And Other Stories from a Life Lived In and Out of the Movies
November 9, 2015
Actress and director Douglas's memoir is an enjoyable down a star-studded memory lane, buoyed by her easy charm and genuine love of all things cinematic. Growing up in Connecticut with parents who took Easy Rider's approach to 1960s counterculture a little too literallyâher father started his own communeâDouglas always knew she wanted a life in the movies. The granddaughter of two-time Oscar-winner Melvyn Douglas once took a young Illeana to the set of Being There and introduced to one of her idols, Peter Sellers, thus cementing her Hollywood dream. Douglas worked her way up from waitressing at a dinner theater to acting school in New York, and thence to working for famed publicist Peggy Siegal. This led to a chance encounter with Martin Scorsese, who would direct her in several of his pictures, including in a particularly memorable scene of his Cape Fear remake in which Robert de Niro's Max Cady gnaws off her face; Douglas and Scorsese were also in a romantic relationship for a decade. Douglas recounts, with equal parts humor and heart, her experiences on films such as Goodfellas, Alive (for which the cast virtually recreated a plane crash high in the Canadian Rockies), and To Die For. She also mentions several friendships, both brief and long-term, with luminaries like Roddy McDowell and Marlon Brando. Douglas nimbly avoids the celebrity tell-all pitfall of unrelieved namedropping by imbuing her debut with an earnest, undeniable passion for movies and the people who make them.