Category: people

Gilles Jacob is widely credited with not allowing commercial pressures to weigh too heavily on the films selected for competition. “My formula is art cinema for a wide audience, or intelligent popular cinema,” he said. “They’re the same thing.”

“A settlement between To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee and a museum in her Alabama hometown which used her name on souvenirs has failed.”

“Possibly the last living musician to have met Richard Strauss” and particularly respected as an orchestra builder, Decker served at various times as the chief conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Montreal Symphony, Barcelona Symphony, and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras.

“The video showed three men and three unveiled women dancing on the streets and rooftops of Tehran. Pharrell Williams, whose song was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year, had protested at the arrests.”

“Working at what he describes as “the interaction between culture and life”, he has sold 6m books. He was in Amsterdam to give a talk for the opening of his Art is Therapy show at the Rijksmuseum. Concurrent shows are under way at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.”

“By sheer force of personality, [he] was a dominant figure in the newsroom at The New York Times for decades, lifting its metropolitan and arts coverage to new heights.”

“Over the course of his career, [Cliff] Curtis, a Maori from New Zealand, has played just about every non-white ethnicity: African-American, Arab, Latino, Indian, even a lord of the Fire Nation in The Last Airbender.” He talks to June Thomas about how he does it (and about the role he really wants to play in Lord of the Rings).

“I find it difficult to remember lines. When I’m doing a long speech for television, I sometimes have an earpiece with someone feeding me the text. But I can get by in the theatre if I study hard for a couple of months.” (His current favorite role is in Beckett’s Eh Joe – no lines!)

“To say that Carr had a distinguished record at the Globe and at New England Cable News where he worked from 1998 to 2010 is overstating the obvious.”

“For intellectuals, the life is secondary to the thinking. It is the quality and utility of ideas that count, not the qualities or heroics of their producers.”