Word: sicklies
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...contrast between two lives badly lived and two not lived at all, and a glorious opportunity, on the stars' part, for virtuoso acting. Actor Portman changes as brilliantly from an enraged but powerless bull to a neatly clipped but bleating, lamb as does Actress Leighton from a hard, sick, glossy siren to a sick, quivering dowd. And, as staged by Peter Glenville, both productions are consistently adroit theater, full of gaudy character acting and authoritative ensemble playing...
...spindly weakness behind what Coleridge called Richard's "wordy courage." But Actor Neville failed to deepen or sustain the role. It was not just that by wallowing in self-pity he never seemed pitiful; that might argue severity of purpose in an actor. Unhappily, he never seemed sick, or contemptible, or tragic either. He merely seemed elaborate. He turned rhetoric into verbosity and Richard's self-dramatizations into theatrics...
...accepted her role, using and exploring it for the enrichment of her art. The bisexuality that she felt to be in every artist is reflected in her work by her manly style and womanly sensitivity. The brotherhood of man, sorrow over death, the cruelty of war, care of the sick--these great humanitarian sentiments were the themes of her work. She wasn't mawkish: her work is grim and reminiscent of Goya's Disaster of War. The grimness is lifted only now and then by a look of suprise on the face of a young girl or by a mother...
Someone Possessed. Maria Callas was still fat and half sick. She was inclined to break out in rashes and blotches; she was often feverish; her legs became painfully swollen. She took her resentments out on the people around her. Her first victim was another soprano, Renata Tebaldi, long-standing favorite of Scala audiences, possessor of a voice of creamy softness, musicianship of delicate sensibility, and a temperament to match. She was no match for Callas. From the beginning the two women glowered. Tebaldi stayed away from Callas' performances; Callas, on the warpath, sat in a prominent box at Tebaldi...
...bounded by thirtysix-thirty and the Rio Grande. Indeed, the bestselling 1952 novel by Edna Ferber, on which this picture is based, bellowed from the bookstalls that Texas in modern times is a microcosm of materialism, a noisome social compost of everything that is crass and sick and cruel in American life. Texas bawled like a branded dogie when the book was published, not without reason; if Author...