Word: alistair
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...Piano" begins, Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) has become the mail-order bride of Alistair Stewart (Sam Neill), a farmer in the remote bush of nineteenth century New Zealand whom she has never met. Together with her nine-year-old daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) and her piano, Ada makes the long voyage by sea from Scotland to New Zealand. When Stewart arrives to meet her, he refuses to transport her piano to their house, leaving it on the beach...
TELEVISION: Filling Alistair Cooke's Armchair...
...news came as a cultural shock. After nearly 22 years and some 800 programs, during which he had occupied 65 different armchairs in clubby library sets, Alistair Cooke, 84, was retiring as host of Masterpiece Theatre. For millions of PBS viewers, Cooke was like the guest they always hoped to meet at a party -- charming, informed but never overbearing as he steered them urbanely through such series as Upstairs, Downstairs, I, Claudius and The Jewel in the Crown, discoursing on Edwardian manners, the English public school or life in the sunlit empire...
...rumor mill -- stage actors, a few Hollywood eminences, novelist John Updike. But the winner turned out to be a dark horse: Pulitzer-prizewinning memoirist and New York Times columnist Russell Baker, 68, who originally declined the offer by saying, "I don't want to be the man who succeeds Alistair Cooke. I want to be the man who succeeds the man who succeeds Alistair Cooke." Baker was won over by the zeal of Christopher Lydon, a newscaster at Boston's WGBH, the station that produces Masterpiece Theatre. Lydon, now a candidate for mayor of Boston, considered the aw-shucks Baker...
Cooke had an uncanny knack for seeming to settle into the viewer's living room. He credited it to the fact that he was one of the few TV performers to memorize his lines and speak without a TelePrompTer. Baker will stick with the TelePrompTer, thank you. "Alistair was amazing because he appeared so spontaneous," he says. "I'm so uneasy now, I just couldn...