Category: people

“Respect is paid when Sammo Hung lumbers down the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui, the [Hong Kong] neighborhood where he first learned martial arts as a boy. … The famously hefty actor did not go the Hollywood route that [Jackie] Chan has pursued, but stayed mainly in Asia, where he has directed, produced, choreographed or acted in about 200 movies.”

Executives at Film4, the movie production arm of Great Britain’s Channel 4, are negotiating with Streep’s agents for her to star in a biopic of the “Iron Lady,” with shooting to begin late this year. Jim Broadbent would play Denis Thatcher, with Phyllida Lloyd (who worked with Streep on Mamma Mia!) directing.

“The £20 English banknote featuring the image of composer Edward Elgar will be accepted in shops for the last time on Wednesday. … The Elgar £20 banknote, first issued in June 1999, has gradually been replaced by the Adam Smith note since March 2007.”

“Mr. Wu’s education and career were constantly disrupted by war and political turmoil,” as when he was forced to do hard labor during the Cultural Revolution. In more recent years, “Mr. Wu won recognition as one of China’s most original artists and became a darling of Asian and Western collectors. In 2009 his works fetched nearly $40 million at auction.”

Friends of the reclusive author of To Kill a Mockingbird agreed to introduce her to a London reporter – on condition that no mention whatsoever be made of ‘The Book.” The conversation was very brief, and mostly about feeding ducks, but Lee’s Alabama neighbors did provide some insight into her mindset and the reasons for her determined silence.

We owe the very fact that her verse was retrieved from that old wooden chest, edited and published to the afternoon trysts that Emily’s very respectable brother was having with a married neighbor lady on Emily’s dining room sofa.

“Mr. Willis was a theatergoing phenomenon. Before he broke his hip in a fall in 2002, he saw everything he could, attending an average of eight live performances a week, 50 weeks a year — which over a half-century adds up to 20,000 shows. (He took off two weeks each June to visit his home in Bean Station, Tenn.)”

“Coetzee had the audience roaring as he railed against the ridiculousness of the once-fertile Karoo area of South Africa, now only good for eco-tourism, and of a whole country’s ‘light grade of sorryness’. His neat repetition of words and phrases were as adept as a stand-up comic’s. Some were sure a smile had cracked his lips.”

“Mr. Kaiser attributes his multiple activities on several platforms — including the book, a Huffington Post blog as well as the road tour — not to any effort at self-promotion but simply to a full-octane passion for arts management.”

“He was a colossus of the entertainment world to a degree that may never be equaled; if only for the fact that he had – count ’em – three network shows at the same time on CBS: a simulcast talk show in the morning, and not one but two (live) prime-time shows every week, consistently in the top ten. Arthur Godfrey was not just an entertainer. If the phrase ever applied to a human being, he was an industry.”