Daniel D’Addario is chief correspondent at Variety. He has won awards from the Los Angeles Press Club for profile writing and for political commentary and is among the moderators of Variety’s Actors on Actors video series. He was previously the television critic for Variety and for Time. A graduate of Columbia University, he lives with his husband and two daughters in Brooklyn.
D’Addario's new novel is The Talent.
At Electric Lit he tagged nine books that shed "light on what kind of temperament it takes to make art, and what pressures artists face as they try to express something genuine." One title on the list:
Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark HarrisRead about the other books on the list at Electric Lit.
The greatest Hollywood biography of recent years tracks one prolific director through a long and varied career. Mike Nichols rose toprominence as a filmmaker with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate and went on to make Working Girl, Closer, and Charlie Wilson’s War. Intriguingly, he lacked a fundamental signature or style. He was competent and engaged enough to allow his career to go on, and he spent his life wearing a wig and false eyebrows (a side effect from a childhood medical treatment), which left him fundamentally relating to outsider characters, whether they were a young college alum driftless in Southern California or a Staten Island secretary looking for more. Harris marshals a fantastic set of interviewees to make Nichols’s life and work into a narrative that, itself, might make a great film.
--Marshal Zeringue
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