Category: people

The actor remembers telling his agent, “‘Look, enough already. I want to play a nice guy with a wife and a family and a dog and a house.’ And she said, ‘We’ll look for that for you’.” And she did, sort of.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, that’s where. Pianist Stephen Hough writes: “I was amazed to discover that it was in this town that the most famous gay musical couple of the 20th century first … well, you know what I mean.” (Hough also reveals the lewd little love note Pears wrote about it later.)

“[Artist Erin] Crowe produced colorful, whimsical canvasses that highlighted Mr. Greenspan’s wrinkled forehead, pursed lips, droopy ears, hand gestures and oversize glasses.” One of her Greenspan portraits sold for $150K at a charity auction; now its owner keeps it under the bed. Another purchaser now snipes that he should use the painting as a dartboard. (Crowe, meanwhile, has moved on to painting Ben Bernanke.)

Her “operatic voice and campus-sweetheart beauty embodied the glamour of Hollywood movie musicals in the 1940s and ’50s” – films such as Anchors Aweigh, Show Boat and Kiss Me Kate.

“I have a concert in six minutes and should change my clothes,” said the maestro over the phone from his dressing room at the Vienna Musikverein. (The interview had already been postponed several times that day.) Not for nothing is the new documentary about Gergiev titled You Cannot Start Without Me.

In a change from recent practice, the doctor-turned-opera director says nice things about both Covent Garden and ENO, talks clearly about how he works, and never once threatens to quit directing – he even says it’s fun. (Don’t worry, he still disses a few colleagues and whinges: e.g., “I find myself between two millstones of idiocy.”)

A hoax message saying that the Canadian folk-rock singer had died appeared on Twitter Thursday afternoon; the story spread fast and ran on several Canadian news services before it emerged that, in fact, Lightfoot had merely gone to the dentist’s office.

National Book Award-winning poet Lucille Clifton died Saturday at 73. “Clifton had six children and made poems not in ‘a room of one’s own’ but, rather, at the proverbial kitchen table, with family life proceeding around her. ‘Why do you think my poems are so short?’ she would often say, with a laugh….”

“Victoria & Albert: Art & Love is the first-ever show to focus on the enthusiasm for art shared by Britain’s longest-reigning monarch and her husband, Prince Albert. It reveals the couple’s starkly-differing attitudes towards works of art, with the queen favouring titillating images featuring plenty of naked flesh, while her husband appears prudish by comparison.”