Shelley Winters: “Wait A Minute—Where Am I?”

By Helen Dudar Writers Bloc June 1980 Shelley Winters has written the story of her life. Anyone who has followed her flourishing career on the talk show circuit will be pardoned for asking what she possibly has left to tell. The TV addict who really keeps track of...

And Don’t Call Her Bogie’s Baby

By Tom Burke The New York Times March 22, 1970 Detroit She isn’t even mildly fatigued. For eight nerve‐shredding weeks, Lauren Bacall has been trying out her first musical, Applause, nightly belting a dozen songs in her big applejack‐brandy alto And swooping through...

‘Shrew’ With No Apologies

By Brock Brower The New York Times August 6, 1978 Meryl Streep and Raul Julia are rehearsing The Taming of the Shrew seated on two studio chairs in a rehearsal room at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. Act II, Scene 1, when Kate and Petruchio meet and clash for the first...

Toni Morrison: Finally Just a Writer

By Helen Dudar The Wall Street Journal September 30, 1987 A few summers ago, Toni Morrison looked out at the Hudson River from the little pier of her house in Rockland County and discovered that she was feeling dizzy. She had, at the urging of her editor at Knopf,...

Uta Hagen, Acting!

By Helen Dudar The New York Times December 15, 1985 Uta Hagen Acting, Acting, in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profeesion’… Since Uta Hagen is one of the glories of the American theater and since she turns up infrequently in large public performance spaces, she is subject to a...

Too Close for Comfort

By Ross Wetzsteon American Film May 1984 “Tell the guys in the crew to use my trailer while I’m gone.” It’s a star’s trailer, parked outside War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, New York, Glenn Close is shooting The Natural with Robert Redford and Robert Duvall. It’s a...

Philippe Petit: Slow Dancing on the High Wire

By Marilyn Johnson New York Woman October 1986 The first time I saw Philippe Petit he was walking an imaginary line across the floor of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He was pale, slight, and red-haired, and he held his jaw and his balancing pole with fierce...

The Great New York Show

By Ross Wetzsteon New York Magazine May 4, 1992 Michael David got the call in the middle of a meeting at the Dodger Productions office at 1501 Broadway. Delicate negotiations had been going on for months, the rights were notorious for being the most closely held in...

Brando

By Mark Kram Esquire November 1989 How civilized the fame game was then, a timid, furtive glimpse for the observer, the observed cordoned off by a dreamlike distance of respect. Worship knew its place; so did greatness. It was caught sharply once by a young American...

Morgan Freeman Takes Off

By Ross Wetzsteon New York Magazine March 14, 1988 Flying. He’d wanted to fly since he was 16. Sitting at his desk in high school in Greenwood, Mississippi, he fantasized that it was a P-51 Mustang, F-86 Sabre jet. He didn’t want to be a pilot, he wanted to be a...

The Most Powerful Man on Broadway

By Chip Brown GQ June 1990 Nobody would care about a damaged boy were the child not the father of the man—the source of his passions, his venom, his appetite for power. Frank Rich, chief drama critic of The New York Times, is the most powerful critic in the country....

Off-Broadway Joe

By Tony Kornheiser Inside Sports July 1981 He came straight from Florida, and in black tie the combination of the tan and the tux glistened in the heat of the night. His eyes were bright, gorgeous green, and the shadings of brown in his hair were caught, then polished...