As an actor, Karl Malden has won both an Oscar and an Emmy, in a career that has spanned over fifty years. In this witty, frank, graceful memoir, filled with unforgettable anecdotes of the stage and screen, he writes with uncomplicated directness, insight, and humor of his life as an actor and of the people he worked with in plays like All My Sons and A Streetcar Named Desire, and films such as On the Waterfront, Baby Doll, One-Eyed Jacks, I Confess, Gypsy, Patton, and Nuts.

Malden writes with passionate intensity about his childhood and his upbringing, and about the enormous influence his father - a proud, traditional, and authoritarian Serb - had over him, giving him the values that have sustained him throughout a long career. He also writes in fascinating detail of his experiences at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, and of the changes in Hollywood that came with the demise of the moguls like Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Darryl Zanuck.