People

The 71-year-old, who retired from City Ballet late last year amid controversial charges of violent bullying and sexual harassment, was found guilty for an incident that happened in late December. This is his second conviction on a charge of driving while impaired.

The general public was aware of her mostly as Carmela Corleone, who sang in the wedding scene, but she used a multi-octave voice and powerful stage presence to make a long career as a jazz singer; she numbered Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington among her admirers.

“It goes like this: More people on Earth have borne witness to Frank Oz’s characters, be it puppet or person, than any other artist in recorded human history. Between the Muppets (in all its forms), the Star Wars franchise, and Sesame Street, Oz has had a part of three of the biggest entertainment juggernauts of the last-half century.” Oz’s response? “My mind isn’t able to grasp that, it’s too large a concept.”

“Fakir Musafar first found pleasure in pain as a teenager named Roland Loomis in his family’s basement in the mid-1940s. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for piercing, branding, tattooing, suspension, corseting and other outré practices that he would come to call ‘body play.’ After years of conducting these activities in secret, away from society’s judgmental gaze, he changed his professional name and became a performance artist and passionate body-play advocate.”

Leonardo appears to have been unhappy with his handiwork, periodically refining the painting, started in 1503, until shortly before his death. Maybe that’s the biggest reason Leonardo lives so durably in the culture some five centuries after his death. He clearly saw himself—and, by extension, us—as an eternal work in progress.

In many ways, the Bernstein family’s experience mirrored that of other Jewish immigrants to the Boston area in the early 20th century. This was the immigrant experience — ups and downs, hopes and disappointments — on steroids.

Jimmy O. Yang says that even his Uber job – a job he got after buying a car with the money he made doing three days of filming for the show Silicon Valley – helped him prep to be a comedian. “There were some stupid drunk people every now and then but, for the most part, people were very nice, and I’m a people person. In a way, I was just kind of running my stand-up material on some of these people, just chatting them up.”

Llort, whose mosaics on San Salvador’s cathedral marking the end of a major civil war were destroyed by the Catholic Church in a “renovation” (for which the Church later apologized), was mourned by El Salvador’s president on social media: “His charisma, masterful works and affection for our people capture the cultural identity and the development in peace and harmony of our nation.”

Silver received a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer in 2004. She “wrote lyrical verse that gave readers an exquisite, intimate and sometimes angry account of her illness,” and she said that nothing focused her mind like cancer.

Moritz was a child star, so she grew up under a fame microscope – but her siblings helped her, as they went through their own struggles to come out, something that helped her as she starred in the new movie The Miseducation of Cameron Post . “I definitely struggled with, ‘Who am I? And what am I?’ My brothers, being marginalized their entire lives, were the first people to try and help me find my voice and my identity. And that’s the beauty of the L.G.B.T. community.”

Sir Vidia “exempted neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny. He wrote of the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of the colonizers, yet exposed the self-deception and ethical ambiguities of the liberation movements that swept across Africa and the Caribbean in their wake. He brought to his work moral urgency and a novelist’s attentiveness to individual lives and triumphs.”

According to Hungarian news site Parameter.sk, the woman, identified only as Eva N, played a four-minute aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ non-stop, in her house with on speakers full blast, from morning until night. Parameter.sk says that the homeowner in the southern town of Sturovo played the music for years to drown out a neighbour’s loud barking dog, and had simply continued doing it.

She took that role in the first U.S. version of Nutcracker, in 1944 at San Francisco Ballet. She was a founding member of that company, and she led her fellow dancers in raising the cash to save it from bankruptcy in 1974; she later spent 20 years teaching at the company school.

Maria Alyokhina – one of the three artist-activists who was arrested and jailed for singing “Mother of God, cast Putin out!” in a Moscow cathedral in 2012 – was leaving for her scheduled appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe when Russian border guards at the airport told her she was barred from leaving the country. So she drove to Lithuania and flew from there.

No, she says, it’s not just her voice or her talent. In a Q&A, Turner talks about her midlife switch from screen to stage, teaching acting and doing cabaret, Michael Douglas and Nicholas Cage, and decades of living with rheumatoid arthritis.

“In the mid-1960s Mr. Dias emerged as the leading figure of Nova Figuração, or ‘New Figuration,’ a movement in Brazilian painting that used bold, graphic imagery to contest Brazil’s junta, which took power in 1964. … [In 1968,] he moved to Milan, where he abandoned his graphic and immediate paintings for an art of cool conceptualism, though his political engagement never wavered.”

After launching and building up the television company Suburban Cable and then selling it to Comcast, Lenfest spent the second part of his life giving away more than $1.3 billion dollars to arts and education. “He was chairman of the board of old-line institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Curtis Institute of Music, … and he willed new ones into existence.” Among those are the Museum of the American Revolution and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, to which he donated The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com (all of which he had acquired outright in 2014).

Rae began her career elsewhere: She “was a fixture on Broadway and television for six decades. But along with other stars from the golden age of Broadway like Betty Garrett and Bea Arthur, she found her greatest success in sitcoms, beginning in the early years of television.”

“[Her] books for children and young adults addressed real-life issues like sexism, racism and censorship after she had emerged from the 1950s to become a feminist.”

“[His] rise to the zenith of the classical music world — as a co-founder of IMG Artists, which represented many of the biggest stars in the field — was improbable, as he was the first to admit. He was a high school French teacher and playing piano on the side when he moved to New York in 1977 to try to make it as an artists’ manager.”

“Mr. Wirtz, whose career began when he opened a flower nursery in 1946, would decades later be compared to André Le Nôtre, the French landscape architect who designed the magnificent gardens of Versailles. … [He] designed gardens for private residences, large estates, public parks, museums, college campuses and corporate headquarters.”

Once the internet has something, it can republished and rediscovered by new trolls. Thus, the cost of damages trolls can inflict on individuals and businesses can be substantial—and ongoing. Setting aside the malicious Wikipedia rewrites and Yelp and Google review attacks, victims can find their computers hacked and destroyed and their homes vandalized. Once a private investigator gets into the mix the price climbs.

His great innovation was to move beyond elegant, swashbuckling swordplay to show real bodies showing the sweat and blood of combat and real, fallible people making missteps.

“[In the 1970s, he] had been blacklisted after criticizing state censorship and defending dissidents such as novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and physicist Andrei Sakharov. … Through his subsequent exile in West Germany and the United States, his return to the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization policy of glasnost, and the rise of President Vladi¬mir Putin, Mr. Voinovich remained one of Russia’s most mordant critics of authoritarianism and bureaucratic corruption.”

Michael LaPointe: “When she sang ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ in 1966, she wasn’t asking to become a permanent surface for our collective reflections. … Today she is best known for the songs she came to loathe. Of course, they’re also her catchiest, but I wonder if her artistic mission — a mission of destruction — is simply incompatible with any of the images we’ve made of her. We construct icons, but Nico was an iconoclast.”