Word: villain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...principal villain in this piece is the actress's father, an itinerant Spanish dancer named Eduardo Cansino. He recruited his daughter, then barely in her teens, to be his partner in his nightclub act. Leaming contends that he also sexually abused her. The evidence here is spotty, based solely on Welles' word that Hayworth once admitted as much to him. But as a working hypothesis, the trauma of incest may explain a lifetime of otherwise inexplicable, self- destructive blunders...
...Cagney & Lacey in a revival drawn from the memoirs of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Prince of Central Park, which quickly closed, derived from a book that had also prompted a made-for-TV movie. Brecht's own The Threepenny Opera, featuring rock star Sting as the seductive villain Macheath, is freely filched from British satirist John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera. Sad to say, although each show could boast ingenious design and staging or beguiling acting, far from the best writers have been at work...
...several occasions I referred to the use of excessive force as a tragedy. They refused to accept that; they insisted on calling it an "incident." In part, this may be because the Chinese word for tragedy implies that there must be a villain. As one close Chinese friend pointed out to me, no proud Chinese leader -- indeed, no national leader anywhere -- can ever admit that he is a villain. One top Chinese leader told me that any colleague who humiliated China in the world community by acting contrite did not deserve to be in office. Contrition may be an attractive...
This absurdity was most in evidence during and after the April 1986 U.S. bombing of the military barracks in Tripoli, Libya. That was when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was the villain of the month. Although Gaddafi and his family were known to be living in the barracks and although the attack killed many soldiers and some civilians -- including, Gaddafi claimed, his 18-month-old adopted daughter -- American officials were at pains to insist that they did not intend to kill Gaddafi himself. President Reagan said, "We weren't . . . dropping these tons of bombs hoping to blow that man up" -- although...
...zenith of his power, in 1981, Marcos said his country was caught between "a world that was dead and a world that was too feeble to be born." The vision that he alone could lead it to prosperity and greatness proved painfully illusory. He died his country's greatest villain...