GUILLAUME

The life of the actor, best known for his starring role in the long-running sitcom Benson.

The illegitimate son of an abused and emotionally unstable mother, Robert Guillaume was born in 1927 in St. Louis, where he grew up in poverty, raised mostly by his grandmother, a cleaning woman, and got his first taste of performing by singing in the church choir. He’d had a successful career as a stage actor, singer, and comedian, most notably in the revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Living in Paris, before being offered the part of Benson, the sharp-tongued butler on the comedy Soap, for which he won an Emmy in 1979. The character was later spun off into his own series, which ran for seven seasons on ABC, from 1979 to 1986. When Benson went off the air, Guillaume continued to work steadily, appearing in several short-lived television series and starring in the title role of the Los Angeles production of The Phantom of the Opera. His career almost came to a halt in 1999 when he suffered a minor stroke on the set of the critically acclaimed “dramedy” Sports Night (on which he played producer Isaac Jaffee), an incident that was put into the show’s plotline to avoid writing out the character. Since then the actor has been slowly recovering—hence the reflective mood this autobiography finds him in. Although he’s endured more than his share of hardship—the poverty and racial discrimination of his youth, his stroke, the death of his son Jacques from AIDS—he doesn’t succumb to hand-wringing, and while the prose is often stilted, and the pacing somewhat uneven, he comes across as serious about his craft and candid about the mistakes he’s made along the way.

Not a great read, then, but fans may be interested.