Octogenarian character actress Mary Louise Wilson has a face that's more familiar than her name. "I'm not well known, I didn't have a glittering career studded with affairs and celebrities," she writes. What she is, however, is a survivor in a very tough profession, and a born storyteller with a deliciously acerbic sense of humor about everything, especially herself.
In her mid-50s, Wilson realized that she had to take control of her flagging career by writing (with Mark Hampton) and starring in Full Gallop, a one-woman show based on the life of Vogue magazine editor Diana Vreeland. The focus of My First Hundred Years in Show Business is Wilson's eight-year journey to bring Full Gallop to the stage. "If you never want to hear from somebody again, send them your play," Wilson writes.
Alternating with this long-gestating project are short, juicy chapters covering her film, TV and theater roles and her private life. Wilson has decades of great backstage anecdotes, starting with her Broadway debut in the 1963 flop Hot Spot starring Judy Holliday--who fired several directors and refused to speak to Wilson offstage. Wilson's behind-the-scenes stories are equally compelling: an accidental overdose, an African American cross-dressing boyfriend, a pre-legal abortion and a cocaine-addicted dentist who used Crazy Glue to fix her teeth.
Wilson won major theater awards in her sixth and seventh decade and has no interest in retiring. At age 82, she writes, "The need to perform doesn't die. It's like lust; it's like throwing a lit match on a pile of dry hay." --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant