Word: protean
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Cagney's pugnacious, straight-from-the-shoulder style and his genuine modesty ("I was always a journeyman actor," he once said) belied both his professionalism and his artistic versatility. He could portray protean Actor Lon Chaney in the film biography Man of a Thousand Faces as easily as the irascible ship's captain in Mister Roberts. His performance as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream inspired Director Max Reinhardt to label him the "best actor in Hollywood." White Heat contains a typical bit of Cagney , business, less a trick than a nuance. He had the killer Cody Jarrett...
Thomas Keneally, 50, is an Australian novelist (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), playwright (Bullie's House), screenwriter (Silver City) and movie actor (The Devil's Playground). The subjects of his nearly 20 books are equally protean: Joan of Arc, the U.S. Civil War battle at Antietam, World War I armistice negotiations, exploration in Antarctica. His 1982 volume, Schindler's List, set off a literary tempest: although it told of an actual German businessman who saved some 1,300 Jews from the Nazis, the book was awarded Britain's prestigious Booker McConnell prize for fiction, eligible apparently because Keneally used novelistic...
...Mendelssohn had the emotional range to evoke the craggy, forbidding atmosphere of the Hebrides in his "Fingal's Cave" Overture, summon up the combative spirit of the Scottish highlands in his Third Symphony and capture the religious fervor of Lutheranism in the "Reformation" Symphony. His was a winning, unaffected, protean talent that, like Mozart's or Schubert's, was snuffed out too early by his death...
...Picassos the artist had hoarded for himself. In addition, he was given paintings from Picasso's private collection, by such artists as Matisse, Renoir and Miro. As a result of Bozo's freedom to make his own selections, the museum admirably represents almost all major phases of a protean career. Yet there are a few gaps. Picasso was a Spaniard, and the Picasso Museum in Barcelona has most of his very early works. Madrid has the Guernica, which found refuge in the Museum of Modern Art during Francisco Franco's 40 years in power; London has the Three Dancers...
...Novelist Stephen King's Overdrive, now filming in North Carolina. The story of everyday machines turning against their human masters marks the directorial debut of King, 37, who quickly learned that filmmaking "is not like writing. You always have a lot of people in your face here." Still, the protean horrorsmith would not have missed a chance to go behind the camera. After all, eleven of his books have been brought to the screen by others. "I had to do this at least once," he says. "This movie is a kind of mechanical Birds. People have been telling...