Category: people

He developed his expertise in venting, was always colorful, always equipped with telling references and, in my opinion at least, fairly consistently completely wrong.

“A woman came up to me the day after I won an Oscar to thank me for my speech. She told me that her boss called her in to his office that Monday morning and gave her a raise. There was no reason she was getting paid less, and she deserved the raise. She started crying, and I started crying.”

“Like many African American opera singers … she was first fully recognized for her talent not in the United States, but rather in Europe – an ocean away from the Jim Crow South where she had grown up.” In 1953, she became the first black singer in a principal role at La Scala; in 1956, she was the first African-American cast as a romantic lead – Gilda in Rigoletto, which she sang in whiteface – at the Met.

Gabriele d’Annunzio “was a thrill-seeking megalomaniac best described as a cross between the Marquis de Sade, Aaron Burr, Ayn Rand, and Madonna. He was wildly popular … and he essentially invented Fascism as an art project because he felt representative democracy was bourgeois and lacked a romantic dramatic arc.”

“Henry James, a member of her coterie, once remarked that Isabella ‘is not a woman, she is a locomotive – with a Pullman car attached.’ … She obsessively saved newspaper clippings of her exploits and once remarked, in response to gossip about her, ‘Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.'” (Is that why she burned all her letters?)

“This is one matter when it comes to art imitating an adult woman’s life, even when that woman’s life encompassed a number of scandalous relationships; it would be another matter when the movies started to imitate Lana Turner’s daughter’s life. By the time Cheryl Crane was 14, and watching her unstable home life reflected back to her in one of her mother’s biggest hit movies, reality and fantasy must have seemed pretty confused.” (podcast plus text)

“[She] made world headlines in 1982 when, aged just 22, she was picked out of the Royal Ballet’s junior ranks by Rudolf Nureyev to become his partner at Covent Garden. … But in the pressure of public glare her career faded in less than a decade. She then acquired a new celebrity when she stepped out (platonically) with Prince Michael of Kent and became the romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland’s daughter-in-law.”

With the passing of Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, The Guardian reviews – verse by verse – the fates of her cohorts.

“Strongly built, balding and with a rasping delivery, Loggia suffered from typecasting during the 1970s, obliged to specialise in sharp-suited ‘heavies’ … But in 1982 he took on the role of Richard Gere’s feckless father in the hit film An Officer and a Gentleman … High-profile roles followed – as mobsters in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) and John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor (1985), and as … the avuncular toy company owner in the ‘age-changing’ comedy Big (1988) with Tom Hanks.”

“An influential and entertaining opera critic who amused, informed and infuriated his readers and editors in almost equal measure … He was the editor of Opera magazine from 1986 to 1999, and, at various times, opera critic of Harpers & Queen, The Spectator and The Times; he also contributed regularly to the Building a Library slot on BBC Radio 3, among many other programmes.”