Category: people

“At a key moment of ‘Desire Under the Elms,’ the character of Ephraim Cabot thanks God for the arrival of his new child. At Tuesday night’s performance at the Goodman Theatre, the actor Brian Dennehy took that rapture a step too far. He fell off the stage. … But Dennehy, an actor of the old school, batted aside assistance, gritted his teeth, assured the audience that the baby (played by a doll) was unhurt and demanded that the show continue.”

“When Beltway insider Jack Valenti died two years ago at age 85, he was playing the role of intermediary between Washington and Hollywood as the theatrical, snowy-haired president of the Motion Picture Association of America. But back in 1964, Valenti was a Houston ad executive newly installed at the White House as a top aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson. And J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI found itself quietly consumed with the vexing question of whether Valenti was gay.”

“As graphics director for CBS and later ABC television news introduced the concept of using logolike images behind anchors as signatures for major news coverage… and in so doing helped transform the appearance and content of network evening news.”

After dancing in Ida Rubinstein’s experimental dance company and the Original Ballet Russe, she was the chief soloist in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet from 1943-50. Her biggest legacy may be as an instructor: she headed Indiana University’s ballet department from 1969 to 1992 and trained hundreds of dancers at her summer programs in Vermont.

“Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer whose assistance to Wladyslaw Szpilman in the [Roman Polanski] movie The Pianist made him famous, has been posthumously recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations for risking his life to save Jews during World War II.”

“In 1987, he helped bring to the public’s attention the incredible discovery, in a Seacaucus, NJ, warehouse, of the original versions of the scores of many Broadway shows [such as Show Boat, Anything Goes, Brigadoon, Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me, Kate]. Many of these original versions had been presumed lost.”

“Alfred A. Knopf Jr., who left the noted publishing house run by his parents to become one of the founders of Atheneum Publishers in 1959, died on Saturday. He was 90, the last of the surviving founders, and lived in New York City.”

Singer Charles Aznavour, often dubbed the “French Sinatra”, has agreed to become ambassador to Switzerland for his ancestral homeland Armenia

He was a “prolific Irish playwright, memoirist, travel writer and dyspeptic newspaper columnist whose autobiographical play Da won four Tony Awards in 1978.” In Dublin he was a celebrity, especially for his Sunday column; one longtime friend said, “He used it to thank his friends and warn his enemies. You didn’t know which you were until you opened the paper on Sunday.”

“His biographer John Richardson, who lived near him in Provence during the 1950s, told me about the warmth and rollicking conviviality of the man: the genius was also genial. Others described a predator who gobbled up visual stimuli and wolfed down friends, employees and lovers.”