Category: people

“Paul Scofield, one of Britain’s greatest Shakespearean actors and an Academy Award winner, has died at the age of 86… Scofield won the Oscar for best actor in 1967 for A Man for All Seasons, and was also nominated in 1995 for best supporting actor for Quiz Show.”

Peter Watchorn was on the Boston subway when a fellow passenger reported him on suspicion of being a terrorist. Watchorn was detained by police and questioned, missing a business trip…

“Anthony Minghella brought the art house to the multiplex without forcing anyone to squirm or read subtitles. In doing so, the filmmaker created a formula that has confounded so many moviemakers since Hollywood first erected that famous shingle in the hills.”

Filmmaker Anthony Minghella, who died earlier this week, “was far more than the sum of his credits; he was truly an industry leader… Above all, he had a refreshing lack of arrogance. He did not believe in sweeping into a foreign country with an American or British film crew, and ordering the locals around.”

“British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90… He came to fame in 1968 when a short story The Sentinel was made into the film 2001: A Space Odyssey by director Stanley Kubrick.”

The British director is best known for The English Patient, Truly Madly Deeply and Cold Mountain. He suffered a brain hemorrhage at 5am today at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where he had an operation on his neck.

McPartland — who’ll celebrate her 90th birthday with a night-before all-star performance-party tomorrow at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, has been known not only as a superb jazz pianist but also as host of ‘Piano Jazz,’ the longest-running national performance program on National Public Radio.

“The reborn, newly healthy Upshaw has reinvented herself as a performer who is also a co-creator. She works with composers such as Golijov and Kaija Saariaho, whose oratorio about Resistance martyr Simone Weil, La Passion de Simone, she sang at the Barbican last summer, and extends commissions to a new generation of musicians like David Bruce, a young Englishman whose chamber opera will be performed this month by the students Upshaw coaches.”

“Now only 25 – and having just appeared on the Grammy Awards telecast – Lang Lang has been there, done that so globally and repeatedly you have to wonder: Are there any new things left for a concert pianist to experience? There are.”

“He went from a family joke to the greatest writer in the English language … and, to many of his peers, a thoroughly nasty piece of work. But is Nobel laureate VS Naipaul finally ready to make peace with the world?”