Category: people

“Consider the evidence: No Weisberg means, arguably, no Taste of Chicago. No Chicago Blues Festival. No Chicago Gospel Music Festival. No Cows on Parade (those cows were copied everywhere; I saw some in France last summer). No After School Matters, surely the most successful arts-education initiative in the history of the city. No Storefront Theatre. No South Shore Line. Maybe no Millennium Park.”

While he became world-famous as a velvet-voiced movie villain (Die Hard; the Harry Potter series), he had equal gifts as a romantic lead (Truly, Madly, Deeply; Sense and Sensibility; Love, Actually) and a classical stage actor of impressive range (Les Liaisons dangereuses; Private Lives; Antony and Cleopatra; John Gabriel Borkman).

“From the beginning, the doctors and nurses agreed that this feat seemed a near-impossibility. There was just not enough time. Not enough time between the Center City hit and run that took [Michael] Toner’s left leg in June and the role awaiting him: a starring spot in the Walnut’s three-week, 15-city tour of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.”

In 1972, he said he’d always been gay; by 1976, he was bi; in 1983, he said he’d only been experimenting; in 1993 he declared, “I was always a closet heterosexual.” J. Bryan Lowder considers how “we for whom queerness is not a phase seem to have two options in terms of how we deal with Bowie’s fraught relationship to our name and our stuff.”

“[He] trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, alongside such classmates as Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates and Albert Finney. He never attained the cinematic stardom of those three, but he arguably exceeding their achievements by leaps and bounds in the theatre, an art to which he devoted the lion’s share of his efforts” – most notably at Canada’s Stratford Festival, where he spend four decades playing everyone from Macbeth to Tartuffe to Trigorin to Lady Bracknell.

“I think that we architects too much tend to create exhibitions where the problems we are dealing with only interest other architects. The jargon that we use and the words that we use, nobody understands except other architects. So I wanted the starting point to be far away from architecture, in problems and challenges that every single citizen would like to see improved.”

“His humour, like that of many amusing people, is hard to recapture in written words. It depended on his twinkling eyes, his perfect timing, his infectious schoolboy giggle, and his reckless compulsion always to say what the other person would not expect. And, when speaking English, on his Inspector Clouseau accent, which he sometimes played to the hilt.”

“[He was] a versatile character actor who performed in scores of supporting stage, film and television roles but was most conspicuous as the common-sense mayor in Ghostbusters and as Tony Soprano’s sleazy lawyer.”

From the time Baryshnikov arrived in the U.S., he found in the Nobel-winning poet and essayist “a kind of older brother, and he needed one. Though a number of people were very kind to him, he did not, at this early point, have close friends in the United States, and he was slow in making them, because he had no time to study English. With Brodsky he could speak in Russian, and they had a city, a government – in some measure, a history – in common.”