Category: people

Danielle Darrieux was only 14 years old “when she made her screen debut, with a supporting role in 1931’s Le Bal. With her expressive face, liquid eyes and original, slightly nasal voice, Darrieux quickly became a favorite of French directors, appearing in films by heavyweights Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy and Andre Techine.”

It was a trip: “As urban centers all over America were banning smoking in public places, life for Joni Mitchell was still a noir film from the 40s, full of nicotine and screwball repartee. She kept smoking in public as long as she could, until she was eventually reduced to e-cigarettes…. She loved to be what she called a ‘pot stirrer.’ She was trouble—and she was really good at it.”

Harold Woof was childhood buddies with Pinter, and his book”paints a nostalgic but unsentimental picture of his boyhood friendship with Pinter in east London and of the other members of the ‘Hackney gang’ – a small band of firm friends who met at Hackney grammar school in the early 1940s. As Jews, Woolf and Pinter were sometimes set upon by local fascist thugs, Woolf recounts, but Pinter, who was a talented schoolboy sportsman, gave as good as he got.”

Rowling is the only celebrity on the list who is chiefly known as a writer, although British chef and television personality Gordon Ramsay, who is ranked at No. 6, is the author of several books. The rest of the list is dominated by musicians and athletes.

On Tuesday, the artist was supposed to fly to São Paulo for a special screening of his documentary Human Flow. But the United ground crew at Newark airport refused to let him board the plane, insisting – because they misread the paperwork – that his (entirely valid) Brazilian visa had expired.

You may remember the news in early August of a strongly worded lawsuitfiled by WNED, the PBS affiliate in Buffalo, New York, that owns the Reading Rainbow brand, against Burton and his digital reading company RRKidz (recently renamed LeVar Burton Kids), for “theft and extortion” regarding a series of alleged trademark violations — including promoting his podcast as “a Reading Rainbow for adults” and his repeated use of a catchphrase he used on-air for over 20 years but didn’t technically own.

“In 1974, Elizabeth Bishop seemed to have all the things a poet could want: a teaching position at Harvard, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a first-look contract with The New Yorker, which almost always decided to publish her work. And yet she was inconsolably unhappy. ‘When you write my epitaph,’ Bishop said to the poet Robert Lowell, ‘you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.'”

Known for what Dance magazine called “her verve, charm and daring,” Cochran performed with the Paul Taylor Dance Company from 1984 to 1996 and led the well-regarded dance department at Barnard College from 2003 to 2013.

“The system of values that is manhood in the American south held up as its virtues firmness, reserve, self-containment, reticence, mastery of emotion. I longed to adhere to this system, but however hard I tried, I failed. I felt too much. I was prone to sudden rushes of emotion, to enthusiasms, affections, to tears… When I sang opera, the same things that had been sources of shame were sources of value. The gestures that embarrassed me in life made sense when I was on stage.”

“[Her] poise, languid glamour and fine singing voice catapulted her to stardom as a teenager in the early 1930s and kept her there for decades, whether in melodramas, frisky comedies or light musicals. … If her pre-war movies emphasized her sparkle and charm, the postwar years elicited some of her most riveting dramatic performances. Much of her critical legacy rests on three celebrated films she made with director Max Ophuls: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952) and The Earrings of Madame de … (1953).