People

Her first musical, “Mod Donna,” had its opening at the Public in 1970. One Lamb supporter: “I was at opening night with my then-boyfriend, … a deceptively mild-mannered man who rose out of his chair at the curtain and began to shout that feminism was a sham and that he would tell the awful truth about what wretched liars, manipulators, fakes and so on we in the movement were. I had never seen him in such a rage. Many men in the audience around us were nodding approval at his outburst.”

Without saying “Brexit,” the actor says Brexit, as his wife gets British citizenship too: “We never really thought much about our different passports. But now, with some of the uncertainty around, we thought it sensible that we should all get the same.”

Bradley’s first album, on the ’60s sound revival label Daptone, was released when he was 62, and his James-Brown-evoking performances became legendary. Daptone’s Gabriel Roth: “Charles was somehow one of the meekest and strongest people I’ve ever known. His pain was a cry for universal love and humanity.”

She specialized in Odissi, a form of temple dance from the eastern Indian state of Odisha. “By the 1940s and ’50s, Odissi had fallen out of favor in India. But Ms. Devi, who began studying it in 1964, helped revive it through worldwide tours in the 1970s and as a professor in New York University’s dance department from 1972 to 1982.”

The former editor of Dance Magazine, Horosko “was the only dancer who carried an old-fashioned typewriter with her on tour.”

Not really, but he’s OK with that. “I come to make room for the ones coming after. Because these people coming after are going to deliver us something. We just need to watch out. Just look at the luscious, juicy deliciousness that is black art right now. I just feel like we’re only scratching the surface.”

“MoDo: You love embroidering rude cushions with bawdy language and giving them to your famous friends.
JuDe: I used to do that a lot, but my eyesight doesn’t let me anymore. I found someone to make the cushions for me.”

“The genial architect in wire-rimmed glasses planned and designed soccer stadiums in Qatar, sweeping roadways in China and entire cities in Algeria, and in a five-decade career was described as one of the finest urban planners in Germany. For all the acclaim, he received few commissions in the German capital. Clients, he said, probably feared the inevitable headline: that Albert Speer – ‘the devil’s architect,’ Hitler’s master builder – was again building in Berlin. Never mind that the builder was in this case his son.”

“He liked to say, with the false modesty that is permitted to great successes, that his career was a series of disasters. As well as his failure to enter art school, he failed to make the grade in his first choice of career, as a game warden in Africa. His second choice was to work on the buses. Before he embarked on this, however, he put his artistic ambition and love of African wildlife together, to create the singular success by which he is known.”

Astaire’s fate in the early fifties was something one suspects he’d never accounted for: his age was beginning to show. Of course, this was a time when elderly men still courted young women on-screen with stunning regularity, and had Astaire been a normal romantic lead, this might not have been a problem. But he was a dancer.

“It’s been nearly two decades since The Big Lebowski, a tale about an emphatically nonchalant man named Jeffrey ‘the Dude’ Lebowski who gets forced over the precipice of chalance, transformed Jeff ‘the actor’ Bridges into an unwitting pop cult leader. … Jeff Bridges isn’t turned off by this, as some already famous actors might be – by the fanatical, undying popularity of a weird thing he did once, back in 1998, that no one has ever forgotten, that people quote at him ad nauseam. He’s too imperturbable, too Dude for that.”

“[Her] innovative journalism appeared in the New Yorker magazine for eight consecutive decades, and whose profiles and articles were considered forebears of both the nonfiction novel and unsparing modern celebrity profile.”

The Flynn’s statement cited Killacky’s emphasis on access and inclusion, as the arts center now works with 75 social-service agencies to provide discounted tickets for their clients. The organization provides $30,000 in scholarships toward participation in the Flynn’s classes and camps. Killacky also led a three-year, $2.3-million renovation campaign for the Flynn that received contributions from 274 sources.

“When an artist knows he or she is dying, the last work that they put into the world comes to be something that is at once a bequest, a memorial and a breakup letter. It has a charge that surpasses reality.”

The artists would “live, eat and devote themselves to the private study, practice and development of their work. They would have communal meals, in the existing main house and shared common spaces that would foster a sense of community among the artists.”

Dalya Alberge interviews screenwriter Ron Hutchinson, who recounts the actor’s bizarre behavior on the set of his last film, The Island of Dr. Moreau.

“The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the most generous arts honors in the United States, has been awarded to the singer, composer and multidisciplinary artist Meredith Monk, whose wordless vocal pirouettes and otherworldly theater compositions have reverberated in New York and internationally for five decades.”

“Billed as Dean Stanton throughout the 1950s and 60s, the narrow-faced, weather-beaten actor with the hangdog expression was probably the busiest actor of his generation. His distinctive features and style proved a godsend for casting directors in search of conmen, misfits, sleazeballs, losers and eccentrics. In the first half of his career, Stanton made scores of television appearances, mainly westerns, and dozens of films, mostly in brief roles. His face but not his name gained recognition. That is until he came into more focus in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as a downtrodden engineer on the doomed spaceship. Then, in 1984, greatness was thrust upon him when he was given two of his rare leading roles, in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas.”

“The AI distinguished between a healthy brain and one with Alzheimer’s with an accuracy of 86 per cent. Crucially, it could also tell the difference between healthy brains and those with MCI with an accuracy of 84 per cent. This shows that the algorithm could identify changes in the brain that lead to Alzheimer’s almost a decade before clinical symptoms appear.”

The world-renowned soprano, 73, said she had stopped performing a year ago but had not revealed her decision until now. Te Kanawa told the BBC it had taken her five years “to say the goodbye in my own mind” but wanted to decide “when it was going to be the last note”.

Lewis, who sang for a decade with the Metropolitan Opera and for two decades with the New York City Opera, was known for interpreting the music of living American composers. She originated two signal roles in contemporary opera: the alcoholic Birdie Hubbard in “Regina,” Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s drama “The Little Foxes,” and the title role in “Lizzie Borden,” by Jack Beeson.

Alberto Guerrero, the Chilean-Canadian who was Glenn’s second and last piano teacher (the first was his mother) said “The secret to teaching Glenn is to let him discover things on his own.” He felt that if Glenn claimed not to have learned anything from Guerrero, “I’d take that as a compliment.”

“The thing about political correctness is that it starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor. … Because they have no sense of proportion, and a sense of humor is actually a sense of proportion. It’s the sense of knowing what’s important.” (He then edges into some rather iffy jokes.)

“Vincent played Tony Soprano’s archenemy Phil Leotardo in The Sopranos, one of his many wiseguy roles. He was Billy Batts in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas – the ‘made man’ who famously told Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito to ‘Go home and get your f*ckin’ shinebox’ – and Frank Marino in the director’s Casino. His performance with Pesci in 1976’s The Death Collector caught the attention of Robert De Niro and Scorsese, and the director offered Vincent a supporting role in Raging Bull.”

Deborah Solomon goes to visit the artist in California: “Hockney is still a dapper, vigorous presence. His conversation is wide-ranging and larded with literary references, and his manner is so genial and confiding that at first you do not notice how stubborn he can be. He delights in espousing contrary opinions, some of which come at you with the force of aesthetic revelation, while others seem perverse and largely indefensible.”

Last week, Noah Charney wrote about how the great painter became a violent, impulsive train wreck. This week, he tells us how much worse Caravaggio got – for instance, he fled to Malta for sanctuary and the Knights welcomed him; the next year, they called him a “putrid and fetid member” of the order and threw him in jail – and how the fact that he was constantly fleeing the authorities affected the way he painted.

“Directors can’t simply let a play speak on its own, but they must put their ear to the ground. Meaning for Hall always returned to an intimate confrontation with the line. He didn’t believe that Shakespeare could be properly done without respecting the forms in which he wrote his plays. Verse, diction, rhetorical patterns — attention to these matters is what allowed a play to live again.”

Michael Billington: “What I most admired about Hall at the National was his tenacity in withstanding industrial action, persistent attacks from disappointed members of the Olivier regime and media abuse.”

Hall’s most startling and lasting achievement is to have been the founding father of the UK’s two biggest subsidised theatres in the form that we now know them: the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.