Category: people

It took Kiran Desai seven years to write the novel that won her last year’s Man Booker Prize. Her life has completely changed since the win. “The youngest woman to win the Man Booker Prize has had a three-month whirlwind since judges hailed her second novel ‘magnificent’.”

Former Getty curator Marion True was “ordered on Wednesday to post $19,500 in bail pending trial on charges that she conspired to buy an ancient funerary wreath that prosecutors say was illegally removed from Greek soil about 15 years ago.”

Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was a legend. “It is tempting to wonder how he would fare today, at a time when criticism itself is changing, partly because of a democratising technology that makes everyone an opinion-pusher, and partly because of a rampantly consumerist culture. But my hunch is that he would have loved the new trend towards fact-based drama and would have relished writing about our more idiosyncratic actors.”

Italian film producer Carlo Ponti, best known for his work on Doctor Zhivago and his marriage to Sophia Loren, has died in a Swiss hospital, aged 94. “During a career spanning four decades Ponti produced more than 140 films and worked with directors including Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lean. However, he was equally famous for discovering Loren as a teenager and turning her into one of the world’s most glamorous stars.”

Bernard Weinraub covered Hollywood for the New York Times for years. Now in retirement, he’s written a play. And it’s being produced Off-Broadway. “Weinraub told me he’d been thinking about this play and its subject matter ‘for a long, long time’ — since the early 1980s, when he saw a PBS documentary by Laurence Jarvik called Who Shall Live And Who Shall Die about how the U.S. responded, or failed to respond, to the Holocaust.”

“Ruthanna Boris, a versatile dancer and choreographer who was the first American ballerina to be a star of one of the prestigious Ballets Russes troupes of the ’40s, died Friday at her home in El Cerrito, Calif.”

“The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk took over a Turkish newspaper for a day and devoted Sunday’s front page to criticism of the oppression of artists in his native country.”

“For the last year he and his brother have been announcing deals almost as often as they have released films, arranging for theatrical, cable television, pay-per-view, video on demand and video-store distribution of their movies. They’ve invested in a MySpace-style social networking site for the rich and famous called aSmallWorld.net, made a new publishing deal with Hachette Book Group, bought the tiny arts channel Ovation, set up a Latin American film distribution fund and partnered with Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, to make movies under a new urban label, Our Stories Films.”

The Mayor of Los Angeles likes to think of himself as a major advocate for art as a center of public life. He’s hardly the first politician to pay lip service to the arts, of course, but after 18 months on the job, reviews of Antonio Villaraigosa’s cultural master plan are winning cautious support from local arts leaders hardened by years of political neglect.

A dark chapter in the history of the Kansas City Symphony was closed this week with the sentencing of a man convicted of killing symphony bassist Steven Peters in a home invasion in 2005. The shooter, who was intending to burgle the house when he was confronted by an armed Peters, will serve a 25-year sentence for second-degree murder.