Word: lear
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Louis Calhern (real name: Carl Henry Vogt), 61, tall (6 ft. 3 in.), topflight. Brooklyn-born character actor of stage (King Lear) and screen (The Magnificent Yankee, Julius Caesar); of a heart attack, while on location with the M-G-M company of The Teahouse of the August Moon; in Nara, Japan...
Oedipus is to Greek mythology very much what King Lear is to British mythology. In the current show we see the last hours of the self-blinded and aged King in exile. This play lacks the searing impact of Oedipus Rex, but exhibits instead a glowing mellowness and profound restraint. It is the wisdom of old age--the old age of both the King and the dramatist. They both are telling us that man is a prey to Fate, which he cannot control but should learn to accept...
...also obviously an actor of considerable experience. He gives a virtuosic performance as Oedipus, who dominates all the scenes of the play. With a sonorous and resonant voice, he conveys to perfection the character of a man who is physically helpless but spiritually strong; a man who, like King Lear, proclaims himself "more sinn'd against than sinning;" a man who, although having committed incest and parricide, is not morally guilty, and arrives at a wiser view of sin in which his past deeds are not crimes but sorrows. The denunciatory "kakon kakiste" speech to Oedipus' wayward son Polyneices...
...Northwestern University's mammoth McGaw Fieldhouse last week, 11,000 fans got a lively demonstration of the difference between the simple scoring of points and the winning of basketball games. In one round, Temple University's Hal "King" Lear set a single game record of 48 points, but in the end his team was able to place only third in the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament. In the big game, San Francisco's incomparable Bill Russell, while lazily turning in 26 points against Iowa, spent most of his time dancing in the air like a joyous...
Particularly challenging is Othello, perhaps Shakspere's finest play and certainly his greatest Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear). For all its length, Othello lacks the usual extraneous trappings and non-essentials; yet Welles has come up with a film exactly 90 minutes long. Obviously this required extensive cutting of the original; and Welles fully realized the impossibility of trying simply to photograph a stage production of the play. The result is not Shakspere's Othello, but Welles' adaptation and interpretation of the Othello tale using Shakspere...