Word: vivants
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Reginald Bathurst ("Reggie") Birch, 87, famed Victorian illustrator; in The Bronx Home for Incurables. Born in London, Bon Vivant Birch illustrated scores of magazines and books. For his drawings for Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (which brought its author $350,000), Birch said he got $400 and two theater tickets...
Discovered at the Home for Incurables in The Bronx was one of the great Victorian illustrators, 85-year-old Reginald Bathurst Birch, illustrator of Little Lord Fauntleroy. The courtly bon vivant of the '80s, half-blind and broke, had no complaints except against Fauntleroy. It was "about the worst thing that ever happened to me," he said. The lace-and-velvet wrapped little hero's fame had obscured everything else the artist had done. At present, he admitted, "you can say that I'm just a little hors de combat...
Mind and Body. Years ago Wisconsin's stubby, pragmatic bon vivant, Philosopher Max Otto, stood on the bank of the upper Mississippi one Sunday sunset to ask himself again what force it was that prevented the technology of the modern world from being used to the greater happiness of the plain man. Afternoon darkened into evening ; the shining silver of the river blurred in the darkness; lights began to appear in the village...
Fredric March, better than holds up his farcical end. Robert Benchley is still Hollywood's most reliable ban vivant, though Cecil Kellaway, as the alcoholic old warlock, gives him unctuous competition. Veronica Lake, with a voice like a hoarse clarinet, makes a bewitching witch, scarcely taller (5 ft. 2 in.) than the broom she hexes. Rene Clair lets Thome Smith have his amiable way much of the time (good line from Witch Lake: "Ever hear of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? That was our crowd"). But Clair's shrewish fiancée is a malicious...
...TMWCTD is now so much the possession of Monty Woolley that even its authors' right to a share in it seems questionable. Possessor of the most Edwardian visage of his era, bon vivant, trust-funder, darling of Manhattan's cafe society, onetime Yale English instructor, 53-year-old Actor Woolley plays Sheridan Whiteside with such vast authority and competence that it is difficult to imagine anyone else attempting it. As one of his intimates has remarked: "At last the old party has got the role he's been rehearsing for all his life...