Talent propelled Zero Mostel from the Orthodox Jewish home of his immigrant parents to the underground nightclubs where he began his career doing stand-up comedy and on to theatre, film, and television. But whatever the medium and whatever the role - comic or serious or frequently both - the personality of the man was inescapable. He was always Zero.

Twenty-one years after his death, the extraordinary Zero Mostel reappears in the unconventional biography he deserves. Arthur Sainer's research, particularly among members of the Mostel family, has been prodigious and the facts of Zero's life are here. But the author does not hesitate to speculate when the facts are not known, to digress when there is a good story to tell, to flash backward and forward in time, even to imagine a dialogue between Zero and Woody Allen.

If he sometimes defies custom, he does so reflecting the spirit of his subject, a man who in his work and his life recognized few boundaries.