<div><p> Mary Louise Wilson became a star at age sixty with her smash one-woman play <i>Full Gallop </i>portraying legendary <i>Vogue </i>editor Diana Vreeland. But before and since, her life and her career?including the Tony Award for her portrayal of Big Edie in <i>Grey Gardens</i>?have been enviably celebrated and varied. </p><p> <br> Raised in New Orleans with a social climbing, alcoholic mother, Mary Louise moved to New York City in the late 1950s; lived with her gay brother in the Village; entered the nightclub scene in a legendary review; and rubbed shoulders with every famous person of that era and since. <i>My First Hundred Years in Show Business </i>gets it all down. Yet as delicious as the anecdotes are, the heart of this book is in its unblinkingly honest depiction of the life of a working actor. In her inimitable voice?wry, admirably unsentimental, mordantly funny?Mary Louise Wilson has crafted a work that is at once a teeming social history of the New York theatre scene and a thoroughly revealing, superbly entertaining memoir of the life of an extraordinary woman and actor.</p></div>