I'll Be Damned: How My Young and Restless Life Led Me to America's #1 Daytime Drama
Written by Eric Braeden
Narrated by Eric Braeden
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
In this startling candid and poignant memoir, the legendary Emmy Award-winning star of The Young and The Restless, America's #1 soap opera, chronicles his amazing life, from his birth in World War II Germany to his arrival in America to his rise to humanitarian and daytime superstar for the past thirty-five years.
For nearly four decades, fans have welcomed the star of television’s number-one daytime show, The Young and the Restless, into their living rooms. While they’ve come to know and love the suave Victor Newman, few truly know the man behind the character, the supremely talented Eric Braeden. I'll Be Damned is his story—a startling and uplifting true tale of war, deprivation, determination, fame, and social commitment that spans from Nazi Germany to modern Hollywood.
Braeden’s journey from a hospital basement in Kiel to the soundstages of Los Angeles has taught him more about joy, heartbreak, fear, dignity, loss, love, loneliness, exhilaration, courage, persecution, and profound responsibility to the global community than he could have hoped to learn in several lifetimes. Growing up in the years after Germany’s defeat, Braeden knew very little about the atrocities of his parents’ generation, until he arrived in America as a teenager—a discovery that horrified and transformed him. Trying to redress the wrongs of his homeland, he has dedicated his life to humanitarian work—even forming the German American Culture Society—working for decades to show the world that what we share as humans is far more important than what separates us from one another.
Told with openness, candor, humor, heart, and occasional raw vulnerability, I’ll Be Damned reveals a man committed to making the world a better, more loving place. I’ll Be Damned will be a treasured keepsake for Y&R fans, and is an inspiring testament to the goodness within us all.
Eric Braeden
Since February 2, 1980, ERIC BRAEDEN has starred in the iconic television series The Young and the Restless, winning a Daytime Emmy for his role as the complex self-made billionaire Victor Newman. He has many other television credits to his name, and has starred in films, in numerous theater productions, including Shakespeare recitals, and on Broadway. Braeden has won two national championships in two different sports: In 1958, he won the German Youth Team Championship in Discus, Javelin, and Shot Put, and in 1973, he won the U.S. National Soccer Championship with the Los Angeles Maccabees.
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Reviews for I'll Be Damned
20 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The hard times that you endure and make the man you are today. I have always loved your acting, thank you for sharing your life.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great story on losing everything and coming to a new country to become a legend. This is a great listen, I really enjoyed m!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While 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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A must for any Y&R fan, but also for fairweather fans. I listened to the audibook read by Braeden, and I enjoyed it even more than expected. His delivery is perfect.