Category: people

“Here, after all, was a man who had worked with those American folk legends Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, had influenced Bob Dylan, and taught both Ry Cooder and Jerry Garcia. A passionate enthusiast for folk music and a performer with a wicked and often outrageous sense of humour, he continued to perform – and to record – for as long as he could. His final album, recorded with his son Ben, was released two years ago.”

“Mr. Petty and his band, the Heartbreakers, released their self-titled debut in 1976 and soon drew comparisons to the bluesy, guitar-heavy rock of the Rolling Stones and the Byrds. Their music was unabashedly sentimental, seeming to speak to striving, everyday Americans no less than the songs of fellow rocker Bruce Springsteen … The group toured seemingly nonstop for decades, leading boisterous shows as recently as last week.”

Alexandre Dumas’ life included more than a hundred mistresses, fleeing regime change in France, and much more – for instance, “In 1846, Dumas used the money he earned from his wildly successful The Count Of Monte Cristo to build a palatial estate he named Château De Monte-Cristo, which included a writing studio elsewhere on the grounds. However, Dumas only lived there for two years. Having blown through his money, as was his custom, he had to sell the place.”

David Remnick: “He owned the operation, paying the salaries and the rent, but he did not touch the magazine’s pages; he never suggested a story, he never revealed his political inclinations, he never gave advance instructions or retrospective criticism of an issue. When he mentioned that he had liked something in The New Yorker, he did so shyly, reluctantly, as if he were overstepping.”

In more than 5000 airings of Let’s Make a Deal, Mr. Hall had quite a few jobs – traffic cop, smooth-talking salesman and more. “‘Monty had to be a very likable con man; he had to convince people to give up a bird in the hand for what’s in the box,’ David Schwartz, the author, with Fred Wostbrock and Steve Ryan, of ‘The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows,’ said in an interview.”

At the age of 41 (he turns 42 on Saturday), Mr. Coates has become one of the most influential black intellectuals of his generation, joining predecessors including Ms. Morrison, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Dr. Cornel West. “He’s a rock star,” said Dr. Nell Irvin Painter, professor emeritus of American history at Princeton University, adding that Mr. Coates is asking questions that even “other historians have not been asking.”

Despite suffering damage to her hands during her Nazi ordeal as well as discrimination from Czech Communist authorities who considered her instrument a feudal and bourgeois relic, she went on to become a celebrated international soloist and the first musician to record J.S. Bach’s complete keyboard music on harpsichord.

His biggest hit, the 1976-77 play Gemini, is still one of the longest-running straight plays ever to have appeared on Broadway, where it played for more than four years. He was also well-known, or perhaps notorious, as an extremely knowledgeable and often ferocious critic of opera, under both his own byline and the screenname of Mrs. John Claggart.

“From the first issue of Playboy in 1953, which featured a photograph of a nude Marilyn Monroe lounging on a red sheet, Mr. Hefner sought to overturn what he considered the puritanical moral code of Middle America. His magazine was shocking at the time, but it quickly found a large and receptive audience and was a principal force behind the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Mr. Hefner brought nudity out from under the counter, but he was more than the emperor of a land with no clothes. From the beginning, he had literary aspirations for Playboy, hiring top writers to give his magazine cultural credibility.”

Daughter of conductor Henri Casadesus and harpist Marie-Louise Beetz, mother of conductor Jean-Claude, composer Dominique, painter Béatrice, and actress Martine Casadesus, Gisèle joined the Comédie-Française in 1934 at age 20, where she played 120 roles over almost three decades. Afterwards, she had an extensive career in both theater and film; her final screen performance, at age 96, was with Gérard Depardieu in the 2010 film La Tête en friche. (in French; Google Translate version here)