Category: people

“As the lead singer for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and in a solo career in which he sold millions of albums, Mr. Pendergrass brought gospel dynamics to bedroom vows in songs like ‘If You Don’t Know Me by Now,’ ‘The Love I Lost,’ ‘Close the Door,’ “Turn Off the Lights’ and ‘”Love T.K.O’.”

A career naval officer, he co-wrote “a novel that was among the first books to deal with American involvement in Southeast Asia and that barely veiled a blistering critique of the nation’s foreign policy there.”

“Then came the Gong Show years, and, as Diller’s bookings dried up, she began to paint. Late at night, she’d throw on a pink smock, put some Gershwin on the stereo, and work up an ink or acrylic sketch of a castle, a few daisies, or Alex Trebek. In 2003, when she was eighty-six, she began holding ‘art parties,’ several times a year, to sell the work.”

“This whole neighbourhood has become centred on the kind of middle-class families that were just one very small minority element then [in the ’70s]. So many of these houses were – it wasn’t just that there were families of different races in them; there were different uses for them. There were boarding houses and boarded-up houses – abandoned ones. And there were also communes. Not just my parents’.”

“A 1999 guide to literary agents described him as ‘a lean, bald, craggy-faced man with a game leg, which he assists with a cane, an expression usually either amused or sardonic, a gruff manner that can sometimes seem downright brusque, and a reputation as one of the truly upright men in the business.'”

“The fabled world of the Yiddish theater on lower Second Avenue … was in steep decline when the Polish-born Ms. Bern arrived in New York in 1949. She and Ben Bonus, who was to be her second husband, helped keep it breathing a good while longer.”

“Mr. Linde was chairman of the board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was a major benefactor to the Museum of Fine Arts, which named its west wing after him, his wife, and the Linde family in recognition of the more than $25 million they donated to the museum.”

Among Eric Rohmer’s most famous critics “was a fictional character: detective Harry Moseby in the 1975 Arthur Penn thriller ‘Night Moves,’ played by Gene Hackman in one of his best roles. Invited to see ‘Maud,’ Moseby demurs, saying, ‘I saw an Eric Rohmer movie once. It was like watching paint dry.’ Moseby could have watched more carefully.”

“Ms. Rich specialized in casting nonstarring roles. She combed her voluminous files of head shots and haunted Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway to find exactly the right person for a part that might comprise just a few lines.” In the process, she gave some actors who would become stars their first big break — and also assembled John Travolta’s gang.