" a virtuoso vocalist whose ease of motion between opera, jazz and South African popular music made her a symbol of the country’s new social order after the end of apartheid. … Mandela famously referred to her as the country's 'first lady of song,' and the title stuck." - The New York Times
By age 32, Tarses was the first woman to head a network entertainment division — and one of the youngest execs ever to lead a Big Three — in her role as ABC Entertainment president from 1996 to 1999. During her tenure, she oversaw popular series including Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night,” David E. Kelley’s “The Practice,” “Dharma & Greg”...
In fact, he recorded his new album of duets with Lady Gaga in sessions spanning 2018 to 2020, and he was first diagnosed with the condition in 2016. And though he is quiet most of the time these days and frequently disoriented, he still sings through his 90-minute set twice a week and was even performing right up until...
In a long career spanning stage, film, and television, he was known for roles ranging from John Adams to Abraham Lincoln to Deep Throat to Willy Loman to the Stage Manager in Our Town. But he was most famous for his one-man show portraying Mark Twain — a role he played for more than 60 years, considerably longer than...
Cohan founded an outpost of Martha Graham's school in London in 1966, and, a couple of years later, The Place. That venture (including the London Contemporary Dance Group) "initially performed pieces from Graham’s and other choreographers’ bodies of work, but Mr. Cohan soon decided that going forward it would offer only works that had been specially created for its...
She died in what her team said was a "terrible accident" in Athens while celebrating the full moon. "SOPHIE was a trailblazer in almost every respect. The Scottish-born, L.A.-based producer transformed underground dance music, melding the worlds of house, techno, trance, pop and the avant-garde into something brazenly new and undeniable." - NPR
Penman's best-selling, lengthy books about medieval England and Wales were stuffed with research - and drama. But "such was her commitment to the factual record that she kept a running list on her website of historical errors in her novels, owning up to even the most minor offense, like describing a medieval greyhound as 'brindled,' long before the breed developed that...
Writer, studio musician at Sugar Hill Records, and singer, Bootee couldn't take the upbeat party aims of early hip-hop. So he wrote "The Message" about the serious, gritty life of his hometown, Elizabeth, N.J. Questlove: "The world (me included) absolutely froze in its tracks the week it debuted on radio. ... Hip-hop was once known as party fodder, a...
Wesley Morris: "Alas, she would not be playing the most daring, out-there characters. And let’s face it: the great parts were always headed to someone whiter anyway. The more audacious move was to declare herself a moral progenitor, to walk with her head high so that Denzel Washington might become a man on fire and Viola Davis could learn...
Lee, the son of immigrants from China, "was determined both to restore the contributions of Asian-Americans to the historical record and to document their present-day lives and struggles, especially those living in New York." - The New York Times
"Having started her career with Harmonia Mundi in 1972 as a press officer, she went on to produce more than 800 recordings with artists including Philippe Herreweghe, , Jean-Guihen Queyras, Isabelle Faust and Paul Lewis. She retired from the classical music label in 2016 following a career spanning nearly 30 years. When her husband Bernard Coutaz, Harmonia Mundi's founder,...
"Regal in bearing, with willowy beauty and delicately chiseled features, Ms. Tyson was known for embodying women of great poise striving under great pressure. … electrifying portrayals of resilient Black women — foremost in the 1974 TV movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman but also as Coretta Scott King and Harriet Tubman — brought some of the...
" began her astonishingly prolific eight-decade career performing radio plays as a child in Iowa. She appeared in Shakespearean comedy and Eugene O'Neill melodrama on Broadway in the 1950s, was a television mainstay from the dawn of the medium" — not to mention her now-legendary big-screen performances in The Last Picture Show and Young Frankenstein — "and, at 82,...
The charge by actress Sand Van Roy was first made in May 2018; it was dismissed for lack of evidence nine months later, and subsequently reopened following a civil complaint by Van Roy. After a five-hour hearing in Paris this week, the judge declared Besson an "assisted witness," a status under French law which means there is currently not...
" became part of the New York art scene during the late 1960s and went on to be associated with the Process art and Post-Minimalist movements. Unlike the best known adherents of those movements, including Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Morris, Le Va has remained a somewhat obscure figure, no doubt in part because his work is so...
