by Nathaniel R
Dennis Quaid as "Gordon Cooper" in THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)
Have you noticed how many movie stars are doing audiobooks these days? (I have a friend who keeps raving about Armie Hammer's reading of Call Me By Your Name.) But it's not just current movies with complimentary audiobooks. There's a new audiobook out this week for Tom Wolfe's 1979 nonfiction bestseller "The Right Stuff" about the astronauts of the Mercury Space Program in the 1940s and 1950s. Dennis Quaid is doing the audiobook honors this time and he famously co-starred in that book's Oscar-favored adaptation in 1983. The Right Stuff (1983) won four craft Oscars in its year (splitting the below-the-line prizes with Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander) and if you haven't seen it you really should. It's quite good.
Here's a little bit of Dennis's familiar comfy gravel voice reading the book... sadly it's not a scene about his character but a scene involving Fred Ward's character Gus Grissom.