Book to share - September 2025

The Moon's a Balloon is a hugely successful 1971 memoir by British actor David Niven, which has sold over 5 million copies and is widely regarded as the gold standard for actors' memoirs. The book is celebrated for Niven's humorous and engaging storytelling, blending anecdotes about his early life and the golden age of Hollywood with surprisingly candid personal accounts, although later biographies have questioned the strict accuracy of some of his stories.

Here Rupert Everett joins John Mitchinson and Andy Miller (of the Blacklisted Podcast) to discuss amongst other things the memoir. Who better to join them as a guest than an actor, writer and director who has had his own tussles with Hollywood and who has published a series of bestselling volumes of memoir and short stories? I especially liked it when Everett read the passage in which Niven recounted the moments when his first wife Primula "Primmie" Rollo fell down basement stairs at Tyrone Power's house, initially suffering a concussion but later experiencing a clot to the brain, which led to an unsuccessful operation. What emotion expressed there!

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