Category: people

Khan, who was only 53 when he died earlier this week, had a quality common in French cinema but rarely embraced in Bollywood: He was jolie laide, beautifully ugly or ugly beautiful, but more than that as well. “In a classic, movie sense, he might be said to be a loser type. Yet … Khan’s regal height, his sensuous, animalistic features, give him the air of a god among mortals. Yet, his extraordinary physicality is cut with hallmarks of normalcy.” – Vulture

“In 1967,[he] wrote a lasting page in art history when, as a 27-year-old curator in Genoa, he mounted an exhibition of five young Italian artists making provisional assemblages of humble materials, which he grouped under the term Arte Povera (‘poor art’). These artists, including Alghiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis and Luciano Fabro, bridled against the conventions of the Italian academies (and American Pop art), and made a virtue of simple everyday objects: melted wax, rusting iron, fallen leaves, ground coffee, even horses munching hay.” – The New York Times

“Mr. Ales was one of [Berry] Gordy’s most indispensable executives throughout the 1960s, when Motown became a ubiquitous force in American pop culture and a prime symbol of black enterprise at the height of the civil rights movement. Officially, he was in charge of sales and promotion. But as a high-ranking white executive at a black-owned label, Mr. Ales was also instrumental in promoting Motown’s music to the white-dominated industry — most importantly the programmers who decided what songs were played on Top 40 radio stations.” – The New York Times

After an unsatisfying early career in Indian TV serials and films (his acting was too subtle and his looks too unconventional for a traditional Bollywood lead), he found acclaim in the British-Indian co-production The Warrior and settled into a career of Bollywood character parts and major roles in Indian art cinema. In the ’00s, his Western career went into high gear as he played the policeman in Slumdog Millionaire, the adult Piscine in Life of Pi, and the owner of the Jurassic World park. – BBC

“Over the course of his wide-ranging career, Harrell performed as a soloist with just about every major orchestra in the U.S. and Europe. Within the classical music world, Harrell was also widely beloved as a generous chamber music colleague, a respected teacher and a musician’s musician.” – NPR

He was part of the first generation of American musicians to work seriously on the revival of historical keyboard instruments and their repertoire. He used the Institution’s instrument collection for both solo work and to start one of the first professional Baroque-instrument groups in the U.S., the Smithsonian Chamber Players (1976), and expanded into the Classical era with the launch of the Smithson String Quartet and the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra. – Early Music America

Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem. He did little to advertise the importance of his ideas, and his modesty did not help. He was not particularly impressed with himself—he thought he was rather lazy. At the same time, the speed with which his mind worked sometimes left a blur on the page. The prominent American philosopher Donald Davidson was one of several thinkers to experience what he dubbed “the Ramsey effect.” You’d make a thrilling breakthrough only to find that Ramsey had got there first. – The New Yorker

His enormous body of prose fiction, poetry, stage dramas and screenplays (including the Oscar-winning Pelle the Conqueror) won him virtually every major Nordic literary prize other than the Nobel. As he once told an interviewer, “Every time I feel depressed that I’m not doing anything, I look at this bookshelf [of my work] and say to myself, ‘Well, that is seven meters and I have done a little bit, so I can die.'” – The Washington Post

For 18 years, Gersten was second-in-command to Joe Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater (where his interventions twice saved Papp’s and the company’s future), and he spent 28 years as executive producer at Lincoln Center Theater, where, alongside artistic directors Gregory Mosher and André Bishop, he “took a theater that had almost been completely dark for eight years and a failure for 20 and helped turn it into one of the nation’s leading nonprofit stage organizations.” – The New York Times

Wall, longtime professor at Rutgers, changed the world of literature. She “championed racial diversity both in the curriculum and the classroom. She encouraged more black students to major in English and pursue postgraduate degrees. And she widened the scope of literary scholarship to include black novelists, poets and nonfiction authors as well as essayists, whom she considered central to the black literary tradition.” – The New York Times