Word: neil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is also a fair amount of drama behind him, the sort that did not make it to the big screen. Three winters ago, Diamond collapsed onstage during a concert. Doctors diagnosed a tumor on the spinal cord, and Neil endured a twelve-hour operation and three months in a wheelchair, uncertain whether he would ever walk again...
...drama and high sentiments of The Jazz Singer may be only a glossy reflection of Diamond's life and sometimes troubled times. But the movie does pull off at least one tricky proposition: it finally and snugly tucks Neil Diamond inside a tradition. He is revealed as a rouser, a showman, a kind of bandmaster of the American mainstream. Like Jolson's, even Diamond's slickest movements seem sincere. The stuff may be corny, but it's never prefab. Neil leans into the Kol Nidre as if it were a sacred version of his sound-track...
...expected serious critics wouldn't like it. It is not an art movie. It is a modern-day Hollywood musical." Well, as Neil's high school English teacher might have told him back home in Brooklyn, one of those modifiers is inappropriate. The only thing "modern day" about Diamond's Jazz Singer is the setting and the overstuffed musical orchestration. All the rest, from story (nice Jewish boy brings down paternal wrath by forsaking tradition and trying to make it big in show biz) to score (love songs, fun songs, even marching songs), is stubbornly vintage. Diamond...
...Neil had to fight to "tell the traditional story. One studio wanted to take some of the 'old-fashionedness' out of it. They tried to make the father a college professor instead of a cantor." Doing right by the source may in fact have undone the remake, which seems like a slightly fragile pop legend propped up-and perhaps overwhelmed-by a Broadway-style score that sends up a great salvo in the opening notes and goes out with all guns blazing...
...insidiously catchy You Baby. Diamond says, "It wasn't until I began to sing my own songs that I had real success." He married young, like Jess, and like him divorced his Jewish wife to start a new life, as they say in the movies, outside the faith. Neil and the former Marcia Murphey of Columbus have two sons, Jesse, 10, and Micah, 3, and homes in Malibu and Beverly Hills. "It's only in the past ten years that I have been making large salaries," Neil says. "I have a couple of holding corporations behind...