Category: people

“Clive Barnes, who as a critic in Britain and later for The New York Times helped bring dance to a broad audience with an exuberant, highly personal style in his reviews, died early this morning… His death, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, was caused by complications of cancer.”

Only four years after he first led a professional orchestra, the boy wonder of conductors has two big music director jobs and a DG contract. But the 27-year-old says his life isn’t so very different now – he’s always conducted a lot, he’s just doing more of it outside Venezuela. He’s never intimidated, either – except for this one time in Vienna …

At the Sydney launch of her latest film, the Baz Luhrmann epic Australia, she said, “In terms of my future as an actor, I don’t know. I’m in a place in my life where I’ve had some great opportunities but I may just choose to have some more children… There’s many things I want to do besides act.”

“Her bold canvases made her a bright star in the 1950s New York art world, but she ‘sank from view faster than the Titanic’ when she moved to Baltimore, The New York Times said. Grace Hartigan, who ultimately found a second career offering her wisdom and advice to generations of young painters at the Maryland Institute College of Art, died of liver failure today at the a Lorien Mays Chapel in Timonium nursing home.”

“Stan Lee, who helped create hundreds of comic book superheroes, including ‘Spider-Man,’ and Olivia de Havilland, 92, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1939 for her portrayal of Melanie Hamilton in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ were among the recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal at the White House yesterday.”

“Peter J. Levinson, a music publicist who parlayed his close familiarity with jazz personalities into rich and sometimes intimate biographies of them, died on Oct. 21 at his home in Malibu… He eventually started his own publicity firm in New York and later expanded it to Los Angeles.”

“Large crowds have flocked to a memorial service in Johannesburg for South African singer Miriam Makeba, who died last weekend after a concert in Italy. Musicians, poets and politicians paid tribute to the 76-year-old performer… The singer, who was known as Mama Africa, spent more than 30 years in exile after lending her support to the campaign against apartheid.”

“More accustomed to listening to performances he financed, Mr. Vilar heard a prosecutor on Wednesday accuse him of stealing from clients and call him a liar dozens of times during closing arguments, while defense lawyers lauded him as a top-notch financial brain who had no need to steal. The case, they said, was built on disputes that really belonged in civil court.”

“Bruce Cole, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities for the past seven years, announced yesterday he is leaving in January to join the American Revolution Center in Valley Forge, Pa. His departure gives the incoming administration of Barack Obama the opportunity to name the heads of both national endowments.”

The People’s Republic’s most famous actress, who “embodies Chinese womanhood in the way Helen Mirren sets British hearts racing, or the way Catherine Deneuve is an icon in France,” has taken the citizenship of her Singaporean husband. Her erstwhile compatriots are fuming: “She earned enough money in China, didn’t she? Then she becomes a foreigner! Why do we make her money for her, just so she can take the money and run.”