Category: people

“A fiercely iconoclastic theater director, scholar and theorist who staged some of the earliest productions of Beckett, Brecht and Genet in the United States, … he is probably best remembered for starting, with Jules Irving, the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco in 1952” and for his 1964 book, The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto.

“For nearly a decade, from the mid-’90s until the early 2000s, Downey was the biggest disaster in Hollywood – excruciating to watch because he had so much potential on screen and was such a mess in life. … Now Downey is the biggest film star on Earth. Last year, he earned $50 million just for his appearance in The Avengers – and he isn’t shy about admitting that the size of the paycheck is a major motivation.”

“His contemporaries saw him as a troublesome, quarrelsome figure. … The satirical weekly Corsair published nasty caricatures of him and mocked his writing and pseudonymous disguises. He was gossiped about when he broke his engagement to the 18-year-old Regine Olsen, and was feared by his targets, among them, Hans Christian Andersen.”

“The composer said yesterday he had been feeling unwell and run down for some time, but he was shocked when he was diagnosed with leukaemia in March.”

“I’f you cut Riz open, you’ll find London inside,’ said Solomons, who is a fellow Londoner. ‘He really is kind of what young Britain is like. He’s kind of spry, he’s kind of sly, he’s kind of moveable. He kind of adapts. He can kind of pass anywhere.'”

“The humanities are all about activating your justice sensors and also about the empowerment of not just sitting there but actually realizing we’re all on Earth to be creative, to change things, to make powerful transformations in our lives and the world around us.”

“I was very, very reluctant when it came to the second movement, because it was quite melodic instead of being harsh and dissonant [and] avant-garde. And he took me aside afterward, and maybe he sensed what I felt or maybe just his observation was: Never be ashamed of something that’s melodic, one could whistle.”

“Filming the violence during the Democratic National Convention in 1968 changed the course of his life. Before that, he said, he had defined himself as a Goldwater Republican; afterward he was angry at the status quo.”

“The singing starlet with the bubbly personality and the jewel-tone voice whose enormously popular movies were widely credited with saving Universal Pictures from bankruptcy during the Depression,” Durbin peaked in popularity “by her late teens and by her mid-20s [she] had left Hollywood forever, made wealthy by her relatively brief career.”

“The suspects include a flamboyant pop star, a sharp-tongued comedian, a disc jockey known as ‘the hairy cornflake’ and a quirky Australian-born entertainer who performed at the queen’s diamond jubilee concert. … In American terms, it is as if Captain Kangaroo, Dick Clark and Jerry Lewis were suddenly being accused of committing sexual crimes dating back 30 or 40 years.”