I first encountered the actor Laurence Harvey as a child, when he played the doomed commander of the Alamo in John Wayne's epic film about that battle. It was my favorite film as a kid, and everything about it captured my imagination, including the foppish British star playing a South Carolinian soldier. I'm sure I would not have known at that time what to make of a biography such as the one I've just read of Harvey, but I'm happy to have read it in my maturity. Harvey was a fascinating actor who is best remembered for his Oscar-nominated role in Room at the Top and for his chilling performance as the brain-washed political scion in original version The Manchurian Candidate. He was known for his frequent roles as charming cads and downright heels, and for some, this was Harvey in real life. An inordinate number of his colleagues seem to have hated him. He was arrogant, manipulative, ambitious, and sometimes brutally selfish. Yet what struck me most powerfully about this biography of Harvey is how many people forgave him his excesses and smallnesses and instead loved him to the point of adoration. A Lithuanian Jew who grew up in South Africa, Harvey wanted desperately to be a rich success in England and then in Hollywood. He sacrificed almost everything except style getting there. Sickly yet strong, manly yet effete, he seemed to understand that he had only a short life in which to accomplish decades-worth of ambitions, and the paradoxes in his life seem only to have added an intriguing gloss to his single-minded determination. There's a mystery at the heart of this actor, a greater one than that normally found in most actors, and the book does not completely unveil it. But it's a fascinating story, and ultimately a terribly sad one, well worth reading. ( )