affairs, a tempestuous marriage, and her growing commitment to the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the political careers of Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy.

Here is Shelley struggling to shed the blonde bombshell image that Universal studios had created for her. She studies the Method with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She takes Broadway by storm in A Hatful of Rain. And she ultimately receives the recognition she deserves, winning a pair of Oscars for her roles in The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch Of Blue

Here is Shelley remembering the antics of her famous friends...

*Marilyn Monroe, her Hollywood roommate, who is perfect in front of the camera but helpless in the kitchen (charged with making salad, she scrubs each lettuce leaf with a Brillo pad)

*James Dean, who guns his motorcycle and plays chicken with a terrified Shelley as she drives down Sunset Boulevard

*Dylan Thomas, who is introduced to Shelley as a "Welsh cartoonist", and who scandalizes Hollywood by reeling drunkenly and "watering" the plants at a Charlie Chaplin open house

*Laurence Olivier, who floats mash notes to Shelley across the pool at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York

*Sean Connery, a young Scottish actor who romances Shelley in his chilly London flat---and later stays with her in New York to avoid hotel bills (not that she minded)

*Tony Franciosa, her costar in A Hatful of Rain, whom Shelley swoons for and marries..."if there had been an Olympic sex team that year," she recalls, "Tony would have been the captain."

Here is Shelley dining with Nikita Khrushchev...wandering around a Moscow suburb at dawn in a white satin evening gown...changing her clothes in a men's room in Brighton---and being surprised when Prince Philip walks in...unable to like naked next to James Mason on the set of Lolita as genius director Stanley Kubrick looks on...and much more.

Revealing, warm and hilariously funny, here is Shelley having the times of her life---the story of a remarkable actress and an extraordinary woman, told with all of Shelley's inimitable exuberance and candor.