I'll Be Damned: How My Young and Restless Life Led Me to America's #1 Daytime Drama

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HarperCollins, Feb 7, 2017 - Biography & Autobiography - 281 pages
Eric Braeden, Emmy Award-winning star of The Young and The Restless, chronicles his amazing life as a famous actor and selfless humanitarian.

For more than four decades, fans have welcomed the star of television’s number-one daytime show, The Young and the Restless, into their living rooms. While they’ve come to know and love the suave Victor Newman, few truly know the man behind the character, the supremely talented Eric Braeden. I’ll Be Damned is his story—a startling and uplifting true tale of war, deprivation, determination, fame, and social commitment that spans from Nazi Germany to modern Hollywood.

Braeden’s journey from a hospital basement in Kiel to the soundstages of Los Angeles has taught him more about joy, heartbreak, fear, dignity, loss, love, loneliness, exhilaration, courage, persecution, and profound responsibility to the global community than he could have hoped to learn in several lifetimes. Growing up in the years after Germany’s World War II defeat, Braeden knew very little about the atrocities of his parents’ generation, until he arrived in America as a teenager—a discovery that horrified and transformed him. Trying to redress the wrongs of his homeland, he has dedicated his life to humanitarian work—even forming the German American Culture Society—working for decades to show the world that what we share as humans is far more important than what separates us from one another.

Told with openness, candor, humor, heart, and occasional raw vulnerability, I’ll Be Damned reveals a man committed to making the world a better, more loving place, and is an inspiring testament to the goodness within us all.

Includes Photographs

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About the author (2017)

Since February 2, 1980, ERIC BRAEDEN has starred in the iconic television series The Young and the Restless, winning a Daytime Emmy for his role as the complex self-made billionaire Victor Newman. He has many other television credits to his name, and has starred in films, in numerous theater productions, including Shakespeare recitals, and on Broadway. Braeden has won two national championships in two different sports: In 1958, he won the German Youth Team Championship in Discus, Javelin, and Shot Put, and in 1973, he won the U.S. National Soccer Championship with the Los Angeles Maccabees.

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