Category: people

“Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the BBC’s ‘Bouncing Botanist’ was a television regular, leaping over ‘wocky pwotuberwances’, enthusing over ‘twee pherns’ or plunging his hands lovingly into evil-looking sludge to declare it a ‘bweeding gwound for amazing organisms’. … [He] did for botany and ecology what David Attenborough did for biology.” In later life, though, a series of very controversial statements brought him into serious conflict with mainstream environmentalists. – The Telegraph (UK)

“Stevens was known for her monumental paintings that dealt with social and political issues, as well as her activism, teaching, and writing. The artist used personal experiences and her responses to racism and oppression to inform her works, which span painting, collage, drawing, and prints.” – ARTnews

“Over a 40-year career, Luce … worked with the likes of Zoe Caldwell, George C. Scott and Claire Bloom as he wrote about the private lives of Charlotte Brontë, Lillian Hellman, Isak Dinesen, Zelda Fitzgerald and others. The Belle of Amherst, his portrait of the reclusive Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson, won [Julie] Harris the fifth of her six Tony Awards … Barrymore, about the gifted and self-destructive actor John Barrymore, earned [Christopher] Plummer his second Tony and was filmed for television.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“Mr. Auberjonois worked constantly as a character actor through several periods and forms, from the dynamic theater of the 1960s to the cinema renaissance of the 1970s to the prime period of network television in the 1980s and ’90s — and each generation knew him for something different.” – The Washington Post

Would Prince have agreed to the release of this material in this form? Does the potential public good, and the contribution to the historical record, outweigh whatever uncertainties Prince might have had about the revealing of his rough drafts? – The New York Times

“I am deeply grateful for the work in Potter and indeed Downton, but it wasn’t what you’d call satisfying. I didn’t really feel I was acting in those things.” – The Guardian

“On a single day, when he was 40 and full of innovative fire, he had jotted down 112 ideas for ‘new things,’ among them a mechanical cotton picker, a snow compressor, an electrical piano, artificial silk, a platinum-wire ice slicer, a system of penetrative photography (presaging radiology by 12 years), and a product unlikely to occur to anyone else, except perhaps Lewis Carroll: ‘Ink for the Blind.’ ” – Washington Post

Destouches defended the French writer, and their anti-Semitic and intensely pro-Nazi stance, for decades. “‘She followed him into the depths of hell with a love, an admiration and an affection that was absolute,’ Frédéric Vitoux, one of Céline’s biographers, wrote of Ms. Destouches.” – Washington Post

Spinney created two indelible characters, and, in his long tenure on Sesame Street, assisted in the creation of many more. “His Big Bird had a childlike innocence, sometimes goofy, sometimes subdued, outgoing or shy, like most children a creature of habit and mood. His themes were simple: that it was good to speak up, O.K. to make a mistake, all right to be sad sometimes. At Jim Henson’s memorial service in 1990 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Big Bird sang a heart-rending farewell, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green.'” – The New York Times