Category: people

“An award-winning playwright who explored the African-American and Caribbean-American experiences with incisiveness, humor and a willingness to wrestle with difficult themes, … Mr. Carter was one of many playwrights to emerge from the renowned Negro Ensemble Company in New York City in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.” – The New York Times

The soprano was admitted to a Moscow hospital with pneumonia on Sept. 12, just days after she sang in two performances of Verdi’s Don Carlo, the Bolshoi’s first production since the pandemic shutdown. A third performance, scheduled for Sept. 10, was cancelled after another cast member, bass Ildar Abdrazakov, fell ill and tested positive for the coronavirus. – The New York Times

Mr. Crouch was an actor, playwright, jazz drummer and college professor — without benefit of a college degree — before he emerged in the late 1970s as one of the country’s most original, contentious and (sometimes literally) combative writers. He was a bare-knuckled literary provocateur — erudite and fearless (some would say reckless) — while reveling in his often truculent takedowns, often of works by other African American artists and intellectuals. – Washington Post

“[He was] an award-winning gay Black writer whose fiction, set largely in a North Carolina hamlet similar to the one where he grew up, artfully blended myth, magic, mysticism and realism.” That village, a sort of Macondo, N.C., was called Tims Creek and, in Kenan’s fictional world, had been founded by a runaway slave named Pharaoh. – The New York Times

“Before Martha Stewart and Marie Kondo were giving advice on household design, before Julia Child was teaching the art of French cooking on television, there was Terence Conran. … He took his ideas around the world and once owned an empire of 90 stores with annual revenue of more than $2 billion. Calling himself a ‘hard-working hedonist,’ he opened more than 50 restaurants, wrote more than 40 books, ran a design studio and later an architecture and urban planning firm. All of it was built on the simple idea that good design leads to better living.” – The Washington Post

When Ms. Howe began teaching in colleges and universities in the 1950s, women’s studies was not an established academic discipline. In fact, it was rare to find a course catalog or syllabus that mentioned scholarship by women at all. With the Feminist Press, founded in 1970, she sought to diversify the materials used in schools around the United States and beyond. – The New York Times

Mr. Hibbert holds a firm spot in Jamaica’s musical pantheon as the first artist to use the word reggae on a record, on the rollicking 1968 single “Do the Reggay” by his group, which was originally billed simply as the Maytals. By some accounts, it was an accidental coinage — Mr. Hibbert has said he was thinking of “streggae,” local slang for a “raggedy” woman — but it stuck, branding the new sound that would become Jamaica’s greatest cultural export. – The New York Times

Peacock’s personal philosophy enabled him to work with a wide variety of musicians and facilitate great depth in those sessions. In a 2017 interview, he told Ken Bader of the Arts Fuse,“I’m not after my statement or my identity as a bass player or improviser. It’s not about me. It’s about the music. It’s about my responsibility to be in a particular place that other people can share, enjoy and feel something.” – NPR

Born in Martinique to an accomplished family (an aunt was the first black female student at the Sorbonne), she first made her mark in coloratura roles such as Leïla in The Pearl Fishers and the title role in Lakmé. She went on to have a stellar career in Paris and abroad, noted especially for Mozart, Rameau (she sang in the first modern revivals of several of his operas), and contemporary works (she created the role of the Angel in Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise). – Barron’s (AFP)

Three or four generations loved her for television roles from Emma Peel in The Avengers to Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca to Olenna Tyrell (the “Queen of Thorns”) in Game of Thrones; film roles from Tracy (the only Bond girl to get James to put a ring on it) in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to Vincent Price’s daughter in Theatre of Blood to Miss Piggy’s employer in The Great Muppet Caper; and stage roles from Euripedes’s Medea to Shakespeare’s Cordelia, Regan, and Hermia to Edward Albee’s Martha to Henry Higgins’s mother (okay, Lerner and Loewe’s). – BBC