Word: diva
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...conducted opera, for New York City in 1922, his U.S. career did not bloom until eight years later when he was hired to lead the CBS symphony orchestra on radio's Chesterfield Hour. After making the program a hit, he added to his celebrity by marrying Opera Diva Lily Pons in 1938 (they divorced in 1958) and by cutting more than 200 discs with Columbia (life time record sales: 52 million). He commissioned works by Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and other Americans that became repertory standards. And while he would outrage purists by making a medley of a Tchaikovsky...
...even laughs at her own pretensions to stardom. She announces that she is "a screen star, in the tradition of Shirley Temple, Liv Ullmann and Miss Piggy." When the audience good-naturedly boos one of her jokes, she exclaims: "The crowd turns on the diva. [Pause] But the diva doesn't care!" Her singing, much of it done with three saucy young women called the Harlettes, is no threat to Streisand, or even Minnelli. But it bursts with feeling-almost too much for mere lyrics to express...
Bertolucci makes incest deadly by simply skirting the whole issue for most of the film. Caterina (Jill Clayburgh) is an American diva with an obnoxious, teen-aged son (Matthew Barry) and a pathetic, ancient husband who's efficiently knocked off in the opening sequence. Dad dead, it's off to sunny Italy for Caterina and Joey. The obligatory opening night sequence is filled with lots of American extras running about trying to look Italian by wildly gesticulating and screaming 'Brava, Brava.' Bertolucci also drags out an antiquated collection of cliches about opera and its fans. His women parade about...
...acting fully matches the wooden level of the screenplay. Why did Jill Clayburgh ever attempt this part? As Erica Benton she was delightful. As a high-powered diva, she's positively grotesque. Those station-wagonned suburban looks don't help and that fabulously skinny body certainly doesn't look appropriate. Who has ever seen or heard an anorexic Joan Sutherland or Beverly Sills? Clayburgh careens about the screen, wildly overacting. Trying so damn hard, Clayburgh becomes positively painful to watch. Matthew Barry reveals some vestiges of talent but when delivering lines like "I must go; she awaits...
...week trouper in working men's clubs and in her heyday became the world's highest-paid star; in Capri, Italy. Born Grace Stansfield in the mill town of Rochdale, she sang at age eight in the local cinema. Though never a beauty and hardly a diva, she set music halls roaring in the '20s with her cheeky Lancastrian banter, stouthearted warbling and flea-scratching, "low-but-clean" brand of clowning. Her 1931 film debut in Sally in Our Alley gave her a theme song, Sally, and endeared her to all England as "Our Gracie." During World...