Category: people

The Cantonese opera star began his performing career in 1930. His “signature move was singing for nearly half an hour with one foot raised and wrapped around a prop.”

“Despite my best mental efforts, I just can’t keep pace with his verbal sprint through several millennia of philosophies this early in the day. The [celebrated Indian-English] musician has skipped from the Hindu Vedas to Einstein via Kepler and Heisenberg, and all before his first sip of coffee. So I’m surprised when he claims not to understand why people call him ‘intense’.”

Both his voice and his looks (“like a drowsy turtle”) were unprepossessing; he played piano and guitar, though not very well; he could be difficult and boorish and he drank way too much. Yet Serge Gainsbourg became one of France’s biggest stars – and biggest Lotharios.

A multiple award-winner for stage acting and directing, he was a co-founder of L.A.’s MET Theatre and a familiar screen figure who played key roles in myriad films (from Urban Cowboy and The Milagro Beanfield War to Major League and Cold Mountain) and television series (from Gunsmoke and The Waltons to Nash Bridges and Grey’s Anatomy).

Victor Hochhauser and his wife Lillian have been presenting dance, opera and classical music in the UK since 1945. He had his biggest impact in convincing the Soviet authorities to let him bring many of the USSR’s greatest artists over to London to perform. (“My great stroke of luck came when Stalin died.”)

“‘Dystopia’ is my middle name. I was born in the Soviet Union, and then we moved to Reagan’s America. … Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it’s important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. … We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions. … When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.”

The (grand-)mother of all blonde European starlets, now 93, “was seriously injured Saturday after falling out of bed and breaking several bones.” She is reportedly at UCLA Medical Center, surrounded by her family.

“Harriman began the William Jewell Performing Arts Series 45 years ago, presenting some of the most prominent names in classical music and dance and introducing Kansas City audiences to up-and-coming performers. For example, Harriman, a notable talent scout, in 1973 brought a soon-to-be-famed Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, to Kansas City for his first recital in the United States.”

“In the midst of a crisis of capitalism, the Western underground is rediscovering communism. Its star is the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who mixes Marxism with pop culture and psychoanalysis. His appearances offer stand-up comedy for a radical leftist avant-garde. … There are Zizek T-shirts and Zizek records, and there is a Zizek club and an international Zizek journal. … One could say that he’s reinvented the profession. Some would say he’s defiled the profession.”

Francesco I de’ Medici, the founder of the Uffizi Gallery, and his mistress-turned-second wife, Bianca Cappello, died agonizing deaths within one day of each other in 1587. For centuries, the suspicious believed that Francesco’s brother and successor, Ferdinando, had them poisoned, likely with arsenic. But recent tests have shown that Ferdinando was innocent (well, in this instance). What killed Francesco and Bianca? Just what the original examiners thought killed them, at it turns out.