Category: people

“Playwright Gregory Burke has turned down an honorary degree from his old university after a row over an attack he carried out as a student. The award-winning writer of Black Watch said he decided to refuse the offer from Stirling University to prevent any embarrassment to the establishment. He was banned from the campus about 20 years ago after violently assaulting a 17-year-old student.”

“She may find the attention at times overwhelming and a touch bewildering, but after years on stages, from karaoke pubs to church choir risers to “Britain’s Got Talent,” she doesn’t mind at all that people are interested in listening to her. Nor, village louts notwithstanding, does she come across as even slightly crazy.”

“Carol Ann Duffy, a 55-year-old Glaswegian lesbian, has thus become the first female laureate, attracting national attention and disturbing the peace of what a succession of commentators described as ‘the male-dominated world of poetry’.”

In February, a Los Angeles judge ruled that evidence of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct could well justify voiding the director’s 1977 conviction for statutory rape – but that Polanski, a fugitive in France ever since, had to return to the U.S. to ask that the case be dismissed. The deadline is arriving, and Polanski has taken no steps to accept the offer.

“Fair or not, it is a commonly held opinion in publishing circles that Talese’s career can be pretty much divided into pre- and post-Thy Neighbor’s Wife – that the writer and his gift never fully recovered from the shock waves. […] ‘[My] shrink was a very nice guy. He liked the book. But he said, ‘What you did was commit literary suicide.'”

The star tenor, whose vocal troubles and cancellations have made headlines regularly for the past few years, has withdrawn from all of his engagements for the rest of 2009 and plans to have a cyst removed from his vocal cords “as soon as possible.” Among the performances he’ll miss are L.A. Opera’s season-opener and a new Tales of Hoffmann at the Met.

The Indian actor-director-producer, known for his tough-guy swagger, played such characters as gangsters, race car champions, and even cowboys in a genre that came to be called “curry westerns.”

“Steven Witser, principal trombonist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, died of an apparent heart attack Monday night in Pasadena, the orchestra announced. He was 48. ‘The shock of Steve’s sudden and unexpected death has robbed us of one of our most beloved and respected musicians,’ Deborah Borda, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, said in a statement.”

How does the creator of Ali G, Borat and Bruno manage to get so many real people to appear on film in such embarrassing situations? And how does the actor himself (out of character) manage to remain so publicity-shy? There are quite deliberate methods to his madness.

“[H]e has always resisted stardom, preferring to be a conduit, a curator, an organizer, and a collaborator. It was almost a blessing, then, that on the brink of serious commercial success, Seeger was forced to drop off the map: He was accused of being a Communist, then blackballed after his politely defiant testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”