G. K. Chesterton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born 29 May 1874(1874-05-29)
London, England1
Died 14 June 1936 (aged 62)
Beaconsfield
Occupation Journalist, Novelist
Genres Fantasy, Christian apologetics, Catholic apologetics, Mystery
Influences
Christianity, Catholicism, St. Thomas Aquinas, George MacDonald, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Hilaire Belloc
Influenced
C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Marshall McLuhan, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, David Dark, Gabriel García Márquez, Karel Čapek, Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Ronald Knox, Anthony Burgess, E. F. Schumacher, Orson Welles, Dorothy Day, Franz Kafka, Brian McLaren, R. A. Lafferty, Philip Yancey, Rich Mullins, Terry Pratchett, J K Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Alan Watts, Don Miller, Garry Wills, Susanna Clarke, Carl Amery, Hannah Arendt, Slavoj iek.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (May 29, 1874 - June 14, 1936) was an influential English writer of the early 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy and detective fiction.
Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox."[1] He wrote in an off-hand, whimsical prose studded with startling formulations. For example: "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."[2] He is one of the few Christian thinkers who are equally admired and quoted by both liberal and conservative Christians, and indeed by many non-Christians. Chesterton's own theological and political views were far too nuanced to fit comfortably under the "liberal" or "conservative" banner. And in his own words he cast aspersions on the labels saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."[3] He routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox Christian," and came to identify such a position with Catholicism more and more, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism.
Life
Born in Campden Hill in Kensington in London, Chesterton was educated at St Paul's School. He attended the Slade School of Art in order to become an illustrator and also took literature classes at University College London but did not complete a degree at either. In 1896 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, and T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. In 1902 he was given a weekly opinion column in the Daily News, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he would continue to write for the next thirty years.
According to Chesterton, as a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards.[4] However, as he grew older, he became an increasingly orthodox Christian, culminating in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922.[5]
Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 21 stone (134 kg or 294 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During World War I a lady in London asked why he wasn't 'out at the Front'; he replied, 'If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.'[6] On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, 'To look at you, anyone would think there was a famine in England.' Shaw retorted, 'To look at you, anyone would think you caused it.'[citations needed]
He usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand, and had a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Chesterton often forgot where he was supposed to be going and would miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent a telegram to his wife from some distant (and incorrect) location, writing such things as "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" to which she would reply, "Home."[7]
Chesterton loved to debate, often engaging in friendly public disputes with such men as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow. According to his autobiography, he and Shaw played cowboys in a silent movie that was never released.
Chesterton died on 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. The homily at Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox. He is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery. Chesterton's estate was probated at 28,389 pounds sterling, approximately equivalent to USD 2.6 million in modern terms.
Writing
Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition (1929). His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. He was a convinced Christian long before he was received into the Catholic Church, and Christian themes and symbolism appear in much of his writing. In the United States, his writings on distributism were popularized through The American Review, published by Seward Collins in New York.
Much of his poetry is little known, though well reflecting his beliefs and opinions. The best written is probably Lepanto, with The Rolling English Road the most familiar, and The Secret People perhaps the most quoted ("we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet"). Another excellent poem is A Ballade of Suicide.
Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens (1903) has received some of the broadest-based praise. According to Ian Ker (The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, 2003), "In Chesterton's eyes Dickens belongs to Merry, not Puritan, England" ; Ker treats in Chapter 4 of that book Chesterton's thought as largely growing out of his true appreciation of Dickens, a somewhat shop-soiled property in the view of other literary opinions of the time.
Chesterton's writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour. He employed paradox, while making serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philosophy, theology and many other topics. When The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's contribution took the form of a letter:
Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton[8]
Typically, Chesterton here combined wit with a serious point (that of human sinfulness) and self-deprecation.
Much of Chesterton's work remains in print, including collections of the Father Brown detective stories. Ignatius Press is currently in the process of publishing a Complete Works.
Views and contemporaries
Chesterton's writing has been seen by some analysts as combining two earlier strands in English literature. Dickens' approach is one of these. Another is represented by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, whom Chesterton knew well: satirists and social commentators following in the tradition of Samuel Butler, vigorously wielding paradox as a weapon against complacent acceptance of the conventional view of things.
Chesterton's style and thinking were all his own, however, and his conclusions were often opposed to those of Wilde and Shaw. In his book Heretics, Chesterton has this to say of Wilde:
" The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.[9] "
More briefly, and with a closer approximation of Wilde's own style, he writes in Orthodoxy concerning the necessity of making symbolic sacrifices for the gift of creation:
" Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde. "
Chesterton and Shaw were famous friends and enjoyed their arguments and discussions. Although rarely in agreement, they both maintained good-will towards and respect for each other. However, in his writing, Chesterton expressed himself very plainly on where they differed and why. In Heretics he writes of Shaw:
" After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.[10] "
Shaw represented the new school of thought, humanism, which was rising at the time. Chesterton's views, on the other hand, became increasingly more focused towards the church. In Orthodoxy he writes:
" The worship of will is the negation of will. . . If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in the matter." You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular.[11] "
This style of argumentation is what Chesterton refers to as using 'Uncommon Sense' ?- that is, that the thinkers and popular philosophers of the day, though very clever, were saying things that were nonsensical. This is illustrated again in Orthodoxy:
" Thus when Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."[12] "
Or, again from Orthodoxy:
" The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless ?- one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is ?- well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.[12] "
" All healthy men, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane.[13] "
Incisive comments and observations occurred almost impulsively in Chesterton's writing. In the middle of his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse he famously states:
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.[14]
The Chesterbelloc
Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc. Shaw coined the name Chesterbelloc for their partnership, and this stuck. Though they were very different men, they shared many beliefs; Chesterton eventually joined Belloc in his natal Catholicism, and both voiced criticisms towards capitalism and socialism. They instead espoused a third way: distributism.
G. K.'s Weekly, which occupied much of Chesterton's energy in the last 15 years of his life, was the successor to Belloc's New Witness, taken over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother who died in World War I.
Both Chesterton and Belloc have faced accusations of anti-Semitism during their lifetimes and subsequently.[15] Their criticisms of the "international Jewish banking families" are some of the most important reasons for these accusations. For example, G.K., Belloc, and G.K.'s brother Cecil were vehement critics of the Isaacs, who were involved in the Marconi scandal in the years before World War I.[16] George Orwell accused Chesterton of being guilty of "endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts."[17]
In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a "Jewish Problem" in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture (not Jewish ethnicity/Semitism) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe.[18] He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to Palestine by Jewish Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause. In 1934, after the Nazi Party took power in Germany he wrote that:
" In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people.[19] "
The Wiener Library (London's archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: "he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on."[20]
Chesterton condemned the Nuremberg Laws, and he died in 1936, as the Hitlerite antisemitic measures were temporarily decreased due to the Berlin Olympics, long before lethal persecution by the Nazis would start.
List of major works
Charles Dickens (1903)
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) text
Heretics (1905)
The Man Who Was Thursday (1907) text
Orthodoxy (1908) Doubleday, 1991. ISBN 978-0-385-01536-3
The Ballad Of The White Horse (1911) poetry
Father Brown short stories (detective fiction)
Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)
The Everlasting Man (1925)
Saint Thomas Aquinas: "The Dumb Ox", Doubleday, 1974. ISBN 978-0-385-09002-5
Saint Francis of Assisi, Doubleday, 1987. ISBN 978-0-385-02900-1
Influence
Chesterton's The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950)[21] Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know," and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (31 December 1947)[22] "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton The Everlasting Man." The book was also cited in a list of 10 books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life."[23]
Chesterton's biography of Charles Dickens was largely responsible for creating a popular revival for Dickens's work as well as a serious reconsideration of Dickens by scholars.[citation needed]
Chesterton's writings have been praised by such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Frederick Buechner, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Karel Čapek, David Dark, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Andrew Greeley, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E. F. Schumacher, Orson Welles, Dorothy Day, Tim Powers, and Franz Kafka.
Philip Yancey said that if he were "stranded on a desert island and could choose only one book apart from the Bible, I may well select Chesterton's own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy."[24]
Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday inspired the Irish Republican leader Michael Collins with the idea: 'if you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out.'[25]
His physical appearance and apparently some of his mannerisms were a direct inspiration for the character of Dr. Gideon Fell, a well-known fictional detective created in the early 1930s by the Anglo-American mystery writer John Dickson Carr.
The author Neil Gaiman has stated that The Napoleon of Notting Hill was an important influence on his own book Neverwhere[citation needed]. Gaiman also based the character Gilbert, from the comic book The Sandman, on Chesterton, as well as featuring a quotation from The Man who was October, a book Chesterton wrote "only in dreams", at the end of Season of Mists. Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens is dedicated "to the memory of G.K. Chesterton: A man who knew what was going on." In a prescript to his novel, Coraline, Gaiman quotes Chesterton: "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
Ingmar Bergman considered Chesterton's little known play Magic to be one of his favourites and even staged a production in Swedish[citations needed]. Later he reworked Magic into his movie The Magician in 1958.
The Third Way (UK) campaigns for the widespread ownership of property are inspired by the economic system Chesterton espoused: Distributism.
The Innocence of Father Brown is cited by Guillermo Martinez as one of the inspirations for his thriller The Oxford Murders.
0 Replies
Letty
1
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Thu 29 May, 2008 07:42 am
Ah, Izzie, I think it is wonderful that you can share with your son. Mine seems to be on the mend, somewhat.
Thanks, gal, for the three great songs by Oasis. They are a gentle reminder of what should be, especially "Don't Look Back in Anger".
Interesting, how many time have we felt anger on a forum? For me, only three, but that is an emotion that I recover from quickly.
Here's another "Stand by Me", y'all, and we not only remember this kid in My Own Little Idaho", but also in "The Body".
Frederick Schiller Faust (May 29, 1892 - May 12, 1944) was an American fiction author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary Westerns. Faust wrote mostly under pen names, and today is primarily known by one, Max Brand. Others include George Owen Baxter, Evan Evans, David Manning, John Frederick, Peter Morland, George Challis, and Frederick Frost.
Faust was born in Seattle to Gilbert Leander Faust and Elizabeth (Uriel) Faust, who both died soon after. He grew up in central California and later worked as a cowhand on one of the many ranches of the San Joaquin Valley. Faust attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he began to write prolifically for student publications, poetry magazines, and occasionally newspapers. He did not attain a degree, as he was deemed a troublemaker, and began to travel extensively. He joined the Canadian Army in 1915, but deserted the next year and went to New York City.
During the 1910s, Faust started to sell stories to the pulp magazines of Frank Munsey, including All-Story Weekly and Argosy Magazine. When the United States joined World War I in 1917, Faust tried to enlist but was turned down. He married Dorothy Schillig in 1917, and the couple had three children. In the 1920s, Faust wrote extensively for pulp magazines, especially Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine, a weekly for which he would write over a million words a year in fiction published under various pen names, with often two serials and a short novel in a single issue. In 1921 he suffered a severe heart attack, and for the rest of his life suffered from chronic heart disease.
In 1925 Faust moved with his family to Europe, renting a villa in Florence, Italy, where he flourished, taking up tennis, horseback riding, and purchasing an Isotta-Fraschini sports car. His lavish lifestyle compelled him to keep writing at a furious pace, and money kept pouring in. Faust felt contempt for his pulp writing, leaving the editing of his stories to his wife, and kept the book editions of his fiction in an enclosed cabinet, never on display in his large library. Faust saved the use of his legal name for the classically themed poetry he considered his real vocation. Sadly for him, his poetry was generally a commercial and critical failure and, according to his biographer Robert Easton, perhaps an artistic failure as well. Charles Beaumont states that Faust knew this, and that his success in work he despised combined with failure at work he valued 'broke his heart'.
His love for mythology was, however, a constant source of inspiration for his fiction and his classical and literary inclinations are perhaps part of the reason for his success at genre fiction. The classical influences are certainly noticeable in his first novel The Untamed, which was also made into a motion picture in 1920 starring Tom Mix. More than seventy of his stories would inspire films. He created the Western character Destry, featured in several filmed versions of Destry Rides Again, and his character Dr. Kildare was adapted to motion pictures, radio, television, and comic books.
Beginning in 1934 Faust began publishing fiction in upscale slick magazines that paid better than pulp magazines. In 1938, due to political events in Europe, Faust returned with his family to the United States, settling in Hollywood, working as a scriptwriter for a number of film studios. At one point Warner Brothers was paying him $3,000 a week (at a time when that might be a year's salary for an average worker), and he made a fortune from MGM's use of the Dr. Kildare stories. He was one of the highest paid writers of that time.
When World War II broke out, Faust insisted on doing his part, and despite being well into middle age and a heart condition managed to become a front line war correspondent. Faust was quite famous at this point and the soldiers enjoyed having this popular author among them. While traveling with American soldiers as they battled Germans in Italy, Faust was mortally wounded by shrapnel and died in 1944. He was personally commended for bravery by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Faust managed a massive outpouring of fiction, rivaling Edgar Wallace and especially Isaac Asimov as one of the most prolific authors of all time. He wrote more than 500 novels for magazines and almost as many stories of shorter length. His total literary output is estimated to have been between 25,000,000 and 30,000,000 words. Most of his books and stories were turned out at breakneck rate, sometimes as quickly as 12,000 words in the course of a weekend. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world.
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bobsmythhawk
1
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Thu 29 May, 2008 07:48 am
Beatrice Lillie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Beatrice Gladys Lillie
May 29, 1894(1894-05-29)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died January 20, 1989 (aged 94) (Alzheimer's Disease)
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Occupation actress
Spouse(s) Sir Robert Peel (1920-1934) (his death), 1 son (killed during WWII)
Bea Lillie (May 29, 1894 - January 20, 1989) was a comic actress. She was born as Beatrice Gladys Lillie in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Following her marriage in 1920 to Sir Robert Peel, she was known in private life as Lady Peel.
Early career
She began performing in Toronto and other Ontario towns as part of a family trio with her mother and older sister, Muriel. Eventually, her mother took the two girls to London, England where she made her West End debut in 1914.
She was noted primarily for her stage work in revues and light comedies, frequently paired with Gertrude Lawrence, Bert Lahr and Jack Haley. Beatrice (or Bea) Lillie, as she would be known professionally, took advantage of her gift for witty satire that made her a stage success for more than 50 years.
In her revues, she utilized sketches, songs, and parody that in her 1924 New York debut won her lavish praise from the New York Times. In some of her best known "bits," she would solemnly parody the flowery performing style of earlier decades, mining such songs as There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden and Mother Told Me So for every double entendre, while other numbers (Get Yourself a Geisha and Snoops the Lawyer, for example) showcased her exquisite sense of the absurd. Her performing in such comedy routines as "One Double Dozen Double Damask Dinner Napkins," (in which an increasingly flummoxed matron attempts to purchase said napkins) earned her the frequently used sobriquet of "Funniest Woman in the World". Lillie never performed the "Dinner Napkins" routine in Britain, because British audiences had already seen it performed by the Australian-born English revue performer Cicely Courtneidge, for whom it was written.
In 1926 she returned to New York city to perform. While there, she starred in her first film, Exit Smiling, opposite fellow Canadian Jack Pickford, the scandal-scarred younger brother of Mary Pickford. From then until the approach of World War II, Lillie repeatedly crisscrossed the Atlantic to perform on both continents. (She made very few films; her 1944 film, On Approval, also starring Clive Brook, who wrote the adapted screenplay, produced and directed, is an excellent example of Lillie in her prime. It is currently available on DVD.)
Lillie is associated particularly with the works of Noel Coward, though Cole Porter is among those who also wrote songs for her. She made few appearances on film, appearing in a cameo role as a revivalist in Around the World in Eighty Days and as "Mrs. Meers" (a white slaver) in Thoroughly Modern Millie. She won a Tony Award in 1953 for her revue An Evening With Beatrice Lillie and made her final stage appearance as Madame Arcati in High Spirits, the musical version of Coward's Blithe Spirit. This was Lillie's only performance in a book musical: that is, a musical with a plot; all her other stage appearances had been in revues.
Throughout her career as a revue performer, Lillie's contracts almost invariably stipulated that she would not make her first entrance onstage until at least half an hour into the show; by that point, every other act in the revue had made its first appearance and the audience would be keenly awaiting the entrance of Miss Lillie, the star of the evening.
After seeing An Evening with Beatrice Lillie, British critic Ronald Barker wrote, "Other generations may have their Mistinguett and their Marie Lloyd. We have our Beatrice Lillie and seldom have we seen such a display of perfect talent." In 1954 she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre.
An amusing, but perhaps apocryphal story has it that a somewhat intoxicated Beatrice Lillie, upon returning to her hotel one evening, regally instructed the desk clerk to hand her "Lady Keel's Pee". Tallulah Bankhead actually made that remark. She and Bea had been out together and Tallulah believing she was the more sober one instructed the desk clerk to give her "Lady Keel's Pee Please."
Relationships and marriages
She married, on January 20, 1920, at the church of St. Paul, Drayton Bassett, Fazeley, near Tamworth in Staffordshire to Sir Robert Peel, 5th Baronet. She eventually separated from her husband (but never divorced him) until he died in 1934. Their only child, Sir Robert Peel, 6th Baronet, was killed in action aboard the HMS Tenedos in Colombo Harbour, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in 1942.
During World War II, Lillie was an inveterate entertainer of the troops. Before she went on stage, she learned her son was killed in action. She refused to postpone the performance saying "she would cry tomorrow."
In 1948 she met singer/actor John Philip Huck, almost three decades younger than she, who became her friend and companion. Huck has been described by biographers and friends of Lillie's as a no-talent, obsessive control freak who used Lillie as his ticket to a brush with fame.[citation needed] Though apparently devoted to her, Huck isolated her from her friends and family in her later years and exerted almost total control over her life and financial affairs. She was reportedly involved in romantic relationships with actresses Tallulah Bankhead and Gertrude Lawrence[1], [2].
Retirement
She retired from the stage due to Alzheimer's disease and died on January 20, 1989, which was also the date of her wedding anniversary, at Henley-on-Thames, aged 94. Huck died of a heart attack only 31 hours later, and is interred next to her in the Peel family estate's cemetery near Peel Fold, Blackburn.
For her contributions to film, Beatrice Lillie has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6404 Hollywood Blvd.
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bobsmythhawk
1
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Thu 29 May, 2008 07:56 am
Bob Hope
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Leslie Townes Hope
May 29, 1903(1903-05-29)
Eltham, London, England
Died July 27, 2003 (aged 100)
Toluca Lake, California
Occupation Comedian, actor
Spouse(s) Dolores Hope (born 1909)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Academy Honorary Award
1941 ,1945, 1953, 1966
Lifetime Achievement Award
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award
1960 Outstanding Contributions to Humanitarian Causes
Emmy Awards
Outstanding Variety Special
1966 Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre
Golden Globe Awards
Cecil B. DeMille Award
1963 Lifetime Achievement
Screen Actors Guild Awards
Life Achievement Award
1966 Lifetime Achievement
Other Awards
Hollywood Walk of Fame
6541 Hollywood Boulevard
Bob Hope, KBE KCSG (May 29, 1903 - July 27, 2003), was an American comedian and actor who appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in radio, television, and movies. He was also noted for his work with the US Armed Forces and his numerous USO tours entertaining American military personnel.[1] Throughout his career, he was honored for his humanitarian work.
Early life and career
Bob Hope was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, London, England, the fifth of seven sons. His English father, William Henry Hope, was a stonemason from Weston-super-Mare and his Welsh mother, Avis Townes, was a light opera singer who later had to find work as a cleaning woman.[2] The family lived in Weston-super-Mare, then Whitehall and St. George in Bristol, before moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1908. The family traveled to the United States as passengers on board the SS Philadelphia. They were inspected at Ellis Island on March 30, 1908. Hope became a U.S. citizen in 1920 at the age of seventeen.[3]
From the age of twelve, he worked at a variety of odd jobs at a local board walk. He would busk, doing dance and comedy patter to make extra money. He entered many dancing and amateur talent contests, and won prizes for his impersonation of Charlie Chaplin. He also boxed briefly and unsuccessfully under the name Packy East, making it once as far as the semifinals of the Ohio novice championship.[4]
Silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle saw one of his performances and in 1925 got him steady work with Hurley's Jolly Follies. Within a year, Hope had formed an act called the Dancemedians with George Burns and the Hilton Sisters, conjoined twins who had a tap dancing routine. Hope and his partner George Byrne had an act as a pair of Siamese twins as well, and both danced and sang while wearing blackface before friends advised Hope that he was funnier as himself.[5] After five years on the vaudeville circuit, by his own account, Hope was surprised and humbled when he and his partner Grace Louise Troxell failed a 1930 screen test for Pathé at Culver City, California. Hope had already had small film parts, in 1927's The Sidewalks of New York and 1928's Smiles.[6]
Hope returned to New York City and subsequently appeared in several Broadway musicals, including Roberta, Say When, the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies, and Red, Hot and Blue with Ethel Merman. His performances were generally well-received and critics noted his keen sense of comedic timing. He changed his name from "Leslie" to "Bob", reportedly because people in the U.S. were calling him "Hopelessly," although in the 1920s he sometimes used the name "Lester Hope".
Films
Hope, like other stage performers, made his first films in New York. Educational Pictures hired him in 1934 for a short-subject comedy, Going Spanish. Unfortunately for Hope, he sealed his own fate with Educational when a newspaper columnist asked him about his new movie. Hope cracked, "When they catch John Dillinger, they're going to make him sit through it twice."[cite this quote] Educational fired him, but he was soon back before the cameras at New York's Vitaphone studio, where he starred in 20-minute comedies and musicals.
Paramount Pictures signed Hope for the 1938 film The Big Broadcast of 1938. During a duet with Shirley Ross as accompanied by Shep Fields and his orchestra, Hope introduced the bittersweet song later to become his trademark, "Thanks for the Memory", which became a major hit and was praised by critics. The sentimental, fluid nature of the music allowed Hope's writers (whom he is said to have depended upon heavily throughout his career) to later invent endless variations of the song to fit specific circumstances, such as bidding farewell to troops while on tour.
According to Hope, early in his film career a director advised him that movie acting was done mostly with the eyes, resulting in the exaggerated and rolling eye movements which characterized many of Hope's on-screen performances.[citation needed]
Hope became one of Paramount's biggest stars, and would remain with the studio through the 1950s. Hope's regular appearances in Hollywood films and radio made him one of the best known entertainers in North America, and at the height of his career he was also making a large income from live concert performances. During an eight-week tour in 1940, he reportedly generated $100,000 in receipts, a record at the time. (This is the equivalent of $1.4 million in 2006 money.)
As a movie star, he was best known for My Favorite Brunette and the highly profitable "Road" movies in which he starred with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour (whom he had first seen performing as a nightclub singer in New York and subsequently invited to work with him on his USO tours). Lamour is said to have shown up for filming fully prepared with her lines, only to be baffled by completely new material which had been written by Hope's own staff of writers without the studio's permission.
Hope and Lamour were lifelong friends, and she is the actress most associated with his film career. Other female co-stars included Paulette Goddard, Lucille Ball, Jane Russell, and Hedy Lamarr.
Hope was host of the Academy Awards ceremony 18 times between 1939 and 1977. His alleged lust for an Oscar became part of his act, perhaps most memorably in a scene from Road to Morocco in which he suddenly erupted in a crazed frenzy, shouting about his imminent death from starvation and heat. Bing Crosby reminds him that rescue is just minutes away, and a disappointed Hope complains that Crosby has spoiled his best scene in the picture, and thus, his chance for an Academy Award. He also expressed this in The Road to Bali, in which Crosby finds Humphrey Bogart's Oscar for The African Queen, and Hope quickly grabs it, saying "Give me that. You've got one."
Although Hope never did win a Oscar for his performances (nor a nomination), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored him with four honorary awards, and in 1960, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. While introducing the 1968 telecast, he famously quipped, "Welcome to the Academy Awards, or, as it's known at my house, Passover." Hope would also gain some recognition as "America's Favorite Funnyman" as well. [7]
Broadcasting
Hope first appeared on television in 1932 during a test transmission from an experimental CBS studio in New York. His career in broadcasting spanned sixty-four years and included a long association with NBC. Hope made his network radio debut in 1937 on NBC. His first regular series for NBC Radio was the Woodbury Soap Hour. A year later The Pepsodent Radio Show Starring Bob Hope began, and would run through 1953.
Hope did many specials for the NBC television network in the following decades. These were often sponsored by Chrysler and Hope served as a spokesman for the corporation for many years. Hope's Christmas specials were popular favorites and often featured a performance of "Silver Bells" (from his 1951 film The Lemon Drop Kid) done as a duet with an often much younger female guest star (such as Olivia Newton-John or Brooke Shields).
In the 1950s, Hope appeared on an episode of then the most viewed program in America, I Love Lucy. He is reported to have said, upon receiving the script: "What? A script? I don't need one of these."[cite this quote] Supposedly, he ad libbed the entire episode. Desi Arnaz said of Hope after his appearance: "Bob is a very nice man, he can crack you up, no matter how much you try for him to not."[cite this quote]
Hope's 1970 and 1971 Christmas specials for NBC?-filmed in Vietnam in front of military audiences at the height of the war?-are on the list of the Top 30 U.S. Network Primetime Telecasts of All Time. Both were seen by more than 60 percent of the U.S. households watching television at the time they aired.
His final television special, Laughing with the Presidents, was broadcast in 1996, with Tony Danza helping Hope present a personal retrospective of presidents of the United States known to the comedian.
Theater
Bob Hope appeared as Huck Haines in the musical Roberta in 1958 at The Muny Theater in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri.
USO
Hope performed his first United Service Organizations (USO) show on May 6, 1941, at March Field, California. He continued to travel and entertain troops for the rest of World War II[8] and later during the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. When overseas he almost always performed in Army fatigues as a show of support for his audience. Hope's USO career lasted half a century, during which he headlined approximately sixty tours. For his service to his country through the USO, Hope was awarded the prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award by the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1968.
Of Hope's USO shows in World War II, writer John Steinbeck, who was then working as a war correspondent, wrote in 1943:
When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people.[9]
A 1997 act of Congress signed by President Clinton named Hope an "Honorary Veteran". He remarked, "I've been given many awards in my lifetime ?- but to be numbered among the men and women I admire most ?- is the greatest honor I have ever received."[cite this quote]
Interest in sports
Hope had a widely reported passion for sports. He boxed professionally during his youth, was a pool hustler, enjoyed watching football and was at times a part owner of the Cleveland Indians and Los Angeles Rams. Hope, who was good friends with San Diego Chargers owner Alex Spanos, attended numerous Charger games and was even honored by the team during a halftime of a home game at Qualcomm Stadium.
One of the highlights of Bob Hope's Christmas specials was his introductions of the Associated Press All-American college football players. Hope would meet each of the players individually on the stage after introducing them, and tell a joke about each one.
Hope was also famous for his interest in golf. He played in a few PGA Tour events and the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic is named for him. Hope played golf with nearly every President of the United States from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush and, as seen in the accompanying photograph, often used a golf club as an on-stage prop. He appeared in an episode of The Simpsons, "Lisa the Beauty Queen" as himself, on stage at Fort Springfield. His opening lines were "You know, that Mayor Quimby is some golfer. His balls spend more time underwater than Greg Louganis."
Hope got hooked on golf in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He played his first game at a local course (thought to be Kildonan Golf Course) in 1930 while performing on the vaudeville circuit at the Orpheum Theatre. The Diamond Brothers, a juggling act, would kill time between shows by playing golf and they invited him to join them, according to Hope on an appearance on the Johnny Carson Show.
In 1978, he and Bing Crosby were voted the Bob Jones Award, the highest honor given by the United States Golf Association in recognition of distinguished sportsmanship in golf. Both men are also members of the World Golf Hall of Fame. Hope also received the 1984 Old Tom Morris Award from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, GCSAA's highest honor.
Marriages
According to biographer Arthur Marx, Hope's first wife was his vaudeville partner Grace Louise Troxell, whom he married on January 25, 1933. When the marriage record was unearthed some years later, Hope denied that the marriage had any substance and said they had quickly divorced. There were rumours that he fathered a daughter with Troxell and that he continued to send generous checks to her despite a widely documented reputation for frugality. In 1934 Bob Hope married Dolores Reade, and adopted four children at The Cradle in Evanston, Illinois: Linda, Anthony, Laura and Kelley.[10] From them he had four grandchildren.
Later years
As Hope entered his eighth decade, he showed no signs of slowing down and continued appearing in numerous television specials. He was given an 80th birthday party in 1983 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. which was attended by President Ronald Reagan. In 1985, he was presented with the Life Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center Honors. He was presented with the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award in 1997 by Nancy Reagan.[11] The following year, Hope was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. Upon accepting the appointment, Hope quipped, "I'm speechless. 70 years of ad lib material and I'm speechless".[12] At the age of 95, Hope made a memorable appearance at the 50th anniversary of the Primetime Emmy Awards with fellow television icons Milton Berle and Sid Caesar. Just two years later, Hope was present at the opening of the Bob Hope Gallery of American Entertainment at the Library of Congress.
Hope celebrated his 100th birthday on May 29, 2003, joining a small group of notable centenarians in the field of entertainment (including Irving Berlin, Hal Roach, Senor Wences, George Abbott, and George Burns.) To mark this event, the intersection of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles, California was named Bob Hope Square and his centennial was declared Bob Hope Day in 35 states. Hope spent the day privately in his Toluca Lake, Los Angeles home where he had lived since 1937. Even at 100, Hope was said to have maintained his self-deprecating sense of humor, quipping, "I'm so old, they've canceled my blood type."[cite this quote]
Death
Hope lived so long that he suffered premature obituaries on two separate occasions. In 1998 a prepared obituary by The Associated Press was inadvertently released on the Internet, prompting Hope's death to be announced in the US House of Representatives. In 2003 he was among several famous figures whose pre-written obituaries were published on CNN's website due to a lapse in password protection.
Beginning in 2000, Hope's health steadily declined and he was hospitalized several times before his death. In June 2000 he spent nearly a week in a California hospital after being hospitalized for gastrointestinal bleeding.[13] In August 2001, he spent close to two weeks in the hospital recovering from pneumonia.[14]
On July 27, 2003, Bob Hope died at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, at 9:28 p.m. According to one of Hope's daughters, when asked on his deathbed where he wanted to be buried, he told his wife, "Surprise me."[cite this quote] After his death, Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, confirmed that Hope had converted to Roman Catholicism years before he died and added that he had died a Catholic in good standing.[1] He was interred in the Bob Hope Memorial Garden at San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Los Angeles, where his mother is also buried. Bob Hope was 100 years old.
The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. has a wing funded by Dolores and Bob Hope in memory of his mother.[15] It is dedicated to a miracle in Pontmain, France.
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Thu 29 May, 2008 07:59 am
T. H. White
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born 29 May 1906(1906-05-29)
Bombay, India
Died 17 January 1964 (aged 57)
Piraeus, Athens
Occupation Writer
Genres Fantasy
Influences
Thomas Malory, J. R. R. Tolkien[1]
Influenced
Gregory Maguire, Ed McBain, Michael Moorcock, J. K. Rowling
Terence Hanbury White (29 May 1906 - 17 January 1964) was an English author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958.
Biography
White was born in Bombay, India, the son of Garrick Hansbury White, an Indian police superintendent, and Constance White.[2] White had a discordant childhood, with an alcoholic father and an emotionally frigid mother, and his parents separated when Terence was fourteen.[3][4] White went to Cheltenham College, a public school, and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by scholar and sometime-author L. J. Potts. Potts became a lifelong friend and correspondent, and White later referred to him as "the great literary influence in my life."[3] While at Queens' College, White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (without reading it),[5] and graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree in English.[2]
White then taught at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, for four years. In 1936 he published England Have My Bones, a well-received memoir about a year spent in England. The same year, he left Stowe and lived in a workman's cottage, where he wrote and "revert[ed] to a feral state", engaging in falconry, hunting, and fishing.[6][2] White also became interested in aviation, partly to conquer his fear of heights.[citation needed] White wrote to a friend that in autumn 1937, "I got desperate among my books and picked [Malory] up in lack of anything else. Then I was thrilled and astonished to find that (a) The thing was a perfect tragedy, with a beginning, a middle and an end implicit in the beginning and (b) the characters were real people with recognisable reactions which could be forecast[...] Anyway, I somehow started writing a book."[5] The novel, which White described as "a preface to Malory",[5] was titled The Sword in the Stone and told the story of the boyhood of King Arthur. White was also influenced by Freudian psychology and his lifelong involvement in naturalism. The Sword in the Stone was well-reviewed and was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1939.[2]
In February 1939 White moved to Doolistown, Ireland, where he lived out the international crisis and the Second World War itself as a de facto conscientious objector.[7] It was in Ireland that he wrote most of what would later become The Once and Future King; two sequels to The Sword and the Stone were published during this time: The Witch in the Wood (later retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness) in 1939, and The Ill-Made Knight in 1940. The version of The Sword in the Stone included in The Once and Future King differs in several respects from the earlier version. It is darker, and some critics prefer the earlier version. White's indirect experience of the war had a profound effect on these tales of King Arthur, which include commentaries on war and human nature in the form of a heroic narrative.
In 1946 White settled in Alderney, one of the smaller Channel Islands, where he lived for the rest of his life.[6] The same year, White published Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's book in which a young girl discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people in Swift's Gulliver's Travels) living near her house. In 1947, he published The Elephant and the Kangaroo, in which a repetition of Noah's Flood occurs in Ireland. In the early 1950s White published two non-fiction books: The Age of Scandal (1950), a collection of essays about 18th-century England, and The Goshawk (1951), an account of White's attempt to train a hawk in the traditional art of falconry. In 1954 White translated and edited The Book of Beasts, an English translation of a medieval bestiary from Latin.
In 1958 White completed the fourth book of The Once and Future King series, The Candle in the Wind, though it was first published with the other three parts and has never been published separately. The Broadway musical Camelot was based on The Once and Future King, as was the animated film The Sword in the Stone.
He died on 17 January 1964 aboard ship in Piraeus, Greece (Athens, Greece) of a heart ailment, en route to Alderney from a lecture tour in the United States.[2] In 1977 The Book of Merlyn, a conclusion to The Once and Future King series, was published posthumously.
Personal life
According to Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography, White was "a homosexual and a sado-masochist."[6] He came close to marrying several times but had no enduring romantic relationships, and wrote in his diaries that "It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them."[6] White was also an agnostic,[8] and towards the end of his life a heavy drinker.[3][9]
Influence
Science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock enjoyed White's The Once and Future King, and was especially influenced by the underpinnings of realism in his work.[10] Moorcock eventually engaged in a "wonderful correspondence" with White, and later recalled that "White [gave] me some very good advice on how to write".[10][11] J. K. Rowling has said that T. H. White's writing strongly influenced the Harry Potter books; several critics have compared Rowling's character Albus Dumbledore to White's absent-minded Merlyn,[12][13] and Rowling herself has described White's Wart as "Harry's spiritual ancestor."[14] Gregory Maguire was influenced by "White's ability to be intellectually broadminded, to be comic, to be poetic, and to be fantastic" in the writing of his 1995 novel Wicked,[15] and crime fiction writer Ed McBain also cited White as an influence.[16]
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Thu 29 May, 2008 08:07 am
Danny Elfman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Daniel Robert Elfman
May 29, 1953 (1953-05-29) (age 55)
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Spouse(s) First marriage: Unknown spouse - 2 children: Lola (born 1979) and Mali (born 1985, adopted); second marriage:Bridget Fonda (November 29, 2003 - present) 1 child
Awards won
Emmy Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Main Title Theme Music
2004 Desperate Housewives
Grammy Awards
Best Instrumental Composition
1989 Batman
Other Awards
Saturn Award for Best Music
2003 Spider Man
2000 Sleepy Hollow
1998 Men in Black
1997 Mars Attacks!
1994 The Nightmare Before Christmas
Daniel Robert Elfman (born May 29, 1953) is an American musician who is famous for composing scores and songs for Tim Burton's films, the "The Simpsons Theme" and leading the rock band Oingo Boingo as singer / songwriter from 1976 until its breakup in 1995, and has composed film scores extensively since 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and won a Grammy Award for Tim Burton's Batman and an Emmy Award for his Desperate Housewives theme. Elfman has also written themes for video games such as Fable.
Early career
Elfman was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Blossom (née Bernstein), a writer and teacher, and Milton Elfman, a teacher who was in the Air Force.[1] Elfman grew up in a racially mixed community in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, where he was known as 'the whitest white kid'.[2] He spent much of his time in the local movie theatre, adoring the music of such film composers as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman.
After dropping out of high school, he followed his brother Richard to France, where he played his violin on the street and performed with Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical theater group. Violin in tow, Elfman next journeyed to Africa where he traveled through Ghana, Mali, and Upper Volta, absorbing new musical styles, including the Ghanaian highlife genre which would eventually influence his own music. Elfman contracted malaria during his one-year stay and was often sick. Eventually he returned home to the United States, where his brother was forming a new musical theater group, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. The group performed the music for Richard's debut feature film, Forbidden Zone. Danny Elfman composed his first score for the film and played the role of Satan. By the time the movie was completed, The Mystic Knights had shortened their name to Oingo Boingo and become a recording and touring rock group.
Personal Life
In November of 2003, Elfman married actress Bridget Fonda in a private ceremony at Los Angeles' First Congressional Church, with Fonda's father, Peter Fonda, giving her away. The couple reportedly met while working on the film A Simple Plan. They have one son, Oliver, born January 2005.
Danny Elfman and Tim Burton
In 1985, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens invited him to write the score for their first feature film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Elfman was apprehensive at first because of his lack of formal training, but with orchestration assistance from Oingo Boingo guitarist and arranger Steve Bartek he achieved his goal of emulating the mood of such composers as Nino Rota and Bernard Herrmann.[3] He later described the first time he heard his music played by a full orchestra as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life[4][citation needed]. Elfman has spoken of the affinity he developed right away with Burton,[3] and he has gone on to score all but two of his major studio films (Ed Wood, which was scored by Howard Shore, and Sweeney Todd, an adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical for which music already existed).
To date Elfman has scored the following Burton films:
Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) - his first orchestral score.
Beetlejuice (1988)
Batman (1989) - his first large-scale action score.
Edward Scissorhands (1990) - his personal favorite of his own scores.[citation needed]
Batman Returns (1992)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) - in which he also performed the singing voice of the lead character (Jack Skellington) and two supporting roles (Barrel, one of Oogie Boogie's three henchmen, and The Clown with the Tearaway Face).
Mars Attacks! (1996)
Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Big Fish (2003)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) - in which he also provided the voices for the Oompa-Loompas in the musical numbers.
Corpse Bride (2005) - in which he also performed the role of Bonejangles.
Burton has said of Elfman: "We don't even have to talk about the music. We don't even have to intellectualize - which is good for both of us, we're both similar that way. We're very lucky to connect" (Breskin, 1997).
Musical influences
Elfman's film scores can be described as dark and brooding, lush and romantic, wild and manic - reflecting the many composers and styles which have influenced him over the years.[citation needed]
He recalls that the first time he became aware of film music was in his youth during a screening of The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951). The music was by Bernard Herrmann, and that, he has said, was where his love of film music began (Russell and Young, 2000). Elfman purposefully nodded towards Herrmann's The Day the Earth Stood Still score in Tim Burton's sci-fi spoof Mars Attacks!
Other film composers have also proven to be influential, such as Nino Rota and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the former in Elfman's playful music for Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the latter in his much grander work, Batman. Sometimes his music has a distinctly Russian feel, inspired by the likes of Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky's ballet music, while his frequent use of choirs reflects his love of choral music by the likes of Mozart and Carl Orff. Jazz and rock influences from his earlier career are evident in such films as Chicago and To Die For.
Criticism
According to Alex Ross of The New Yorker, Elfman's "rock origins and lack of classical training raised doubts at the start; some established composers considered him a 'hummer'?-Hollywood slang for a would-be composer who can't read music and relies on ghostwriters. (Charlie Chaplin was a hummer.)"[5]
After the release of Batman, Elfman reacted to comments in Keyboard Magazine wherein Micah Rubenstein conjectured that a rock musician like Elfman, not classically trained, probably didn't even write out the musical score to Batman. Speaking on behalf of "the many musicians, composers, and arrangers who lack formal education," Keyboard published an open letter by Elfman in March 1990. Elfman referred to Rubenstein's comments as a growing "musical elitism," stating he worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for a month and a half to write the Batman score, and called Rubenstein a "dumb ****" for supposing that Elfman didn't write down his scores: "...I actually wrote it down - I will not sit back passively and allow myself to be discredited for the work I did by an idiot who mistakenly thinks that I lazily hire people to do it for me, or that only a conservatory can produce a real film composer."[6]
And, as Alex Ross notes, Elfman has gone on to receive Academy Award nominations and other accolades for his work.[5]
Hearing damage
When asked during a 2007 phone-in interview on XETRA-FM if he ever had any notions of performing in an Oingo Boingo reunion, Elfman immediately rejected the idea and stated that in the last few years with the band he had begun to develop significant and irreversible hearing damage as a result of his continuous exposure to the high noise levels involved in performing in a rock band. He went on to say that he believes his hearing damage is partially due to a genetic predisposition to hearing loss, and that he will never return to the stage for fear of worsening the condition.
Serenada Schizophrana and concert works
Elfman has recently started working in the classical world, beginning with Serenada Schizophrana for the American Composers Orchestra. It was conducted by John Mauceri on its recording and by Steven Sloane at its premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York City on 23 February 2005. After its premiere, it was recorded in studio and released onto SACD on 3 October 2006. The meeting with Mauceri proved fruitful as the composer was encouraged then to write a new concert piece for Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Elfman composed an "overture to a nonexistent musical" and called the piece "The Overeager Overture."
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Thu 29 May, 2008 08:09 am
Annette Bening
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Annette Francine Bening
May 29, 1958 (1958-05-29) (age 50)
Topeka, Kansas, U.S.
Spouse(s) J. Steven White
Warren Beatty (1992-)
[show]Awards won
BAFTA Awards
Best Actress in a Leading Role
2000 American Beauty
Golden Globe Awards
Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
2004 Being Julia
Screen Actors Guild Awards
Best Cast - Motion Picture
1999 American Beauty
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
1999 American Beauty
Annette Francine Bening (born May 29, 1958) is a Golden Globe-, BAFTA- and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning American actress.
Biography
Early life
Bening was born in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of Shirley, a church singer and soloist, and Grant Bening, a sales training consultant and insurance salesman.[1][2] Her parents, natives of Iowa, were practicing Episcopalians and conservative Republicans.[3][4] Her sister and two brothers are Jane Bening (born 1953), Bradley Bening (born 1955) and Byron Bening (born 1957). The family moved to Wichita, Kansas, in 1959, where she spent her early childhood. In 1965, her father took a job with a company in San Diego, California, and they moved there. She began acting in junior high school, playing the lead in The Sound of Music. She studied drama at Patrick Henry High School.
She then spent a year working as a cook on a charter boat taking fishing parties out on the Pacific Ocean, and scuba diving for recreation. She attended San Diego Mesa College, then completed an academic degree in theatre arts at San Francisco State University. Bening joined the acting company at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco while studying acting as part of the Advanced Theatre Training Program. During this time she established herself as a formidable acting talent in roles like Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth.
Career
Bening moved to New York City, where she debuted off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre (McGinn-Cazale Theatre) in the role of 'Holly Dancer' in Tina Howe's widely acclaimed Coastal Disturbances (1987) opposite Tim Daly. However, despite the praise and recognition, it took some time for that success to translate to her film career. Her television debut was with the made-for-TV movie Manhunt for Claude Dallas (1986). Her first major role in a theatrical feature was in The Great Outdoors (1988) playing 'Kate Craig' opposite Dan Aykroyd and John Candy. Her next role was as the Marquise de Merteuil in Valmont (1989) opposite Colin Firth.
Bening's next major feature, Stephen Frears's The Grifters (1990) starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack, met with critical acclaim. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for The Grifters. She followed that with her appearance in Bugsy. Bening was offered the role as Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992), but after she became pregnant, the role went to Michelle Pfeiffer. Bening was paid $3 million to play the role of 'Elise Kraft/Sharon Bridger' in The Siege (1998) co-starring Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis. Her next role, in the 1999 film American Beauty, would give her the highest-profile role of her career thus far. Bening played a real-estate agent in three different movies: Regarding Henry, American Beauty, and What Planet Are You From?. She has appeared in three different Mike Nichols' movies: Postcards From The Edge, Regarding Henry, and What Planet Are You From?
She was originally cast as the mother in Disney's Freaky Friday, but dropped out. She replaced Julianne Moore in her most recent appearance, Running with Scissors, playing Deirdre Burroughs in the film adaptation of the Augusten Burroughs book. On December 9, 2006, Bening hosted Saturday Night Live with musical guests Gwen Stefani and Akon.
Bening is a council member for the California Arts Council.
Personal life
In 1985, she and her first husband, choreographer J. Steven White, moved to Denver, Colorado, to work at the Shakespeare Festival[5] in Boulder, Colorado. They separated the following year.
She and Warren Beatty met on the set of Bugsy (1991), in which she played Virginia Hill, and the two began a secret romance. They married in 1992. She and Beatty live in Los Angeles with their four children, Kathlyn Elizabeth Beatty (born January 8, 1992 in Los Angeles County, California), Benjamin Maclean Beatty (born August 23, 1994 in Los Angeles County, California), Isabel Ira Ashley Beatty (born 1996) and Ella Corinne Beatty (born 2000). Her marriage to Beatty provided an additional push to her career, simply because of the large amount of tabloid publicity surrounding the romance and marriage; Beatty had been a life-long "most eligible bachelor" and was considered a playboy, before he met Bening.
She is a student of Iyengar Yoga.
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Thu 29 May, 2008 08:11 am
Melissa Etheridge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Birth name Melissa Lou Etheridge
Born May 29, 1961 (1961-05-29) (age 47)
Origin Leavenworth, Kansas
Genre(s) Rock
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, musician, activist
Instrument(s) Vocals, guitar, piano
Years active 1988-present
Label(s) Island Records
Website MelissaEtheridge.com
Melissa Lou Etheridge (born May 29, 1961, in Leavenworth, Kansas) is an Academy Award-winning and two-time Grammy Award-winning American rock singer-songwriter and musician.
Career
In 1982, Etheridge moved from Leavenworth, Kansas to Los Angeles to break into the music business. She got some small gigs performing at The Candy Store on the Sunset Strip, as well as two lesbian bars, the Executive Suite in Long Beach and Vermie's in Pasadena. Some of her early fans from Vermie's gave her demo tape to Bill Leopold, a friend's husband who worked in the music business. Etheridge auditioned for Leopold, who was so impressed that he offered to represent her on the spot.
As Etheridge continued performing in lesbian bars in Los Angeles, Leopold arranged for music executives to come see her play. Eventually, she caught the attention of A&M Records, who hired her as a staff songwriter. For two years, Etheridge wrote music for A&M and many of her songs were recorded by mainstream artists. In 1985, Etheridge sent her demo to Olivia Records, a lesbian record label, but was ultimately rejected. She saved the rejection letter, signed by "the women of Olivia," which was later featured in Intimate Portrait (TV series), the Lifetime Television documentary of her life.
In 1986, Etheridge was signed by Island Records, but her first album was rejected by the label as being too polished and glossy. Given four days in the studio to re-record, she cut ten tracks which was released as her eponymous debut album.
Etheridge has released ten albums in her career. Three of them have gone multi-platinum: Melissa Etheridge (1988), Yes I Am (1993) and Your Little Secret (1995). Two others went platinum and two more gold.
Etheridge is a Bruce Springsteen fan, and she has covered his songs "Thunder Road" and "Born to Run" during live shows. She is also a fan of the Dave Matthews Band and has expressed interest in collaborating with them.
In October 2004, Melissa Etheridge was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the 2005 Grammy Awards, she made a return to the stage and, although bald from chemotherapy, performed a tribute to Janis Joplin with the song Piece of My Heart. Etheridge was praised for her performance, which was considered one of the highlights of the show. Etheridge's bravery was lauded in song in India.Arie's "I Am Not My Hair."[1]
On September 10, 2005, Etheridge participated in ReAct Now: Music & Relief, a telethon in support for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. ReAct Now: Music & Relief, part of an ongoing effort by MTV, VH1, CMT, seeks to raise funds for the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and America's Second Harvest. Etheridge introduced a new song specially written for the occasion called "Four Days." The a cappella song included themes and images that were on the news during the aftermath of the hurricane. Other charities she supports include the Dream Foundation and Love Our Children USA.
On November 15, 2005, Etheridge appeared on the Tonight Show to perform her song "I Run For Life", which references her own fight with breast cancer and her determination to overcome it, as well as encourages other breast cancer survivors and their families. After her performance, Jay Leno told her, "Thanks for being a fighter, kiddo."
Etheridge wrote the song "I Need To Wake Up" for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The song was released only on the enhanced version of her greatest hits album, The Road Less Traveled.[2][3]
On 7 July 2007 Etheridge performed at Giants Stadium at the American leg of Live Earth. Etheridge performed the songs "Imagine That" and "What Happens Tomorrow" from The Awakening, Etheridge's tenth album, released on September 25, 2007, as well as the song "I Need To Wake Up" before introducing Al Gore. On December 11 2007, she performed on the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway together with a variety of artists, which was broadcast live to over 100 countries.[4]
Awards
At the 20th Annual Juno Awards in 1990, Etheridge won International Entertainer of the Year. [5]
Etheridge has won the Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance twice in her career, for the songs "Ain't It Heavy" in 1992, and "Come to My Window" in 1994.[6]
In 2001 she won the Gibson Guitar Award for Best Rock Guitarist: Female. [7]
In 2006 at the 17th Annual GLAAD Media Awards, Etheridge received GLAAD's Stephen F. Kolzak Award, honoring openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender media professionals who have made a significant difference in promoting equal rights.[8]
On February 25, 2007, Etheridge received the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "I Need to Wake Up", the theme song to the Al Gore-moderated, Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The award was presented by Queen Latifah and John Travolta.
Personal life
Etheridge is famous as a gay rights activist, having come out publicly as a lesbian in January 1993 at the Triangle Ball, a gay/lesbian celebration of President Bill Clinton's first inauguration. She is also a committed advocate for environmental issues and in 2006, she toured the US and Canada using biodiesel.[9]
Etheridge had a long-term partnership with Julie Cypher, which made headlines. During this partnership, Cypher gave birth to two children, Bailey Jean, born February 1997, and Beckett, born November 1998, fathered by sperm donor David Crosby.
In 2000, Cypher began to reconsider her sexuality and on September 19, 2000, Etheridge and Cypher announced they were separating. In 2001, Etheridge documented her breakup with Cypher and other experiences in her memoir The Truth Is... My Life in Love and Music. In the book, Etheridge recounts that she was molested by her sister, Jennifer, over five years as a child, and mentions an alleged affair Cypher had with k.d. lang.
After splitting from Cypher, Etheridge went on to exchange vows in a 2003 commitment ceremony with actress Tammy Lynn Michaels.
In October 2004, Melissa Etheridge was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent chemotherapy.
In October 2005, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Etheridge appeared on Dateline NBC with Michaels to discuss her struggle with cancer. By the time of the interview, Etheridge's hair had grown back after being lost during chemotherapy. She said that her partner had been very supportive during her illness. Etheridge also discussed using medicinal marijuana while she was receiving the chemotherapy. [10] She said that the drug improved her mood and increased her appetite. Chemotherapy patients often have difficulty eating because of severe nausea.
In April 2006, Etheridge and Michaels announced that Michaels was pregnant with twins via an anonymous sperm donor. Michaels gave birth to a son, Miller Steven, and a daughter, Johnnie Rose, on October 17, 2006.
0 Replies
bobsmythhawk
1
Reply
Thu 29 May, 2008 08:13 am
Many years ago, a fisherman's wife blessed her husband with twin sons. They loved the children very much, but couldn't think of what to name their children. Finally, after several days, the fisherman said, "Let's not decide on names right now. If we wait a little while, the names will simply occur to us."
After several weeks had passed, the fisherman and his wife noticed a peculiar fact. When left alone, one of the boys would also turn towards the sea, while the other boy would face inland. It didn't matter which way the parents positioned the children, the same child always faced the same direction. "Let's call the boys Towards and Away," suggested the fisherman. His wife agreed, and from that point on, the boys were simply known as Towards and Away.
The years passed and the lads grew tall and strong. The day came when the aging fisherman said to his sons, "Boys, it is time that learned how to make a living from the sea." They provisioned their ship, said their goodbyes, and set sail for a three month voyage.
The three months passed quickly for the fisherman's wife, yet the ship had not returned. Another three months passed, and still no ship. Three whole years passed before the greiving woman saw a lone man walking towards her house. She recognized him as her husband. "My goodness! What has happened to my darling boys?" she cried.
The ragged fisherman began to tell his story: "We were just barely one whole day out to see when Towards hooked into a great fish. Towards fought long and hard, but the fish was more than his equal. For a whole week they wrestled upon the waves without either of them letting up. Yet eventually the great fish started to win the battle, and Towards was pulled over the side of our ship. He was swallowed whole, and we never saw either of them again."
"Oh dear, that must have been terrible! What a huge fish that must of been!"
"Yes, it was, but you should have seen the one that got Away...."
0 Replies
Letty
1
Reply
Thu 29 May, 2008 08:53 am
Hmmm, really a big surprise about T.E. White.
Having some problems with our studio equipment, so here is one from the politically incorrect Miss Lillie.
xx
