Régine, a singer and actress "who once ran a nightclub empire from Paris to Los Angeles," opened her first club in the 1950s in Paris, replacing the jukeboxes with DJs and changing the nightclub game. However, in France, she was more famous for her quintessential French songwriting. - France 24
She died on April 30, one day before she and her daughters Wynonna and Ashley were due to perform at the Country Music Hall of Fame, and just after Naomi and Wynonna had announced a Judds farewell tour. - Variety
Julie Phillips: "When I actually looked at Lessing's life, I didn’t find either heartless abandonment or a bold dash for freedom. Unsurprisingly, the author who brilliantly laid bare the dissatisfactions and self-deceptions of mid-20th-century women's lives ... had a much more complicated story." - Slate
"All that stuff you squash, all that frustration, eventually you have to spoon it out, but then you're left with holes inside you. ... I see myself as a chunk of Swiss cheese, and I've spent five years trying to fill the holes so I become a chunk of Cheddar." - The New York Times Magazine
"The founder of the Istanbul nonprofit art center Anadolu Kültür and the creator of Depo Istanbul, an independent art space serving as a platform for critical voices, Osman Kavala had long been a central figure in in the Turkish cultural scene." His alleged crime: "attempting to overthrow the government." - Artforum
"The incident crystallised several Jeffersonian themes: televised glamour, Black entertainers, and the question of how to behave in public." (In short, Smith and Rock both "are definitely too old ... for these shenanigans.") - The Guardian (UK)
Panah Panahi is the son of acclaimed, and officially stifled, filmmaker Jafar Panahi. "No matter how hard you try to be positive and go on fighting, we feel completely trapped. The only possible option is this dream, sometimes reality, of fleeing." - The New York Times
Okay, you may well know about J. Paul Getty, and if you're an ArtsJournal regular you probably recognize Eli Broad. Writer Patt Morrison introduces us to them and to Percy Marmont, Sid Grauman, Collis P. Huntington, Jack Skirball, Charles Lummis, Armand Hammer (Armie's great-grandfather), and others. - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
She had a gift for unusual metaphors that made her teachings stick. In the bedroom of her 17th-floor apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where she gave lessons almost every day deep into her 80s, she would ask her students to build theaters inside their heads. - The New York Times
For one thing, he's the first executive editor who may be wealthier than the paper's owners. (He is heir to a large retailing fortune.) And, finds profiler Shawn McCreesh (former assistant to Maureen Dowd), Kahn is erudite, disciplined, and very, very earnest. - New York Magazine
He first gained fame in the Broadway and film versions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. That show won him his first Tony; his second was for Tru, his one-hander about Truman Capote. His major late-career success was as the venerable advertising guru in Mad Men. - Variety
The story spread by publicists: she was born in Tasmania and moved to India as a young girl. In fact, she was born in Bombay and raised in Calcutta; her father was English and her mother (who later traveled with her, passed off as a maid) was half-Sri Lankan-half-Maori. - BBC
"Bouquet appeared in nearly 120 film and television roles" — he was a favorite of filmmakers Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut — "even as he remained active on the Paris stage, taking parts well into retirement age — he starred in a production of Molière's Tartuffe at 92." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Joseph F. Kahn, currently managing editor (the number-two position in the newsroom), and previously Beijing bureau chief and then international editor, will succeed Dean Baquet as executive editor this summer. (Kahn is the oldest son of Leo Kahn, co-founder of the Staples office supply store chain.) - The New York Times
Birtwistle's work was widely championed by many notable conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, Christoph von Dohnányi and Oliver Knussen, as well as soloists like violinist Christian Tetzlaff (who premiered his Violin Concerto in 2011) and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. - NPR
