Category: people

“The role, wife to the bigoted Archie of Carroll O’Connor, could easily have been rendered as a mere middle-aged bimbo. But Ms. Stapleton didn’t just toss it off; she put everything she had into it, and what she had was a lot of stage training.”

“Whedon was only allowed to watch BBC shows, so he consumed a diet of Masterpiece Theatre and Monty Python. ‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I was a little bit ashamed of American TV.'”

“Mr. Demby was interested in boundaries — between people, and between the present and the past — and he liked crossing them. His marriage in 1953 to an Italian actress and writer, Lucia Drudi, made news in Rome. (He spent many years writing English-language subtitles for films by Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini and other Italian directors.)”

“When the issues of ‘All in the Family’ centered on Edith — as when she went through menopause, beset with hilarious mood swings — she became an emblem of all housewives who felt their problems pooh-poohed at home, as if nothing they ever suffered was worth the attention of their husbands and children.”

Shohreh Aghdashloo: “If I’m asked what religion I am, I say I was born a Muslim. I don’t introduce myself as a Muslim woman, but I guess the distribution company put the dots together and felt it’s too early for this.”

“Over six decades of personal, professional and political partnership, [the couple] wrote a series of well-known plays credited to them jointly. … But by all accounts, their collaboration was so close, and so seamless, that in most cases even pieces credited exclusively to one or the other … bear the stamp of both.”

“Each time I make a movie, it’s like a paid scholarship to a different university course. … Playing Sigmund Freud for David Cronenberg meant I read work by Jung, by Freud, remembrances, contemporary accounts. Right now I’m shooting a movie set in 1962 in Greece and Turkey.”

“Greeley was the author of more than 50 bestselling novels, many of them international mystery thrillers, and dozens of nonfiction works. His writing was translated into 12 languages and his career spanned five decades.”

“Mr. Miller developed his voice in the 1970s, combining the bright precision of bebop … with the clattering intrigue of modal jazz … His balanced but assertive style was a model of fluency, lucidity and bounce, and it influenced more than a generation of younger pianists.” A revered side man, he recorded well over 400 albums, including just under a dozen as soloist or bandleader.

“‘She hates movies,’ says [feline talent agent Tom] Lashes of his client, Grumpy Cat, a cat with a mouth puckered into a frown whose viral photos have ricocheted around the Internet.”