The immediate reason for my “leave of presence” is my health. The “painful fracture” that made it difficult for me to walk has recently been revealed to be a cancer.
Category: people
Bolshoi’s Sergei Filin To Undergo Complex Eye Tissue Transplant
“Sergei Filin, the ballet director of the Bolshoi Theater, who suffered an acid attack in Moscow in January and who is currently receiving treatment in Germany, is to undergo a complicated surgery involving eye tissue transplantation” as part of the ongoing attempt to restore his vision.
Maya Angelou On Reuniting With Her Birth Mother
“Well, she didn’t look like a mother to me. She didn’t remind me of my grandmother, who we called Mama. She wore lipstick. And she had record players and she played music, loudly and danced, in the middle of the dining room floor. … I said, ‘I’d like to call you Lady, because you’re very beautiful and you sound like a lady.'”
Hayden Griffin, 70, Noted Set Designer
“[He] was regarded by many as the finest stage designer of his generation … The reason for this lies in what Hayden himself said in an interview in 1983: ‘Theatre is about a man or a woman saying the line. The designer’s job is to decide what the audience should see when that line is said’.”
Was Shakespeare A Scam Artist?
“William Shakespeare was fined repeatedly for illegally hoarding grain, malt and barley for resale during a time of food shortages. He also was threatened with jail for avoiding taxes, according to the study of court and tax archives by researchers at Aberystwyth University in Wales.”
Actor Richard Griffiths, 65
“He was the kind of actor whom everyone remembers with affection, whether as the flawed but inspirational Hector in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (first staged in 2004, then filmed in 2006) or as the eccentrically gay Uncle Monty in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I (1987) … [or] in the Harry Potter films as Uncle Vernon Dursley.”
William Shakespeare, Scofflaw
“An academic study confirms the playwright was repeatedly hauled before the courts and fined for illegally stockpiling food and was threatened with jail for dodging his taxes.”
Her Gig Canceled After Anti-Gay Tirade, Michelle Shocked Plays Outside In Protest
Following her now-notorious remarks from the stage at a San Francisco in March, “clubs around the country responded by canceling bookings they had made with her. But that hasn’t stopped her: Thursday night she turned up outside one such club with her face covered and her mouth taped shut to protest the way she is being treated.”
My David Mamet Problem
“I don’t subscribe to Mamet’s ideologies, but the problem for me has less to do with the nature of his reactionary positions than with the way he has allowed the polemicist to overshadow the dramatic poet.”
Fay Kanin, 95, Blacklisted Screenwriter And President Of The Academy
“‘I’m a big feminist,’ she declared at the time that her play Goodbye, My Fancy opened on Broadway in 1948. ‘I’ve put into my play my feeling that women should never back away from life.'”