Category: people

“We’re fundamentally attached to the redemption narrative: I was lost but now I’m found, I sinned but now I’m saved, I made lemonade from lemons, and so on. But the question I ask in different ways throughout the book is what happens when or if you don’t come out of a tough situation a better or changed person? What if you’re just the same person? And why is that not actually the best outcome?”

“No species of fame is as fleeting as the sort bestowed by network TV. But Lear fell further, faster, and more fully than most, and it is noteworthy that he has nothing to say about this descent in his newly published autobiography, Even This I Get to Experience,1 in which he is fairly forthcoming about most other aspects of his long and eventful life (he is 92 years old).”

The value of 800 rare books at the center of a legal dispute between the executors of Maurice Sendak’s will and the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia is estimated at $1.65 million, according to a figure offered by the Sendak estate in probate court filings. But the Rosenbach, which is suing Sendak’s estate, puts the value much higher.
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If Larkin, who died in 1985, woke up today, he would have good reason to scream. The three decades following his death have savaged his reputation. “I have no enemies,” he once joked, “but my friends don’t like me.” Posterity proved the second part of that statement correct.

“The 6-foot-5 actor schooled in London was a natural to play aristocrats and authority figures” – from Nelson Rockefeller and editor Max Eastman on film to FDR and (much more recently) the grandfather in Gilmore Girls. Those roles were but part of wide-ranging career including everything from a Tony-winning performance in a Bernard Shaw play to being a spokesmodel for Dodge cars.

“[He] lived long enough to see his two National Art Schools – begun during a utopian moment in the Cuban revolution, then abandoned as counterrevolutionary – newly embraced around the world as the crown jewels of modern Cuban architecture.”

“Merlin Holland, grandson of the Irish wit and author of The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan, has unearthed medical evidence within private family letters, which has enabled a doctor to determine the likely cause of Constance’s demise.”

“What is an It Girl? According to the dictionary installed on a MacBook Pro, she is ‘a young woman who achieves celebrity because of her socialite lifestyle’. … But the original It Girl, as the dictionary acknowledges, was one of the most successful and revolutionary film stars of the silent era, Clara Bow. When she earned the title, it meant something completely different.”

Luise Rainer’s meteoric rise and rapid descent has mystified movie fans for decades. It was almost impossible to believe that — after winning an Academy Award for her wrenching performance in “The Great Ziegfeld” in 1936, and then following it up with a triumphal turn as O-Lan in “The Good Earth” a year later — Rainer was not on her way to being one of Hollywood’s most enduring film stars.”

“A pianist much admired for interpretations elegantly perched between penetrating expressivity and rigorous intellectual inquest, … Frank was an influential performer and pedagogue, teaching at Yale University for nearly four decades, and a member of the Curtis Institute of Music faculty since 1988.”