Category: people

A.O. Scott: “Mr. Nielsen’s ability to stay in character, to reel off sublime non sequiturs and koans of cluelessness with a precisely measured balance of dignity and density represents both a rare gift and considerable work. Looking back, it is easy to see that the times required someone like Leslie Nielsen: a handsome silver-haired gentleman of fatherly demeanor willing to commit and submit to any kind of indignity without losing his cool.”

“Mr. Brubeck, who turns 90 on Monday, has been forcing jazz to change direction for seven decades. Clean living, a happy marriage and global popularity have made Mr. Brubeck a media darling–and a target of envy.”

After the outspoken novelist made some controversial remarks last month about the Indian government and its policies in Kashmir, a private citizen made a formal complaint accusing Roy of sedition. Delhi authorities have confirmed that they are taking action on the complaint.

Hofmann made his name as a handsome Teutonic hero at the Bayreuth Festival. For well over a decade he sang Wagner’s leading tenor roles at most of the world’s great opera houses; in 1990 he began a new career playing the lead in the Hamburg production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera.

“One of the greats of post-war Italian cinema, Mario Monicelli, has killed himself by jumping out of a hospital window, media reports say. Monicelli, 95, was dubbed the “father of Italian comedy” for directing films such as Amici Mei (My Dear Friends) and I Soliti Ignoti (Persons Unknown).”

“It invites iconoclasm. Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.”

“[An] aristocratic friend and fellow Freemason, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, had sued Mozart over a debt and won a judgment of 1,435 florins and 32 kreutzer in Austrian currency of the time (nearly twice Mozart’s yearly income) weeks before the composer died.”

In recent years, the common view of the author has mutated from the saintly image propagated by his secretary, Vladimir Chertkov – brilliant, slightly nutty, gentle and generous – into the more mixed portrait depicted in the diaries of Tolstoy’s monumentally put-upon wife. “But would Sofia’s understanding of her husband, as accurate a perception as it may be of the creative artist, have inspired peaceful revolutions in India and Alabama?”

While he was a section player in the National Symphony in Washington, DC, he “began participating in labor contract negotiations involving other orchestras and opera companies throughout the country.” Among the precedents he helped set were getting musicians the right to ratify their labor contracts and to share in recording royalties, and establishing the Code of Ethical Audition Practices.

“The 84-year-old Ms. Leachman, whose first television roles came in the late 1940s and who has won more primetime Emmys than any other actress, is relishing her latest role” – in which she “chain-smokes, runs around the front yard in a lace bra, jumps a group of trick-or-treaters and tries to breast-feed an infant.” And her “off-camera antics and salty remarks are as unpredictable as any scripted moments.”