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letty :

the MOON appears in many german children's bedtime stories and songs .
PETERCHENS MONDFAHRT - LITTLE PETER'S TRAVEL TO THE MOON

Of course, hbg. I told my children fairy tales all the time, until they got too big, then they started telling them to me. This was a Norwegian fairy tale and there is a song that goes with it.

I had to listen to Moonlight Sonata, hbg. Such passion in the pianist's face. One is born knowing how to do that.

The sky is black as ebony and nothing, nothing do I see, so I must say goodnight.

Diana Kraal again. She is fabulous, and to think that a Canuck introduced me to her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjAwp5x-NYw

Goodnight,
From Letty with love

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wpuszYEjWkM

Nina Simone
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

we just stepped outside into the frigid air(12 BELOW C and going down ! ) - quite a sight - the moon is RUSTBROWN !
glad we did take a peek at it - beats watching it on TV .
neighbours dog was barking at the moon - nobody told annie about the eclipse , i bet .
hbg

Good morning, WA2K folks.

edgar, Nina's voice portrayed her inner feelings so eloquently. It was simple, yet profound. Thanks, Texas.

hbg, your observation about the moon was quite poetic, and the added line, "Nobody told Annie about the eclipse", simply follows the flow of genetic memory.

Today is WH Auden's birthday and here is the last verse of his poem remembering W.B. Yeats.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

WOW!

Anaïs Nin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anaïs Nin IPA: [ana'iːs nin] (born Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell) (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a Cuban-French author who became famous for her published journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death. Nin is also famous for her erotica, which not only is sensual, but also acts as a study of sexuality in its perfection and flaws.

Her first husband was Hugh Parker Guiler, a banker and artist, whom she married as a young woman in March 1923. Rupert Pole, whom she married in 1955 while still married to Guiler, was a forester and the step-grandson of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. After the death of Hugh Guiler in 1985, the unexpurgated versions of her journals were commissioned by Pole.[1]





Biography

Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France to two artistic parents. Her father, Joaquin Nin, was a Cuban[2][3] pianist and composer, and her mother Rosa Culmell[4] was also Cuban,[5] but of French and Danish ancestry and was a classically trained singer. Her paternal great-grandfather fled France during the Revolution, going first to Haiti, then New Orleans, and finally to Cuba where he helped build that country's first railroad.[6] After her parents separated, her mother moved Anaïs and her two brothers, Thorvald Nin and Joaquin Nin-Culmell from Barcelona to New York City. According to her diaries, Volume One, 1931 - 1934, Nin abandoned formal schooling at the age of 16 and began working as a model.

On 3 March 1923, in Havana, Cuba, she married Guiler aka Ian Hugo (1898-1985) the name he used when he became a filmmaker of experimental films in the late 1940s. The couple moved to Paris the following year, where Guiler pursued his banking career and Nin began to pursue her interest in writing. Her first published work was a critical evaluation of D. H. Lawrence called D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. She also explored the field of psychotherapy, studying under the likes of Otto Rank, a disciple of Sigmund Freud. According to her diaries,Volume One, 1931 - 1934, Nin shared a Bohemian lifestyle with Henry Miller during that time in Paris. There is no mention of her husband in that edited edition. In 1939, Nin and Hugh Parker Guiler moved back to New York City. Nin appeared in the Kenneth Anger film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) as Astarte, the Maya Deren film Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and in Bells of Atlantis (1952), a film directed by Guiler under the name "Ian Hugo" with a soundtrack of electronic music by Louis and Bebe Barron.

She entered into a second marriage to Rupert Pole, which took place in Quartzsite, Arizona on 17 March 1955, before she and Pole returned to live in California.[7] Guiler remained in New York City and was unaware of Nin's second marriage until after her death in 1977. She often cited authors Djuna Barnes and D. H. Lawrence as inspirations. She states in Volume One of her diaries that she and Henry Miller drew inspiration from Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud.


Journals

Anaïs Nin is perhaps best remembered as a diarist. Her journals, which span several decades, provide a deeply explorative insight into her personal life and relationships. Nin was acquainted, often quite intimately, with a number of prominent authors, artists, and psychoanalysts and other prominent figures. Her journals portray these persons in a profound depth of analysis and frankness of description. Moreover, as a female author describing a primarily masculine constellation of celebrities, Nin's journals have acquired importance as a counterbalancing perspective.


Erotic writings

Nin is hailed by many critics as one of the finest writers of female erotica. She was one of the first women to really explore the realm of erotic writing, and certainly the first prominent woman in modern Europe to write erotica. Before her, erotica written by women was very infrequent except for a few writers such as Kate Chopin.

According to Volume I of her diaries, 1931 - 1934, published in 1966 (Stuhlmann), Nin first came across erotica when her mother and two brothers returned to Paris in her late teens. They rented the apartment of an American man who was going away for the summer, and Nin came across a number of French paperbacks: "One by one, I read these books, which were completely new to me. I had never read erotic literature in America… They overwhelmed me. I was innocent before I read them, but by the time I had read them all, there was nothing I did not know about sexual exploits… I had my degree in erotic lore."

Faced with a desperate need for money, Nin and Miller began in the 1940s to write erotic and pornographic narratives for an anonymous "collector" for a dollar a page, somewhat as a joke.[8] Nin considered the characters in her erotica to be extreme caricatures and never intended the work to be published, but changed her mind in the early 1970s and allowed them to be published as Delta of Venus and Little Birds.

Nin was a friend, and in some cases lover, of many leading literary figures, including Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, James Agee, and Lawrence Durrell. Her passionate love affair and friendship with Miller strongly influenced her both as a woman and an author. An apocryphal rumor abounds that Nin was bisexual, promulgated by the Philip Kaufman film, Henry & June. Although this rumor is widely believed to be false, Nin's journals leave many questions about her relationship with June Miller, Henry Miller's wife. In her unexpurgated journals, she wrote that she had an incestuous relationship with her father, and she refers to experiments with bisexuality, and sexual relationships and experiences with women.


Later life and legacy

In 1973 she received an honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. She died in Los Angeles, California on January 14, 1977; her body was cremated, and her ashes were scattered over Santa Monica Bay. Rupert Pole was named Nin's literary executor, and he arranged to have new unexpurgated editions of Nin's books and diaries published between 1985 and his death in 2006.

In 1990 Philip Kaufman directed the film Henry & June based on Nin's novel Henry & June from The Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932.


Quotes

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."
"This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice."
"...for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men."
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

W. H. Auden
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born 21 February 1907
York, England
Died 29 September 1973 (aged 66)
Vienna, Austria

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 - 29 September 1973, pronounced /ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/;[1]), who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[2] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form, and content.[3][4] The central themes of his poetry are: personal love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, in the late 1920s and 1930s, alternated between obscure modern styles and accessible traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined new forms devised by Auden himself with traditional forms and styles. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. [5]

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") and "September 1, 1939", became widely known through films, broadcasts, and popular media.[2]




Life

Childhood and education, 1907-1927

Childhood

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, where his father George Augustus Auden was a physician. Wystan (see note on the source of this name[6]) was the third of three children, all sons; the oldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer; the second, John Bicknell Auden, became a geologist. His mother, Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, had trained as a missionary nurse. Auden's grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen; his household was Anglo-Catholic, following a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual resembling that of Roman Catholicism.[7][8] Auden traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood.[9] He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and sagas is visible throughout his work.[10]

In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health; Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays.[7]

From the ages six to twelve, "I spent a great many of my waking hours in the fabrication of a private secondary sacred world, the basic elements of which were (a) a limestone landscape mainly derived from the Pennine Moors in the North of England, and (b) an industry - lead mining".[11] His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems; the remote decaying mining village of Rookhope was for him a "sacred landscape",[12] evoked in a late poem, "Amor Loci".

Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his "passion for words" had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do".[13]


Education

Auden's first school was St. Edmund's School (Hindhead), Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous as a novelist. At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk, where, in 1922, his friend Robert Medley first suggested that he might write poetry.[7] In the same year he "discover[ed] that he has lost his faith" (through a gradual realization that he had lost interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views).[14] His first poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.[15]

In 1925 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology, but he switched to English by his second year. Friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree.[7][9]

He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925; for the next few years Isherwood was his literary mentor to whom he sent poems for comments and criticism. Auden probably fell in love with Isherwood (who was unaware of the intensity of Auden's feelings) and in the 1930s they maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. In 1935-39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.[16]

From his Oxford years onward, his friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome. He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing to live amidst physical disorder.[8]


Britain and Europe, 1928-1938

In the autumn of 1928 Auden left Britain for nine months in Weimar Berlin, partly to rebel against English repressiveness in a city where homosexuality was widely tolerated. In Berlin, he said, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his central subjects.[9]

On returning to Britain in 1929, he worked briefly as a tutor. In 1930 his first published book, Poems (1930), was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber; the firm also published all his later books. In 1930 he began five years as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at the Larchfield Academy, in Helensburgh, Scotland, then three years at the The Downs School, near Malvern, Worcestershire, where he was a much-loved teacher.[7] At the Downs, in June 1933, he experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape," when, while sitting with three fellow-teachers at the school, he suddenly found that he loved them for themselves, that their existence had infinite value for him; this experience, he said, later influenced his decision to return to the Anglican Church in 1940.[17]

During these years, Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealized "Alter Ego"[18] rather than on individual persons. His relations (and his unsuccessful courtships) tended to be unequal either in age or intelligence; his sexual relations were transient, although some evolved into long friendships. He contrasted these relations with what he regarded as the "marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in 1939 (see below), based on the unique individuality of both partners.[19]


From the G.P.O. Film Unit's Night Mail; scene possibly directed by AudenFrom 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the G.P.O. Film Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office, headed by John Grierson. He collaborated there with Benjamin Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto. Auden's plays in the 1930s were performed by the Group Theatre, in productions that he supervised to varying degrees.[9]

His work now reflected his belief that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist".[20] In 1936 he spent three months in Iceland, where he gathered material for a travel book Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left in order to visit the front. His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he had imagined.[7][19] Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a War (1939). On their way back to England they stayed briefly in New York and decided to move to the United States. Auden spent the autumn of 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.[7]

Many of his poems during the 1930s and afterward were inspired by unconsummated love, and in the 1950s he summarized his emotional life in a famous couplet: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me" ("The More Loving One"). He had a gift for friendship and, starting in the late 1930s, a strong wish for the stability of marriage; in a letter to his friend James Stern he called marriage "the only subject".[21] Throughout his life, he performed charitable acts, sometimes in public, as in his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935 that gave her a British passport with which to escape the Nazis,[7] but, especially in later years, usually in private, and he was embarrassed if they were publicly revealed (as when his gift to his friend Dorothy Day for the Catholic Worker movement was reported on the front page of The New York Times in 1956).[22]


United States and Europe, 1939-1973

Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain was later seen by many there as a betrayal and Auden's reputation suffered.[7] In April 1939 Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden saw each other only intermittently in later years. Around this time, Auden met an eighteen-year old poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years (Auden described their relation as a "marriage" that began with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey).[23] In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual relations because he could not accept Auden's insistence on a mutual faithful relationship, but he and Auden remained companions for the rest of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments from 1953 until Auden's death. Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry (1945/50 and 1966) to Isherwood and Kallman.[24]

In 1940-41, Auden lived in a house in Brooklyn Heights which he shared with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, and which became a famous center of artistic life.[25] In 1940, he joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at thirteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams,[26] whom he had met in 1937, partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.[27]

In 1941-42 he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942, but did not use it, choosing instead to teach at Swarthmore College in 1942-45.[7] In the summer of 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an experience that affected his postwar work as his visit to Spain had affected him earlier.[24] On his return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer and as a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946 he became a naturalized citizen of the US.[7][9]

His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically oriented Protestantism in the early 1940s to a more Roman Catholic-oriented interest in the significance of the body and in collective ritual in the later 1940s and 1950s, and finally to the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer which rejected "childish" conceptions of God for an adult religion that focused on the significance of human suffering.[24][27]

Auden began summering in Europe in 1948, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house, then, starting 1958, in Kirchstetten, Austria where he bought a farmhouse, and, he said, shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time.[7]

In 1951, shortly before the two British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the USSR, Burgess attempted to phone Auden to arrange a vacation visit to Ischia that he had earlier discussed with Auden; Auden never returned the call and had no further contact with either spy, but a media frenzy ensued in which his name was mistakenly associated with their escape. The frenzy was repeated when the MI5 documents on the incident were released in 2007.[28][29]

In 1956-61, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University where he was required to give three lectures each year. This fairly light workload allowed him to spend most of his time in New York and his summer home. He now earned his income mostly by readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker and other magazines.[9]

During his last years, his conversation became repetitive, to the disappointment of friends who had known him earlier as a witty and wide-ranging conversationalist.[7][30] In 1972, he moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, but he continued to summer in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973 and was buried in Kirchstetten.[7]


Work


Overview

Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters.[5] The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.[19][2]

He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had".[31]

Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective.[32] His rejected poems include "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Auden's Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it.[33] (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)


Early work, 1922-1939


Through 1930

Auden began writing poems at thirteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy. At eighteen he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at twenty, when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From the very first coming down".[19] This and other poems of the late 1920s tended to be in a clipped, elusive style that alluded to, but did not directly state, their themes of loneliness and loss. Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book Poems (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen Spender.[34]

In 1928 he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A Charade," which combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English school life. This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-the-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work.[5] This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first published book Poems (1930, 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, 1933); the poems in the book were mostly lyrical and gnomic mediations on hoped-for or unconsummated love and on themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal; among these poems were "It was Easter as I walked," "Doom is dark," "Sir, no man's enemy," and "This lunar beauty."[19]

A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the title of a poem). A parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals (voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).[5][19]


1931 through 1935

Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English Study (1932; revised editions, 1934, 1966), in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life. In his shorter poems, his style became more open and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his new interest in Robert Burns.[5] During the next few years, many of his poems took their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, and also from expansive classical forms like the Odes of Horace, which he seems to have discovered through the German poet Hölderlin.[19] Around this time his main influences were Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.[35]


During these years, much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet, although his work was more politically ambivalent than many reviewers recognized.[19] He generally wrote about revolutionary change in terms of a "change of heart", a transformation of a society from a closed-off psychology of fear to an open psychology of love.[8] His verse drama The Dance of Death (1933) was a political extravaganza in the style of a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull".[36] His next play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood, was similarly a quasi-Marxist updating of Gilbert and Sullivan in which the general idea of social transformation was more prominent than any specific political action or structure.[5][19]

The Ascent of F6 (1937), another play written with Isherwood, was partly an anti-imperialist satire, partly (in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom) an examination of Auden's own motives in taking on a public role as a political poet.[19] This play included the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), written as a satiric eulogy for a politician; Auden later rewrote the poem as a "Cabaret Song" about lost love (written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson for whom he wrote many lyrics in the 1930s).[37] In 1935, he worked briefly on documentary films with the G.P.O. Film Unit, writing his famous verse commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his attempts in the 1930s to create a widely-accessible, socially-conscious art.[19][5][37]


1936 through 1939

These tendencies in style and content culminate in his collection Look, Stranger! (1936; his British publisher chose the title, which Auden hated; Auden retitled the 1937 US edition On This Island).[19] This book included political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verse. Among the poems included in the book, connected by themes of personal, social, and evolutionary change and of the possibilities and problems of personal love, were "Hearing of harvests", "Out on the lawn I lie in bed", "O what is that sound", "Look, stranger, on this island now" (later revised versions change "on" to "at"), and "Our hunting fathers."[19][5] Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland (1937) a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice, which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to Lord Byron".[38] In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically-engaged pamphlet poem Spain (1937); he later discarded it from his collected works. Journey to a War (1939) a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their visit to the Sino-Japanese War.[38] Auden's last collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the Frontier, an anti-war satire written in Broadway and West End styles.[19][9]

Auden's themes in his shorter poems now included the fragility and transience of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head"), a theme he treated with ironic wit in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson" (which included "O Tell Me the Truth About Love" and the revised version of "Funeral Blues"), and also the corrupting effect of public and official culture on individual lives ("Casino", "School Children", "Dover").[5][19] In 1938 he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor"). All these appeared in his next book of verse, Another Time (1940), together with other famous poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musée des Beaux Arts" (all written before he moved to America in 1939), and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (written in America).[5] The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly statements of Auden's anti-heroic theme, in which great deeds are performed, not by unique geniuses whom others cannot hope to imitate, but by otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" (Yeats) or of whom it could be said "he wasn't clever at all" (Freud), and who became teachers of others, not awe-inspiring heroes.[19]


Middle period, 1940-1957

1940 through 1946

In 1940 Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man (1941). At the time of his return to the Anglican Communion he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos". Around 1942, as he became more comfortable with religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore.[24]

His recurring themes in this period included the artist's temptation to use other persons as material for his art rather than valuing them for themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while recognizing the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health").[5][24] From 1942 through 1947 he worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each differing from the others in form and content: "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" (both published in For the Time Being, 1944), and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (published separately 1947).[24] The first two, with Auden's other new poems from 1940-44, were included in his first collected edition, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.[5]


1947 through 1957

After completing The Age of Anxiety in 1946 he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A Walk After Dark," "The Love Feast", and "The Fall of Rome."[24] Many of these evoked the Italian village where he summered in 1948-57, and his next book, Nones (1951), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. A new theme was the "sacred importance" of the human body[39] in its ordinary aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature that the body made possible (in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had emphasized in the 1930s); his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" and "Memorial for the City".[5][24] In 1949 Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, and later collaborated on two libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze.[7][40]

Auden's first separate prose book was The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature.[41] Between 1949 and 1954 he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas of time. While writing this, he also wrote a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature, "Bucolics". Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles (1955), with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".[5][24]

Extending the themes of "Horae Canonicae", in 1955-56 he wrote a group of poems about "history," a word he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature," the set of involuntary events created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds. These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of his next collection Homage to Clio (1960).[5][24]


Later work, 1958-1973

In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In 1958, having moved his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: An Unwritten Poem", a prose poem about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct. These and other poems, including his 1955-66 poems about history, appeared in Homage to Clio (1960).[5][24]

His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956-61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.[24]

While translating the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings, Auden began using haiku for many of his poems.[24] A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat", appeared in About the House (1965), with other poems that included his reflections on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit".[5] In the late 1960s he wrote some of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and two poems that looked back over his life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On". All these appeared in City Without Walls (1969). His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda (1969).[5][24]

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up of favorite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject. His last prose book was a selection of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords (1973).[7]

His last books of verse, Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (1974) include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics") and about his own aging ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself", "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]). His last completed poem, in haiku form, was "Archeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.[24]


Reputation and influence

Auden's stature in modern literature is much disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him "a complete wash-out", to the obituarist in the Times (London), who wrote: "W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed master".[42]

In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and accessible voice, in contrast to the politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T. S. Eliot. His departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in Britain (once even in Parliament), with some critics treating it as a betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan Thomas, although defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden "arches over all". His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1972).[2]

In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas set the style for a whole generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden "was the modern poet".[42] His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some British writers (notably Philip Larkin) lamented that Auden's work had declined from its earlier promise.[42][43]

By the time of Auden's death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. With some exceptions, British critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favor his middle and later work. Unlike other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death, and Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was "the greatest mind of the twentieth century".[4]

Auden's popularity and familiarity suddenly increased after his "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000 copies. After September 11, 2001, his poem "September 1, 1939" was widely circulated and frequently broadcast.[42] Public readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked his centenary year.[44]

Ann Sheridan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Clara Lou Sheridan
Born February 21, 1915(1915-02-21)
Denton, Texas, U.S.
Died January 21, 1967 (aged 51)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Ann Sheridan (February 21, 1915 - January 21, 1967) was an American film actress.

Born Clara Lou Sheridan in Denton, Texas, she was a college student when her sister sent a photograph of her to Paramount Studios. She subsequently entered and won a beauty contest, with part of her prize being a bit part in a Paramount film. She abandoned college to pursue a career in Hollywood.

She made her film debut in 1934, aged 19, in the film Search For Beauty, and played uncredited bit parts in Paramount films for the next two years. Paramount made little effort to develop Sheridan's talent, so she left, signing a contract with Warner Bros. in 1936, and changing her name to "Ann Sheridan".

Sheridan's career prospects began to improve. The red-haired beauty would soon become Warner's top sex symbol. Tagged "The Oomph Girl", Sheridan was a popular pin-up girl by the early 1940s, despite the fact the she was generally assigned films that did not show off her talents.

She received substantial roles and positive reaction from critics and moviegoers in such films as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), opposite James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Dodge City (1939) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, Torrid Zone with Cagney and They Drive by Night with George Raft and Bogart (both 1940), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) with Bette Davis, and Kings Row (1942), where she received top billing playing opposite Ronald Reagan, Robert Cummings, and Betty Field. Known for having a fine singing voice, Ann also appeared in such musicals as Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) and Shine On, Harvest Moon (1944). She was also memorable in two of her biggest hits, Nora Prentiss and The Unfaithful, both in 1947.

Despite these successes, her career began to decline. Her role in I Was a Male War Bride (1949), directed by Howard Hawks and costarring Cary Grant, gave her another success (she was especially good in this brillant comedy), but by the 1950s, she was struggling to find work and her film roles were sporadic.

Sheridan appeared in the television soap opera Another World during the mid-1960s, then started a role in the TV series Pistols 'n' Petticoats.

She became ill during the filming of its first season, and died from esophageal and liver cancer in Los Angeles, California. She had been a chain cigarette smoker for years; Cagney remarked in his autobiography that when the cancer struck, "she didn't have a chance." She was cremated and her ashes were stored at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles until they were permanently interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2005.[1]

Sheridan married four times, including a marriage lasting one year to fellow Warners actor, George Brent, but had no children.

For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Ann Sheridan has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame at 7024 Hollywood Boulevard.




Trivia


In 1939, a fraternity bet inspired a UCLA student to handcuff himself to Ann during a movie premiere and then swallow the key, so that a locksmith had to be summoned to the theater.
Had a large gap between her front teeth. She always wore a porcelain cap when having her picture taken.
Was used as a body double (hands, legs, shoulders) while at Paramount.
Made a cameo in the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. She was in Mexico at the same time the film was being shot there. As a good luck gesture, Sheridan agreed to appear in the film in an unbilled, walk-on part as a passing prostitute who looked at Dobbs (Bogart) as he left the barbershop in Tampico.
In "Dodge City" during the saloon fight, Sheridan's dress top comes off as she falls off a chair.

Erma Bombeck
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Erma Louise Bombeck (February 21, 1927 - April 22, 1996), born Erma Fiste, was an American humorist who achieved great popularity for a newspaper column that depicted suburban home life in the second half of the 20th century.




Life and career

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Bombeck graduated from the University of Dayton in 1949 with a degree in English. She started her career in 1949 as a reporter for the Dayton Journal Herald, but after marrying school administrator Bill Bombeck, a college friend, she left the job and raised three children.

As the children grew she started writing At Wit's End, telling self-deprecating tales about the life of a housewife. It debuted in the Kettering-Oakwood Times in 1964. She was paid $3 per column.

Growing popularity led At Wit's End to be nationally syndicated in 1965, and eventually it ran three times a week in more than 700 newspapers. The column was collected in many best-selling books, and her fame was such that a television sitcom was based on her. The series, Maggie, ran for eight shows in 1982 before being cancelled.

In 1971, the Bombecks moved to Paradise Valley, Arizona.

Bombeck had autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease. In 1996 worsening health forced her to have a kidney transplant, and she died of complications that year. She is interred in the Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio.

Nina Simone
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information

Born February 21, 1933(1933-02-21)

Origin North Carolina, United States
Died April 21, 2003 (aged 70)
Genre(s) Jazz, soul, R&B, folk, gospel
Years active 1954-2003
Label(s) RCA Victor, Philips, Bethlehem, Colpix, Legacy Recordings
Website www.ninasimone.com

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known by her stage name Nina Simone (IPA: ninɐ sʌmɞnɑ) (February 21, 1933 - April 21, 2003), was an Grammy Award-nominated American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger and civil rights activist.

Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is generally classified as a jazz musician. She preferred the term "Black Classical Music" herself. Simone originally aspired to become a classical pianist, but her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles besides her classical basis, such as jazz, soul, folk, R&B, gospel, and pop music. Her vocal style (with a rich alto vocal range[1]) is characterized by intense passion, breathiness, and tremolo. Sometimes known as the High Priestess of Soul, she paid great attention to the musical expression of emotions. Within one album or concert she could fluctuate between exuberant happiness or tragic melancholy. These fluctuations also characterized her own personality and personal life, worsened by a bipolar disorder with which she was diagnosed in the mid-sixties, but was kept secret until 2004.[2]

Simone recorded over 40 live and studio albums, the biggest body of her work being released between 1958 (when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue) and 1974. Songs she is best known for include "My Baby Just Cares for Me", "I Put a Spell on You", "I Loves You Porgy", "Feeling Good", "Sinner Man", "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", "Strange Fruit", "Ain't Got No-I Got Life" and "I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl". Her music and message made a strong and lasting impact on African-American culture[3], illustrated by the numerous contemporary artists who cite her as an important influence (among them Mary J. Blige, Alicia Keys, Jeff Buckley, and Lauryn Hill), as well as the extensive use of her music on soundtracks and in remixes.




Biography

Youth (1933-1954)

Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, one of eight children. She began playing piano at her local church and showed prodigious talent on this instrument. Her concert debut, a classical piano recital, was made at the age of ten. During her performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. Simone refused to play until her parents were moved back.[4][5] This incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement.


Cover of Simone's debut album Little Girl Blue (1958), also known as Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street ClubSimone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (who lived into her late 90s) was a strict Methodist minister; her father, John Divine Waymon, was a handyman and sometime barber who suffered bouts of ill-health. Mrs. Waymon worked as a maid and her employer, hearing of Nina's talent, provided funds for piano lessons.[6] Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist in Eunice's continued education. At seventeen, Simone moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she taught piano and accompanied singers to fund her own studying as a classical music pianist at New York City's Juilliard School of Music. With the help of a private tutor she studied for an interview to further study piano at the Curtis Institute, but she was rejected. Simone believed that this rejection was directly related to her being black, as well as being a woman.[7] It further fueled her hatred of the widespread and institutionalized racism present in the U.S. during the period.


Early success (1954-1959)

Simone played at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City to fund her study. The owner said that she would have to sing as well as play the piano in order to get the job. She took on the stagename "Nina Simone" in 1954 because she did not want her mother to know that she was playing "the devil's music". "Nina" (from "niña", meaning "little girl" in Spanish) was a nickname a boyfriend had given to her and "Simone" was after the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the movie Casque d'or.[8] Simone played and sang a mixture of jazz, blues and classical music at the bar, and by doing so she created a small but loyal fan base.[9]

After playing in small clubs she recorded a rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess) in 1958, which was learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 40 hit in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue soon followed on Bethlehem Records. Simone would never benefit financially from the album, because she sold the rights for 3000 dollars. It meant that she missed out on more than 1 million dollars of royalties (mainly because of the successful re-release of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" in the 1980s).[10]


Becoming "popular" (1959-1964)

After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with the bigger label Colpix Records, followed by a string of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control, including the choice of material that would be recorded, to Nina in exchange for her signing with them. Simone, who at this point only performed pop music to make money to continue her classical music studies, was bold with her demand for control over her music because she was indifferent about having a recording contract. She would keep this attitude towards the record industry for most of her career.[11]


Civil rights era (1964-1974)

Simone was made aware of the severity of racial prejudice in America by her friends Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry (author of the play Raisin in the Sun). In 1964, she changed record labels, from the American Colpix to the Dutch Philips, which also meant a change in the contents of her recordings. Simone had always included songs in her repertoire that hinted to her African-American origins (such as "Brown Baby" and "Zungo" on Nina at the Village Gate in 1962). But on her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone In Concert (live recording, 1964), Simone for the first time openly addresses the racial inequality that was prevalent in the United States with the song "Mississippi Goddam". It was her response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black children. The song was released as a single, being boycotted in certain southern states.[12][3] With "Old Jim Crow" on the same album she reacts to the Jim Crow Laws.

From then onwards, the civil rights message was standard in Simone's recording repertoire, where it had already become a part of her live performances. Simone performed and spoke at many Civil Rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches.[13] She covered Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" (on Pastel Blues (1965)), a song about the lynching of black men in the South, and sang the W.Cuney poem "Images" on Let It All Out (1966), about the absence of pride in the African-American woman. Simone wrote the song "Four Women" and sings it on Wild Is the Wind (1966). It is about four different stereotypes of African-American women.[3]

Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor in 1967. She sang "Backlash Blues", written by her friend Langston Hughes on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings The Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967) she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The last song illustrates how white children would get indoctrinated with racism at an early age. The album Nuff Said (1968) contains live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair, April 7th 1968, three days after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. She dedicated the whole performance to him and sang "Why? (The King Of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player directly after the news of Dr. King's death had reached them.[14]

Together with Weldon Irvine, Simone turned the late Lorraine Hansberrys unfinished play "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" into a civil rights song. She performed it live on Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and the song became the official "National Anthem of Black America" and has been covered by Aretha Franklin (on 1972s Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway.[15][3]


Later life (1974-2003)

Simone left the United States in September 1970. The continuous performances and decline of the Civil Rights movement had exhausted her. She flew to Barbados, expecting her husband and manager, Andrew Stroud, to contact her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance (and the fact that she left behind her wedding ring) as a cue for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was also in charge of Simone's income. This meant that after their separation Simone had no knowledge about how her business was run, and what she was actually worth. Upon returning to the United States she also learned that there were serious problems with the tax authorities, causing her to go back to Barbados again.[16] Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow.[17][18] A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, convinced her to come to Liberia. After that she lived in Switzerland and the Netherlands, before settling in France in 1992. Simone's divorce from her husband and manager can be seen as the end of her most successful years in the American music business, and the beginning of her (partially self-imposed) exile and estrangement from the world for the next two decades.

After her last album for RCA Records, It Is Finished (1974), it was not until 1978 that Simone was convinced by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor to record another album, Baltimore. While not a commercial success, the album did get good reviews and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her voice had not lost its power over the years, but developed an additional warmth and a vivacious maturity.[19] Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later Simone recorded Fodder On My Wings on a French label. It is one of her most personal albums, with nearly all of the (autobiographical) songs written by herself. In the 1980s Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London, where the album Live At Ronnie Scott's was recorded in 1984. Though her on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging her audiences by recounting sometimes humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and soliciting requests. Her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, was published in 1992 and she recorded her last album, A Single Woman in 1993.

In 1993 Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She had been ill with breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, Bouches-du-Rhône on April 21, 2003, aged 70. Her funeral service was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti Labelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actor Ossie Davis and hundreds of others. Elton John sent a floral tribute with the message "We were the greatest and I love you".[20] Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. She left behind a daughter Lisa Celeste, now an actress/singer who took on the stagename Simone and has appeared on Broadway in Aida.[21]


Simone standards

Throughout her career, Simone gathered a collection of songs that would become standards in her repertoire (apart from the civil rights songs) and for which she is still remembered, even though most of these songs didn't do well on the charts at the time. These songs were self-written tunes, cover versions (usually with a new arrangement by Simone), or songs written especially for Simone. Her first hit song in America was a cover of George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 in the pop singles chart and number 2 on the black singles chart.[22] In that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest hit years later in 1987, when it featured in a Chanel no. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was then created by Aardman Studios.[23]

Well known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964), "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne Me Quitte Pas" (a Jacques Brel cover) and "Feeling Good" on I Put A Spell On You (1965), "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).[24] Especially the songs "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have great popularity today in terms of cover versions (most notably The Animals's version of the former song), sample usage and its use on various movie-, TV-series- and videogame soundtracks.

Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned a number of singles and album songs that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968 it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album Nuff Said (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK pop charts and introducing her to a younger audience.[25] In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder. The following single, the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody" also reached the UK top 10 in 1969. "House of the Rising Sun" featured on Nina Simone Sings The Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song earlier in 1961 (featuring on Nina At The Village Gate, 1962), predating versions by Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan.[26][27] It was later picked up by The Animals and became their signature hit.


Personality, style and viewpoints

Performing style

Simone's regal bearing and commanding stage presence earned her the title "High Priestess of Soul". Her live performances were regarded not as mere concerts, but as happenings. In a single concert she could be a singer, pianist, dancer, actress, activist, as well as both therapist and patient all simultaneously.[28] On stage Simone's versatility became truly evident, as she moved from gospel to blues, jazz and folk, to numbers infused with European classical styling, and counterpoint fugues. She incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element.[29] Simone compared it to "mass hypnosis. I use it all the time"[15] Many recordings exist of her concerts, expressing fragments of her on-stage power, wit, sensuality and occasional menace towards her audience. Throughout most of her live and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Flemming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman.[30]


Being 'difficult'

Simone had a reputation in the music industry for being volatile and sometimes difficult to deal with, a characterization with which she strenuously took issue. In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with a pneumatic pistol after his laughing disturbed her concentration.[31] She also fired a gun at a record company executive whom she accused of stealing royalties.[32] It is now recognised that this 'difficulty' was not just the result of an overly-perfectionist rigor, but her raging outbursts and diva-like extremes were actually the result of a psychiatric condition, most probably a bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. Simone reluctantly took medication for her condition from the mid sixties on.[33] All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down And Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this secret in 2004.


Honors

On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington DC more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone for her music and commitment to humanity.[34][35] Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities from the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm X College.[36] She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her.[37] Only two days before her death, Simone was awarded an honorary diploma by the Curtis Institute, the school that had turned her down at the start of her career.[38]


Views on homosexuality

Simone's fanbase and personal circle included a significant number of gay people. Her view on homosexuality can be described as ambivalent.[39] On one hand her viewpoint was colored by her strict religious upbringing, opposing homosexuality. On the other hand, Simone was aware of widespread homosexuality within her fanbase and the entertainment industry.[40] Many of the people close to her were homosexual, including her younger brother,the writers Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, and the founders of her European fanclub, David Nathan and Sylvia Hampton. The latter two stated in their biography of Simone that she had no problem with homosexuals, as long as she did not have to hear about it explicitly [39][41].


Legacy

Nina Simone is often cited by artists from diverse musical fields as a source of inspiration. Musicians who have cited her as important for their own musical upbringing are among others Jeff Buckley, Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys, and Mary J. Blige.[3] [42] [43] [44] John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles song "Michelle".[44] Musicians who have covered her work (or her specific renditions of songs) include Jeff Buckley, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, The Animals, Muse, Michael Bublé, Katie Melua and Timbaland. Simone's music has featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games. Her music is frequently used in remixes, commercials and TV series.

On film

The documentary Nina Simone: La Legende (The Legend) was made in the '90s by French filmakers.[15] It was based on her autobiography I Put A Spell On You and features live footage from different periods of Nina's career, interviews with friends and family, various interviews with Nina herself while she was living in the Netherlands, and on a trip to her birthplace. A significant amount of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and titled simply 'Nina'.

Plans for a Nina Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005. The movie will be based on Nina Simone's autobiography I Put A Spell On You (1992) and will also focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006. TV writer Cynthia Mort (Will & Grace, Roseanne) is working on the script, and singer Mary J. Blige will take on the lead role. The movie is scheduled for 2009.[45]

In the film Point of No Return, Bridget Fonda's character, Maggie, plays Nina Simone records for comfort from her inner pain. A number of Simone songs are in the soundtrack. Her employer/captor (probably the CIA) gives her the codename "Nina": When she answers the phone and the caller calls her "Nina," she knows that it's time to do another assassination.

Gary Lockwood
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Birth name John Gary Yusolfsky
Born February 11, 1937 (1937-02-11) (age 71)
Van Nuys, California, U.S.
Occupation Actor
Spouse(s) Denise DuBarry (1982-1988), one child
Stefanie Powers (1966-1972)
Hope Gilchrist Harrsen (born 1953) (? to ?)

Gary Lockwood (born John Gary Yusolfsky on February 21, 1937, in Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley of southern California) is an American actor who is probably best known for his 1968 role as the astronaut Dr. Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A familiar face to film and television audiences for nearly a half century, Lockwood was a movie stuntman and stand-in for Anthony Perkins prior to his acting debut in 1959 in an uncredited bit role in Warlock.

Lockwood's two series came early in his career, and each lasted only a single season. ABC's Hawaii-set Follow the Sun in 1961-1962 cast him in support of Brett Halsey and Barry Coe, who played adventurous magazine writers based in Honolulu. Lockwood was Eric Jason, who did the legwork for their articles, but his on-screen time was limited since most of the plot focused on Halsey or Coe. In the story, Lockwood was said to have been born on December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor Day), but he was actually born nearly five years earlier.

In 1963-1964, Lockwood starred as a handsome young Marine second lieutenant named William "Bill" Rice in the NBC series The Lieutenant. The drama about the peacetime military was produced by future Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and later Man from U.N.C.L.E. creator Norman Felton. The series co-starred Robert Vaughn as Lieutenant Rice's immediate superior, Captain Raymond Rambridge. Despite moderately good reviews, The Lieutenant's Saturday time slot opposite CBS's blockbuster Jackie Gleason's American Scene Magazine caused its cancellation after twenty-nine episodes.

Lockwood's other notable television work includes playing Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell in Where No Man Has Gone Before, (filmed as the second pilot, but broadcast as the third episode) of Star Trek. He also co-starred with Stefanie Powers, his wife at the time, in a memorable episode of ABC's Love, American Style as a newlywed who gets his mouth stuck around a doorknob.

Between 1959 and 2006, Gary Lockwood had roles in some forty theatrical and made-for-TV features and made almost eighty TV guest appearances, including several as a villain on CBS's Barnaby Jones starring Buddy Ebsen.

Gary Lockwood also used the name Gary Yurosek.

Tyne Daly
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Birth name Ellen Tyne Daly
Born February 21, 1946 (1946-02-21) (age 61)
Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.
Spouse(s) Georg Stanford Brown (1966 - 1990; divorced) 3 children
[show]Awards
Emmy Awards
Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Cagney & Lacey: 1983, 1984, 1985, 1988

Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Christy: 1996
Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Judging Amy: 2003

Tony Awards
Best Actress in a Musical in Gypsy: 1990

Tyne Daly (born Ellen Tyne Daly on February 21, 1946) is an Emmy Award and Tony Award-winning US-American stage and screen actress.




Personal life

Daly was born in Madison, Wisconsin into a creative family; she is the daughter of actor James Daly. Her younger brother is actor Timothy Daly. She is also related to former game show host and newsman John Charles Daly. Her sister-in-law, Amy Van Nostrand, is also an actress.

She studied at Brandeis University and The American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

Daly was married to actor/director Georg Stanford Brown from 1966 to 1990. They have three daughters, Alisabeth, a potter, Alyxandra, and Kathryne Dora, who is an actress.


Career

Film roles

Daly's best known appearance in a feature film was as Inspector Harry Callahan's partner, Kate Moore, in the 1976 Dirty Harry film The Enforcer. She also made appearances in Play It As It Lays, John and Mary, The Adulteress, and Speedtrap. She received top billing for 'The Adultress' released in 1973 in which she appeared topless and making 'love' to Eric Braeden while riding a horse.


Television roles


In the 1970s, Daly began to appear frequently as a guest on episodic primetime shows including Ironside, McMillan and Wife, The Mod Squad, The Streets of San Francisco, and Barnaby Jones. On several programs, including Medical Center, The Rookies, and Quincy, M.E., she appeared over the run of the programs several times as several different characters.

In 1981, Daly was cast as detective Mary Beth Lacey in the TV movie Cagney and Lacey, opposite Loretta Swit as Christine Cagney. The following year, CBS developed a series based on the movie, and actress Meg Foster was cast as Cagney. After a few episodes, CBS decided to let Foster go because of her resemblance to Daly, and Sharon Gless was cast. Daly is perhaps best known for her appearance in this show, which ran for seven seasons.

After the series ended, Daly continued to make additional appearances on prime-time programs, including a comedic turn on The Nanny, an appearance on the Sharon Gless program The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, and a reunion Cagney and Lacey movie in 1996. Her next continuing role was on the CBS drama Christy. Most recently, she appeared as Maxine Gray on the CBS drama Judging Amy, which ran from 1999 to 2005.


Theater roles

Daly has made several appearances on the Broadway stage. Her first appearance was in 1967, in a short-lived play, "That Summer, That Fall". She appeared in a revival of the Anton Chekhov play The Seagull, and had a nearly two-year run in a 1989 revival of Gypsy playing Mama Rose. She most recently appeared in the 2006 play Rabbit Hole, portraying the mother of the play's protagonist, played by Cynthia Nixon, and in 2008 as Mother in the world premiere production of the Edward Albee play Me, Myself & I.


Role model

Daly has been identified as a feminist role model, particularly based on her television roles in Cagney and Lacey and Judging Amy. Her role as Lacey showed a woman detective at a time where the idea was still novel; the show was also novel in presenting Lacey primarily in a work environment, rather than always showing the character at home. She has also been outspoken about maintaining a natural appearance as she ages, and for the run of Judging Amy, Daly's hair was shown in its naturally gray state. [1]


Awards and recognition

Daly has been nominated for the Emmy Award a total of 14 times; she won 6 times, for the following television performances:

Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Cagney and Lacey in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1988
Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Christy in 1996
Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Judging Amy in 2003
She was also recognized for the following:

She won the 1990 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Mama Rose in Gypsy.
She was nominated for a 2006 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role in Rabbit Hole.
Daly has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Mary Chapin Carpenter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information

Born February 21, 1958 (1958-02-21) (age 50)
Origin Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Genre(s) Country
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter
Instrument(s) Vocals, rhythm guitar
Years active 1987-present
Website www.marychapincarpenter.com

Mary Chapin Carpenter (born February 21, 1958) is a American country/folk singer-songwriter and guitarist. She spent several years singing in Washington, D.C. clubs before signing in the late 1980s with Columbia Records, who marketed her as a country singer. Carpenter's first album, 1987's Hometown Girl, did not produce any singles, although 1989's State of the Heart and 1990's Shooting Straight in the Dark each produced four Top 20 hits on the Billboard country singles charts.

In 1992, Carpenter released her most successful album to date, Come On Come On, which yielded seven charting country singles and was certified quadruple platinum in the U.S. for sales exceeding four million copies. She followed it with Stones in the Road (1994) and A Place in the World (1996), which both featured hit singles. In the 2000s, Carpenter's albums departed both thematically and musically from her early work, becoming less radio-friendly and more focused on societal and political issues.[citation needed] Her most recent album, The Calling, was released in March 2007.

Carpenter has won five Grammy Awards, and is the only artist to have won four consecutive Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, which she received from 1992 to 1995.[1] As of 2005, she had sold more than 12 million records.[2]

Carpenter has performed on television shows such as Late Night with David Letterman and Austin City Limits and tours frequently, returning to Washington almost every summer to perform at the popular outdoor venue Wolf Trap.




Biography

Early life

Carpenter was born in Princeton, New Jersey to Chapin Carpenter Jr., a Life Magazine executive, and Mary Bowie Robertson. Carpenter lived in Japan from 1969 to 1971 before moving to Washington, D.C..[3] She attended Princeton Day School, a private coeducational prep school[4], before graduating from The Taft School in 1976.[5]

Carpenter described her childhood as "pretty typical[ly] suburban," with her musical interests defined chiefly by her sisters' albums of artists such as The Mamas & the Papas, the Beatles, and Judy Collins.[6] When Carpenter was 16 her parents divorced, an event that affected Carpenter and that she wrote about in her song "House of Cards."[3] Carpenter spent much of her time in high school playing the guitar and piano; while at Princeton Day School, her "classmates threatened to cut her guitar strings if she played "Leaving on a Jet Plane" one more time."[7] Despite her interest in music, Carpenter never considered performing publicly until, shortly after graduating from Taft, her father suggested that she perform at a local open-mike bar, a stressful experience for the shy Carpenter, who recalled, "I thought I was going to barf."[8]

Carpenter graduated from Brown University in 1981 with a degree in American Civilization. Carpenter played some summer sets in Washington's music scene, where she met guitarist John Jennings, who would become her producer and long-time collaborator. However, she considered music a hobby and planned on getting a "real job."[6] At those gigs, most played in bars, Carpenter developed what she called an "awful" drinking problem, and later recalled, "I had to make a lifestyle change in a drastic way. It's still so painful to me to think about how I was."[6] She briefly quit performing, but after several job interviews decided to return to music. Carpenter quit drinking and was persuaded by Jennings to play original material instead of covers.[8] Within a few years, she landed a manager and recorded a demo tape that led to a deal with Columbia Records.[6]


Early records and "country" label

Carpenter's first album, Hometown Girl, was produced by John Jennings and was released in 1987. Though songs from Hometown Girl got play on public and college radio stations, it was not until Columbia began promoting Carpenter as a "country" artist that she found a wider audience.[9] For a long time, Carpenter was ambivalent about this pigeonholing, saying she preferred the term "singer-songwriter" or "slash rocker" (as in country/folk/rock). She told Rolling Stone in 1991, "I've never approached music from a categorization process, so to be a casualty of it is real disconcerting to me."[6]

Some music critics argue that Carpenter's style covers a range of influences even broader than those from "country" and "folk." Time critic Richard Corliss described the songs in her album A Place in the World as "reminiscent of early Beatles or rollicking Motown,"[10] and one reviewer of Time* Sex* Love* noted the "wash of Beach Boys-style harmonies[...]backwards guitar loops" and use of a sitar on one track,[11] all elements not commonly found on a country or folk album.

After 1989's State of the Heart, Carpenter released Shooting Straight in the Dark in 1990, which yielded her biggest single up to that point, the Grammy Award-winning "Down at the Twist and Shout". Two years later, Carpenter released the album that, to date, has been her biggest popular success, Come On Come On (1992). The album went quadruple platinum, remaining on the Country Top 100 list for more than 97 weeks,[1] and eventually spawned seven charting singles. Come On Come On was also critically acclaimed; The New York Times's Karen Schoemer wrote that Carpenter had "risen through the country ranks without flash or bravado: no big hair, sequined gowns, teary performances[...]enriched with Ms. Carpenter's subtlety, Come On Come On grows stronger and prettier with every listen."[12]

The songs of Come On Come On had the qualities that would come to identify her work: humorous, fast-paced country-rock songs with themes of perseverance, desire, and independence, alternating with slow, introspective ballads that speak to social or relational issues.[13] "Passionate Kisses", a cover of fellow singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams's 1988 song, was the album's third single. Carpenter's version peaked on the U.S. Country chart at #4, and was the first of Carpenter's songs to cross over to mainstream pop and adult contemporary charts, charting at #57 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at #11 on Adult Contemporary.[14]

The sixth single off Come On Come On, "He Thinks He'll Keep Her," was Carpenter's biggest hit off the album, charting at #2 on Billboard's Country chart and at #1 on Radio & Records's Country chart.[14] Written by Carpenter and Don Schlitz, the fast-paced song follows a middle-aged homemaker who leaves her husband, and was inspired by a 1970s series of Geritol commercials in which a man boasts of his wife's seemingly limitless energy and her many accomplishments, then concludes by saying "My wife...I think I'll keep her." Carpenter said, "That line has always stuck with me. It's just such a joke."[15]


Continued 90s success

In the wake of Come On Come On's success, Carpenter wrote songs for a variety of artists, including folk singer Joan Baez, who recorded "Stones in the Road" for her 1992 album Play Me Backwards after hearing Carpenter sing it live. Pop singer Cyndi Lauper co-wrote "Sally's Pigeons" with Carpenter and released it on her 1993 album Hat Full of Stars. Country singer Wynonna Judd recorded Carpenter's composition "Girls With Guitars" on her 1993 album Tell Me Why. Judd released the song as a single in 1994, in what Carpenter called "the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me as a songwriter,"[1] and it peaked on the U.S. Country chart at #10.[16] Later, Carpenter co-wrote "Where Are You Now," which Trisha Yearwood recorded on her 2000 album Real Live Woman; the song peaked on the Country chart at #45. In the 1990s, Carpenter also dueted with Shawn Colvin, a "longtime recording pal",[17] Dolly Parton (on Parton's 1993 single "Romeo") and Joan Baez (on a 1995 live recording of "Diamonds & Rust.")

Carpenter followed Come On Come On with 1994's Stones in the Road, at which point USA Today wrote that "without sounding anything like a country star was previously expected to sound, [Carpenter]'s one of the genre's biggest stars."[3] Stones in the Road sold only around two million copies, but was a crossover success with non-country audiences.[17] Carpenter's sixth album, A Place in the World, was released in 1996 to "raves" from publications as varied as Time, People, Elle, the New York Post, and USA Today.[17] The Boston Globe found the album more "philosophical [and] heady" than her previous work, and quoted Carpenter as saying, "[A]ll I've wanted to get out of songwriting is a sense of growth[...]I'm not shying away from any issues or subjects. I don't feel there's anything I can't address."[17]

In 1996, Carpenter's cover of the John Lennon song "Grow Old With Me," from the Lennon tribute album Working Class Hero, became an Adult Contemporary chart hit. In 1998, Carpenter was signed to write the music and lyrics for a planned Broadway musical adaptation of the 1953 western film Shane; the show was announced to open in spring 2000,[18] but as of November 2007 remains unproduced.



2000s work

In 2001, Carpenter released her first studio album in five years, Time*Sex*Love. The New York Times wrote that Carpenter was "harder than ever to define stylistically," and described the album as a departure, "essentially a concept album about middle age."[19] In songs such as "The Long Way Home," Carpenter espoused taking life at one's own pace, rather than indulging in rampant goal-driven materialism.

Time*Sex*Love sold fewer copies than Carpenter's earlier work,[19] and yielded only one charting single, "Simple Life," which peaked on the U.S. Country chart at #53.[14] Carpenter explained that, "When the record was released, I really believed there were several radio-friendly songs[...]it has been since proven to me that is not exactly the case." [11]

In 2004, Carpenter released Between Here and Gone, a somber album that addressed events such as the events of September 11 and the death of singer-songwriter Dave Carter.[2][20] Carpenter's ninth studio album, The Calling, was released in 2007 by Rounder Records' rock/pop imprint Zoë, and featured commentary about contemporary politics, including reactions to the impact of Hurricane Katrina ("Houston") and the vilification of the Dixie Chicks ("On With the Song"). In less than three months after its release, The Calling sold more than 100,000 copies in the US.


Personal life

Despite a series of relationships, including one with John Jennings, the media made much of Carpenter's single status throughout the nineties; in a 1994 profile, Entertainment Weekly even dubbed her "a spokes-singer for the thirtysomething single woman."[21] In 2002, Carpenter married Tim Smith, a general contractor. They currently reside on "Elysium," a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. Throughout her career, she has actively supported various charities, including CARE and Habitat for Humanity, and has conducted fundraising concerts for such causes as the elimination of landmines.

Carpenter has struggled with periods of depression since childhood.[22] While on tour with her album The Calling in spring 2007, Carpenter experienced severe chest and back pain. She continued to perform until a bout of breathlessness took her to the ER, where she learned she had suffered a pulmonary embolism. Cancelling her summer tour to recover, Carpenter "felt that [she] had let everyone down" and fell into a depression before rediscovering "the learning curve of gratitude."[23] Carpenter spoke about the experience on National Public Radio's This I Believe program in June 2007.

William Baldwin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born February 21, 1963 (1963-02-21) (age 45)
Massapequa, New York
Spouse(s) Chynna Phillips (1995-)

William "Billy" Baldwin (born February 21, 1963) is an American actor, known for his starring roles in such films as Backdraft (1991) and Flatliners (1990).





Biography

Early life

Baldwin was born in Massapequa, New York, the son of Carol Newcomb (née Martineau) and Alexander Rae Baldwin, Jr., a high school history/social studies teacher and football coach.[1] He is the brother of notable actors Daniel, Stephen and Alec, sometimes collectively known as the Baldwin brothers. Baldwin was raised in a Catholic family of Irish and French descent.[2][3] A graduate of Binghamton University, he has a degree in political science and is known for his support and contributions to Binghamton's wrestling team.


Career


Before starting his acting career, he was a fashion model. Baldwin starred alongside Cindy Crawford in the 1995 film, Fair Game, and has continued to act in films and on television, but he has not taken many leading roles. He was well-received in a supporting role in the 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. Currently, he co-stars as Donald Sutherland's oldest son, Patrick Darling VI, on Dirty Sexy Money, for ABC.


Personal life

Since 1995, Baldwin has been married to singer Chynna Phillips (formerly of the group Wilson Phillips), who is the daughter of John and Michelle Phillips of the 60s group, The Mamas and the Papas. They have three children: daughter Jamison (born 2000), son Vance Alexander (born 2001) and daughter Brooke (born 2004). Like his brother Alec Baldwin, William is a vegetarian[4] and has been nominated for PETA's 'Sexiest Vegetarian'.

He lives in Bedford, New York.[5]

Jennifer Love Hewitt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born February 21, 1979 (1979-02-21) (age 29)
Waco, Texas, U.S.A.[1]
Occupation actress, singer-songwriter
Years active 1985 ─ present
Official site jenniferlovehewittonline.com
[show]Awards
Other Awards
Saturn Award for Best Actress on Television
2006 Ghost Whisperer

Jennifer Love Hewitt (born February 21, 1979) is an American actress and singer-songwriter. She is well-known for her television and film roles in the Fox television series Party of Five, as Sarah Reeves, and also starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequel, as Julie James. Hewitt can currently be seen on the CBS television series Ghost Whisperer, as Melinda Gordon, a young newlywed who communicates with the dead.




Biography

Early life and career

Hewitt was born in Waco, Texas, the daughter of Patricia Mae (née Shipp), a speech-language pathologist, and Herbert Daniel Hewitt, a medical technician.[2] Hewitt grew up in Nolanville, Texas; after the divorce of her parents, Hewitt and her only sibling, Todd Hewitt, were brought up by her mother. Her first name was given to her by her brother, after a girl he was fond of as a youngster, while her middle name, "Love", was given to her by her mother after her best friend in college.

As a young girl, Hewitt was attracted to music which led to her first encounters with the entertainment industry. At the age of three, she sang "The Greatest Love of All" at a livestock show. Just a year after that, at a restaurant-dance hall, she entertained an audience with her version of "Help Me Make It Through the Night". By the time she was five, Hewitt already had tap dancing and ballet in her portfolio. At nine, she became a member of the Texas Show Team (which also toured in the Soviet Union). At the age of ten, at the suggestion of talent scouts, she moved to Los Angeles, California, with her mother to pursue a career in both acting and singing.


Film career

After moving to Los Angeles, Hewitt appeared in more than twenty television commercials. Her first break came as a child actor on the Disney Channel variety show Kids Incorporated (1989 - 1991), where she was credited as just Love Hewitt. During this time she danced in and sang all the songs for a live action video called "Dance! Workout With Barbie" released by Buena Vista.

In 1993, she played Pierce Brosnan's daughter in a pilot for NBC called Running Wilde, which featured Brosnan as a reporter for Auto World magazine whose stories cover his own wild auto adventures, but the series wasn't picked up and the pilot never aired. She later played on television in several short-lived series, such as Fox's Shaky Ground (1992 - 1993), ABC's Byrds of Paradise (1994), and McKenna (1994 - 1995). Finally, Hewitt became a young star after landing the role of Sarah Reeves on the popular Fox Television show Party of Five (1995 - 1999), joining the cast during its second season. She continued the same role in the short-lived Party of Five spin-off, Time of Your Life (1999). Hewitt was also one of the producers, but the show was cancelled after only half a season.

She made her film debut in the independent film Munchie (1992). Hewitt became a film star after a lead role in the horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). The film had great box-office success (125,000,000 U.S. dollars worldwide), and Hewitt became one of the most popular young stars in the USA (together with her co-stars: Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe, and Sarah Michelle Gellar). She also appeared in the sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), which was not as successful as the first film but brought in more money than the first on its opening weekend. Other notable film roles included the high-school comedy Can't Hardly Wait (1998) and a starring role with Sigourney Weaver in the romantic comedy Heartbreakers (2001).

In 2000, Hewitt appeared in The Audrey Hepburn Story. That same year, she was the "most popular actress on television" due to her Q-rating (a measurement of a celebrity's popularity) of thirty-seven. For that reason, Nokia chose her to become its spokesperson, because of her "fresh image", and her being "a symbol of youthfulness and wholesomeness".

In 2001, she appeared in the music video for the Enrique Iglesias song, "Hero", as the singer's love interest.

Hewitt wrote I'm Gonna Love You for the movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame II because, although she was a well-known singer at the time, her character Madellaine was the only character who didn't sing in the movie. The song won an award for Best Song on DVD Awards.

Since September 2005, Hewitt has starred in the television series Ghost Whisperer. In Australia, Ghost Whisperer has been popular since its introduction; in the United States, the show averages 9-11 million viewers for each new episode. Hewitt has also auditioned for many roles. She lost the role of "Juliet" in Romeo + Juliet to Claire Danes at the last moment. She also had to give up the role of "Darlene" in Brokedown Palace because of scheduling conflicts. Hewitt also auditioned for the role of "Elektra" in Daredevil.

Hewitt confirmed that she would not pose nude or do nude scenes in movies.[3]


Music career

In 1991, Meldac funded the recording of Hewitt's first album, when she was just 12. The album was only released in Japan in 1992 where Hewitt became a pop star. Her explanation for her success in Japan is that the Japanese "love perky music. The poppier the music, the better."[4]

After she joined the cast of Party of Five in 1995, she signed to Atlantic Records, who rushed her first single and second album Let's Go Bang out in October. Neither the single nor the album generated much public interest.

Juggling her music career with her acting career, she recorded her follow-up in 1996. The first single, "No Ordinary Love" failed to chart and led to the album doing the same. Atlantic dropped Hewitt, who didn't return to the music scene for 3 years.

In 1999, she recorded the single "How Do I Deal" for the I Still Know What You Did Last Summer Soundtrack. The song became Hewitt's first charting single by climbing to #59 on the Hot 100 and #36 on the Top 40 Mainstream. It also reached #8 in Australia.

In 2002, Hewitt signed to Jive Records and recorded her fourth album with singer/songwriter/producer Meredith Brooks. The first single, "BareNaked", became her biggest radio hit to date when it peaked at #24 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart, #31 on the Adult Top 40 and #25 on the Top 40 Mainstream. It also climbed to #6 in Australia. The success of the single propelled her album of the same name to peak at #37 on the Billboard 200 and #31 in Australia. However, it only remained on the chart for 3 weeks. The second single, "Can I Go Now", failed to chart in the US, while only managing to peak at #12 in Australia.

Since 2003, Hewitt hasn't actively done anything in the music industry, but a compilation called Cool with You: The Platinum Collection was released in Asia.


Personal life

Hewitt is an honorary godparent of the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund.[5]

Hewitt began dating Scottish actor Ross McCall in January 2006 after he made an appearance on Ghost Whisperer. In November 2007, while on vacation in Hawaii, they became engaged.[6] Some paparazzi shots during this vacation were criticized by bloggers. Hewitt responded: "I've sat by in silence for a long time now about the way women's bodies are constantly scrutinized.... What I should be doing is celebrating some of the best days of my life and my engagement to the man of my dreams, instead of having to deal with photographers taking invasive pictures from bad angles."[7]

She has also dated singer-guitarist John Mayer,[8] talk show host Carson Daly, actor/model Kip Pardue, writer Chris Benson, singer-songwriter Rich Cronin and actor Will Friedle.

Charlotte Church
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information

Birth name Charlotte Maria Cooper
Born 21 February 1986 (1986-02-21) (age 22)
Origin Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Genre(s) Pop
Celtic
Classical
Classical crossover
Years active 1998 - present
Label(s) Sony BMG
1998 - 2006
(acquired from Sony upon merger with BMG)
Website official site

Charlotte Church (born Charlotte Maria Cooper on February 21, 1986) is a Welsh singer and television presenter who rose to international fame in childhood as a popular classical crossover singer. Since 2005, she has branched out into pop music.

As of 2007, she has sold over 10 million albums worldwide, although her first three classical crossover albums account for the majority of her sales.




Early life

Church was born in Llandaf, a district of Cardiff, Wales. She was raised a Roman Catholic by her mother, Maria, who was separated from Church's biological father. Church was legally adopted by her mother's second husband, James Church in 1998. Her big break came at the age of 11 when she sang "Pie Jesu" on the television show Talking Telephone Numbers in 1997, closely followed by her performance on ITV's Big, Big Talent Show in 1998. This led to concerts at Cardiff Arms Park, Royal Albert Hall and the opening spot for Shirley Bassey in Antwerp. She also received a vocal scholarship to Howell's Girls School in Cardiff where she started in 1998. She balanced performing and school with help from tutors for when she was on the road and said in many interviews that she was "just like every other girl her age".


Classical career

Charlotte was then introduced to the Cardiff-based impresario, Jonathan Shalit, who later became her manager and negotiated a record contract with Sony BMG. Her first album, Voice of an Angel, showcased her unique voice in a collection of arias, sacred songs, and traditional pieces that sold millions of copies worldwide and made her the youngest artist with a No. 1 selling album on the British classical crossover charts to date.

Church later appeared on numerous PBS specials. Her self-titled second album included another array of operatic, religious, and traditional tracks. One track on the album, the soaring and inspirational Just Wave Hello, was the centerpiece of a millennium-themed ad campaign for the Ford Motor Company. The song's full-length video, featuring Church, won popular acclaim at the Detroit Auto Show and introduced her to a new legion of fans. The track reached #31 back in her native UK.

In 2000, she released Dream a Dream, principally an album of Christmas carols, but including Church's first foray into a more pop-influenced genre: the title track Dream a Dream, a memorable song borrowing the melody from Fauré's Pavane and featuring young American country singer Billy Gilman. Church also sang with Gilman in a duet ("Sleigh Ride") on his CD Classic Christmas.

In 2001, Church added more pop, swing, and Broadway to her classical repertoire with her album Enchantment. That same year, movie-going audiences heard Church for the first time in the 2001 Ron Howard film A Beautiful Mind. Since Celine Dion was not available to perform the film's end title song, "All Love Can Be" (Dion was beginning her concert engagement in Las Vegas), composer James Horner enlisted Church to handle the vocals, and the song was re-written to Church's vocal range. Church also handled other vocal passages throughout the score.

In 2002, at the age of 16, she released a 'best of' album called Prelude, and took part in the Royal Christmas tour alongside Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, concluding her classical music career. Her next album, Tissues and Issues, would be of a rather different genre.

Church has also sung in religious services in Taizé. She has also performed before Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton, who was the United States President at the time.


Pop career

Church's first pop album, "Tissues and Issues"Church made her first venture out of classical music in February 2003 providing vocals for Jürgen Vries (aka DJ and producer Darren Tate's) single "The Opera Song". She was credited on the sleeve as CMC - CMC being Charlotte's initials, Charlotte Maria Church. The track reached number 3 in the UK charts.

In 2005, she issued her first pop album Tissues and Issues and the first four singles have all been at least moderately successful in the UK with "Crazy Chick" reaching no. 2, "Call My Name" number 10, "Even God Can't Change the Past" number 17, and "Moodswings (to Come at Me like That)" number 14. Although these were released in Australia as well, they failed to reach the same level of success there, and in March 2006 it was announced that there would be no US releases of Church's pop work until she had achieved a number 1 hit in the UK.

In April 2006, she performed three concerts in Glasgow, London, and Cardiff, in venues holding between 2,000 and 3,000 people; the dates at London and Cardiff were sold out. Supported by Irish band the New Druids, Church performed a mix of tracks from her debut pop album and a number of pop covers including Prince's "Kiss" and Gloria Estefan's "Rhythm is Gonna Get You". Though Church hinted at the possibility of a full tour in the future, no dates are yet scheduled.

In November 2006, it was announced that she and Sony had parted ways. According to her publicist, this was a mutual decision reached after a series of meetings, ostensibly since her five and later six album deal had come to an end. There was some speculation that Church had decided to take a break (temporarily or permanently) from her singing career, in order to focus on her more successful television show (see below). Others suggested that the performance of her pop releases in the charts also contributed to the decision.[1]


Acting and television career

Church has made a number of cameo appearances on television. She appeared in the CBS series Touched by an Angel, starred in the 1999 Christmas special of Heartbeat, and in 2003 she presented an episode of Have I Got News For You. In 2005 she played herself in an episode of The Catherine Tate Show, in a sketch with the fictional character Joannie Taylor.

She made her silver screen debut in 2003's I'll Be There, co-starring and directed by Craig Ferguson. Church played the role of Olivia, the daughter of a washed-up 80s rocker from a one-night-stand, played by Ferguson. The film did not meet with widespread success, playing for only ten days in UK cinemas and being released directly to video in the US.


The Charlotte Church Show

In the summer of 2006, Church began work on her own entertainment TV show, The Charlotte Church Show. After a pilot episode which caused some controversy and which was never released to the public,[2] the series began on 1 September 2006, on Channel 4.

The show, hosted by Charlotte and featuring two celebrity guests each week, involves a mixture of sketches, reality TV, interviews and music, as well as a recurring Welsh theme (the first show included a Wales vs. the World competition and a Welsh remake of Will & Grace). Denise van Outen, Michael McIntyre, Ruby Wax, Billie Piper, and Patsy Kensit were amongst the first celebrities to appear on the series.

The show has averaged 1.9 million viewers and 10% of the available audience, and on 6 October 2006, it was announced that Channel 4 had commissioned a further two series of the show. However, the show's ratings have yet to seriously compete with the well-established Friday Night with Jonathan Ross which is broadcast on BBC One in the same timeslot.[citation needed] According to her official website, the final series, originally planned for summer of 2007, was deferred until after Church gave birth. However, on 18 December 2007, Church stated in an interview that she had no immediate plans to shoot the final series, as she was too busy being a new mother.

Church won a British Comedy Award for "Best Female Comedy Newcomer" in 2006,[3] and the 'Funniest TV Personality' award at the 2006 Loaded Magazine's 'LAFTA' awards.[4]

It was announced on the 10th February 2008 that Charlotte was ready to make her return to TV. Channel 4 are said to be still in the planning stages but the show will air some time in the summer. [5]


Personal life

Church's personal life has often been portrayed in the sensationalist tabloid newspapers in the UK (inspiring the song "Let's Be Alone" on her album Tissues and Issues).

Church released an autobiography titled Voice of an Angel (My Life So Far), at the age of 14 (before the release of "Enchantment" and just after she had wrapped up her "Dream a Dream" Christmas CD). Her eventual change of music direction is foreshadowed in the final chapter, entitled "Turning Corners." (Church, who wrote the book without the help of a ghost writer, recounts the complex details of her fast-paced career with a considerable skill owed in part to her photographic memory.)

Revisited with particular frequency is her love life. In 2002, aged 16, she moved out of the family home to live with her rap DJ/model boyfriend, Steven Johnson (inspiring the song "Casualty of Love", also from Tissues and Issues); the couple split at the end of 2003. The tabloid press documented her subsequent relationship with Kyle Johnson (no relation), which ended in February 2005. The couple stated at the time that they remained friends, though shortly afterwards Johnson revealed graphic details about the couple's sex life to the press, leading to a slap from Church.

Other aspects of her personal life have been criticized in the press. In 2002, she was photographed smoking, and it gradually emerged that she had developed a smoking habit (another fact alluded to on her album Tissues and Issues, in the song "Confessional Song")...

In recent interviews, Church has stated that she has stopped smoking and that her behaviour is now much more low-key.[6][7]

The press has recently devoted much attention to Church's relationship with current boyfriend Gavin Henson, a Welsh International Rugby Union player: they have reportedly bought a manor in Glamorgan. At the end of 2005, she purchased a property in her native Llandaff, Cardiff, for a reported £500,000, although Henson has said that he is not part owner of the property. The couple have mentioned the possibility of marriage on talk shows and in the press,[7] but put off any talk of marriage whilst Church was expecting.

On Thursday, 20 September 2007 at 10:35 pm Church gave birth to a baby girl named Ruby Megan Henson.[8]

The couple have been nicknamed the "Welsh Victoria and David Beckham".[9] In 2007, Church made another appearance on a British young people's rich list with Henson. They were ranked as the 49th richest young people in Britain with an estimated joint wealth of £10 million.[10]


Philanthropic efforts

Church has lent her support to the production of limited-edition T-shirts or vests for the 'Little Tee Campaign' for Breast Cancer Care which donates money for breast cancer research.

She has also been a long time and very visible supporter of the Noah's Ark Appeal to build a children's hospital in Wales.[11][12]


Controversy

Controversy surrounds the circumstances of the dismissal of Church's first manager, Jonathan Shalit. He was allegedly discharged from her representation in a letter faxed by Church's mother; although allegations were later made by the Church family of "inappropriate tactile conduct" on the part of Shalit, nothing ever came of them. Shalit subsequently sued for breach of contract and received an out-of-court settlement believed to be worth £ 2 million[13] (although the exact details were never released, as one of the parties to the matter was a minor and such details are protected under UK law).

Church has provoked controversy on some occasions with her comments and criticisms - in an interview with Davina McCall, Charlotte agreed that being diplomatic was "not in her nature".[14] Her remarks on the September 11, 2001 attacks, saying New Yorkers were being overdramatic, drew considerable outrage.[15]

The pilot episode of Church's new show, The Charlotte Church Show, provoked a backlash from some religious groups, as Church reportedly mocks the Roman Catholic Church and makes some controversial comments about Pope Benedict XVI, calling him a "Nazi" in reference to his forced service in the Hitler Youth and German Army.[16] One large Roman Catholic distributor of books, CDs and other goods, Ignatius Press, is reported to have pulled Church's products from its catalogue.[17]

In her video blog entry for 22 March 2007, Church referred to the UK's Eurovision entry, Scooch, as "absolute ****" and went on to say "I've never seen **** like it, because Scooch really are ****". Russ Spencer of Scooch hit back saying "what a pity the voice of an angel has acquired the mouth of a sewer". Spencer's fellow bandmember Natalie Powers added "As a mother of a young child myself I find her behaviour and language quite unacceptable. What kind of role model is this for a mum-to-be?" Church hit back by saying on her Channel 4 show "They called me attention seeking... then what's doing the Eurovision dressed as air hostesses?"

She has claimed that she would be a better judge for the reality show X-Factor than any of the judges on the show. She becomes "annoyed" when their remarks are inaccurate, stating "they just do not know the ins and outs of a voice or music"[18]

Dear friends, it is with the saddest heart that I have to pass on the following:

The Pillsbury Doughboy died Monday of a severe yeast infection and complications from repeated pokes to the belly. He was 71. Doughboy was buried in a lightly greased coffin. Dozens of celebrities turned out, including Mrs. Butterworth, the California Raisins, Hungry Jack, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies, and Captain Crunch. The graveside was piled high with flours as longtime friend Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy, describing Doughboy as a man who "never knew how much he was kneaded".

Doughboy rose quickly in show business but his later life was filled with many turnovers. He was not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes. Despite being a little flaky at times, even as a crusty old man, he was considered a roll model for millions.

Toward the end it was thought he'd rise once again, but he was no tart. Doughboy is survived by his second wife, Play Dough. They have two children, and one in the oven.

The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.