Word: wastrel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kean was the first superstar, an Olivier onstage and an Errol Flynn off, a rake, a wastrel and yet an actor, as Critic William Hazlitt said, who had "a gleam of genius." If he were at the end of his career today, he would be writing his memoirs in Malibu and growing rich off Polaroid commercials. In Sartre's play, however, he is dodging creditors, juggling mistresses and in his spare moments asking himself that old existential question: Who am I? Sartre's answer, given with stylish wit, is that Kean is like all of life...
...Wastrel Americans...
Lance Morrow's Essay "The Weakness That Starts at Home" [June 4] said it all. America is a shocking wastrel...
...affecting of this honest workman, intruding his democratic values and lower-class common sense on Middle European court politics at the turn of the century. Sellers must save his best comic efforts for the prince's role. He makes him into a perfect twit, a gambling, womanizing, cowardly wastrel, complete with an absolutely splendid lisp that is as loonily effective as Inspector Clouseau's fractured French...
...years foreigners have regarded America (enviously, contemptuously) as a shocking wastrel, besotted with its own resources, lighting its cigars with $1,000 bills. In winter, visitors remark, the U.S. is always too warm indoors, and in summer always too cold; in a flawless little American parable, Richard Nixon used to turn up the White House air conditioning full blast and then start a cozy blaze in the fireplace...