Word: dinesen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...presents Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Knopf; 592 pages; $30), with both an embarrassment of riches and a Sisyphean task. Despite working on this book for nine years, Thurman, who won a National Book Award in 1983 for her biography of Isak Dinesen (and has been nominated again for this book), acknowledges that Colette remains an elusive figure, an author who hid herself in plain sight...
...they are cheaper both to launch and to keep running, and every season brings one. Broadway last week had three: Tracey Ullman impersonating '50s stage mother Florence Aadland in a tour de force that has just closed; Jackie Mason opining about almost everything; and Julie Harris portraying writer Isak Dinesen. Off-Broadway, Eileen Atkins appears as Virginia Woolf. Artistically, these shows recall the theater's primal origins in storytelling. At best they offer unexcelled emotional intimacy between actor and audience. At worst they lack dramatic movement and reveal character in the most obvious way: by declaiming, instead of through...
Harris' welcome return to Broadway -- where she has won a record five Tony Awards -- depicts Dinesen in her mid-70s, back in the house near Copenhagen where she was born. Its real subject is her 18 years as one man's wife and another's mistress on a farm near Nairobi, where the writer says she arrived a Dane and left a Masai. These events shaped the scenic, Oscar-winning Out of Africa, and playgoers who saw the movie may find this new version drably lacking in sense of place. Those who didn't, and who also haven't read...
...trouble starts with the very idea of the piece. Harris, 65, who commissioned it, chose a period of Dinesen's life suited to her own age. That sets her the daunting task of making audiences feel as urgent the joys and sorrows of decades ago. If any actress could make this work, Julie Harris could...
...Africa (1985). Sydney Pollack's romantic adventure movie showed that Hollywood could still make 'em like it used to, with as much power and more subtlety. Meryl Streep had her most popular role as author Isak Dinesen, her restless heart liberated by the untamed beauty of Kenya...