The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines

Tehran-born actor Aghdashloo was the first Iranian to be nominated for an Academy Award (for the film House of Sand and Fog). In this memoir, she describes her dramatic journey from the Shah’s Iran of her childhood to Hollywood. As a teenager in the 1970s, she had an epiphany while seeing Gone with the Wind, deciding right then to become an actor. Before she was 20 she’d married and landed her first lead role in a play. But with the changing political landscape in the country in the late 1970s and her growing vocal opposition to the Ayatollah, she left Iran. Experiencing total freedom for the first time, she divorced her husband and got an education. Eventually she moved to the U.S., where she found work in television and radio amid the huge Iranian community in L.A. Her success didn’t happen overnight: “With my accent and jet-black hair, I was not exactly the girl next door.” She got her first break on Matlock, more than a decade before her trip to the Oscars. But with that transformative moment, she explains in this heartfelt narrative, her Hollywood adventure began in earnest. (June)