Michael Winner's new book Tales I Never Told! is scurrilous, affectionate and sometimes sensational! Winner's tales have a cast including Simon Cowell, Sir Michael Caine, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Faye Dunaway and many others of great fame and even some of less fame. The tales recount things that have happened in Winner's life. This is a man who lived with the stars and lived through extraordinary experiences. The book is a dazzling mix of genuine food 'expertise' — from the man who says he knows nothing about food but is arguably the most read food columnist in the world — and acerbic wit in telling the stories with which Michael has entertained his friends for years. Winner is full of surprises, none greater than when he married his long-time girlfriend Geraldine Lynton-Edwards in September 2011. His life has been extraordinary. At age fourteen he had a show column in twenty-seven newspapers. He was at Cambridge aged seventeen and came out with an Honours Degree in law and economics at twenty. He was, for a while, the youngest movie director in the English-speaking language. His career included decades in Hollywood and the producing and/or directing of some of the most famous films of the twentieth century, including the Death Wish series. His fi lms have been shown at the Venice, San Francisco and Cannes film festivals. In early 2011, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles mounted a three-day tribute to him showing six of his movies, with Michael giving his well-known one-man show on one evening and speaking between movies on the others. He became a food critic by accident but has nevertheless been writing in the Sunday Times for over sixteen years. He has never missed a week — even when he was in intensive care and heavily dosed with morphine. The book also includes the last year of his Sunday Times reviews to bring people up to date with what is going on in that arena.
