Word: personae
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ANGELES: Phil Hartman was a personality without a story, a successful "Saturday Night Live" graduate without a Belushi legend or a pile of lurid Farley stories. Hartman did impressions; he was a voice man; he perfected the persona of the likable jerk -- but he never really captured your imagination. You never wondered what he did at home...
...quickly left his skeptical parents behind to launch a career based on iron self-confidence. In the '40s, married to his doting first wife Nancy, he was the heartthrob balladeer who sang I'll Be Seeing You to World War II G.I.s and their sweethearts. In the '50s, the persona went to war with the man. Sinatra at ballad tempo was the soul-sick, lovelorn, solitary man who closes down a midtown saloon. Up-tempo, and increasingly in his life, he was the unapologetic and (some said) unconscionable swinger, the ring-a-ding ringmaster of a million all-night parties...
Amos, 34, has always been tough to figure. In 1992, when she entered the national music scene, her intensely personal style of piano rock was derided in some alternative-rock circles as precious. Today her brazen sexual persona seems a bit oversize to fit in with the Lilith Fair set ("I like a little testosterone," she says, explaining why she won't play the all-female Lilith scene). Still, she's found her own platinum niche. Her debut album, Little Earthquakes (1992), which features songs about sexual awakening, sold more than a million copies; her last, Boys for Pele...
...best self: his comfort in clapping to the beat of tribal music, the sparkle in his eyes as he reached out to people in the crowds. Dressed in a dark suit among a gathering of Africa's new leaders at Entebbe in Uganda, he conveyed the dignified persona of the world's unchallenged leader--or top CEO. Stripped to shirtsleeves, he exhibited his powerful empathy as he talked with Venuste Karasira, who lost his hand during a massacre of nearly 4,000 Rwandans...
...avoiding the harsh criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups, and providing spin control on the gossip newspapers that were rapidly taking on an alarming independence. Actors who were rumored to be homosexual were ordered to get married and give the public what it wanted: a persona who fit the on-screen image of an acceptably "manly" man or "feminine" woman. Most actors acquiesced, to one degree or another. When Haines told MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, in a scene that has become legend, that he was already married--to his lover, Jimmie Shields--he found...