Word: matriarchal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...drug war began bizarrely when 31-year-old Refugio Reyes Pruneda gunned down a Mexican federal police agent and his aide in a Nuevo Laredo restaurant. Simona Pruneda de Reyes, the 72-year-old matriarch of the clan, reacted sharply to the unwanted publicity; with the help of another son, she tied Refugio's arms and legs to stakes driven into the earth of their farmyard, then left him there for two days in temperatures that often rose above...
...innocence or heroism in Hardwick's eyes. She complies unconsciously in her own downfall. Hester Prynne, too, is merely a symbolic figure, and she persists marble-like, from the moment she leaves prison--"the place where radicals are made"--by becoming the epitome of the omnipotent New England matriarch, a self-reliant Puritan. Like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, she emerges the stronger in the contest of seduction and betrayal. Tess, "nature's noble woman," shows an earthy complicity in her own seduction; as an unlikely sort of peasant-aristocrat, she floats between opposite poles of believable human characterization...
Died. May Craig, 83, matriarch of the Irish theater; in Dublin. In 1907 Craig appeared in the first performance of J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, at Dublin's Abbey Theater. By the standards of the time, the play was considered risque and derogatory to Irish society; the controversy escalated to street riots. Both Craig and the Abbey survived the dispute. She cultivated an American audience during six U.S. tours, and remained a trouper for more than 60 years...
...Second Mrs. Tanqueray in 1922, she managed London's Playhouse Theater. Planning to spend three weeks in Hollywood making Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 melodrama Rebecca, she remained for nearly three decades, playing in such movie classics as Now, Voyager and Separate Tables. Then she became the matriarch of a mob of high-class swindlers on the NBC comedy series The Rogues, cultivating yet another generation of fans during the mid-'60s. Her lifelong interest in the theater was reflected in her recent letter to TIME damning the play Jesus Christ Superstar: "Is there no Christianity left...
Ultimately, Burgess is the only admirable figure of the piece. Marion is revealed as a coquette, unable to resolve her social obligations-and her passionate urges. Leo is caught in the midst of Maudsley cruelty, is used by the matriarch to reveal Marion's 'sin', and is shattered by the experience. He is revealed in the end as a drained man, left forever in a state of adolescent ataxia...