"Charles Dibdin was no one-hit wonder, but a hugely prolific, extremely famous figure. He performed in operas and then wrote his own, composed more than a thousand songs, toured one-man shows around the country, and opened his own London theatre." - BBC
He started with Sadler's Wells Ballet in London in 1940, appeared with the Paris Opera Ballet and with touring companies across four continents, then taught the national ballets of Colombia and Venezuela as well as at Sarah Lawrence and Juilliard before not-retiring to Mississippi in his 70s. - AP
In particular, he was the first to use polyester resin and Plexiglas to make sculptures. (He learned how to shape and sand them in shop class.) His goal as an artist, he once said, was "to cut out large chunks of ocean or sky and say: 'Here it is.'" - ARTnews
"When Richard Eyre accepted his knighthood and I asked why, he said 'vanity.' If somebody asks me why I turned down an OBE, I’d say 'vanity' too. It wouldn’t suit me, like wearing a bobble hat or something." - The Guardian (UK)
At the L.A. Philharmonic, Kraft was principal timpanist, composer-in-residence, and associate conductor; he co-founded the L.A. Phil New Music Group, with which he started the orchestra's now-famous Green Umbrella concerts of contemporary music. (Kraft was also Stravinsky's preferred percussionist.) - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"More than fifty years of writing about Naipaul! Yet only in the last few years, the dust having settled"— Naipaul died in 2018, and, writes Theroux, was a far less difficult person in his final years — " I have seen how complex our relationship was." - London Review of Books
"O'Rourke was one of the most quoted writers in America, dissecting US politics and culture with a withering disdain and a powerful line in put-downs – often laced with a warm, self-deprecating humanity." A frequent magazine contributor and talk-show guest, he was once Rolling Stone's foreign affairs correspondent. - The Guardian
"Critics and collectors, once made aware that Ms. Herrera existed, were rapt by the intensity of her work, which she achieved by juxtaposing geometric shapes in contrasting colors." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Born in Czechoslovakia and raised in Canada (where he first met such young comics as his later stars Dan Aykroyd and Rick Moranis), Reitman made his first major impression as the producer of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978). - Variety
Saul, an art historian with the ability to be bluntly honest with her artists but also to protect them fiercely, created a place for mixed media artists, photographers, and artists from opera composers to the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi. - The New York Times
The book that inspired thousands of aspiring dancers caused the subject serious issues. "Stephanie was not just another young woman who decided that the boot-camp-like demands of dance were not for her; she was the heroine of a beloved book." - The New York Times
Last year he sold his fx company. Forbes estimates Jackson personally made about $600m in cash and $375m in stock from the deal, making him the third person in history to become a billionaire from making films, after Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. - The Guardian
A long, loving profile of Caetano Veloso, who has transformed Brazilian music more than once, was a famous exile during the dictatorship, and has become a leading voice of opposition to Jair Bolsonaro. - The New Yorker
"Tutankhamun represents an extremely narrow slice of Egyptian history; imagine if, in the year 4850, the world understood the United States largely through the Presidency of Millard Fillmore." - The New Yorker
In a 1983 interview that has resurfaced, the then-92-year-old Effie Wisdom remembers how the dirt-poor, parentless London child (his father ran away with a chorus girl, his mother had a breakdown) used to steal eggs and wear rags until her aunt took him in. - The Guardian
