Word: polymath
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...everyone agreed, one of the planet's best dinner companions. At once sardonic and curiously boyish, he was both autodidact and polymath--his curiosity and his information equally boundless. To a film critic he might recommend some recondite movie that he had caught but that the latter had carelessly missed. To a filmmaker desperately behind schedule, he might offer to share his state-of-the-art editing suite to speed things up. To a harried studio executive, he might provide an evening of baseball nostalgia, centered on the New York Yankees, beloved since Kubrick's Bronx boyhood. Maybe Warren Beatty...
DIED. BOB MERRILL, 77, songwriting polymath whose hits ranged from How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? to Barbra Streisand's signature People; in Los Angeles. Merrill started his career writing such airy novelties for Tin Pan Alley as If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake and Mambo Italiano. He racked up 18 Top 10 hits between 1949 and 1956. His success continued on Broadway where he wrote the lyrics for Funny Girl and Carnival, among many others. Merrill also wrote screenplays, including one for Mahogany, starring Diana Ross...
...small role Macpherson is a mere cartoon character (her name in the film: Mickey Morse). But Bart the grizzly, who starred in 1989's The Bear, deserves a Best Supporting Animal award for his ferocious work. Baldwin is persuasive in his familiar persona, the cagey sleazebag. And as the polymath plutocrat, Hopkins manages to make erudition sexy; a library intelligence and a steely intellect make him Baldwin's ideal adversary. The Edge merits a modest cheer as an action film that celebrates not brute force but survival of the smartest...
...slow day sportswriters could depend on the polymath Berg to fill a column. "More profiles of Berg were published than any other journeyman ballplayer in history," writes Dawidoff. But he will be best remembered as the spy who took rain checks. An OSS operative during World War II, Berg traveled widely, lived well and managed to be where trouble wasn't. In 1944 he was at a conference in peaceful Switzerland to hear a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel prizewinning physicist who headed Hitler's atom-bomb project. Berg's orders were to shoot the scientist if it became...
...lasted a little longer in a life that was lived harder and faster than most (mood: appassionato; tempo: allegro con brio), Leonard Bernstein would have turned 75 this week. But the polymath pianist, conductor, composer, television personality, Harvard man, Broadway baby and quintessential New Yorker died in 1990, leaving a hole in the fabric of American musical life that many have found irreparable. In the three years since Bernstein's death, sales of his records have doubled, his compositions have started to win greater respect, and his legend has waxed. It's almost as if the great man had never...