Word: icon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seemed to know, maybe before we did, that there was more to playing the part than looking it. She began as a feminine icon, not a feminist one, abiding by history's demands: producing heirs, cutting ribbons, walking a conspicuous three paces behind the times. A few years and a thousand talk shows later, she became the Princess Victim, bulimic, suicidal, betrayed by a caddish paramour with a tell-all book, trapped in a loveless marriage. But that image too was fleeting, replaced by a very '90s portrait of a shrewd operator, better at public relations than all the palace...
...adopted son of working-class parents, Jobs became a millionaire by age 25, an American icon by age 30 and corporate history the same year, all thanks to Apple. It would be easy to read his return--12 years after he was booted by the board--as a moment of sweet revenge. But for Jobs, who grew up idolizing the Hewlett-Packard ideal of an egalitarian workplace where ideas came before hierarchy, returning to Apple is something akin to rescuing a son before he loses himself to booze and bad company. There has been a literal deathwatch on Apple...
Although many computer wonks still think Apple is too tempting for Jobs to resist, the truth is that he's been much better at building new companies than running existing ones. Pixar, his latest love, is taking off. Eleven years ago, he clicked his mouse on the Hollywood icon and bought Pixar from Star Wars director George Lucas. He has dumped upwards of $55 million of his own money into the venture and fairly burbles with that famed charisma over his new mission: marrying Silicon Valley technology to Hollywood's creative genius. His studio became the first--besides Disney...
...from Cupertino, Calif. Still, it must be a comedown for Jobs and his old pals to slip from visionary champions to fringy cultists in a mere decade. Oh, well. As shooting stars from Madonna to Newt Gingrich could tell you, that's the coolest thing about being a cultural icon: by the time the market goes south on you, you've already changed the world...
...life was as extreme as the experimental fiction he pioneered, involving alcohol, heroin, homosexuality, a celebrated obscenity trial in Boston and, in 1951, his accidental killing of his wife while shooting a glass off the top of her head. In his last years, he became a recurring pop icon, with cameos in movies and even a Nike...