Category: people

He was one of the few Americans to dance with the legendary troupe (he had to Russify his name) before making his name in such landmarks as the original Broadway Oklahoma and the films Tonight and Every Night and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

“He forgot to kiss the bride at his first wedding. He rarely drank and avoided drugs. He was plagued by his deep love for an overbearing mother. He was a poor family man. Even the arc of his career was marked by a strange blandness.”

“My haven for solace in and away from home is in the world of composers, harmonies, and possibilities. My musical haven has shaped my character and without it, my life would not be half as wonderful as it is today,” he writes.

“One of the most enduring stereotypes in all of comedy is of the road-weary, alcohol-soaked, and/or drug-addled comedian. Certainly there is a long line of victims.” (The L.A. comedy club the Laugh Factory even has an in-house therapy program.)

“You are a disfigured meat grinder of over inflated, self deluded, petty and insular insults, whose limitations are those of many, whose minds have closed to their once great imagination for hope of a brighter and better future. You are the cynic, but ultimately you are less than that.”

This obituary would be about the man who wrote the scripts for Papillon, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and the like – if he hadn’t seen “the absurdity in the character of a wealthy bachelor who enjoyed dressing up as a bat to fight crime.”

“The Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, who began working on a biography of the former poet laureate in 2010, said he was surprised that the estate has barred him from private archives, asked that he return photocopies of privately held documents, and withdrawn his right to quote extensively from the poet’s work.”

“He was a powerfully individual composer, an amazingly talented conductor” – Balanchine thought he was the best ballet conductor out there – “and one of the most quotable critics ever to put pen to paper.” He was also Margot Fonteyn’s lover, and he was brilliant at dirty limericks. “[He] complicated posterity’s job by deliberately choosing not to specialize in a single line of creative endeavor.”

“Since you are a New York Times Film Critic this should be very easy for you. According to your logic I should not have Written and Directed JUNGLE FEVER because I have never lived in HARLEM and BENSONHURST. I should not have Directed CLOCKERS because I have never lived in Boerum Hill and the Gowanus Projects. I should have not Written and Directed HE GOT GAME because I have never lived in CONEY ISLAND.”

“I think it is under the pressure of desperation that extraordinary things can happen in a human life. And if ever there was a country oversupplied with desperation, it was South Africa in that time.” (audio)