Category: people

Rachel Morrison, the director of photography for Dee Rees’ Mudbound, is the first woman ever nominated for cinematography. That’s embarrassing for a stupidly sexist Hollywood, but no slight to the great Morrison, who was also the first woman to shoot a comic book movie: She’s been walking the walk for two decades. “Now I’m seeing many more women getting calls to do bigger films,” she says.

After working in other careers and getting inspired by sculptures he saw through a window in Paris, “Mr. Harvey became a masterly sculptor of intricately detailed, realistic bronze figures whose works were exhibited by Tiffany & Company in its Fifth Avenue flagship store, have been collected by museums, and were purchased by Henry Fonda, Jamie Wyeth, Barry Manilow and Danielle Steel.”

Scott Beauchamp: “The spiritually inverted radicals of the Sixties who sacralized their politics and secularized their spirituality – blame Reich and Marcuse – read Kerouac with blinders on. They only saw what they wanted to see, and what they wanted to see was a celebration of the ‘freedoms’ of hedonism. … The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac” – who described himself as a “strange solitary Catholic mystic” – “was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century.”

“In 1964, living in opulence at Switzerland’s Montreux Palace Hotel, Nabokov began to keep a dream diary of a sort, dutifully inscribing his memories on index cards at his bedside in rubber-banded stacks.” And they contained some doozies.

“[He] was a short, pudgy comedian who found his greatest success from 1957 to 1968, when he teamed with [Steve] Rossi, a tall, handsome singer who set up his partner’s vaudeville-style, groan-worthy gags. … With the bulging eyes and innocence of a Harpo Marx-like fool, Mr. Allen ambled onstage with his trademark catchphrase, ‘Hello dere,’ and quickly waded into comic quicksand.”

“[She] epitomized the company’s early eclectic profile by excelling in roles that ranged from Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart to the ‘Bluebird’ pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty … Because of her lyrical style in ballets like Les Sylphides, Ms. Koesun was often cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she could also show dramatic ferocity, as the evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s Undertow.”

Mr. Damone lacked the outsize personality of fellow Italian American pop singers Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but he nonetheless flourished on a rung just below greatness. He made more than 2,000 recordings, as well as dozens of movie and TV appearances, and sold out live performances until he retired in the early 2000s after a stroke.

Once upon a time, not turning up for an awards ceremony held a kind of clout: “When a writer doesn’t show his face,” as DeLillo wrote in his 1991 novel, “Mao II,” about a reclusive novelist who becomes a prisoner of a terrorist organization, “he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.” Now it feels a little rude, like not showing up to a dinner party held in your honor.

“Paata Burchuladze, a prominent opera singer who challenged Georgia’s ruling coalition in 2016 parliamentary elections, has been questioned by prosecutors [in Tbilisi] investigating allegations of embezzlement and misuse of funds by his charitable foundation.”