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Eva Coutaz, Longtime Director Of Classical Label Harmonia Mundi, Dead At 77

"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,...

Cicely Tyson, 96

"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...

Actress Cloris Leachman, 94

" 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,...

In Rape Case, Filmmaker Luc Besson Is — Well, Not Exonerated, Exactly …

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...

Sculptor Barry Le Va Dead At 79

" 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...

Leslie Odom Jr Almost Passed On Playing Sam Cooke

Those who have seen One Night in Miami will appreciate that the actor, singer, and star of Hamilton made a different choice, especially with his movie-closing performance of "A Change Is Gonna Come," Cooke's big civil rights song. The actor says, "There’s a part of me that feels like these projects I take on — and I could be...

Judi Dench Is A Bit Bored In Lockdown

Someone hire her, quickly. "Lockdown, I fear, is not the life Dench was born to. She used to practically eat and drink on the stage, but the theatres have closed, who knows for how long. She used to bounce from one film set to the next, but now production is mothballed and the industry has gone to ground. All...

Bob Avian, Broadway Choreographer, 83

Avian co-choreographed A Chorus Line with Michael Bennett, and choreographed Miss Saigon and Sunset Boulevard. He "directed a 2006 revival of A Chorus Line that ran on Broadway for almost two years, as well as productions of that show in London in 2013 and at New York City Center in 2018. He shared Tony Awards for choreography with Mr....

Walter Bernstein, Blacklisted And Celebrated Filmmaker, 101

Bernstein's "career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, The Front." - The New York Times

Junior Mance, ‘One Of The Most Swinging And Utterly Delightful Pianists In Jazz,’ 92

Mance was "a buoyant, bluesy jazz pianist who worked with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley and Dinah Washington, before establishing himself as the leader of his own groups." - The New York Times

Larry King, Interviewer Of Darn Near Everyone, 87

King "shot the breeze with presidents and psychics, movie stars and malefactors — anyone with a story to tell or a pitch to make — in a half-century on radio and television, including 25 years as the host of CNN’s globally popular Larry King Live." - The New York Times

Why Storm The Capitol? “I Came To See The Art!”

“Faced with the photo evidence, Pham then allegedly admitted to climbing over torn-down fences to get inside. But still, he insisted his reasons were benign: He just wanted the rare opportunity to view ‘historical art,’ investigators said.” - Washington Post

The Lonely, Mysterious Death Of A Science Fiction Pioneer

"This past Saturday, about a dozen people from across the United States and Canada held a Zoom memorial for a man whose remains have been lying in an unmarked grave in Nova Scotia since last spring. He was Charles R. Saunders, and his lonely death in May belied his status as a foundational figure in a literary genre known...

Meet Maya Phillips, The NYT’s Newest Critic-At-Large

"There have been a lot of bad things happening this year, obviously. But the good thing about being a critic during this pandemic is that it forces us to be flexible in a way that a lot of critics may have been resistant to. I think it’s really essential that we don’t lock critics in this very strict, old-fashioned...

Roger Mandle, Who Ran RISD And Co-Founded Qatar’s Museums, Dead At 79

As director of the Toldeo Museum of Art, he organized a pathbreaking (and record-breaking) El Greco exhibition. As president of the Rhode Island School of Design, he built a new museum and quadrupled the endowment. And when a member of the Qatari royal family was determined to turn Doha into an international art destination, she hired him to direct...

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