Dying of Politeness by Geena Davis

Two-time Academy Award winner Geena Davis has written an engaging and comprehensive memoir, detailing how a self-effacing girl from a conservative Massachusetts family became a cinematic badass; an empowered woman on screen well before real life.

With such a rich career, she spends the first third on growing up and becoming a New York model (even though at 6 ft. and 22 years old she was too tall and too old!). Everyone's youth is different, and she tells it to you like a friend. Her plan to be discovered as an actor through modeling came true in a once-in-a-lifetime offer, her first film role in Tootsie.

She has built a career as women living bolder lives than her own. Her ingrained skills at being no trouble to anyone meant the wishes of strangers took precedence over her own, and being seen a product as a model were just what Hollywood looks for.

Tootsie became the biggest hit of 1982, between E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She worked in TV and starred in her own sitcom before meeting Jeff Goldblum on the set of Transylvania 6-5000 (answering how the film was so terrible despite the comedic star power). They married and starred in Cronenberg's The Fly, where she was the first to utter the classic line: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

After Beetlejuice and Earth Girls Are Easy, she won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for The Accidental Tourist. She will always be best known, though, for her role in Thelma and Louise, the international classic with a feminist touch co-starring Susan Sarandon (and a young Brad Pitt), followed by A League of Their Own with Tom Hanks (a film about women's baseball marketed as the story of a male coach).

She became the highest-paid female actor for Cutthroat Island, a pirate spectacle built on the bankruptcy of the studio; and she reached the height of the action genre with The Long Kiss Goodnight, a terrific film written for a man and not changed for a female actor.

Despite how "gooney" she felt, with each role she found her voice. I appreciated her mentioning all her work, including the early days on Fantasy Island, Knight Rider, and Remington Steele, and not glossing over what may not have been her shining moments. She even details behind-the-scenes harassment on the caper comedy Quick Change, which I thought was a funny film.

One of Hollywoods most respected actors, she now runs an insititute for gender equality, ensuring a difference in showing representation in film.

I was impressed with this highly enjoyable memoir.

2022 / Hardcover / 288 pages