Book description
As an actress, Marsha Mason has had a varied and very successful
career. Winner of the Golden Globe award as best actress and a four-time
Academy Award® nominee, she has worked in film (perhaps most notably in
the movies
Cinderella Liberty, Chapter Two,
and The Goodbye Girl),
television (most recently as Sherry on Frasier),
and the theater (having performed in London's West End, on and off
Broadway, and in regional theater around the U. S.).
While the path
she followed to achieve her success was seldom an easy one, Marsha
Mason never wavered in her determination. She wanted to be an actress
-- that much she knew even as a young girl growing up in a modest
neighborhood in St. Louis. For her, acting would be an escape, a
chance to be someone other than the girl who seemed always to
disappoint and anger her parents, the ticket that would take her out
of their provincial, strict Catholic household and transport her to
another world somewhere between reality and fantasy.
Now, in Journey, Marsha Mason retraces the path she followed
out of her difficult childhood. She moved to New York City, where she
worked as a waitress and go-go dancer before landing a role in the
then popular daytime TV soap opera Love of Life. After that,
her world started to change, as one success led to another.
The biggest change, however, came when she met Neil Simon,
Broadway's most successful and powerful playwright, the creator of
such long-running shows as Barefoot in the Park and The Odd
Couple. Cast in his play The Good Doctor, Mason found
herself drawn to the charismatic Simon, who was still struggling with
the pain of losing his wife, Joan, to cancer. After a brief, whirlwind
courtship, they married, and nothing was ever the same. The couple
moved to Hollywood so Mason could pursue film work, and Simon began
writing a string of films to star his new wife. Her journey had indeed
taken her far, as she realized an undreamed-of level of success. There
was, however, a price to pay.
The marriage to Simon ended so abruptly, and left such a major void,
that for quite some time afterward Marsha Mason seemed to have neither
direction nor focus in her life. Finally deciding to leave Hollywood
and to undertake an entirely different career raising herbs on a ranch
in New Mexico, she began a new stage of her journey -- the one that
frames this very personal and involving memoir -- by packing up a
lifetime of memories and setting off with friends on an odyssey that
finds her today a successful farmer with a still active career as an
actress.
Marsha Mason's Journey is revealing of the demands and
sacrifices of the life of a successful actress, and at the same time
inspiring, as she traces a lifetime spent in search of an elusive
happiness. As an adult child of alcoholics, she has come to understand
the forces that shaped her life and propelled her along a path that
was as inevitable as it was debilitating. And now, from her present
vantage point, she is able to look back with a new understanding, one
that enables her to take comfort in the success she has found and find
joy in learning to celebrate life.
Marsha Mason, a four-time Academy Award® nominee
and a two-time winner of the Golden Globe award, has starred in movies
such as The Goodbye Girl, Cinderella Liberty, and Nick of
Time. Most recently she appeared opposite Richard Dreyfuss in a
stage revival of The Prisoner of Second Avenue in London, in
The Vagina Monologues in New York, and as Sherry on TV's
Frasier. She now lives in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where she owns a
successful medicinal herb farm. Journey is her first book.
