Category: people

“The easiest way to describe what it means to me is like this — when I sit in a hotel room, listening to the news, and listening to the idiots blabber in what they like to call ‘news’ … if I didn’t have Twain to go on stage and attack this kind of foolishness, I would end up in the nuthouse.”

“To Vanessa’s tragically unbending Antigone, Lynn was the levelheaded Ismene, the sibling not built for radical extremes, who preferred everyday humanity to the glories of myth. … The truth is that critics, by and large, were as susceptible to her appeal as her fans. As much as Vanessa Redgrave is revered, Lynn was beloved.”

“[A]s both a deft comedian and a commanding dramatic actress she carved out a varied career, playing parts in Shakespeare and Shaw and on ‘Fantasy Island.’ In the last two decades, she started on a new professional path as a writer. At her death she was at work on a solo show, her fourth play to draw on her family history.”

Shatner has been doing Priceline commercials for ten years. Instead of being paid he took stock in the internet startup. Stock, which is now worth about $600 million.

The U.S. ranked 21st with 78 percent of high school students graduating and going on to college in 2007, according to a 2009 survey. “The American people frankly have been over many, many years, to be blunt, fat, dumb and happy,” said Broad, 77. “If they want their children to compete with children in India, China or Korea, they better get them a far better education.”

His “passionate commitment to breaking the fourth wall of the proscenium arch stage, and rooting a resident company of actors, writers, musicians and designers in the local community, was revolutionary.”

“Mr. Connell spent the past three decades in a crucial though unsung job that requires the combined abilities of a musician, linguist, conjurer, computer whiz, psychotherapist and animal wrangler.”

The Juilliard String Quartet, which he helped start in 1946, “is widely considered the first American string quartet to attain major international status. … Winograd left the quartet in 1955 to pursue conducting. In 1964 he became the Hartford Symphony’s music director, a post he held until 1985. Under his leadership, the orchestra became known for more ambitious programming.”

He “was one of the most important independent abstract artists of his generation; but an insistence on his work always containing a strong emotional and narrative thread sometimes led him into conflict with the orthodoxies of the day.”