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North of Hollywood
What's It Like To Act Alongside Hollywood Greats Like Goldie Hawn and Walter Matthau?

Rick Lenz Dishes the Details in his New Insider Memoir!

An intimate, sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching and always honest account of making a living and living life next to Hollywood legends, Rick Lenz finds meaning in the experiences he’s had as a successful actor through his new memoir North of Hollywood.

The book is full of anecdotes such as tough guy Al Pacino giving Lenz a gift of sorts, funny lady Lucille Ball being less than humorous with him in a dressing room and recounting his first meeting with Gwyneth Paltrow.

“North of Hollywood concentrates on the part of an actor’s story that happens after a person has reached the goal of becoming a working actor—the point when the actor asks himself: How do I keep this from slipping away?” Lenz said. “Even if as an actor you – unwittingly or not – sought the spotlight, how do you cope with the unnaturalness of it? How do you avoid the convoluted ego-involvement that severely limits so many show business lives?”

The gifted artist and widely produced playwright uses his masterful storytelling skills to share with readers his personal experiences with entertainers we normally only hear about through the rumor mills. Pop-culture junkies will certainly eat it up, learning stories of Hollywood Royalty like Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, Al Pacino and Elizabeth Taylor. But more than an ordinary Hollywood insider story, North of Hollywood also reveals real-life experiences of heartbreak, suspense, discovery and joy. The memoir is a product of converging crises in the author’s personal life.

“My daughter was going through a pause in her music career while she dealt with drug addiction, and my sister was diagnosed with cancer,” Lenz said. “The best way I could think of coping—aside from poring through spiritual books that seemed, at the time, beyond my ability to grasp—was to write about my family and my career and the changes that never stop swirling around all of us.”

Writer/editor Kevin Cook said North of Hollywood is “fall-on-the floor funny and graveyard-serious, a page-turner with a brain. This is an excitingly original book overflowing with lyrical power that I can’t compare to anything else I’ve ever read.” And A Woman of Independent Means author Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey said North of Hollywood is “enchantingly written … Rick Lenz reveals with enormous poignancy and gleeful insight what it has taken to make one real life work while pursuing the Hollywood dream.”

One of the workingest actors of the late-20th century, Lenz was Goldie Hawn's boyfriend in the movie Cactus Flower and Eddie Albert’s law partner on television’s Green Acres. His many other small and big screen roles ranged from the serious to the comedic. North of Hollywood is the start to his new career as an author, as Lenz is also planning the debut of his first novel in 2013 called Redeeming Norma Jean.

Learn more at www.RickLenzAuthor.com

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Rick Lenz
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North of Hollywood