Category: people

He lives on the remotest island in the Baltic Sea, and it takes considerable effort to get there. “This is where the 88-year-old Ingmar Bergman, one of the legends of world cinema, is spending his last days. He first came to the island more than 40 years ago, scouting locations for Through A Glass Darkly (1961) and fell in love with Faro. Within moments of arriving, he had decided he wanted to live here.”

“Leibovitz, famed for her celebrity portraits, was photographing the Queen for a series of official pictures to commemorate her trip to Washington in May when she inadvertently annoyed her by suggesting a more informal pose.” The Queen, irritated, “flounced” out…

“Luciano Pavarotti’s wife, Nicoletta Mantovani, has told Italian daily La Stampa that the renowned singer is finally ‘doing well’ in his fight against pancreatic cancer… Ironically, his wife said, he hasn’t shown two of the side effects of radiation therapy: ‘Despite the heavy treatment, he has not lost weight – which, by the way, he would have liked – or his hair.'”

“Charles Lane, a skinny character actor who played mostly cranky roles and made more than 200 Hollywood movies and scores of television shows over six decades, died July 11 in Los Angeles at age 102. No cause of death was reported.”

Just who got the final interview with author before he died? Three contenders come forward…

His adherents regard Lyndon LaRouche as the greatest mind of the past 300 years, at very least. “I’m probably the best economist in the world today,” as LaRouche told The Washington Post in 1985. But a list of the areas of expertise behind that claim of eminence is even more astounding. LaRouche has determined the correct pitch for tuning musical instruments. Any other tuning bothers him, besides being incompatible with the structure of the universe.”

Post-National Symphony, conductor Leonard Slatkin has landed at the Nashville Symphony. “For the moment, it seems hard to believe that Slatkin would seriously consider a permanent post in Nashville–if for no other reason than that he was earning about $1 million a year more in Washington than the Nashville Symphony could reasonably afford to pay a new music director.” So what’s the attration?

Tenor Jerry Hadley shot himself in the head and is in hospital attached to life support. “Mr. Hadley created the title role in Mr. Harbison’s ‘Great Gatsby’ at the Metropolitan Opera in 1999, and performances in the role in May 2002 were his last at the Met, where he made his debut in 1987. ‘He came across, obviously, as a very upbeat character, but you could always tell, in his singing, that there was a lot of complexity to his personality.”

Ted Hartwell, longtime curator of photography at Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a pioneer in the field, died this week at his home in Wisconsin. “Hartwell was among the first generation of photography curators in American museums,” working tirelessly at a time when many museums believed photographs to be something less than art. Hartwell was 73.

Movie producer Alan Ladd Jr. is embroiled in a legal battle with Warner Brothers, and the proceedings “could focus attention on a variant of that old Hollywood bugaboo, studio accounting… The crux of the dispute is how studios account for revenues from the licensing of their movies to cable and television networks here and overseas.”