People

“A journeyman director who shepherded a new generation of young stars to the big screen in St. Elmo’s Fire and steered the Batman franchise into its most baroque territory in Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, … he established himself as a filmmaker of great flair, if not often good reviews, in a string of mainstream films in the 1980s and ’90s. To the frequent frustration of critics but the delight of audiences, Mr. Schumacher favored entertainment over tastefulness — including those infamous Batman and Robin suits with visible nipples — and he did so proudly.” – The Washington Post

At $6.01m after fees, the guitar is the most expensive ever sold at auction, Julien’s Auctions said. Bidding in Los Angeles opened at $1m and was won by Rode Microphones founder Peter Freedman. – BBC

Banes’ writing “paired a vivid and inquisitive approach with a lack of agenda and a belief that dance was a crucial part of cultural history.” – The New York Times

Zafón, who had been dealing with colon cancer for two years, wrote The Shadow of the Wind after a visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles. It became the second-best-selling Spanish book of all time … second only to Don Quixote. – The New York Times

The director in lockdown says he reads and watches everything: “WrestleMania. The Kardashians. I’m fascinated by it. So I don’t say read Tolstoy and nothing else. Read everything. See everything. The poet must not avert his eyes.” – The Guardian (UK)

Bemused locals were left to digest the fact that the pleasant newcomer to their island paradise, who had been helping out at the local animal shelter, was in fact a fugitive art dealer who stands accused of, among other things, selling millions of dollars worth of overlapping shares in valuable pieces of art, in one of the greatest art scams this century. – The Daily Beast

On stage, he enjoyed a dazzling early period and triumphant later years, most especially in Shakespeare and Pinter; but, if there was a prolonged period when Holm was absent from the theatre, it was because he suffered a temporarily paralysing form of stage fright. The theatre’s loss, however, was the cinema’s gain. He transferred the vocal precision, technical skill and impish mischief he had displayed on stage to the screen, enjoying a new, late-flowering career in scores of movies including, most notably, the Lord of the Rings cycle. – The Guardian

A precocious talent who began playing in Texas jazz clubs at age 12 and continued to perform for most of his life, he spent many years teaching theory and composition at UMass-Amherst and wrote more than 100 scores as well as 15 volumes of poetry and the influential textbook Jazz Theory and Improvisation. – The New York Times

“At the start of the second world war, Vera Lynn … was an up-and-coming dance band singer. By 1945” — thanks to her hits “We’ll Meet Again” and “The White Cliffs of Dover” — “this working-class young woman had become a symbol of the British wartime spirit, with a status comparable to that of the patrician prime minister, Winston Churchill. After the war, her friend Harry Secombe liked to joke that ‘Churchill didn’t beat the Nazis. Vera sang them to death.'” – The Guardian

Banes was the first dance critic to write about the exciting new urban form known as break dancing. Her article “To the Beat Y’All: Breaking is Hard to Do,” in the Village Voice in April 1981, introduced break dancing to readers before there was even a name for hip-hop culture. Fascinated by what she saw, she returned to this genre again and again. – Wendy Perron

“For more than a half-century, Ms. Linklater taught vocal technique to A-list stars like Patrick Stewart, Donald Sutherland and Sigourney Weaver; to students at New York University, Emerson College and Columbia University; and to people far removed from the performing arts who simply wanted to be less timid vocally. … Two books she wrote … have become part of many actors’ kit bags: Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language (1976) and Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice: The Actor’s Guide to Talking the Text (1992).” – The New York Times

“The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. … [They] are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. … The root of this problem is the society that we’ve created that contains this schism, and we don’t deal with it, because we’ve outsourced our accountability to the police.” – The New York Times Magazine

O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. – The New Yorker

Navaretta was not an artist herself, nor a gallery owner, but she was a quiet force on the art scene in New York and beyond. In the early 1970s she was immersed in various efforts by women to secure a bigger voice in the art world, and in 1975, with Judy Seigel as founding editor, she began publishing Women Artists Newsletter, covering issues and events of interest to women in that world that often went unmentioned in mainstream publications. – The New York Times

Over the past week, some fans said that they had decided to simply walk away from the world that spans seven books, eight movies and an ever-expanding franchise. Others said that they were trying to separate the artist from the art, to remain in the fandom while denouncing someone who was once considered to be royalty. – The New York Times

As the famously passionate fans of the Harry Potter franchise rise up to express raging disappointment at the bigotry espoused by its creator, and the surprisingly passionate fans of Live P.D.—who launched vicious attack campaigns on journalists and critics calling for its cancellation—just rage, there’s another question beyond the right and wrong of all this. It’s the question of what, exactly, fans are owed from the culture they support—and what are they willing to accept in order to keep enjoying it? – The Daily Beast

“This is O.K. for me because I am trying to live in a different world, besides the world of the illness. I’m trying to live in a world of the spirit wherein I am concentrating on things such as the golden rule. This is my big thing; I am trying to live by it. The main thing is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Sure, everybody knows it, but nobody lives by it. We live in a world where it’s about “I’ve gotta get mine, and—too bad for you—I’ve gotta get mine first.” – The New Yorker

“[We] reached out to more than a dozen black artists” — painters, actors, musicians, poets, quilters, hip-hop artists — “across the state to discuss what they think is at the center of today’s protests and how their art has been part of the movement and catalyst for change.” – The Post and Courier (Charleston)

“[He] was ‘an antique guy in a modern world,’ appearing in a derby and vest and performing illusions from the vaudeville era: classic tricks with steel rings or handkerchief, dividing an assistant into thirds. … After [his sons] were born, Mr. Fields spent a year teaching elementary school in Manhattan’s Chinatown, which inspired him to create MatheMagic, a show for children that he performed up to 200 times a year.” – The New York Times

“A world-class saxophonist with a big sound, a big presence and a capricious improviser’s imagination, [he] sometimes seemed more at home playing pub gigs in his Croydon birthplace than chasing the high-profile career implied by his collaborations with a raft of stars. … Despite a late start, a self-effacing nature, few recordings, and a guileless indifference to just about any form of PR, he left an indelible impression.” – The Guardian

“To mark his farewell, Mad‘s ‘Usual Gang of Idiots’ will salute Jaffee with a tribute issue next week. It will be the magazine’s final regular issue to offer new material, including Jaffee’s final Fold-In, 65 years after he made his Mad debut” and 78 years after he began his career. – The Washington Post

“Long was the right man at the right time in 1957, when he came to Houston to establish Meredith Long & Co. With less than a million residents then, the city had two art museums, three galleries and a core group of culturally ambitious oil, real estate and financial tycoons who could build important collections.” – Houston Chronicle

In the late 1950s, Northern joined the Metropolitan Opera symphony, “where, he later recalled, as the only African-American member he was often subjected to racist abuse — reminiscent of what he had endured from white officers in the military.” He also played “on some of the most storied orchestral recordings in jazz history, including The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall, John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.” – The New York Times

Edwards started writing when she was 7, but published her first novel almost 50 years later. She wrote six detective novels, “mysteries set in Harlem starring a female cop turned sociologist and accidental sleuth named Mali Anderson, always with a backbeat of jazz,” and also became director of the Harlem Writers Guild for nearly a decade. – The New York Times

His tenure as a senior administrator in the Florentine Republic saw many more failures than successes; he was bounced into prison and then exile after the Medici returned to power; when he finally got back into their favor, he was commissioned to write a great history of the city, only to see the family booted once again and die himself a couple of months later. “That hallmark of his work, Fortune, shined upon him only posthumously.” – History Today

“Mr. Friedman, who also wrote the screenplays for the hit film comedies Stir Crazy and Splash, was an unusual case in American letters: an essentially comic writer whose work skipped back and forth between literature and pop culture. … [His] early novels, short stories and plays were pioneering examples of modern American black humor, making dark but giggle-inducing sport of the deep, if not pathological, insecurities of his white, male, middle-class and often Jewish protagonists.” – The New York Times

“[She] first became known in Cambridge when she started selling her photos in a pushcart in Harvard Square. When police tried to chase her away, [her husband], a civil rights attorney, successfully argued that photographs are not ordinary merchandise that required a peddler’s license but were an intellectual product protected by the First Amendment. … Far from a pushcart, at the height of her career a 20-by-24 inch Polaroid portrait by Dorfman cost thousands of dollars.” – WBUR (Boston)

“Hoffman was one of the first book retailers to employ aggressive marketing techniques in the service of creating mass market bookselling. Despite occasional criticism from authors and publishers that Walden emphasized the sales of commercial books over more literary ones, Hoffman never backed down on his belief that more books should be published with mass appeal.” – Publishers Weekly