Word: aristocrats
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's 1988 novel, The Remains of the Day, a drama so delicate that it touches the reader deeply without applying the pressure of sentiment. The story runs on parallel tracks: the years before World War II, when Stevens worked for his beloved Lord Darlington, an aristocrat who falls into an alliance with the Nazis; and the late '50s, when ! Stevens seeks out Miss Kenton in hopes she will return as housekeeper and, perhaps, something more. In his own ornate, unknowing words, Stevens condemns himself as the English version of a "good German": a man who disappointed...
...heroine is Ellen Olenska, May's cousin, now separated from her European aristocrat husband and thus the subject of purring rumor from the town's smooth hypocrites. As the radiantly giddy May seems a child to Newland, so he feels like a boy in Ellen's presence. The two fall in furtive love. But it is not falling so much as tiptoeing in the dark. Once he kisses her slipper; later he unbuttons her glove and kisses her wrist, then her mouth, which opens more in anguish than in lust. Guilt is the barrier between their lips. And both could...
...chess education of this bantam Rocky. It has Josh learning almost equally from Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley) and a kindly street hustler (Laurence Fishburne). In fact, Pandolfini was the boy's main teacher. Kingsley does have a charismatic gravity and the carriage of -- Fred Waitzkin's phrase -- "a ruined aristocrat." In portraying a teacher whom Josh refers to as "a great friend, a wonderful man," Kingsley also has a touch of the bullying pedant in him, a dab of Wackford Squeers. "I was just never that mean," says Pandolfini, a famous soft touch. "I hope not, anyhow...
...person Anna Deavere Smith is a tall, slender, gorgeous black woman with an aristocrat's features, a dancer's grace and a Stanford drama professor's vocabulary. Onstage she is a disabled old Korean man, a white male Hollywood talent agent, a Panamanian immigrant mother, a teenage black gang member, a macho Mexican sculptor and 21 other people whose lives were forever changed by the 1992 Los Angeles riots. With a minimum of costumes and props she can make herself tall, short, pudgy, burly. If the person she is enacting speaks Spanish or Korean, so does she. This kind...
...rollicking contempt for General Motors (and for humanity) in Pets or Meat. The gem is A Sense of History, directed by Mike Leigh. Jim Broadbent, who wrote this deft monologue, plays a squire of Churchillian mien and Sweeney Todd meanness. Not since Browning's My Last Duchess has an aristocrat confessed his crimes with such self-lacerating...