Category: people

Not that he hated it. “I’m not ungrateful. I loved the money, of course, and I’m proud of a lot of those films. But if someone said to me, ‘Do you have any talent as an actor?’ I’d say, ‘Well, only in regard to character acting.'” – Los Angeles Times

Miller was the first woman to be the Post-Dispatch‘s classical music critic, but as that role shrank (as at so many papers), she filled many other spots as well. Originally, “she got into journalism because she wanted to make a difference. In 2001, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra found itself in a financial crisis that threatened its existence. Ms. Miller covered the situation and explained to readers the options for keeping the SLSO alive, from maintaining it as an international-class ensemble to downgrading it to a regional orchestra.” Her articles inspired donors. – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The self-engrossed Gregory of “My Dinner With Andre” was in the midst of a Dantesque midlife crisis. The Gregory who emerges in his autobiographical first book, “This Is Not My Memoir,” is older and more quietly reflective, less prone to grandiose pronouncements and more humbly accepting of the wisdom between words. – Los Angeles Times

“Chopin’s Men, a two-hour radio programme that aired on Swiss public broadcaster SRF’s arts channel, argues that the composer’s letters have been at times deliberately mistranslated, rumours of affairs with women exaggerated, and hints at an apparent interest in ‘cottaging’ … simply ignored. The music journalist Moritz Weber, who started researching Chopin’s letters during the spring lockdown, said he discovered a ‘flood of declarations of love aimed at men’, sometimes direct in their erotic tone, sometimes full of playful allusions.” – The Guardian

He and his mentor, Jean Moulin, spent part of World War II undercover as art dealers in occupied Nice, where they showed Matisse, Degas and Bonnard. After the war, Cordier took up art as his career, running a leading Paris gallery (with outposts in Frankfurt and New York) and giving Robert Rauschenberg his first major show in France. – Artnet

“During his four decades in publishing, Mr. Hills brought to market both commercial hits and literary prizewinners and edited more than 50 New York Times best sellers. His stable of authors encompassed an eclectic assortment from multiple genres — Heinrich Böll and Jane Fonda, Justin Kaplan and William Saroyan, Raymond Carver and James MacGregor Burns, Sumner Redstone and Joan Kennedy, Phil Donahue and David Halberstam.” – The New York Times

The privilege and social rank that Bridget Rose Dugdale repudiated gave her the trained intellect and discerning eye that made her the most notorious (and nearly the only) female art thief in history. – Washington Post

The Argentine turned French director, whose death was caused by COVID-19, made “witty, satire-tinged French films about female empowerment and revenge.” – The New York Times

Morris established her reputation with dispatches from Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary’s climb of Mount Everest – she went 3/4 of the way up herself – and continued as a journalist interviewing everyone from Che Guevara to Guy Burgess. In a book review, “Anatole Broyard extolled Ms. Morris’s travel books as ‘oddly reassuring, showing us that there are more ways of experiencing cultures than most of us supposed.'” – The New York Times

Happy endings don’t happen often during a novel coronavirus pandemic. Marsalis, eighty-five, died in New Orleans of complications from the virus on April 1. But when the crying is over and Marsalis gets the jazz funeral he deserves, even the most sober study of his contributions to music might begin with a celebratory cork popping from a bottle of champagne. Jazz spoke to him early, in a way that no music had before, and in its service, his character was revealed. – Oxford American