People often assume that actors and performers are extroverts, and that their work is a natural extension of an outgoing personality. But while, indeed, there are quite a few extroverts in the business, many who work in the performing arts are more likely to be introverts, for whom communicating with an audience is a form of expression that gives meaning to their lives.

These three memoirs all speak of difficult journeys. Jo Buchanan’s Wings of Madness tells the story of her son, Miles, whose brief but notable career as an actor was cut short by drugs, alcohol and psychotic depression. It is billed as ‘a story of faith, human resilience and eventually, a happy ending’. In Finding My Voice, on the other hand, Peter Brocklehurst (with some help from Debbie Bennett) recounts how only in middle age did he find the career he really wanted, as a tenor. It is, Nick Columb assures us in his foreword, ‘inspiring and uplifting’, about a journey that is ‘wondrous’. And in Little Black Bastard, Noel Tovey, from the vantage point of his seventy years, reviews a remarkable life that took him from a childhood of deprivation and homelessness to a successful international career as an actor, dancer and director.