Category: people

Burgie, known professionally as Lord Burgess, said that the calypso hits he adapted and wrote for Belafonte “‘revolutionized music’ by introducing Afro-Caribbean rhythms to the pop mainstream.” – The New York Times

He was born and raised in Soviet-occupied Latvia and trained in what was then Leningrad; he became well-known in the West as music director of the Oslo Philharmonic and then the Pittsburgh Symphony. “In the first decades of this century he was frequently awarded the accolade of greatest living conductor. His tours in those years … with his two primary orchestras, the Bavarian Radio Symphony and the [Royal] Concertgebouw [Orchestra] of Amsterdam, were eagerly awaited events and rarely did they disappoint.” – The Guardian

Yalom, who was a professor of French at Stanford before she segued into writing history books for a wider audience, admired the salons of the 18th century in France and ran one of her own in the Bay Area “where women found support and encouragement for their writing projects as well as practical advice about publishing.” – The New York Times

Well, no time to confront those fears like filming a Noah Bambach movie, of course. Julie Hagerty has been in everything from Airplane to Lost In America (and a whole lot more), but it was new to work with Bambach – and for Netflix. Wallace Shawn, a frequent collaborator, says: “I’ve seen her act on Broadway. I know that she has an incredible … ability to control what she does to make the audience laugh, to do whatever the director wants her to do. When you act with her, it feels as if it’s never happened before.” – Los Angeles Times

McClinton, who was mourned on actors’ Instagram feeds and Twitter posts as soon as word spread that he had passed, was “a noted director who was a favorite of the playwright August Wilson and took two of his plays to Broadway.” McClinton was also an actor and a playwright who did some of his best work in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. “‘London and New York have the glamour and money,’ he told The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2007, when he was directing Samm-Art Williams’s Home at the Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis. ‘But when you are working on Broadway, you are as much a director as a manager solving people’s problems. Here, I get to concentrate on the art, without distractions.'” – The New York Times

From the 1980s, beginning with the classic Unreliable Memoirs, he published a series of uproarious biographies that charted his journey from dusty Australia to windy Cambridge to grubby Fleet Street and on to eventual success with TV shows such as Clive James on Television. James may, however, be best remembered for inventing modern television criticism. – Irish Times

“He first achieved fame as an actor in the anti-establishment revue “Beyond the Fringe,” a hit in both London and New York. He went on to win acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic for his productions of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado” and other works. He also produced and hosted television shows. Most unusually, he was a medical doctor, with a special interest in neurology, who periodically left the world of theater to practice medicine.” – The New York Times

“[Paul] Sills, who directed the show, came up to him, and said, ‘Mike, I want you to meet the only other person on campus who’s as hostile as you are: Elaine May.’ She looked over Mike’s shoulder at the rave and went, ‘Ha!’ and walked off. It’s the beginning of a romantic comedy.” – Tablet