Category: people

The tempestuous actor son of France’s most famous tempestuous actor died of a sudden case of acute pneumonia. “[His] health had never fully recovered from a life of drug addiction, a road crash and a hospital infection which forced the amputation of his right leg five years ago.”

The man who has played Hannibal Lecter, Titus Andronicus and Richard M. Nixon has been writing music for 50 years, and the Dallas Symphony is giving him a world premiere concert this week.

“Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed King of All Media, has lost his crown. The shock jock’s syndicated morning radio show once drew a national audience of 12 million, but since jumping to satellite radio three years ago, his listeners have dwindled to a fraction of that. … So far, the radio personality’s leap from traditional media to a niche platform has come at a heavy price — namely, cultural relevancy.”

In front of rolling cameras and a surprised audience, he railed against German television, saying there was nothing on it worth watching. He said that maybe he should have made his opinions known earlier, but explained: “I didn’t know what was waiting for me here.”

William Claxton, a celebrated photographer who worked with such entertainers as Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra and who helped establish the organization that runs the Grammy Awards, has died.

Alex Sanchez writes books about gay youth and their struggle to find acceptance, but local school principals were not comfortable allowing him to address their students. “A few of them were getting pressure from a few parents, and they just weren’t comfortable going in that direction,”

Toni Morrison has become a figurehead for repressed minorities and underdogs. All the same, it must have been odd for her, in light of the recent Nobel commotion, to find herself recast in the usual role by virtue of neither her race nor her gender, but her nationality.

In the popular imagination, Emily Dickinson “is forever the lovelorn spinster, pining away in her father’s mansion on Main Street in Amherst, Mass. … Her exile on Main Street has seemed a necessary part of the Dickinson myth, so necessary, indeed, that contrary information–which happens to have been piling up lately–has often been discounted or ignored.”

“Kevin Spacey flung his arms open to hug the frail playwright Alan Ayckbourn after his show ‘The Norman Conquests’ in London. Instead, he knocked over the 69-year-old Ayckbourn, who walks with a stick.”

A new BBC documentary argues – with agreement from both the defense and prosecuting attorneys – that the director’s notorious trial for statutory rape was distorted by an ambitious judge. “It really isn’t about whether Polanski is likeable or not. It’s about whether he was treated fairly under California state law. And clearly he was not.”