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The Unimportance Of Being Oscar
''The Unimportance of Being Oscar'' is a 1968 memoir by writer/pianist/radio personality/actor Oscar Levant. The book is known for Oscar's laconic witticisms, such as "everyone in Hollywood is gay, except Gabby Hayes — and that's because he is a transvestite." Levant writes about his family, his mental health issues, his musical career, politics, and more in typically amusing style. The book is full of observations of and encounters with the famous, including George and Ira Gershwin, Benny Goodman, George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, W. S. Gilbert, T.S. Eliot, Moss Hart, Alexander Woolcott, Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Bowles, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and many others. Details * The title of this autobiography is a pun on the title of the Oscar Wilde play ''The Importance of Being Earnest ''The Importance of B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oscar Levant
Oscar Levant (December 27, 1906August 14, 1972) was an American concert pianist, composer, conductor, author, radio game show panelist, television talk show host, comedian and actor. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for recordings featuring his piano performances. He was equally famous for his mordant character and witticisms, on the radio and later in movies and television, as for his music. Early life Levant was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, in 1906, to Orthodox Jewish parents who had emigrated from Russia. His father, Max, was a watchmaker who wanted his four sons to become either dentists or doctors. His mother Annie was a highly religious woman whose father was a Rabbi who presided over his daughter's wedding to Max Levant. Oscar Levant moved to New York in 1922, following the death of his father. He began studying under Zygmunt Stojowski, a well-established piano pedagogue. In 1925, aged 18, he appeared with Ben Bernie in a short fil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franklin D
Franklin may refer to: People * Franklin (given name) * Franklin (surname) * Franklin (class), a member of a historical English social class Places Australia * Franklin, Tasmania, a township * Division of Franklin, federal electoral division in Tasmania * Division of Franklin (state), state electoral division in Tasmania * Franklin, Australian Capital Territory, a suburb in the Canberra district of Gungahlin * Franklin River, river of Tasmania * Franklin Sound, waterway of Tasmania Canada * District of Franklin, a former district of the Northwest Territories * Franklin, Quebec, a municipality in the Montérégie region * Rural Municipality of Franklin, Manitoba * Franklin, Manitoba, an unincorporated community in the Rural Municipality of Rosedale, Manitoba * Franklin Glacier Complex, a volcano in southwestern British Columbia * Franklin Range, a mountain range on Vancouver Island, British Columbia * Franklin River (Vancouver Island), British Columbia * Franklin Strai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music Autobiographies
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect of all human societies, a cultural universal. While scholars agree that music is defined by a few specific elements, there is no consensus on their precise definitions. The creation of music is commonly divided into musical composition, musical improvisation, and musical performance, though the topic itself extends into academic disciplines, criticism, philosophy, and psychology. Music may be performed or improvised using a vast range of instruments, including the human voice. In some musical contexts, a performance or composition may be to some extent improvised. For instance, in Hindustani classical music, the performer plays spontaneously while following a partially defined structure and using characteristic motifs. In modal jazz th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Importance Of Being Earnest
''The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People'' is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian morality, Victorian ways. Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humour and the culmination of Wilde's artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make ''The Importance of Being Earnest'' Wilde's most enduringly popular play. The successful opening night marked the climax of Wilde's career but also heralded his downfall. The John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Lor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel ''The Picture of Dorian Gray'', and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46. Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, Wilde read Literae Humaniores#Greats, Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional Classics, classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barbra Streisand
Barbara Joan "Barbra" Streisand (; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress and director. With a career spanning over six decades, she has achieved success in multiple fields of entertainment, and is among the few performers List of people who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards, awarded an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT). Streisand began her career by performing in nightclubs and Broadway theaters in the early 1960s. Following her guest appearances on various television shows, she signed to Columbia Records, insisting that she retain full artistic control, and accepting lower pay in exchange, an arrangement that continued throughout her career, and released her debut ''The Barbra Streisand Album'' (1963), which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Throughout her recording career, Streisand has topped the US Billboard 200, ''Billboard'' 200 chart with 11 albums—a record for a woman—including ''People (Barbra Streisand album), People'' (1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Judy Garland
Judy Garland (born Frances Ethel Gumm; June 10, 1922June 22, 1969) was an American actress and singer. While critically acclaimed for many different roles throughout her career, she is widely known for playing the part of Dorothy Gale in '' The Wizard of Oz'' (1939). She attained international stardom as an actress in both musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage. Renowned for her versatility, she received an Academy Juvenile Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Special Tony Award. Garland was the first woman to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, which she won for her 1961 live recording titled ''Judy at Carnegie Hall''. Garland began performing as a child with her two older sisters, in a vaudeville group " The Gumm Sisters" and was later signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. She appeared in more than two dozen films for MGM. Garland was a frequent on-screen partner of both Mickey Rooney and Gene Kelly and regularly collaborated w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel ''The Sheltering Sky'' (1949), set in French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947, Bowles settled in Tangier, at that time in the Tangier International Zone, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Ceylon during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles's home for the remainder of his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include '' Goodbye to Berlin'' (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical ''Cabaret''; ''A Single Man'' (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and '' Christopher and His Kind'' (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement". Biography Early life and work Isherwood was born in 1904 on his family's estate in Cheshire near Stockport in the north-west of England. He was the elder son of Francis Edward Bradshaw Isherwood (1869–1915), known as Frank, a professional soldier in the York and Lancaster Regiment, and Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood, nee Machell Smith (1868–1960), the only daughter of a successful wine merchant. He was the grandson of John Henry Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall and Wyberslegh Hall, Cheshire, and he included ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gore Vidal
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, erudition, and patrician manner. Vidal was bisexual, and in his novels and essays interrogated the social and cultural sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He twice sought office—unsuccessfully—as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the U.S. House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate (for California). A grandson of a U.S. Senator, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's primary focus was the history and society of the United States, especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in ''The Nation'', the ''New Statesman'', the ''New York Revie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John F
John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second Epistle of John, often shortened to 2 John * Third Epistle of John, often shortened to 3 John People * John the Baptist (died c. AD 30), regarded as a prophet and the forerunner of Jesus Christ * John the Apostle (lived c. AD 30), one of the twelve apostles of Jesus * John the Evangelist, assigned author of the Fourth Gospel, once identified with the Apostle * John of Patmos, also known as John the Divine or John the Revelator, the author of the Book of Revelation, once identified with the Apostle * John the Presbyter, a figure either identified with or distinguished from the Apostle, the Evangelist and John of Patmos Other people with the given name Religious figures * John, father of Andrew the Apostle and Saint Peter * Pope Jo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adlai Stevenson II
Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (; February 5, 1900 – July 14, 1965) was an American politician and diplomat who was twice the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. He was the grandson of Adlai Stevenson I, the 23rd vice president of the United States. Raised in Bloomington, Illinois, Stevenson was a member of the Democratic Party. He served in numerous positions in the federal government during the 1930s and 1940s, including the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Federal Alcohol Administration, Department of the Navy, and the State Department. In 1945, he served on the committee that created the United Nations, and he was a member of the initial U.S. delegations to the UN. In 1948, he was elected governor of Illinois, defeating incumbent governor Dwight H. Green in an upset. As governor, he reformed the state police, cracked down on illegal gambling, improved the state highways, and attempted to cleanse the state government of corruption. Stevenson also sou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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