Word: shakespearean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...doesn't look like a Shakespearean matinee idol, this thin-lipped Irishman with puddingy skin and a huge head piked like a pumpkin on his stocky frame. He lacks conventional star magnetism: the athletic abandon, the flaming sexuality, the audacity of interpretation that risks derision to achieve greatness. Expect no swooning teenagers to queue at his stage door, no desperate fan to write him suicide notes. Anyway, he would reject that form of hero worship, for his personality radiates shopkeeper common sense. He is a model of Thatcherite initiative in a British arts scene of radical distemper...
...earthquake is simply an unannounced convulsion. It is nature performing a Shakespearean tragedy that begins absurdly in the fifth act: after 15 seconds, Hamlet and the others lie dying, the stage is covered with blood and debris. For many years one may have lived on top of the San Andreas fault and made doomy jokes about it; it is like having a violent beast in the basement, knowing that one day it may burst up through the living-room floor. But there is no preparation for the moment. Only certain animals feel premonitory vibrations undetectable to humans. They grow skittish...
...some tense moments with the former President. But she does not regret the experience (she and Nixon still correspond regularly): "I knew that being out there with him was going to be a seminar the likes of which one could never attend. I had a real sense of the Shakespearean, dark history that I was going to be a minor character...
...role in that Shakespearean drama caused something of an uproar at CBS, when, shortly after leaving Nixon in 1978, she was given a reporter's job by Washington bureau chief William Small. Several correspondents, including Rather, openly expressed opposition to her hiring. "Conversations would stop as I entered the room," she recalls...
...minds of theatergoers. Brilliance, for once, had its rewards. As critic Kenneth Tynan proclaimed in 1966, "Laurence Olivier at his best is what everyone has always meant by the phrase 'a great actor.' " Director, producer, prime mover of Britain's National Theater, embodier of the most vital Shakespearean heroes, Olivier at his death last week at 82 held undisputed claim to yet another title: the 20th century's definitive man of the theater...