Category: people

Hands began his career as a co-founder of the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, and, after his well-regarded 13 years as RSC artistic director, spent 18 years in Wales at the helm of Clywd Theatr Cymru, which he saved from collapse. (He was also director of one of the most notorious flops in Broadway music history, Carrie.) – The Guardian

“[His] distinctive cleft chin, raspy voice and highly charged dramatic energy whose starring roles in Spartacus, Lust For Life, Champion, Ace in the Hole and Paths of Glory helped him become one of Hollywood’s foremost leading men and enduring stars.” – The Washington Post

He was what many people call a human encyclopedia—not in the American sense, a blank vault of facts, but in the French Enlightenment one: a critical repository of significant knowledge. His long book reviews for this magazine, written over thirty years, from 1966 to 1997, were dotted with allusions of the kind that a naturally horizontal thinker couldn’t help but include. But they were never imposed or forced—his mind truly, on its way to Borges, passed through Sophocles and stopped for a moment to take in the view at Heidegger. Steiner was a lifelong traveller of those routes. – The New Yorker

“There isn’t even a word for us, really. Quiz players? Trivia fanatics? I prefer quizzers. But when I use that to describe myself to a civilian – to a non-quizzer – the inevitable inquiry follows: ‘What does that mean?’ For that question, ironically, there is no easy answer.” – The Guardian

“A top editor at Simon & Schuster who assembled a roster of literary heavyweights, … Ms. Mayhew focused on popular histories and biographies as well as the journalistic genre known as “the Washington book.” Released only a year or two after the events they covered, the books featured heavily reported, insider accounts of Beltway politics and White House intrigue, tailored for readers who wanted details that were often unavailable to daily journalists.” – The Washington Post

A former child star, Reynolds directed many episodes of classic 1960s American sitcoms and went on to create and produce three of the best-known and well-regarded series of the ’70s: Room 222, M*A*S*H, and Lou Grant. – The New York Times

“His name was William Dorsey Swann, but to his friends he was known as ‘the Queen.’ … Beginning in the 1880s, he not only became the first American activist to lead a queer resistance group; he also became, in the same decade, the first known person to dub himself a ‘queen of drag’ — or, more familiarly, a drag queen.” – The Nation

“An essayist, fiction writer, teacher, scholar and literary critic … Mr. Steiner both dazzled and dismayed his readers with the range and occasional obscurity of his literary references.” As one New York Times critic wrote, “His bracing virtue has been his ability to move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph. His irritating vice has been that he can move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph.” – The New York Times

Schjeldahl’s primary mode is that of a lover, and you can read many of his pieces as impassioned love letters, often involving his favorite art: painting. His deep devotion to the medium continued throughout the decades painting was supposed to be dead. Every painter I know would give a couple fingers off their non-painting hand for a good long review by Peter Schjeldahl – not only for the recognition, but because he unfailingly brings something new into the discourse, getting to the very heart of the medium that he succinctly describes as “engaging our strongest sense, eyesight, and our finest physical aptitude, that of the hand – it’s about the hand and eye in concert.” – Momus

Feldman took the classic doily craft and turned it into fashion and art. She sold her creations mostly “at Studio Del, a boutique she opened in 1965 on East Seventh Street in Manhattan’s East Village. The garments — including open-weave vests, string bikinis, minidresses and capes — seemed to capture the freewheeling spirit of the neighborhood and of the 1960s counterculture. Her clientele included Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick and Andy Warhol.” – The New York Times