Category: people

“The sad-faced actor who emerged from a workmanlike stage career to find belated fame in the 1970s as the earnest mobster Tessio in The Godfather and the dyspeptic Detective Phil Fish on the hit sitcom Barney Miller, died on Tuesday morning in [New Jersey]. He was 94, having outlived by about 34 years an erroneous report of his death that made him a cult figure.”

“This season, for the first time, Paul Gasol and Nikola Mirotic both have been starters for the Chicago Bulls. But around town, they’ve become known as something else: the city’s biggest patrons of the arts. Gasol and Mirotic are regulars at the opera house. They have been backstage guests of the symphony orchestra. Officials from the city’s highbrow cultural institutions say they can’t remember professional athletes coming to any of their performances—let alone as many as these Bulls.”

“‘What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?’ reads the opening line of Erich Segal’s 1970 best-seller Love Story. Well, for starters, Jenny – or the real-life model for Segal’s fictional tragic heroine – didn’t die. Her name is Janet, she’s Jewish, and she’s alive and well and living in New York City.”

“I regret that my comments could have been misinterpreted. I simply meant to say that in an ideal world every performance will be given equal opportunities for consideration.”

“No openly gay man has ever won the Oscar; I wonder if that is prejudice or chance.” Observing that Tom Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sean Penn won best actor Oscars for playing gay men, he added, “What about giving me one for playing a straight man?”

“Ms. Charles-Roux, a decorated nurse and resistance fighter during World War II, found her way into fashion when she was hired in 1946 as a writer for a new women’s weekly, Elle. Two years later, she began writing for the French edition of Vogue, which installed her as editor in chief in 1954 … Four months after she [was fired from] Vogue, To Forget Palermo, her first novel, won the Prix Goncourt.”

“One can never really know, perhaps the black actors did not deserve to make the final list … Do we have to take from this that there should be lots of minorities everywhere?”

“Mr. Tournier, a failed philosopher, came late to literature – his first novel, Friday, was published in 1967, when he was 43 – but got off to a running start. The Académie Française awarded its grand prize to that novel, his retelling of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe … Ogre (published in England as The Erl-King), the twisting story of a French prisoner of war who ends up procuring boys for an elite Hitler youth camp, won France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1970.”

“[He was] a painstaking and passionate chronicler of Italian society whose unforgettable masterpieces featured global stars like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. … He leaves behind a wide-ranging oeuvre portraying the dark years of Italy under fascism and its identity crisis in the early half of the 21st century.”

“Boulez fought harder than anyone for the cause of contemporary music, and even those who received his barbs benefitted in one way or another from his energy. No composer of the past hundred years achieved such worldly power: in Paris, IRCAM, the Cité de la Musique, and the new Philharmonie stand as his monuments. In more than one way, he resembled Wagner. He forced you to take sides; his rage was clarifying.”