Eric Braeden

While this doesn’t go into much depth, it does touch on every stage of his life from his childhood in Germany through to his present day life in Los Angeles on The Young and the Restless, mostly just expanding upon a speech he once wrote that’s featured at the end of the book, to be honest, you’d probably come away knowing almost as much about him if you only read the speech.

The writing is pretty basic, not a lot of sensory detail (which maybe is more noticeable to me because I mostly read fiction rather than non-fiction) but I thought the book captured his voice well enough with plenty of his trademark “I’ll be damned” throughout and he definitely doesn’t hold back his opinions on a wide array of subjects from his German heritage to sports, so it very much echoes the man you see in interviews.

Eric Braeden’s plenty complimentary towards his abilities athletically and as an actor, but I liked that he’s also willing to show a few flaws along the way as well, I mean, I probably could have done with just one story of traveling by car rather than several, nonetheless, I appreciated that in those anecdotes as well as a few others he doesn’t shy away from illustrating how his quick temper sometimes gets away from him.

There’s a little written about a certain actor who’s exit from the The Young and The Restless remains controversial, and Braeden does single out several castmates, mentioning how he feels about their work and them as people, but I was otherwise disappointed by the sections about Y&R. There were some summaries of Victor’s stories, but the thing is, if you’re a fan of Y&R, you already know what’s happened on the show, you watched it, it’s the stories behind those stories that I craved and mostly didn’t get. It’s not that I wanted dirt on the cast or anything like that, it’s that I want to know about his work on the show, what’s it like on set, what’s his day to day and how has it changed as the genre has changed with lower budgets, shorter scenes, faster storytelling, how did it feel to play certain scenes, etc. He frequently talks in interviews about Victor’s backstory and the episode featuring Victor’s dad, so I was hoping in the book he’d discuss some other areas of the show, some other storylines, however, there wasn’t much more here.

I felt like the early days of his acting career (movies and television), as well as the bits on Titanic and the movie he produced managed to capture more of what I had wanted from the Y&R section, whether it was the difficulty of navigating German stereotypes in his first few roles, his stunt on Titanic, or how much he fought against taking that role, I felt there was more insight there than was afforded to Y&R in the book, which I totally understand, if you’ve done something for forty years you probably would feel more blase about it, and it likely blurs more in your memory than those shoots that were a much more singular experience than Y&R probably feels like to him.

Still, Y&R is such a significant part of his life that I just can’t help but wish his co-author or the editor had insisted on a delving a bit deeper into it. I felt the same way after reading Susan Lucci’s autobiography, like there could have been more All My Children content, so it’s entirely possible that it’s more a me thing than an actual problem with these books, it’s just that their soap opera work is the part of their career that means the most to me so that’s where I would have preferred the focus to be, though I’m sure there are other fans/readers who are curious to learn more about the other aspects of their lives.… (mais)