Category: people

Dame Judi Dench is one of England’s most distinguished actors. “She’s a peculiarly British heroine. An underdog. Dench is short and a little dumpy and not obviously glamorous. And yet she can transcend her given lot to become beautiful and heroic. In polls, she is regularly voted Britain’s best-dressed woman, Britain’s most admired woman (she recently beat the Queen down to number two), the woman we would most like to be.”

“Atwood’s dragon persona is less fire-breathing than gently, relentlessly smouldering. She can isolate the moment she became a writer – “became”, naturally, not “wanted to become” – in 1956, when she was “crossing the football field on the way home from school. I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the only thing I wanted to do.”

“She is the artist the British public likes to laugh at most. Even Damien Hirst’s infamous pickled sharks and cows are treated with more respect. And yet until now Tracey Emin, the creator of ‘that bed’, has accepted ridicule and contempt as all part of being a famous conceptual artist. No longer. Speaking for the first time about her row with a primary school over the sale of a quilt – a row that has seen her branded as selfish and money-grabbing – Emin reveals she has been deeply upset by the onslaught of criticism. Blame for the unpleasant affair, which at one point came down to a physical tug-of-war, lies with the school, the 40-year-old artist claims.”

Motion Picatura Association of America president Jack Valenti — the “5-foot, 7-inch titan who invented movie ratings, reigned as Washington’s highest-paid lobbyist and earned the unlikely nickname Boom-Boom from Robin Williams on one Oscar telecast — has finally announced his decision to step down from the job he has held for 38 years. ‘I think there won’t ever be another like him because one of the reasons why he is so credible in his advocacy for the entertainment industry is because he is so personally theatrical’.”

“A French scuba team has discovered parts of the missing warplane piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince and one of France’s most beloved writers, an Air Force official said yesterday. The French aviation hero disappeared during World War II while flying a reconnaissance mission for the Allies over the Mediterranean. Until now, nobody knew where the plane went down. Two pieces — from the landing gear and engine — of Saint-Exupery’s Lockheed P-38 aircraft were pulled from the Mediterranean near the southern France city of Marseille, said Capt. Frederic Solano.”

“The head of Liverpool’s Capital of Culture team has resigned from his £100,000-plus role after just two months. Kevin Johnson, the chief operating officer, cites personal reasons for his decision to leave the post,” and sources say that he was simply tired of commuting from his home in Scotland. Cultural leaders in the city are expressing surprise and disappointment, but with the next Europe-wide Capital of Culture competition nearly four years away, no one on the Liverpool team is panicking.

“The chairman of the Scottish Arts Council, James Boyle, is set to remain in the post for a second three-year term, the Scottish Executive said yesterday… The move caused surprise and interest across the Scottish arts scene yesterday. The arts council’s own future is said to be in doubt, with the Executive promising to reshape arts policy and funding in Scotland in its forthcoming cultural review. As recently as this January, it was thought that Mr Boyle might renew his contract for only a year. Many in the arts world had the impression he was ready to leave the council, but he signalled in a recent interview that he would be happy to stay on.”

Was Wynton Marsalis ever really all that good? He’s a legend, sure, write Fred Kaplan, but he disappoints. “Marsalis, who’s now 42, is a superb trumpeter and a brilliant educator. (His schoolhouse lectures on music, which aired on PBS a few years ago, are the best of their kind since Leonard Bernstein’s telecasts in the ’60s.) But he has never been a great bandleader or a composer. He’s written and recorded scores of compositions, but I defy anyone to hum a few.”

It might have been embarrassing that the Royal Opera House fired Deborah Voigt from its production of Ariadne for being too large. But Voigt says it’s brought her a lot of positive publicity. “The timing of this couldn’t be much better, quite frankly. You can’t really buy this kind of publicity, and good, bad or indifferent. There’s the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I’ve sort of been asking myself, would you have admitted this or brought attention to it had you realised that you would become international news? And I’m not really sure what the answer to that is yet.”

“I remember one review where the critic made some comment about my weight but went on to say the tenor – who by the way was a very, very large man – had ‘the shoulders of a linebacker.’ And I thought, What is that? How come I’m heavy and he has the shoulders of a linebacker? So yes, it’s a double standard – and it shouldn’t surprise any women with a professional life.”