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[
"Paul Ryan",
"Early life and education",
"Where was Ryan born?",
"Paul Davis Ryan Jr. was born in Janesville, Wisconsin,",
"Where did Ryan go to school?",
"Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team,",
"Did he do anything noteworthy in school?",
"then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king.",
"Where did he attend college?",
"Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio,",
"Did he graduate with honors?",
"with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten",
"What jobs did he have before becoming involved in politics?",
"Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's.",
"What else did he do for employment?",
"Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser."
]
| C_3e8539e8237d4b058d107f04ee5e4a39_1 | Is there anything else interesting about his early life? | 8 | Is there anything else interesting about Paul Ryan's early life aside from being involved with politics? | Paul Ryan | Paul Davis Ryan Jr. was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children of Elizabeth "Betty" Ann (nee Hutter), who later became an interior designer, and Paul Davis Ryan, a lawyer. He is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother of German and English ancestry. One of Ryan's paternal ancestors settled in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan (1858-1917), founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan's grandfather, Stanley M. Ryan (1898-1957), was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin. Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team, then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king. As class president Ryan was a representative of the student body on the school board. Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's. He was on his high school's ski, track, and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations. Ryan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack. Following the death of his father, Ryan's grandmother moved in with the family. As she had Alzheimer's, Ryan helped care for her while his mother commuted to college in Madison, Wisconsin. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits, which were saved for his college education. His mother remarried, to Bruce Douglas. Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He often visited the office of libertarian professor Richard Hart to discuss the theories of these economists and of Ayn Rand. Hart introduced Ryan to National Review, and with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser. He attended the Washington Semester program at American University. Ryan worked summers as a salesman for Oscar Mayer and once got to drive the Wienermobile. Ryan was a member of the College Republicans, and volunteered for the congressional campaign of John Boehner. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity. CANNOTANSWER | When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack. | Paul Davis Ryan (born January 29, 1970) is an American retired politician who served as the 54th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from October 2015 to January 2019. He was the 2012 Republican Party vice presidential nominee running alongside Mitt Romney, losing to incumbent president Barack Obama and then-vice president Joe Biden.
Ryan, a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, graduated from Miami University in 1992. He spent five years working for Republicans in Washington, D.C. and returned to Wisconsin in 1997 to work at his family's construction company. Ryan was elected to Congress to represent the following year, replacing an incumbent Republican who ran for U.S. Senate. Ryan would represent the district for 20 years. He chaired the House Budget Committee from 2011 to 2015 and briefly chaired the House Ways and Means Committee in 2015 prior to being elected Speaker of the House in October 2015 following John Boehner's retirement.
A self-proclaimed deficit hawk, Ryan was a major proponent of Social Security privatization in the mid-2000s. In the 2010s, two proposals heavily influenced by Ryan—"The Path to Prosperity" and "A Better Way"—advocated for the privatization of Medicare, the conversion of Medicaid into a block grant program, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and significant federal tax cuts. As Speaker, he played a key role in the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act in 2018, which partially repealed the Dodd-Frank Act. His other major piece of legislation, the American Health Care Act of 2017, passed the House but failed in the Senate by one vote.
Ryan declined to run for re-election in the 2018 midterm elections. With the Democratic Party taking control of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi succeeded Ryan as Speaker of the House.
Early life and education
Paul Davis Ryan was born on January 29, 1970 in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children of Elizabeth "Betty" Ann (née Hutter), who later became an interior designer, and Paul Murray Ryan, a lawyer. He is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother of German and English descent. One of Ryan's paternal ancestors settled in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan, founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan's grandfather, Stanley M. Ryan, was appointed United States Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin. In 2018, while filming a segment for the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Ryan learned that his DNA results included 3 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king. As class president Ryan was a representative of the student body on the school board. Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's. He was on his high school's ski, track, and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations. Ryan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips to the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Although Ryan's father was not a lifelong heavy drinker, staying sober for nearly twenty years after his first stint in rehabilitation, he had become an alcoholic by the time Ryan was a teenager. Ryan later commented on his relationship with his father, whom he revered as a young child, stating that "[alcohol] made him more distant, irritable and stressed ... whiskey had washed away some of the best parts of the man I knew." When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack, something Ryan later partially attributed to heavy alcohol consumption. Following the death of his father, Ryan's grandmother moved in with the family. As she had Alzheimer's, Ryan helped care for her while his mother commuted to college in Madison, Wisconsin. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits, which were saved for his college education. His mother later married widower Bruce Douglas.
Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He often visited the office of libertarian professor Richard Hart to discuss the theories of these economists and of Ayn Rand. Hart introduced Ryan to National Review, and with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten, where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser.
Ryan attended the Washington Semester program at American University. He worked summers as a salesman for Oscar Mayer and once got to drive the Wienermobile. Ryan was a member of the College Republicans, and volunteered for the congressional campaign of John Boehner. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity.
Early career
Betty Ryan reportedly urged her son to accept a congressional position as a legislative aide in Senator Kasten's office, which he did after graduating in 1992. In his early years working on Capitol Hill, Ryan supplemented his income by working as a waiter, as a fitness trainer, and at other jobs.
A few months after Kasten lost to Democrat Russ Feingold in the 1992 election, Ryan became a speechwriter for Empower America (now FreedomWorks), a conservative advocacy group founded by Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett.
Ryan later worked as a speechwriter for Kemp, the Republican vice presidential candidate in the 1996 United States presidential election. Kemp became Ryan's mentor, and Ryan has said he had a "huge influence".
In 1995, Ryan became the legislative director for then-U.S. Congressman Sam Brownback of Kansas. In 1997 he returned to Wisconsin, where he worked for a year as a marketing consultant for the construction company Ryan Incorporated Central, owned by his relatives.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
Ryan was first elected to the House in 1998, winning the 1st District seat of Republican Mark Neumann, a two-term incumbent who had vacated his seat to make an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate. 28-year-old Ryan won the Republican primary over 29-year-old pianist Michael J. Logan of Twin Lakes, and the general election against Democrat Lydia Spottswood. This made him the second-youngest member of the House.
Reelected eight times, Ryan never received less than 55 percent of the vote in a congressional election. He defeated Democratic challenger Jeffrey C. Thomas in the 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections. In the 2008 election, Ryan defeated Democrat Marge Krupp.
In the 2010 general election, he defeated Democrat John Heckenlively and Libertarian Joseph Kexel. In 2012, under Wisconsin election law, Ryan was allowed to run concurrently for vice president and for Congress and was not allowed to remove his name from the Congressional ballot after being nominated for the vice presidency. He faced Democratic nominee Rob Zerban. As of July 25, 2012, Ryan had over $5.4 million in his congressional campaign account, more than any other House member. He was reelected with 55 percent of his district's vote and 44 percent of the vote in his hometown, Janesville.
Zerban again challenged Ryan in the 2014 House election. Ryan won with 63 percent of his district's vote.
In the 2016 Republican primary election, Ryan faced businessman Paul Nehlen, who had been endorsed by Sarah Palin. Because of Nehlen's support for Trump, Trump publicly thanked him on Twitter and later told The Washington Post that Nehlen was "running a very good campaign", even though he did not endorse him. On August 5, 2016, Trump endorsed Ryan's re-election after pressure from fellow Republican leaders. In the August 9, 2016 primary election, Ryan overwhelmingly defeated Nehlen, taking over 84 percent of the vote. In the November general election, Ryan faced Democrat Rebecca Solen and won with 65 percent of his district's vote.
Committee assignments
As Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ryan was not a chair or a member of any committee. Prior to his speakership, Ryan held the following assignments:
Committee on Ways and Means (Chairman)
Subcommittee on Health
Caucus memberships
House Republican Caucus
Caucus of House Conservatives Republican Study Committee
United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus
Middle East Economic Partnership Caucus
Prayer Caucus
Sportsmen's Caucus (Co-Chair)
Congressional Western Caucus
Pre-Speaker congressional tenure (1999–2015)
Ryan became the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee in 2007 and became chairman of the committee in 2011 after Republicans took control of the House. That same year, he was selected to deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union address.
As of August 2012, Ryan had been the primary sponsor of more than 70 bills or amendments, and only two of those bills had become law. One, passed in July 2000, renamed a post office in Ryan's district; the other, passed in December 2008, lowered the excise tax on arrow shafts. As of August 2012, Ryan had also co-sponsored 975 bills, of which 176 had passed; 22% of these bills were originally sponsored by a Democrat.
Ryan was a "reliable supporter of the [George W. Bush] administration's foreign policy priorities" who voted for the 2002 Iraq Resolution, authorizing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2010, Ryan was a member of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Bowles-Simpson Commission), which was tasked with developing a plan to reduce the federal deficit. He voted against the final report of the commission. In 2012, Ryan accused the nation's top military leaders of using "smoke and mirrors" to remain under budget limits passed by Congress. Ryan later said that he misspoke on the issue and called General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to apologize for his comments.
Speaker of the House
114th Congress
On September 25, 2015, John Boehner formally announced to House Republicans his intention to resign from the speakership and the House. Among those interested in the post, Kevin McCarthy—who had wide support among Republicans, including Boehner, and Ryan, who was set to officially nominate him—was considered the presumptive favorite. His candidacy was opposed by conservative House Republicans of the Freedom Caucus, and when it became clear that caucus members would not support his candidacy, McCarthy withdrew his name from consideration on October 8. This led many Republicans to turn to Ryan as a compromise candidate. The push included a plea from Boehner, who reportedly told Ryan that he was the only person who could unite the House Republicans at a time of turmoil. Ryan released a statement that said, "While I am grateful for the encouragement I've received, I will not be a candidate." The next day however, close aides of Ryan's confirmed that Ryan had re-evaluated the situation, and was considering the possibility of a run.
Ryan confirmed on October 22, that he would seek the speakership after receiving the endorsements of two factions of House Republicans, including the conservative Freedom Caucus. Ryan, upon confirming his bid for the speakership, stated, "I never thought I'd be speaker. But I pledged to you that if I could be a unifying figure, then I would serve – I would go all in. After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as one, united team. And I am ready and eager to be our speaker."
On October 29, Ryan was elected Speaker, receiving 236 votes, an absolute majority of the 435-member chamber. Democrat Nancy Pelosi received 184 votes, with 12 more going to others. After the vote Ryan delivered his first remarks as speaker-elect and was sworn in by John Conyers, the dean of the House, becoming, at age , the youngest person elected as speaker since James G. Blaine (age ) in 1869. Later, he named lobbyist John David Hoppe as his Chief of Staff.
As Speaker, Ryan became the leader of the House Republicans. However, by tradition, he largely ceased taking part in debate and almost never voted from the floor. He was also not a member of any committees.
2016 presidential election
After Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election on May 4, 2016, Ryan was hesitant to endorse him, stating on May 5 that he was "not ready". Ryan and Trump met in private on May 12, releasing a joint statement afterward, acknowledging their differences but stating "we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground." On June 2, Ryan announced his support for Trump in an op-ed in The Janesville Gazette.
The following day, June 3, amid Trump's criticism of Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, Ryan said Trump's critique "just was out of left field for my mind," and voiced disagreement with him. On June 7, Ryan disavowed Trump's comments about Curiel because he believed they were "the textbook definition of a racist comment". Nevertheless, Ryan continued to endorse Trump, believing that more Republican policies will be enacted under Donald Trump than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. On June 15, after Kevin McCarthy stated during a conversation among Republicans, "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. Swear to God", Ryan interjected, "No leaks. This is how we know we're a real family here."
On July 5, after FBI Director James Comey advocated against pressing charges against Clinton for her email scandal, Ryan said Comey's decision "defies explanation" and stated that "[d]eclining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible precedent."
In October 2016, following the Donald Trump Access Hollywood controversy, Ryan disinvited Trump from a scheduled campaign rally, and announced that he would no longer defend or support Trump's presidential campaign but would focus instead on Congressional races. He also freed down-ticket congress members to use their own judgment about Trump, saying "you all need to do what's best for you and your district." Trump then went on to attack Ryan, accusing him and other "disloyal" Republicans of deliberately undermining his candidacy as part of "a whole sinister deal".
115th Congress
Two months after the 2016 elections, Ryan was re-elected Speaker of the House on January 3, 2017, the opening day of the 115th Congress. He received 239 votes to House Democratic Leader Pelosi's 189 votes (with 5 more going to others).
On February 7, 2017, Ryan told reporters a replacement for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be introduced "this year" amid speculation Donald Trump would not act toward doing so until the following year. On March 9, Ryan gave a 30-minute lecture explaining the proposed replacement for the ACA, titled the American Health Care Act (AHCA). On March 30, Ryan said that he did not intend to work with Democrats on repealing and replacing the ACA, reasoning their involvement would lead to "government running health care." On April 4, Ryan confirmed renewed discussions of an ACA replacement, but warned that a replacement was in the "conceptual" stages of its development. On May 4, the House narrowly voted for the AHCA to repeal the ACA. On May 9, Ryan said that "a month or two" would pass before the Senate would pass its own ACA repeal and replacement legislation. The Senate created several of its own versions of the act but was unable to pass any of them.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Ryan suggested that candidate Trump should release his tax returns.
In May 2017, Ryan said Congress' goal was "calendared 2017 for tax reform" and reported progress was being made in doing so. In December 2017, both houses of Congress passed a $1.5 trillion tax bill called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law on December 22. The tax law is projected to add an additional $1.5 trillion to the national debt over a decade, but the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation also estimated that the GDP level on average would be 0.7% higher during the same period. In the weeks leading up to his retirement announcement, Ryan also championed a $1.3 trillion government-wide spending bill that boosted military spending significantly. Politico noted that Ryan "clamored for austerity when he's been in the minority, trashing Democrats as profligate budget-busters, but he's happily busted budgets in the majority."
In June 2017, Ryan expressed support for strong sanctions on Russia in response to Russian interference in the 2016 elections and its annexation of the Crimea, saying that Russia's actions were "unacceptable". He urged Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional oversight committees to "do their jobs so that we can get to the bottom of all of this." In July Congress passed a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia and giving Congress the power to overrule White House attempts to roll back sanctions. Both houses passed the bill with veto-proof majorities (98-2 in the Senate, 419-3 in the House), so Trump reluctantly signed it into law on August 2, 2017.
Ryan provided political cover for Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who many characterized as a source of the dysfunction in the committee as it investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. Nunes accused the Obama administration of improperly “unmasking” the identities of Trump associates (which led Nunes' temporary recusal from the committee's Russia investigation), accused the FBI of misconduct, leaked the text messages of Senator Mark Warner (in an effort to misleadingly suggest impropriety on his behalf), and threatened to impeach FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The House Intelligence Committee was one of few so-called "select" committees in Congress, which meant that it was up to Ryan to decide the chairman of the committee.
Despite having favored comprehensive immigration earlier in his congressional career, Speaker Ryan prevented immigration legislation from being advanced in the House. When President Trump ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) – which granted temporary stay for undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as minors – Ryan said DACA recipients should "rest easy" because Congress would solve the problem for them, but Ryan backed no bills to protect DACA recipients.
An article in The Washington Post described Ryan's relationship with President Trump as "friendly, if occasionally uneasy," adding that "Ryan did little to check the president or encourage oversight of his administration." Ryan supported Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, and did not support legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Ryan said that legislation to protect Mueller's investigation was not "necessary".
On April 11, 2018, Ryan announced that he would not run for re-election in November, saying, "I like to think I've done my part, my little part in history to set us on a better course." In response, Trump tweeted, "Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question."
In May 2018, Ryan led the House in passing the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which partially repealed the Dodd-Frank Act. It was signed into law by President Trump a few days later.
After Republicans lost control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Ryan suggested that there were irregularities about the election results in California. Ryan said that California's election system was "bizarre", "defies logic" and that "there are a lot of races there we should have won." After Ryan's remarks were reported on, Ryan's spokesperson said "The Speaker did not and does not dispute the results".
Assessment of Speaker tenure
Following Ryan's retirement announcement, an article in The Washington Post stated that Ryan was "leav[ing] behind a legacy of dramatically expanded government spending and immense deficits, a GOP president unchecked, a broken immigration system, and a party that's fast abandoning the free-trade principles that he himself championed." According to the Associated Press, Ryan "achieved one of his career goals: rewriting the tax code"; however, "on his other defining aim — balancing the budget and cutting back benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — Ryan has utterly failed".
Constituent services
In fiscal year 2008, Ryan garnered $5.4 million in congressional earmarks, including $3.28 million for bus service in Wisconsin, $1.38 million for the Ice Age Trail, and $735,000 for the Janesville transit system. In 2009, he successfully advocated with the Department of Energy for stimulus funds for energy initiatives in his district.
Other home district projects he has supported include a runway extension at the Rock County Airport, an environmental study of the Kenosha Harbor, firefighting equipment for Janesville, road projects in Wisconsin, and commuter rail and streetcar projects in Kenosha. In 2008, Ryan pledged to stop seeking earmarks. Prior to that he had sought earmarks less often than other representatives. Taxpayers for Common Sense records show no earmarks supported by Ryan for fiscal years 2009 and 2010. In 2012, Ryan supported a request for $3.8 million from the Department of Transportation for a new transit center in Janesville, which city officials received in July.
Ryan was an active member of a task force established by Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle that tried unsuccessfully to persuade General Motors to keep its assembly plant in Janesville open. He made personal contact with GM executives to try to convince them to save or retool the plant, offering GM hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded incentives. Following the closure of factories in Janesville and Kenosha, constituents expressed dissatisfaction with Ryan's voting history. During the 2011 Congressional summer break, Ryan held town hall meetings by telephone with constituents. The only public meetings Ryan attended in his district required an admission fee of at least $15.
In August 2011, constituents in Kenosha and Racine protested when Ryan would not meet with them about economic and employment issues, after weeks of emailed requests from them. His Kenosha office locked its doors and filed a complaint with the police, who told the protesters that they were not allowed in Ryan's office.
Ryan maintained a mobile office to serve constituents in outlying areas.
2012 vice presidential campaign
Dan Balz of The Washington Post wrote that Ryan was promoted as a candidate for Vice President "by major elements of the conservative opinion makers, including The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard and the editor of National Review".
On August 11, 2012, the Romney campaign announced Ryan as its choice for Vice President through its "Mitt's VP" mobile app. It was reported that Romney had offered the position to Ryan on August 1, 2012, the day after returning from a foreign policy trip to the United Kingdom, Poland, and Israel. On August 11, 2012, Ryan formally accepted Romney's invitation to join his campaign as his running mate, in front of the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk. Ryan is the first individual from Wisconsin as well as the first member of Generation X to run on a major party's national ticket.
Also in August 2012, the Associated Press published a story saying that while the Tea Party movement had wanted a nominee other than Romney, it had gotten "one of its ideological heroes" in the Vice Presidential slot. According to the article, Ryan supports the Tea Party's belief in "individual rights, distrust of big government and an allegorical embrace of the Founding Fathers".
According to a statistical-historical analysis conducted by Nate Silver, "Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900" and "is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee [for vice president who previously served in the Congress] was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center" of any vice presidential candidate chosen from Congress since the turn of the 20th century.
Political scientist Eric Schickler commented that while Ryan "may well be the most conservative vice presidential nominee in decades," the NOMINATE methodology "is not suited to making claims about the relative liberalism or conservatism of politicians" over a long time span. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that 39% thought Ryan was an "excellent" or "pretty good" vice presidential choice, compared to 42% who felt he was a "fair" or "poor" choice.
Ryan formally accepted his nomination at the 2012 Republican National Convention on August 29, 2012. In his acceptance speech, he promoted Mitt Romney as the presidential candidate, supported repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), said that he and Romney had a plan to generate 12 million new jobs over the ensuing four years, and promoted founding principles as a solution: "We will not duck the tough issues—we will lead. We will not spend four years blaming others—we will take responsibility. We will not try to replace our founding principles, we will reapply our founding principles."
The speech was well received by the convention audience and praised for being well-delivered. Some fact-checkers purported that there were important factual omissions and that he presented details out of context. Conservative media (including Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, the Investor's Business Daily, and Fox News) disputed some of the fact-checkers' findings. Of 33 of Ryan's statements which Politifact.com suspected of being false or misleading, it rated 10.5% as True, 18% as Mostly True, 21% as Half True, 36% as Mostly False, 9% as False, and 6% as Pants on Fire. On October 11, 2012, Ryan debated his Democratic counterpart, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden, in the only vice presidential debate of the 2012 election cycle.
Romney and Ryan lost the 2012 presidential election, but Ryan retained his seat in the House of Representatives.
Congressional Leadership Fund
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a Super PAC, has been closely linked and aligned with Ryan. Ryan has directed major GOP donors towards the CLF.
Political positions
Ryan's political positions were generally conservative, with a focus on fiscal policy. Ryan "played a central role in nearly all" the policy debates of the period 2010–2012. In 2012, Ryan voted against the Simpson-Bowles commission proposal to reduce the deficit, because the proposal raised taxes and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. While he was a self-proclaimed deficit hawk, Ryan's tenure of Speaker of the House saw a major expansion in government spending and a ballooning of deficits despite unified Republican control of Congress and the White House, no recession and no new foreign conflict.
Ryan subscribed to supply-side economics and supported tax cuts including eliminating the capital gains tax, the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the Alternative Minimum Tax. Ryan supports deregulation, including the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed some financial regulation of banks from the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. During the economic recovery from the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Ryan supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which authorized the Treasury to purchase toxic assets from banks and other financial institutions, and the auto industry bailout; Ryan opposed the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which expanded consumer protections regarding credit card plans, and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which strengthened financial regulation. In 2018 as House Speaker, Ryan helped pass the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act that repealed large parts of Dodd-Frank.
In 2016, Ryan rolled out a set of anti-poverty proposals that "seek to expand work requirements for those receiving federal benefits, to give states and local jurisdictions a greater role in administering those benefits, to better measure the results of federal programs for the poor, and to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse." Ryan believes federal poverty reduction programs are ineffective and he supports cuts to welfare, child care, Pell Grants, food stamps, and other federal assistance programs. Ryan supports block granting Medicaid to the states and the privatization of social security and Medicare. Ryan supported the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit and opposes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as "Obamacare." Ryan supported the American Health Care Act of 2017 (AHCA), the 2017 House Republican plan to repeal and replace the ACA. In 2012, The New York Times said Ryan was "his party's most forceful spokesman for cutting entitlement spending."
Ryan's non-fiscal policy positions were subject to additional national attention with his 2012 candidacy for Vice President. Ryan is pro-life and opposes abortion rights. Ryan opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which provides that the 180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination resets with each new paycheck affected by that discriminatory action. In 2012, Ryan supported civil unions and opposed same-sex marriage.
Ryan supported school vouchers, and supported the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and its repeal the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Ryan is unsure, and believes climate scientists are unsure, of the impact of human activity on climate change. Ryan supported tax incentives for the petroleum industry and opposed them for renewable energy. Ryan supported gun rights and opposed stricter gun control. Ryan supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ryan condemned Barack Obama's decision not to block a UN resolution criticizing Israeli settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories as "absolutely shameful". Ryan supported President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. He stated: "Jerusalem has been, and always will be, the eternal, undivided capital of the State of Israel."
Following the 2018 Russia–United States summit, in which Donald Trump stated that he believed Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Ryan confirmed his belief that Russian government interfered and advocated for more economic sanctions against Russia for the interference.
Ryan supported U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen and used his power to block a House vote on the war in Yemen.
History with Objectivism
At a 2005 Washington, D.C. gathering celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth, Ryan credited Rand with having inspired him to get involved in politics. In a speech that same year at the Atlas Society, he said he grew up reading Rand, and that her books taught him about his value system and beliefs. Ryan required staffers and interns in his congressional office to read Rand and gave copies of her novel Atlas Shrugged as gifts to his staff for Christmas. In his Atlas Society speech, he also described Social Security as a "socialist-based system".
In 2009, Ryan said, "What's unique about what's happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it's as if we're living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault."
In April 2012, after receiving criticism from Georgetown University faculty members on his budget plan, Ryan rejected Rand's philosophy as atheistic, saying it "reduces human interactions down to mere contracts". He also called the reports of his adherence to Rand's views an "urban legend" and stated that he was deeply influenced by his Roman Catholic faith and by Thomas Aquinas.
Electoral history
Post-congressional life
In March 2019, Ryan joined the board of directors of Fox Corporation, the owner of Fox News Channel and the Fox broadcast network. In August 2019, he joined the board of SHINE Medical Technologies. He has since joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame as a professor of practice for the 2019–20 academic year as a guest lecturer in political science and economics. In April 2019, Ryan was nominated as the delegation leader to represent President Trump to visit Taipei. With Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, he attended the 40th anniversary ceremony of the Taiwan Relations Act. In October 2019, Ryan launched a non-profit called American Idea Foundation.
Personal life
In December 2000, Ryan married Janna Christine Little, a tax attorney, a graduate of Wellesley College and George Washington University Law School, and a native of Madill, Oklahoma. The Ryans live in the Courthouse Hill Historic District of Janesville, Wisconsin. They have three children: Elizabeth "Liza" Anne, Charles Wilson, and Samuel Lowery. A Roman Catholic, Ryan is a member of St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Janesville.
Janna is a cousin of former Democratic Representative Dan Boren (D-OK). She is also a granddaughter of Reuel Little, who helped found the American Party to support the 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace.
Due to a family history of fatal heart attacks before age 60, Ryan pursues an intense cross-training fitness program called P90X. Ryan has always been a fitness enthusiast and was a personal trainer when he came out of college. About P90X, he said, "It works because it's called muscle confusion. It hits your body in many different ways. Pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, lots of cardio, karate, jump training. It has results, it works. It's a good workout."
In a 2010 Politico interview, he said that he weighed 163 pounds and maintained his body fat percentage between 6 and 8%. Tony Horton, creator of P90X, who has personally trained Ryan many times, reiterated the claim saying, "He is very, very, very lean. I know what 6 to 8 percent body fat looks like, and there's no fat anywhere on the man. I'm around 9 percent and he's much leaner than I am. He’s easily 6 to 8 percent body fat. You just have to eat right and exercise every day, and that’s what he does."
In a radio interview, Ryan claimed he had once run a marathon in under three hours; he later stated that he forgot his actual time and was just trying to state what he thought was a normal time. His one official marathon time is recorded as slightly over four hours.
Awards and honors
2004, 2010 – Guardian of Small Business Award, National Federation of Independent Business
2008 – Defending the American Dream Award, Americans for Prosperity, Wisconsin chapter
2009 – Manufacturing Legislative Excellence Award, National Association of Manufacturers
2009 – Honorary Degree, Miami University
2010 – Legislator of the Year Award, International Franchise Association
2011 – Statesmanship Award, Claremont Institute
2011 – Fiscy Award for responsible financial stewardship and fiscal discipline in government.
2011 – Leadership Award, Jack Kemp Foundation
2011 – Freedom and Prosperity Award, Mason Contractors Association of America
2012 – Chair, Honorary Board of the Archery Trade Association
2014 – Alexander Hamilton Award, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
2018 – Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service
References
Further reading
Works about Ryan
Works by Ryan
External links
Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Historical Society
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1970 births
2012 United States vice-presidential candidates
20th-century American politicians
20th-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
American male non-fiction writers
American people of English descent
American people of Jewish descent
American people of German descent
American people of Irish descent
American political writers
American speechwriters
American University alumni
Catholics from Wisconsin
Living people
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Members of the United States House of Representatives from Wisconsin
Miami University alumni
Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign
Politicians from Janesville, Wisconsin
Republican Party (United States) vice presidential nominees
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
Speakers of the United States House of Representatives
University of Notre Dame faculty
Wisconsin Republicans
Writers from Wisconsin
Joseph A. Craig High School alumni
21st-century American male writers | false | [
"\"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" is a 2010 science fiction/magical realism short story by American writer Harlan Ellison. It was first published in Realms of Fantasy.\n\nPlot summary\nA scientist creates a tiny man. The tiny man is initially very popular, but then draws the hatred of the world, and so the tiny man must flee, together with the scientist (who is now likewise hated, for having created the tiny man).\n\nReception\n\"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" won the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, tied with Kij Johnson's \"Ponies\". It was Ellison's final Nebula nomination and win, of his record-setting eight nominations and three wins.\n\nTor.com calls the story \"deceptively simple\", with \"execution (that) is flawless\" and a \"Geppetto-like\" narrator, while Publishers Weekly describes it as \"memorably depict(ing) humanity's smallness of spirit\". The SF Site, however, felt it was \"contrived and less than profound\".\n\nNick Mamatas compared \"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" negatively to Ellison's other Nebula-winning short stories, and stated that the story's two mutually exclusive endings (in one, the tiny man is killed; in the other, he becomes God) are evocative of the process of writing short stories. Ben Peek considered it to be \"more allegory than (...) anything else\", and interpreted it as being about how the media \"give(s) everyone a voice\", and also about how Ellison was treated by science fiction fandom.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAudio version of ''How Interesting: A Tiny Man, at StarShipSofa\nHow Interesting: A Tiny Man, at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database\n\nNebula Award for Best Short Story-winning works\nShort stories by Harlan Ellison",
"\"If You Can Do Anything Else\" is a song written by Billy Livsey and Don Schlitz, and recorded by American country music artist George Strait. It was released in February 2001 as the third and final single from his self-titled album. The song reached number 5 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart in July 2001. It also peaked at number 51 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.\n\nContent\nThe song is about man who is giving his woman the option to leave him. He gives her many different options for all the things she can do. At the end he gives her the option to stay with him if she really can’t find anything else to do. He says he will be alright if she leaves, but really it seems he wants her to stay.\n\nChart performance\n\"If You Can Do Anything Else\" debuted at number 60 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks for the week of March 3, 2001.\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n2001 singles\n2000 songs\nGeorge Strait songs\nSongs written by Billy Livsey\nSongs written by Don Schlitz\nSong recordings produced by Tony Brown (record producer)\nMCA Nashville Records singles"
]
|
[
"Paul Ryan",
"Early life and education",
"Where was Ryan born?",
"Paul Davis Ryan Jr. was born in Janesville, Wisconsin,",
"Where did Ryan go to school?",
"Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team,",
"Did he do anything noteworthy in school?",
"then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king.",
"Where did he attend college?",
"Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio,",
"Did he graduate with honors?",
"with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten",
"What jobs did he have before becoming involved in politics?",
"Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's.",
"What else did he do for employment?",
"Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser.",
"Is there anything else interesting about his early life?",
"When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack."
]
| C_3e8539e8237d4b058d107f04ee5e4a39_1 | Is his mother still alive? | 9 | Is Paul Ryan's mother still alive? | Paul Ryan | Paul Davis Ryan Jr. was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children of Elizabeth "Betty" Ann (nee Hutter), who later became an interior designer, and Paul Davis Ryan, a lawyer. He is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother of German and English ancestry. One of Ryan's paternal ancestors settled in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan (1858-1917), founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan's grandfather, Stanley M. Ryan (1898-1957), was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin. Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team, then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king. As class president Ryan was a representative of the student body on the school board. Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's. He was on his high school's ski, track, and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations. Ryan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack. Following the death of his father, Ryan's grandmother moved in with the family. As she had Alzheimer's, Ryan helped care for her while his mother commuted to college in Madison, Wisconsin. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits, which were saved for his college education. His mother remarried, to Bruce Douglas. Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He often visited the office of libertarian professor Richard Hart to discuss the theories of these economists and of Ayn Rand. Hart introduced Ryan to National Review, and with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser. He attended the Washington Semester program at American University. Ryan worked summers as a salesman for Oscar Mayer and once got to drive the Wienermobile. Ryan was a member of the College Republicans, and volunteered for the congressional campaign of John Boehner. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity. CANNOTANSWER | His mother remarried, to Bruce Douglas. | Paul Davis Ryan (born January 29, 1970) is an American retired politician who served as the 54th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from October 2015 to January 2019. He was the 2012 Republican Party vice presidential nominee running alongside Mitt Romney, losing to incumbent president Barack Obama and then-vice president Joe Biden.
Ryan, a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, graduated from Miami University in 1992. He spent five years working for Republicans in Washington, D.C. and returned to Wisconsin in 1997 to work at his family's construction company. Ryan was elected to Congress to represent the following year, replacing an incumbent Republican who ran for U.S. Senate. Ryan would represent the district for 20 years. He chaired the House Budget Committee from 2011 to 2015 and briefly chaired the House Ways and Means Committee in 2015 prior to being elected Speaker of the House in October 2015 following John Boehner's retirement.
A self-proclaimed deficit hawk, Ryan was a major proponent of Social Security privatization in the mid-2000s. In the 2010s, two proposals heavily influenced by Ryan—"The Path to Prosperity" and "A Better Way"—advocated for the privatization of Medicare, the conversion of Medicaid into a block grant program, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and significant federal tax cuts. As Speaker, he played a key role in the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act in 2018, which partially repealed the Dodd-Frank Act. His other major piece of legislation, the American Health Care Act of 2017, passed the House but failed in the Senate by one vote.
Ryan declined to run for re-election in the 2018 midterm elections. With the Democratic Party taking control of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi succeeded Ryan as Speaker of the House.
Early life and education
Paul Davis Ryan was born on January 29, 1970 in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children of Elizabeth "Betty" Ann (née Hutter), who later became an interior designer, and Paul Murray Ryan, a lawyer. He is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother of German and English descent. One of Ryan's paternal ancestors settled in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan, founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan's grandfather, Stanley M. Ryan, was appointed United States Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin. In 2018, while filming a segment for the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Ryan learned that his DNA results included 3 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king. As class president Ryan was a representative of the student body on the school board. Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's. He was on his high school's ski, track, and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations. Ryan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips to the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Although Ryan's father was not a lifelong heavy drinker, staying sober for nearly twenty years after his first stint in rehabilitation, he had become an alcoholic by the time Ryan was a teenager. Ryan later commented on his relationship with his father, whom he revered as a young child, stating that "[alcohol] made him more distant, irritable and stressed ... whiskey had washed away some of the best parts of the man I knew." When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack, something Ryan later partially attributed to heavy alcohol consumption. Following the death of his father, Ryan's grandmother moved in with the family. As she had Alzheimer's, Ryan helped care for her while his mother commuted to college in Madison, Wisconsin. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits, which were saved for his college education. His mother later married widower Bruce Douglas.
Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He often visited the office of libertarian professor Richard Hart to discuss the theories of these economists and of Ayn Rand. Hart introduced Ryan to National Review, and with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten, where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser.
Ryan attended the Washington Semester program at American University. He worked summers as a salesman for Oscar Mayer and once got to drive the Wienermobile. Ryan was a member of the College Republicans, and volunteered for the congressional campaign of John Boehner. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity.
Early career
Betty Ryan reportedly urged her son to accept a congressional position as a legislative aide in Senator Kasten's office, which he did after graduating in 1992. In his early years working on Capitol Hill, Ryan supplemented his income by working as a waiter, as a fitness trainer, and at other jobs.
A few months after Kasten lost to Democrat Russ Feingold in the 1992 election, Ryan became a speechwriter for Empower America (now FreedomWorks), a conservative advocacy group founded by Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett.
Ryan later worked as a speechwriter for Kemp, the Republican vice presidential candidate in the 1996 United States presidential election. Kemp became Ryan's mentor, and Ryan has said he had a "huge influence".
In 1995, Ryan became the legislative director for then-U.S. Congressman Sam Brownback of Kansas. In 1997 he returned to Wisconsin, where he worked for a year as a marketing consultant for the construction company Ryan Incorporated Central, owned by his relatives.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
Ryan was first elected to the House in 1998, winning the 1st District seat of Republican Mark Neumann, a two-term incumbent who had vacated his seat to make an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate. 28-year-old Ryan won the Republican primary over 29-year-old pianist Michael J. Logan of Twin Lakes, and the general election against Democrat Lydia Spottswood. This made him the second-youngest member of the House.
Reelected eight times, Ryan never received less than 55 percent of the vote in a congressional election. He defeated Democratic challenger Jeffrey C. Thomas in the 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections. In the 2008 election, Ryan defeated Democrat Marge Krupp.
In the 2010 general election, he defeated Democrat John Heckenlively and Libertarian Joseph Kexel. In 2012, under Wisconsin election law, Ryan was allowed to run concurrently for vice president and for Congress and was not allowed to remove his name from the Congressional ballot after being nominated for the vice presidency. He faced Democratic nominee Rob Zerban. As of July 25, 2012, Ryan had over $5.4 million in his congressional campaign account, more than any other House member. He was reelected with 55 percent of his district's vote and 44 percent of the vote in his hometown, Janesville.
Zerban again challenged Ryan in the 2014 House election. Ryan won with 63 percent of his district's vote.
In the 2016 Republican primary election, Ryan faced businessman Paul Nehlen, who had been endorsed by Sarah Palin. Because of Nehlen's support for Trump, Trump publicly thanked him on Twitter and later told The Washington Post that Nehlen was "running a very good campaign", even though he did not endorse him. On August 5, 2016, Trump endorsed Ryan's re-election after pressure from fellow Republican leaders. In the August 9, 2016 primary election, Ryan overwhelmingly defeated Nehlen, taking over 84 percent of the vote. In the November general election, Ryan faced Democrat Rebecca Solen and won with 65 percent of his district's vote.
Committee assignments
As Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ryan was not a chair or a member of any committee. Prior to his speakership, Ryan held the following assignments:
Committee on Ways and Means (Chairman)
Subcommittee on Health
Caucus memberships
House Republican Caucus
Caucus of House Conservatives Republican Study Committee
United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus
Middle East Economic Partnership Caucus
Prayer Caucus
Sportsmen's Caucus (Co-Chair)
Congressional Western Caucus
Pre-Speaker congressional tenure (1999–2015)
Ryan became the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee in 2007 and became chairman of the committee in 2011 after Republicans took control of the House. That same year, he was selected to deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union address.
As of August 2012, Ryan had been the primary sponsor of more than 70 bills or amendments, and only two of those bills had become law. One, passed in July 2000, renamed a post office in Ryan's district; the other, passed in December 2008, lowered the excise tax on arrow shafts. As of August 2012, Ryan had also co-sponsored 975 bills, of which 176 had passed; 22% of these bills were originally sponsored by a Democrat.
Ryan was a "reliable supporter of the [George W. Bush] administration's foreign policy priorities" who voted for the 2002 Iraq Resolution, authorizing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2010, Ryan was a member of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Bowles-Simpson Commission), which was tasked with developing a plan to reduce the federal deficit. He voted against the final report of the commission. In 2012, Ryan accused the nation's top military leaders of using "smoke and mirrors" to remain under budget limits passed by Congress. Ryan later said that he misspoke on the issue and called General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to apologize for his comments.
Speaker of the House
114th Congress
On September 25, 2015, John Boehner formally announced to House Republicans his intention to resign from the speakership and the House. Among those interested in the post, Kevin McCarthy—who had wide support among Republicans, including Boehner, and Ryan, who was set to officially nominate him—was considered the presumptive favorite. His candidacy was opposed by conservative House Republicans of the Freedom Caucus, and when it became clear that caucus members would not support his candidacy, McCarthy withdrew his name from consideration on October 8. This led many Republicans to turn to Ryan as a compromise candidate. The push included a plea from Boehner, who reportedly told Ryan that he was the only person who could unite the House Republicans at a time of turmoil. Ryan released a statement that said, "While I am grateful for the encouragement I've received, I will not be a candidate." The next day however, close aides of Ryan's confirmed that Ryan had re-evaluated the situation, and was considering the possibility of a run.
Ryan confirmed on October 22, that he would seek the speakership after receiving the endorsements of two factions of House Republicans, including the conservative Freedom Caucus. Ryan, upon confirming his bid for the speakership, stated, "I never thought I'd be speaker. But I pledged to you that if I could be a unifying figure, then I would serve – I would go all in. After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as one, united team. And I am ready and eager to be our speaker."
On October 29, Ryan was elected Speaker, receiving 236 votes, an absolute majority of the 435-member chamber. Democrat Nancy Pelosi received 184 votes, with 12 more going to others. After the vote Ryan delivered his first remarks as speaker-elect and was sworn in by John Conyers, the dean of the House, becoming, at age , the youngest person elected as speaker since James G. Blaine (age ) in 1869. Later, he named lobbyist John David Hoppe as his Chief of Staff.
As Speaker, Ryan became the leader of the House Republicans. However, by tradition, he largely ceased taking part in debate and almost never voted from the floor. He was also not a member of any committees.
2016 presidential election
After Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election on May 4, 2016, Ryan was hesitant to endorse him, stating on May 5 that he was "not ready". Ryan and Trump met in private on May 12, releasing a joint statement afterward, acknowledging their differences but stating "we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground." On June 2, Ryan announced his support for Trump in an op-ed in The Janesville Gazette.
The following day, June 3, amid Trump's criticism of Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, Ryan said Trump's critique "just was out of left field for my mind," and voiced disagreement with him. On June 7, Ryan disavowed Trump's comments about Curiel because he believed they were "the textbook definition of a racist comment". Nevertheless, Ryan continued to endorse Trump, believing that more Republican policies will be enacted under Donald Trump than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. On June 15, after Kevin McCarthy stated during a conversation among Republicans, "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. Swear to God", Ryan interjected, "No leaks. This is how we know we're a real family here."
On July 5, after FBI Director James Comey advocated against pressing charges against Clinton for her email scandal, Ryan said Comey's decision "defies explanation" and stated that "[d]eclining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible precedent."
In October 2016, following the Donald Trump Access Hollywood controversy, Ryan disinvited Trump from a scheduled campaign rally, and announced that he would no longer defend or support Trump's presidential campaign but would focus instead on Congressional races. He also freed down-ticket congress members to use their own judgment about Trump, saying "you all need to do what's best for you and your district." Trump then went on to attack Ryan, accusing him and other "disloyal" Republicans of deliberately undermining his candidacy as part of "a whole sinister deal".
115th Congress
Two months after the 2016 elections, Ryan was re-elected Speaker of the House on January 3, 2017, the opening day of the 115th Congress. He received 239 votes to House Democratic Leader Pelosi's 189 votes (with 5 more going to others).
On February 7, 2017, Ryan told reporters a replacement for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be introduced "this year" amid speculation Donald Trump would not act toward doing so until the following year. On March 9, Ryan gave a 30-minute lecture explaining the proposed replacement for the ACA, titled the American Health Care Act (AHCA). On March 30, Ryan said that he did not intend to work with Democrats on repealing and replacing the ACA, reasoning their involvement would lead to "government running health care." On April 4, Ryan confirmed renewed discussions of an ACA replacement, but warned that a replacement was in the "conceptual" stages of its development. On May 4, the House narrowly voted for the AHCA to repeal the ACA. On May 9, Ryan said that "a month or two" would pass before the Senate would pass its own ACA repeal and replacement legislation. The Senate created several of its own versions of the act but was unable to pass any of them.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Ryan suggested that candidate Trump should release his tax returns.
In May 2017, Ryan said Congress' goal was "calendared 2017 for tax reform" and reported progress was being made in doing so. In December 2017, both houses of Congress passed a $1.5 trillion tax bill called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law on December 22. The tax law is projected to add an additional $1.5 trillion to the national debt over a decade, but the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation also estimated that the GDP level on average would be 0.7% higher during the same period. In the weeks leading up to his retirement announcement, Ryan also championed a $1.3 trillion government-wide spending bill that boosted military spending significantly. Politico noted that Ryan "clamored for austerity when he's been in the minority, trashing Democrats as profligate budget-busters, but he's happily busted budgets in the majority."
In June 2017, Ryan expressed support for strong sanctions on Russia in response to Russian interference in the 2016 elections and its annexation of the Crimea, saying that Russia's actions were "unacceptable". He urged Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional oversight committees to "do their jobs so that we can get to the bottom of all of this." In July Congress passed a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia and giving Congress the power to overrule White House attempts to roll back sanctions. Both houses passed the bill with veto-proof majorities (98-2 in the Senate, 419-3 in the House), so Trump reluctantly signed it into law on August 2, 2017.
Ryan provided political cover for Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who many characterized as a source of the dysfunction in the committee as it investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. Nunes accused the Obama administration of improperly “unmasking” the identities of Trump associates (which led Nunes' temporary recusal from the committee's Russia investigation), accused the FBI of misconduct, leaked the text messages of Senator Mark Warner (in an effort to misleadingly suggest impropriety on his behalf), and threatened to impeach FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The House Intelligence Committee was one of few so-called "select" committees in Congress, which meant that it was up to Ryan to decide the chairman of the committee.
Despite having favored comprehensive immigration earlier in his congressional career, Speaker Ryan prevented immigration legislation from being advanced in the House. When President Trump ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) – which granted temporary stay for undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as minors – Ryan said DACA recipients should "rest easy" because Congress would solve the problem for them, but Ryan backed no bills to protect DACA recipients.
An article in The Washington Post described Ryan's relationship with President Trump as "friendly, if occasionally uneasy," adding that "Ryan did little to check the president or encourage oversight of his administration." Ryan supported Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, and did not support legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Ryan said that legislation to protect Mueller's investigation was not "necessary".
On April 11, 2018, Ryan announced that he would not run for re-election in November, saying, "I like to think I've done my part, my little part in history to set us on a better course." In response, Trump tweeted, "Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question."
In May 2018, Ryan led the House in passing the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which partially repealed the Dodd-Frank Act. It was signed into law by President Trump a few days later.
After Republicans lost control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Ryan suggested that there were irregularities about the election results in California. Ryan said that California's election system was "bizarre", "defies logic" and that "there are a lot of races there we should have won." After Ryan's remarks were reported on, Ryan's spokesperson said "The Speaker did not and does not dispute the results".
Assessment of Speaker tenure
Following Ryan's retirement announcement, an article in The Washington Post stated that Ryan was "leav[ing] behind a legacy of dramatically expanded government spending and immense deficits, a GOP president unchecked, a broken immigration system, and a party that's fast abandoning the free-trade principles that he himself championed." According to the Associated Press, Ryan "achieved one of his career goals: rewriting the tax code"; however, "on his other defining aim — balancing the budget and cutting back benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — Ryan has utterly failed".
Constituent services
In fiscal year 2008, Ryan garnered $5.4 million in congressional earmarks, including $3.28 million for bus service in Wisconsin, $1.38 million for the Ice Age Trail, and $735,000 for the Janesville transit system. In 2009, he successfully advocated with the Department of Energy for stimulus funds for energy initiatives in his district.
Other home district projects he has supported include a runway extension at the Rock County Airport, an environmental study of the Kenosha Harbor, firefighting equipment for Janesville, road projects in Wisconsin, and commuter rail and streetcar projects in Kenosha. In 2008, Ryan pledged to stop seeking earmarks. Prior to that he had sought earmarks less often than other representatives. Taxpayers for Common Sense records show no earmarks supported by Ryan for fiscal years 2009 and 2010. In 2012, Ryan supported a request for $3.8 million from the Department of Transportation for a new transit center in Janesville, which city officials received in July.
Ryan was an active member of a task force established by Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle that tried unsuccessfully to persuade General Motors to keep its assembly plant in Janesville open. He made personal contact with GM executives to try to convince them to save or retool the plant, offering GM hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded incentives. Following the closure of factories in Janesville and Kenosha, constituents expressed dissatisfaction with Ryan's voting history. During the 2011 Congressional summer break, Ryan held town hall meetings by telephone with constituents. The only public meetings Ryan attended in his district required an admission fee of at least $15.
In August 2011, constituents in Kenosha and Racine protested when Ryan would not meet with them about economic and employment issues, after weeks of emailed requests from them. His Kenosha office locked its doors and filed a complaint with the police, who told the protesters that they were not allowed in Ryan's office.
Ryan maintained a mobile office to serve constituents in outlying areas.
2012 vice presidential campaign
Dan Balz of The Washington Post wrote that Ryan was promoted as a candidate for Vice President "by major elements of the conservative opinion makers, including The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard and the editor of National Review".
On August 11, 2012, the Romney campaign announced Ryan as its choice for Vice President through its "Mitt's VP" mobile app. It was reported that Romney had offered the position to Ryan on August 1, 2012, the day after returning from a foreign policy trip to the United Kingdom, Poland, and Israel. On August 11, 2012, Ryan formally accepted Romney's invitation to join his campaign as his running mate, in front of the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk. Ryan is the first individual from Wisconsin as well as the first member of Generation X to run on a major party's national ticket.
Also in August 2012, the Associated Press published a story saying that while the Tea Party movement had wanted a nominee other than Romney, it had gotten "one of its ideological heroes" in the Vice Presidential slot. According to the article, Ryan supports the Tea Party's belief in "individual rights, distrust of big government and an allegorical embrace of the Founding Fathers".
According to a statistical-historical analysis conducted by Nate Silver, "Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900" and "is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee [for vice president who previously served in the Congress] was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center" of any vice presidential candidate chosen from Congress since the turn of the 20th century.
Political scientist Eric Schickler commented that while Ryan "may well be the most conservative vice presidential nominee in decades," the NOMINATE methodology "is not suited to making claims about the relative liberalism or conservatism of politicians" over a long time span. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that 39% thought Ryan was an "excellent" or "pretty good" vice presidential choice, compared to 42% who felt he was a "fair" or "poor" choice.
Ryan formally accepted his nomination at the 2012 Republican National Convention on August 29, 2012. In his acceptance speech, he promoted Mitt Romney as the presidential candidate, supported repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), said that he and Romney had a plan to generate 12 million new jobs over the ensuing four years, and promoted founding principles as a solution: "We will not duck the tough issues—we will lead. We will not spend four years blaming others—we will take responsibility. We will not try to replace our founding principles, we will reapply our founding principles."
The speech was well received by the convention audience and praised for being well-delivered. Some fact-checkers purported that there were important factual omissions and that he presented details out of context. Conservative media (including Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, the Investor's Business Daily, and Fox News) disputed some of the fact-checkers' findings. Of 33 of Ryan's statements which Politifact.com suspected of being false or misleading, it rated 10.5% as True, 18% as Mostly True, 21% as Half True, 36% as Mostly False, 9% as False, and 6% as Pants on Fire. On October 11, 2012, Ryan debated his Democratic counterpart, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden, in the only vice presidential debate of the 2012 election cycle.
Romney and Ryan lost the 2012 presidential election, but Ryan retained his seat in the House of Representatives.
Congressional Leadership Fund
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a Super PAC, has been closely linked and aligned with Ryan. Ryan has directed major GOP donors towards the CLF.
Political positions
Ryan's political positions were generally conservative, with a focus on fiscal policy. Ryan "played a central role in nearly all" the policy debates of the period 2010–2012. In 2012, Ryan voted against the Simpson-Bowles commission proposal to reduce the deficit, because the proposal raised taxes and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. While he was a self-proclaimed deficit hawk, Ryan's tenure of Speaker of the House saw a major expansion in government spending and a ballooning of deficits despite unified Republican control of Congress and the White House, no recession and no new foreign conflict.
Ryan subscribed to supply-side economics and supported tax cuts including eliminating the capital gains tax, the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the Alternative Minimum Tax. Ryan supports deregulation, including the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed some financial regulation of banks from the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. During the economic recovery from the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Ryan supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which authorized the Treasury to purchase toxic assets from banks and other financial institutions, and the auto industry bailout; Ryan opposed the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which expanded consumer protections regarding credit card plans, and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which strengthened financial regulation. In 2018 as House Speaker, Ryan helped pass the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act that repealed large parts of Dodd-Frank.
In 2016, Ryan rolled out a set of anti-poverty proposals that "seek to expand work requirements for those receiving federal benefits, to give states and local jurisdictions a greater role in administering those benefits, to better measure the results of federal programs for the poor, and to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse." Ryan believes federal poverty reduction programs are ineffective and he supports cuts to welfare, child care, Pell Grants, food stamps, and other federal assistance programs. Ryan supports block granting Medicaid to the states and the privatization of social security and Medicare. Ryan supported the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit and opposes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as "Obamacare." Ryan supported the American Health Care Act of 2017 (AHCA), the 2017 House Republican plan to repeal and replace the ACA. In 2012, The New York Times said Ryan was "his party's most forceful spokesman for cutting entitlement spending."
Ryan's non-fiscal policy positions were subject to additional national attention with his 2012 candidacy for Vice President. Ryan is pro-life and opposes abortion rights. Ryan opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which provides that the 180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination resets with each new paycheck affected by that discriminatory action. In 2012, Ryan supported civil unions and opposed same-sex marriage.
Ryan supported school vouchers, and supported the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and its repeal the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Ryan is unsure, and believes climate scientists are unsure, of the impact of human activity on climate change. Ryan supported tax incentives for the petroleum industry and opposed them for renewable energy. Ryan supported gun rights and opposed stricter gun control. Ryan supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ryan condemned Barack Obama's decision not to block a UN resolution criticizing Israeli settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories as "absolutely shameful". Ryan supported President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. He stated: "Jerusalem has been, and always will be, the eternal, undivided capital of the State of Israel."
Following the 2018 Russia–United States summit, in which Donald Trump stated that he believed Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Ryan confirmed his belief that Russian government interfered and advocated for more economic sanctions against Russia for the interference.
Ryan supported U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen and used his power to block a House vote on the war in Yemen.
History with Objectivism
At a 2005 Washington, D.C. gathering celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth, Ryan credited Rand with having inspired him to get involved in politics. In a speech that same year at the Atlas Society, he said he grew up reading Rand, and that her books taught him about his value system and beliefs. Ryan required staffers and interns in his congressional office to read Rand and gave copies of her novel Atlas Shrugged as gifts to his staff for Christmas. In his Atlas Society speech, he also described Social Security as a "socialist-based system".
In 2009, Ryan said, "What's unique about what's happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it's as if we're living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault."
In April 2012, after receiving criticism from Georgetown University faculty members on his budget plan, Ryan rejected Rand's philosophy as atheistic, saying it "reduces human interactions down to mere contracts". He also called the reports of his adherence to Rand's views an "urban legend" and stated that he was deeply influenced by his Roman Catholic faith and by Thomas Aquinas.
Electoral history
Post-congressional life
In March 2019, Ryan joined the board of directors of Fox Corporation, the owner of Fox News Channel and the Fox broadcast network. In August 2019, he joined the board of SHINE Medical Technologies. He has since joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame as a professor of practice for the 2019–20 academic year as a guest lecturer in political science and economics. In April 2019, Ryan was nominated as the delegation leader to represent President Trump to visit Taipei. With Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, he attended the 40th anniversary ceremony of the Taiwan Relations Act. In October 2019, Ryan launched a non-profit called American Idea Foundation.
Personal life
In December 2000, Ryan married Janna Christine Little, a tax attorney, a graduate of Wellesley College and George Washington University Law School, and a native of Madill, Oklahoma. The Ryans live in the Courthouse Hill Historic District of Janesville, Wisconsin. They have three children: Elizabeth "Liza" Anne, Charles Wilson, and Samuel Lowery. A Roman Catholic, Ryan is a member of St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Janesville.
Janna is a cousin of former Democratic Representative Dan Boren (D-OK). She is also a granddaughter of Reuel Little, who helped found the American Party to support the 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace.
Due to a family history of fatal heart attacks before age 60, Ryan pursues an intense cross-training fitness program called P90X. Ryan has always been a fitness enthusiast and was a personal trainer when he came out of college. About P90X, he said, "It works because it's called muscle confusion. It hits your body in many different ways. Pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, lots of cardio, karate, jump training. It has results, it works. It's a good workout."
In a 2010 Politico interview, he said that he weighed 163 pounds and maintained his body fat percentage between 6 and 8%. Tony Horton, creator of P90X, who has personally trained Ryan many times, reiterated the claim saying, "He is very, very, very lean. I know what 6 to 8 percent body fat looks like, and there's no fat anywhere on the man. I'm around 9 percent and he's much leaner than I am. He’s easily 6 to 8 percent body fat. You just have to eat right and exercise every day, and that’s what he does."
In a radio interview, Ryan claimed he had once run a marathon in under three hours; he later stated that he forgot his actual time and was just trying to state what he thought was a normal time. His one official marathon time is recorded as slightly over four hours.
Awards and honors
2004, 2010 – Guardian of Small Business Award, National Federation of Independent Business
2008 – Defending the American Dream Award, Americans for Prosperity, Wisconsin chapter
2009 – Manufacturing Legislative Excellence Award, National Association of Manufacturers
2009 – Honorary Degree, Miami University
2010 – Legislator of the Year Award, International Franchise Association
2011 – Statesmanship Award, Claremont Institute
2011 – Fiscy Award for responsible financial stewardship and fiscal discipline in government.
2011 – Leadership Award, Jack Kemp Foundation
2011 – Freedom and Prosperity Award, Mason Contractors Association of America
2012 – Chair, Honorary Board of the Archery Trade Association
2014 – Alexander Hamilton Award, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
2018 – Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service
References
Further reading
Works about Ryan
Works by Ryan
External links
Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Historical Society
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1970 births
2012 United States vice-presidential candidates
20th-century American politicians
20th-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
American male non-fiction writers
American people of English descent
American people of Jewish descent
American people of German descent
American people of Irish descent
American political writers
American speechwriters
American University alumni
Catholics from Wisconsin
Living people
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Members of the United States House of Representatives from Wisconsin
Miami University alumni
Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign
Politicians from Janesville, Wisconsin
Republican Party (United States) vice presidential nominees
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
Speakers of the United States House of Representatives
University of Notre Dame faculty
Wisconsin Republicans
Writers from Wisconsin
Joseph A. Craig High School alumni
21st-century American male writers | false | [
"\"Still Alive\" is the closing credits song from the Portal video game.\n\nStill Alive may also refer to:\n \"Still Alive\", the theme song from the video game Mirror's Edge\n Still Alive – the Remixes, an extended soundtrack for the game\n Still Alive (album), the album by DJ Mayonnaise\n \"Still Alive\", a remix on and repackage of the EP Alive by Big Bang\n Still Alive (book), by Ruth Kluger\n \"Still Alive\", a song by 3 Doors Down from Us and the Night\n \"Seimei/Still Alive\", a single by Japanese rock band B'z",
"\"The Storyteller\" is the first segment of the twenty-seventh episode, the third episode of the second season (1986–87) of the television series The Twilight Zone. In this segment a young boy keeps his ancestor alive using a technique similar to that employed by Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights: telling him a story each night and going to bed in the midst of the story.\n\nPlot\nRetired teacher Dorothy Livingston is visiting her niece when she bumps into a man she recognizes. Dorothy and her niece follow him and Dorothy tells her niece how she met the man in 1933.\n\nDorothy was assigned to a school in West Virginia and replaced a teacher who told her that Mica Frost, one of her students, should be allowed access to the library at all times. She meets Mica and discovers that he enjoys scribbling in his notebook. She believes Mica's behavior to be unusual and asks him to schedule a parent-teacher conference. Mica informs her that his parents are dead and he lives with his grandfather, who he refuses to let her meet.\n\nMica secretly takes extra books home. Dorothy visits and finds that the boy is reading the books to his ailing grandfather. Mica now confesses that the old man is not his grandfather but actually his great-great-great-grandfather, who he claims to be 133 years old. He says he has kept the old man alive by reading to him a story every night, but never finishing the story until the next night, claiming the suspense is the only thing keeping the old man alive. He claims he's continuing the tradition as his father and grandfather did.\n\nThe next morning at school, Mica falls from a tree, hits his head, and breaks his arm. He is taken to the town doctor to spend the night but he fights back because no one will be home to keep his \"grandfather\" alive. Dorothy goes to their house and tells his grandfather a story she makes up on the fly. The next day, Mica rushes home to find that his grandfather still alive and well. Dorothy tells Mica that she still does not believe in his storytelling method but thought it would not hurt to tell one just in case.\n\nBack in the present, the adult Mica enters an apartment building followed closely by Dorothy and her niece. As they sneak into Mica's apartment, Dorothy is heard narrating the events at some future date. As she pauses in the narrative, her mother asks excitedly, \"Is the old man there? Is he 200 years old?\" Dorothy answers: \"I can't say, mother. Not until tomorrow.\" and leaves with the old woman waiting for tomorrow’s story.\n\nExternal links\n \n\nThe Twilight Zone (1985 TV series season 2) episodes\n1986 American television episodes\nFiction set in 1933\nTelevision episodes about immortality\n\nfr:Le Conteur"
]
|
[
"Paul Ryan",
"Early life and education",
"Where was Ryan born?",
"Paul Davis Ryan Jr. was born in Janesville, Wisconsin,",
"Where did Ryan go to school?",
"Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team,",
"Did he do anything noteworthy in school?",
"then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king.",
"Where did he attend college?",
"Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio,",
"Did he graduate with honors?",
"with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten",
"What jobs did he have before becoming involved in politics?",
"Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's.",
"What else did he do for employment?",
"Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser.",
"Is there anything else interesting about his early life?",
"When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack.",
"Is his mother still alive?",
"His mother remarried, to Bruce Douglas."
]
| C_3e8539e8237d4b058d107f04ee5e4a39_1 | Is there anything odd about his early life? | 10 | Is there anything odd about Paul Ryan's early life? | Paul Ryan | Paul Davis Ryan Jr. was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children of Elizabeth "Betty" Ann (nee Hutter), who later became an interior designer, and Paul Davis Ryan, a lawyer. He is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother of German and English ancestry. One of Ryan's paternal ancestors settled in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan (1858-1917), founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan's grandfather, Stanley M. Ryan (1898-1957), was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin. Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team, then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king. As class president Ryan was a representative of the student body on the school board. Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's. He was on his high school's ski, track, and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations. Ryan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack. Following the death of his father, Ryan's grandmother moved in with the family. As she had Alzheimer's, Ryan helped care for her while his mother commuted to college in Madison, Wisconsin. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits, which were saved for his college education. His mother remarried, to Bruce Douglas. Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He often visited the office of libertarian professor Richard Hart to discuss the theories of these economists and of Ayn Rand. Hart introduced Ryan to National Review, and with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser. He attended the Washington Semester program at American University. Ryan worked summers as a salesman for Oscar Mayer and once got to drive the Wienermobile. Ryan was a member of the College Republicans, and volunteered for the congressional campaign of John Boehner. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity. CANNOTANSWER | was on his high school's ski, track, and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. | Paul Davis Ryan (born January 29, 1970) is an American retired politician who served as the 54th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from October 2015 to January 2019. He was the 2012 Republican Party vice presidential nominee running alongside Mitt Romney, losing to incumbent president Barack Obama and then-vice president Joe Biden.
Ryan, a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, graduated from Miami University in 1992. He spent five years working for Republicans in Washington, D.C. and returned to Wisconsin in 1997 to work at his family's construction company. Ryan was elected to Congress to represent the following year, replacing an incumbent Republican who ran for U.S. Senate. Ryan would represent the district for 20 years. He chaired the House Budget Committee from 2011 to 2015 and briefly chaired the House Ways and Means Committee in 2015 prior to being elected Speaker of the House in October 2015 following John Boehner's retirement.
A self-proclaimed deficit hawk, Ryan was a major proponent of Social Security privatization in the mid-2000s. In the 2010s, two proposals heavily influenced by Ryan—"The Path to Prosperity" and "A Better Way"—advocated for the privatization of Medicare, the conversion of Medicaid into a block grant program, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and significant federal tax cuts. As Speaker, he played a key role in the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act in 2018, which partially repealed the Dodd-Frank Act. His other major piece of legislation, the American Health Care Act of 2017, passed the House but failed in the Senate by one vote.
Ryan declined to run for re-election in the 2018 midterm elections. With the Democratic Party taking control of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi succeeded Ryan as Speaker of the House.
Early life and education
Paul Davis Ryan was born on January 29, 1970 in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children of Elizabeth "Betty" Ann (née Hutter), who later became an interior designer, and Paul Murray Ryan, a lawyer. He is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother of German and English descent. One of Ryan's paternal ancestors settled in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan, founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan's grandfather, Stanley M. Ryan, was appointed United States Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin. In 2018, while filming a segment for the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Ryan learned that his DNA results included 3 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king. As class president Ryan was a representative of the student body on the school board. Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's. He was on his high school's ski, track, and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations. Ryan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips to the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Although Ryan's father was not a lifelong heavy drinker, staying sober for nearly twenty years after his first stint in rehabilitation, he had become an alcoholic by the time Ryan was a teenager. Ryan later commented on his relationship with his father, whom he revered as a young child, stating that "[alcohol] made him more distant, irritable and stressed ... whiskey had washed away some of the best parts of the man I knew." When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack, something Ryan later partially attributed to heavy alcohol consumption. Following the death of his father, Ryan's grandmother moved in with the family. As she had Alzheimer's, Ryan helped care for her while his mother commuted to college in Madison, Wisconsin. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits, which were saved for his college education. His mother later married widower Bruce Douglas.
Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He often visited the office of libertarian professor Richard Hart to discuss the theories of these economists and of Ayn Rand. Hart introduced Ryan to National Review, and with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten, where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser.
Ryan attended the Washington Semester program at American University. He worked summers as a salesman for Oscar Mayer and once got to drive the Wienermobile. Ryan was a member of the College Republicans, and volunteered for the congressional campaign of John Boehner. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity.
Early career
Betty Ryan reportedly urged her son to accept a congressional position as a legislative aide in Senator Kasten's office, which he did after graduating in 1992. In his early years working on Capitol Hill, Ryan supplemented his income by working as a waiter, as a fitness trainer, and at other jobs.
A few months after Kasten lost to Democrat Russ Feingold in the 1992 election, Ryan became a speechwriter for Empower America (now FreedomWorks), a conservative advocacy group founded by Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett.
Ryan later worked as a speechwriter for Kemp, the Republican vice presidential candidate in the 1996 United States presidential election. Kemp became Ryan's mentor, and Ryan has said he had a "huge influence".
In 1995, Ryan became the legislative director for then-U.S. Congressman Sam Brownback of Kansas. In 1997 he returned to Wisconsin, where he worked for a year as a marketing consultant for the construction company Ryan Incorporated Central, owned by his relatives.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
Ryan was first elected to the House in 1998, winning the 1st District seat of Republican Mark Neumann, a two-term incumbent who had vacated his seat to make an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate. 28-year-old Ryan won the Republican primary over 29-year-old pianist Michael J. Logan of Twin Lakes, and the general election against Democrat Lydia Spottswood. This made him the second-youngest member of the House.
Reelected eight times, Ryan never received less than 55 percent of the vote in a congressional election. He defeated Democratic challenger Jeffrey C. Thomas in the 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections. In the 2008 election, Ryan defeated Democrat Marge Krupp.
In the 2010 general election, he defeated Democrat John Heckenlively and Libertarian Joseph Kexel. In 2012, under Wisconsin election law, Ryan was allowed to run concurrently for vice president and for Congress and was not allowed to remove his name from the Congressional ballot after being nominated for the vice presidency. He faced Democratic nominee Rob Zerban. As of July 25, 2012, Ryan had over $5.4 million in his congressional campaign account, more than any other House member. He was reelected with 55 percent of his district's vote and 44 percent of the vote in his hometown, Janesville.
Zerban again challenged Ryan in the 2014 House election. Ryan won with 63 percent of his district's vote.
In the 2016 Republican primary election, Ryan faced businessman Paul Nehlen, who had been endorsed by Sarah Palin. Because of Nehlen's support for Trump, Trump publicly thanked him on Twitter and later told The Washington Post that Nehlen was "running a very good campaign", even though he did not endorse him. On August 5, 2016, Trump endorsed Ryan's re-election after pressure from fellow Republican leaders. In the August 9, 2016 primary election, Ryan overwhelmingly defeated Nehlen, taking over 84 percent of the vote. In the November general election, Ryan faced Democrat Rebecca Solen and won with 65 percent of his district's vote.
Committee assignments
As Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ryan was not a chair or a member of any committee. Prior to his speakership, Ryan held the following assignments:
Committee on Ways and Means (Chairman)
Subcommittee on Health
Caucus memberships
House Republican Caucus
Caucus of House Conservatives Republican Study Committee
United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus
Middle East Economic Partnership Caucus
Prayer Caucus
Sportsmen's Caucus (Co-Chair)
Congressional Western Caucus
Pre-Speaker congressional tenure (1999–2015)
Ryan became the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee in 2007 and became chairman of the committee in 2011 after Republicans took control of the House. That same year, he was selected to deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union address.
As of August 2012, Ryan had been the primary sponsor of more than 70 bills or amendments, and only two of those bills had become law. One, passed in July 2000, renamed a post office in Ryan's district; the other, passed in December 2008, lowered the excise tax on arrow shafts. As of August 2012, Ryan had also co-sponsored 975 bills, of which 176 had passed; 22% of these bills were originally sponsored by a Democrat.
Ryan was a "reliable supporter of the [George W. Bush] administration's foreign policy priorities" who voted for the 2002 Iraq Resolution, authorizing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2010, Ryan was a member of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Bowles-Simpson Commission), which was tasked with developing a plan to reduce the federal deficit. He voted against the final report of the commission. In 2012, Ryan accused the nation's top military leaders of using "smoke and mirrors" to remain under budget limits passed by Congress. Ryan later said that he misspoke on the issue and called General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to apologize for his comments.
Speaker of the House
114th Congress
On September 25, 2015, John Boehner formally announced to House Republicans his intention to resign from the speakership and the House. Among those interested in the post, Kevin McCarthy—who had wide support among Republicans, including Boehner, and Ryan, who was set to officially nominate him—was considered the presumptive favorite. His candidacy was opposed by conservative House Republicans of the Freedom Caucus, and when it became clear that caucus members would not support his candidacy, McCarthy withdrew his name from consideration on October 8. This led many Republicans to turn to Ryan as a compromise candidate. The push included a plea from Boehner, who reportedly told Ryan that he was the only person who could unite the House Republicans at a time of turmoil. Ryan released a statement that said, "While I am grateful for the encouragement I've received, I will not be a candidate." The next day however, close aides of Ryan's confirmed that Ryan had re-evaluated the situation, and was considering the possibility of a run.
Ryan confirmed on October 22, that he would seek the speakership after receiving the endorsements of two factions of House Republicans, including the conservative Freedom Caucus. Ryan, upon confirming his bid for the speakership, stated, "I never thought I'd be speaker. But I pledged to you that if I could be a unifying figure, then I would serve – I would go all in. After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as one, united team. And I am ready and eager to be our speaker."
On October 29, Ryan was elected Speaker, receiving 236 votes, an absolute majority of the 435-member chamber. Democrat Nancy Pelosi received 184 votes, with 12 more going to others. After the vote Ryan delivered his first remarks as speaker-elect and was sworn in by John Conyers, the dean of the House, becoming, at age , the youngest person elected as speaker since James G. Blaine (age ) in 1869. Later, he named lobbyist John David Hoppe as his Chief of Staff.
As Speaker, Ryan became the leader of the House Republicans. However, by tradition, he largely ceased taking part in debate and almost never voted from the floor. He was also not a member of any committees.
2016 presidential election
After Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election on May 4, 2016, Ryan was hesitant to endorse him, stating on May 5 that he was "not ready". Ryan and Trump met in private on May 12, releasing a joint statement afterward, acknowledging their differences but stating "we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground." On June 2, Ryan announced his support for Trump in an op-ed in The Janesville Gazette.
The following day, June 3, amid Trump's criticism of Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, Ryan said Trump's critique "just was out of left field for my mind," and voiced disagreement with him. On June 7, Ryan disavowed Trump's comments about Curiel because he believed they were "the textbook definition of a racist comment". Nevertheless, Ryan continued to endorse Trump, believing that more Republican policies will be enacted under Donald Trump than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. On June 15, after Kevin McCarthy stated during a conversation among Republicans, "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. Swear to God", Ryan interjected, "No leaks. This is how we know we're a real family here."
On July 5, after FBI Director James Comey advocated against pressing charges against Clinton for her email scandal, Ryan said Comey's decision "defies explanation" and stated that "[d]eclining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible precedent."
In October 2016, following the Donald Trump Access Hollywood controversy, Ryan disinvited Trump from a scheduled campaign rally, and announced that he would no longer defend or support Trump's presidential campaign but would focus instead on Congressional races. He also freed down-ticket congress members to use their own judgment about Trump, saying "you all need to do what's best for you and your district." Trump then went on to attack Ryan, accusing him and other "disloyal" Republicans of deliberately undermining his candidacy as part of "a whole sinister deal".
115th Congress
Two months after the 2016 elections, Ryan was re-elected Speaker of the House on January 3, 2017, the opening day of the 115th Congress. He received 239 votes to House Democratic Leader Pelosi's 189 votes (with 5 more going to others).
On February 7, 2017, Ryan told reporters a replacement for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be introduced "this year" amid speculation Donald Trump would not act toward doing so until the following year. On March 9, Ryan gave a 30-minute lecture explaining the proposed replacement for the ACA, titled the American Health Care Act (AHCA). On March 30, Ryan said that he did not intend to work with Democrats on repealing and replacing the ACA, reasoning their involvement would lead to "government running health care." On April 4, Ryan confirmed renewed discussions of an ACA replacement, but warned that a replacement was in the "conceptual" stages of its development. On May 4, the House narrowly voted for the AHCA to repeal the ACA. On May 9, Ryan said that "a month or two" would pass before the Senate would pass its own ACA repeal and replacement legislation. The Senate created several of its own versions of the act but was unable to pass any of them.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Ryan suggested that candidate Trump should release his tax returns.
In May 2017, Ryan said Congress' goal was "calendared 2017 for tax reform" and reported progress was being made in doing so. In December 2017, both houses of Congress passed a $1.5 trillion tax bill called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law on December 22. The tax law is projected to add an additional $1.5 trillion to the national debt over a decade, but the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation also estimated that the GDP level on average would be 0.7% higher during the same period. In the weeks leading up to his retirement announcement, Ryan also championed a $1.3 trillion government-wide spending bill that boosted military spending significantly. Politico noted that Ryan "clamored for austerity when he's been in the minority, trashing Democrats as profligate budget-busters, but he's happily busted budgets in the majority."
In June 2017, Ryan expressed support for strong sanctions on Russia in response to Russian interference in the 2016 elections and its annexation of the Crimea, saying that Russia's actions were "unacceptable". He urged Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional oversight committees to "do their jobs so that we can get to the bottom of all of this." In July Congress passed a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia and giving Congress the power to overrule White House attempts to roll back sanctions. Both houses passed the bill with veto-proof majorities (98-2 in the Senate, 419-3 in the House), so Trump reluctantly signed it into law on August 2, 2017.
Ryan provided political cover for Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who many characterized as a source of the dysfunction in the committee as it investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. Nunes accused the Obama administration of improperly “unmasking” the identities of Trump associates (which led Nunes' temporary recusal from the committee's Russia investigation), accused the FBI of misconduct, leaked the text messages of Senator Mark Warner (in an effort to misleadingly suggest impropriety on his behalf), and threatened to impeach FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The House Intelligence Committee was one of few so-called "select" committees in Congress, which meant that it was up to Ryan to decide the chairman of the committee.
Despite having favored comprehensive immigration earlier in his congressional career, Speaker Ryan prevented immigration legislation from being advanced in the House. When President Trump ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) – which granted temporary stay for undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as minors – Ryan said DACA recipients should "rest easy" because Congress would solve the problem for them, but Ryan backed no bills to protect DACA recipients.
An article in The Washington Post described Ryan's relationship with President Trump as "friendly, if occasionally uneasy," adding that "Ryan did little to check the president or encourage oversight of his administration." Ryan supported Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, and did not support legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Ryan said that legislation to protect Mueller's investigation was not "necessary".
On April 11, 2018, Ryan announced that he would not run for re-election in November, saying, "I like to think I've done my part, my little part in history to set us on a better course." In response, Trump tweeted, "Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question."
In May 2018, Ryan led the House in passing the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which partially repealed the Dodd-Frank Act. It was signed into law by President Trump a few days later.
After Republicans lost control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Ryan suggested that there were irregularities about the election results in California. Ryan said that California's election system was "bizarre", "defies logic" and that "there are a lot of races there we should have won." After Ryan's remarks were reported on, Ryan's spokesperson said "The Speaker did not and does not dispute the results".
Assessment of Speaker tenure
Following Ryan's retirement announcement, an article in The Washington Post stated that Ryan was "leav[ing] behind a legacy of dramatically expanded government spending and immense deficits, a GOP president unchecked, a broken immigration system, and a party that's fast abandoning the free-trade principles that he himself championed." According to the Associated Press, Ryan "achieved one of his career goals: rewriting the tax code"; however, "on his other defining aim — balancing the budget and cutting back benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — Ryan has utterly failed".
Constituent services
In fiscal year 2008, Ryan garnered $5.4 million in congressional earmarks, including $3.28 million for bus service in Wisconsin, $1.38 million for the Ice Age Trail, and $735,000 for the Janesville transit system. In 2009, he successfully advocated with the Department of Energy for stimulus funds for energy initiatives in his district.
Other home district projects he has supported include a runway extension at the Rock County Airport, an environmental study of the Kenosha Harbor, firefighting equipment for Janesville, road projects in Wisconsin, and commuter rail and streetcar projects in Kenosha. In 2008, Ryan pledged to stop seeking earmarks. Prior to that he had sought earmarks less often than other representatives. Taxpayers for Common Sense records show no earmarks supported by Ryan for fiscal years 2009 and 2010. In 2012, Ryan supported a request for $3.8 million from the Department of Transportation for a new transit center in Janesville, which city officials received in July.
Ryan was an active member of a task force established by Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle that tried unsuccessfully to persuade General Motors to keep its assembly plant in Janesville open. He made personal contact with GM executives to try to convince them to save or retool the plant, offering GM hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded incentives. Following the closure of factories in Janesville and Kenosha, constituents expressed dissatisfaction with Ryan's voting history. During the 2011 Congressional summer break, Ryan held town hall meetings by telephone with constituents. The only public meetings Ryan attended in his district required an admission fee of at least $15.
In August 2011, constituents in Kenosha and Racine protested when Ryan would not meet with them about economic and employment issues, after weeks of emailed requests from them. His Kenosha office locked its doors and filed a complaint with the police, who told the protesters that they were not allowed in Ryan's office.
Ryan maintained a mobile office to serve constituents in outlying areas.
2012 vice presidential campaign
Dan Balz of The Washington Post wrote that Ryan was promoted as a candidate for Vice President "by major elements of the conservative opinion makers, including The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard and the editor of National Review".
On August 11, 2012, the Romney campaign announced Ryan as its choice for Vice President through its "Mitt's VP" mobile app. It was reported that Romney had offered the position to Ryan on August 1, 2012, the day after returning from a foreign policy trip to the United Kingdom, Poland, and Israel. On August 11, 2012, Ryan formally accepted Romney's invitation to join his campaign as his running mate, in front of the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk. Ryan is the first individual from Wisconsin as well as the first member of Generation X to run on a major party's national ticket.
Also in August 2012, the Associated Press published a story saying that while the Tea Party movement had wanted a nominee other than Romney, it had gotten "one of its ideological heroes" in the Vice Presidential slot. According to the article, Ryan supports the Tea Party's belief in "individual rights, distrust of big government and an allegorical embrace of the Founding Fathers".
According to a statistical-historical analysis conducted by Nate Silver, "Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900" and "is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee [for vice president who previously served in the Congress] was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center" of any vice presidential candidate chosen from Congress since the turn of the 20th century.
Political scientist Eric Schickler commented that while Ryan "may well be the most conservative vice presidential nominee in decades," the NOMINATE methodology "is not suited to making claims about the relative liberalism or conservatism of politicians" over a long time span. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that 39% thought Ryan was an "excellent" or "pretty good" vice presidential choice, compared to 42% who felt he was a "fair" or "poor" choice.
Ryan formally accepted his nomination at the 2012 Republican National Convention on August 29, 2012. In his acceptance speech, he promoted Mitt Romney as the presidential candidate, supported repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), said that he and Romney had a plan to generate 12 million new jobs over the ensuing four years, and promoted founding principles as a solution: "We will not duck the tough issues—we will lead. We will not spend four years blaming others—we will take responsibility. We will not try to replace our founding principles, we will reapply our founding principles."
The speech was well received by the convention audience and praised for being well-delivered. Some fact-checkers purported that there were important factual omissions and that he presented details out of context. Conservative media (including Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, the Investor's Business Daily, and Fox News) disputed some of the fact-checkers' findings. Of 33 of Ryan's statements which Politifact.com suspected of being false or misleading, it rated 10.5% as True, 18% as Mostly True, 21% as Half True, 36% as Mostly False, 9% as False, and 6% as Pants on Fire. On October 11, 2012, Ryan debated his Democratic counterpart, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden, in the only vice presidential debate of the 2012 election cycle.
Romney and Ryan lost the 2012 presidential election, but Ryan retained his seat in the House of Representatives.
Congressional Leadership Fund
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a Super PAC, has been closely linked and aligned with Ryan. Ryan has directed major GOP donors towards the CLF.
Political positions
Ryan's political positions were generally conservative, with a focus on fiscal policy. Ryan "played a central role in nearly all" the policy debates of the period 2010–2012. In 2012, Ryan voted against the Simpson-Bowles commission proposal to reduce the deficit, because the proposal raised taxes and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. While he was a self-proclaimed deficit hawk, Ryan's tenure of Speaker of the House saw a major expansion in government spending and a ballooning of deficits despite unified Republican control of Congress and the White House, no recession and no new foreign conflict.
Ryan subscribed to supply-side economics and supported tax cuts including eliminating the capital gains tax, the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the Alternative Minimum Tax. Ryan supports deregulation, including the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed some financial regulation of banks from the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. During the economic recovery from the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Ryan supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which authorized the Treasury to purchase toxic assets from banks and other financial institutions, and the auto industry bailout; Ryan opposed the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which expanded consumer protections regarding credit card plans, and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which strengthened financial regulation. In 2018 as House Speaker, Ryan helped pass the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act that repealed large parts of Dodd-Frank.
In 2016, Ryan rolled out a set of anti-poverty proposals that "seek to expand work requirements for those receiving federal benefits, to give states and local jurisdictions a greater role in administering those benefits, to better measure the results of federal programs for the poor, and to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse." Ryan believes federal poverty reduction programs are ineffective and he supports cuts to welfare, child care, Pell Grants, food stamps, and other federal assistance programs. Ryan supports block granting Medicaid to the states and the privatization of social security and Medicare. Ryan supported the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit and opposes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as "Obamacare." Ryan supported the American Health Care Act of 2017 (AHCA), the 2017 House Republican plan to repeal and replace the ACA. In 2012, The New York Times said Ryan was "his party's most forceful spokesman for cutting entitlement spending."
Ryan's non-fiscal policy positions were subject to additional national attention with his 2012 candidacy for Vice President. Ryan is pro-life and opposes abortion rights. Ryan opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which provides that the 180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination resets with each new paycheck affected by that discriminatory action. In 2012, Ryan supported civil unions and opposed same-sex marriage.
Ryan supported school vouchers, and supported the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and its repeal the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Ryan is unsure, and believes climate scientists are unsure, of the impact of human activity on climate change. Ryan supported tax incentives for the petroleum industry and opposed them for renewable energy. Ryan supported gun rights and opposed stricter gun control. Ryan supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ryan condemned Barack Obama's decision not to block a UN resolution criticizing Israeli settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories as "absolutely shameful". Ryan supported President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. He stated: "Jerusalem has been, and always will be, the eternal, undivided capital of the State of Israel."
Following the 2018 Russia–United States summit, in which Donald Trump stated that he believed Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Ryan confirmed his belief that Russian government interfered and advocated for more economic sanctions against Russia for the interference.
Ryan supported U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen and used his power to block a House vote on the war in Yemen.
History with Objectivism
At a 2005 Washington, D.C. gathering celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth, Ryan credited Rand with having inspired him to get involved in politics. In a speech that same year at the Atlas Society, he said he grew up reading Rand, and that her books taught him about his value system and beliefs. Ryan required staffers and interns in his congressional office to read Rand and gave copies of her novel Atlas Shrugged as gifts to his staff for Christmas. In his Atlas Society speech, he also described Social Security as a "socialist-based system".
In 2009, Ryan said, "What's unique about what's happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it's as if we're living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault."
In April 2012, after receiving criticism from Georgetown University faculty members on his budget plan, Ryan rejected Rand's philosophy as atheistic, saying it "reduces human interactions down to mere contracts". He also called the reports of his adherence to Rand's views an "urban legend" and stated that he was deeply influenced by his Roman Catholic faith and by Thomas Aquinas.
Electoral history
Post-congressional life
In March 2019, Ryan joined the board of directors of Fox Corporation, the owner of Fox News Channel and the Fox broadcast network. In August 2019, he joined the board of SHINE Medical Technologies. He has since joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame as a professor of practice for the 2019–20 academic year as a guest lecturer in political science and economics. In April 2019, Ryan was nominated as the delegation leader to represent President Trump to visit Taipei. With Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, he attended the 40th anniversary ceremony of the Taiwan Relations Act. In October 2019, Ryan launched a non-profit called American Idea Foundation.
Personal life
In December 2000, Ryan married Janna Christine Little, a tax attorney, a graduate of Wellesley College and George Washington University Law School, and a native of Madill, Oklahoma. The Ryans live in the Courthouse Hill Historic District of Janesville, Wisconsin. They have three children: Elizabeth "Liza" Anne, Charles Wilson, and Samuel Lowery. A Roman Catholic, Ryan is a member of St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Janesville.
Janna is a cousin of former Democratic Representative Dan Boren (D-OK). She is also a granddaughter of Reuel Little, who helped found the American Party to support the 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace.
Due to a family history of fatal heart attacks before age 60, Ryan pursues an intense cross-training fitness program called P90X. Ryan has always been a fitness enthusiast and was a personal trainer when he came out of college. About P90X, he said, "It works because it's called muscle confusion. It hits your body in many different ways. Pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, lots of cardio, karate, jump training. It has results, it works. It's a good workout."
In a 2010 Politico interview, he said that he weighed 163 pounds and maintained his body fat percentage between 6 and 8%. Tony Horton, creator of P90X, who has personally trained Ryan many times, reiterated the claim saying, "He is very, very, very lean. I know what 6 to 8 percent body fat looks like, and there's no fat anywhere on the man. I'm around 9 percent and he's much leaner than I am. He’s easily 6 to 8 percent body fat. You just have to eat right and exercise every day, and that’s what he does."
In a radio interview, Ryan claimed he had once run a marathon in under three hours; he later stated that he forgot his actual time and was just trying to state what he thought was a normal time. His one official marathon time is recorded as slightly over four hours.
Awards and honors
2004, 2010 – Guardian of Small Business Award, National Federation of Independent Business
2008 – Defending the American Dream Award, Americans for Prosperity, Wisconsin chapter
2009 – Manufacturing Legislative Excellence Award, National Association of Manufacturers
2009 – Honorary Degree, Miami University
2010 – Legislator of the Year Award, International Franchise Association
2011 – Statesmanship Award, Claremont Institute
2011 – Fiscy Award for responsible financial stewardship and fiscal discipline in government.
2011 – Leadership Award, Jack Kemp Foundation
2011 – Freedom and Prosperity Award, Mason Contractors Association of America
2012 – Chair, Honorary Board of the Archery Trade Association
2014 – Alexander Hamilton Award, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
2018 – Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service
References
Further reading
Works about Ryan
Works by Ryan
External links
Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Historical Society
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1970 births
2012 United States vice-presidential candidates
20th-century American politicians
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21st-century American politicians
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21st-century Roman Catholics
American male non-fiction writers
American people of English descent
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American people of Irish descent
American political writers
American speechwriters
American University alumni
Catholics from Wisconsin
Living people
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Members of the United States House of Representatives from Wisconsin
Miami University alumni
Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign
Politicians from Janesville, Wisconsin
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Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
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University of Notre Dame faculty
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21st-century American male writers | true | [
"Odd Thomas is a thriller novel by American writer Dean Koontz, published in 2003. The novel derives its title from the protagonist, a twenty-year-old short-order cook named Odd Thomas. The book, which was well received and lauded by critics, went on to become a New York Times Bestseller. Following the success of the novel, six sequels, Forever Odd (2005), Brother Odd (2006), Odd Hours (2008), Odd Apocalypse (2012), and Deeply Odd (2013), were also written by Koontz. The final novel in the series Saint Odd (2015) was released on Jan 13, 2015. Three graphic-novel prequels, In Odd We Trust, Odd Is On Our Side and House of Odd have also been released. In the postscript to the graphic novel, Koontz states that \"God willing, there will be six Odd Thomas novels.\" A Special Odd Thomas Adventure (short novel), Odd Interlude, was released on December 26, 2012, and another Odd Thomas: You Are Destined to Be Together Forever on December 9, 2014.\n\nPlot summary\nIn the beginning of the book, Odd Thomas is silently approached by the ghost of a young girl brutally raped and murdered, and through his unique ability to understand the dead, is psychically led to her killer, a former schoolmate named Harlo Landerson. Koontz discloses how Odd was named and begins, layer by layer, to show how Odd's dysfunctional upbringing has shaped his life, and as those details are uncovered, his supernatural abilities begin to make more sense.\n\nWhile working as a short order cook in a California desert town, Odd meets a suspicious-looking man in the diner followed by bodachs, shadowy spirit creatures who appear only during times of death and disaster. This man, who Odd nicknames \"Fungus Man\" (due to his waxy complexion and blond hair that resembles mold), has an unusually large swarm of bodachs following him, and Odd is convinced that this man is connected to some terrible catastrophe that is about to occur. To gather more information about him, Odd uses his gift of supernatural intuition, which his soulmate Bronwen (a.k.a. Stormy) Llewellyn calls \"psychic magnetism,\" to track him down.\n\nOdd's sixth sense leads him to Fungus Man's home, and Odd begins to uncover more details about the man and a mysterious other-worldly link to the dark forces about to be unleashed on the town of Pico Mundo. Accompanied sometimes by the ghost of Elvis Presley and encountering other memorable spirits, including a murdered prostitute, Odd is soon deeply involved in an attempt to prevent the disastrous bloodshed he knows will happen the next day.\n\nCharacters\n\nOdd Thomas\n\n\"I see dead people. But then, by God, I do something about it.\" – Odd Thomas pg. 32\n\nOdd could see the dead and also see shadowy figures that normally lurk around people that will cause deaths or will die. They are called bodachs and feed on the pain of others. Odd is a 20 year old short-order cook at a breakfast joint in Pico Mundo. His girlfriend is Stormy. Little Ozzie is his best friend. Odd leads a simple life because he has to, since he finds the job of speaking to the lingering dead complicated enough. Odd is an optimist seeing the good in most individuals despite his troubling life; he fears going anywhere with a large population because it would interfere with his \"simple life\"—he would be overwhelmed by the volume of dead in a large city like Los Angeles. He never told his father or mother because he thought that his father would use his son's powers to make himself rich. He once met a boy who also saw bodachs but when the bodachs realized this, they seemed to cause a fatal accident, killing the little boy instantly, so Odd keeps this ability a secret.\n\nStormy Llewellyn\n\"Loop me in, Odd One.\" – Stormy Llewellyn\n\nOdd's destiny. Stormy's real name is Bronwen, but she prefers to be called Stormy because she thinks this makes her sound less like an elf. She is the manager of an ice cream shop and hopes to own a shop of her own some day. Stormy's parents died when she was very young. She was adopted by a couple when she was 7. Her foster father sexually molested her for almost 3 months. She reported him to a social worker and was moved to an orphanage where she lived until seventeen, at which point she was cared for by her uncle, Father Sean Llewellyn, rector of St. Bartholomew's church. She remained under his legal guardianship until she could become independent. She is a strong believer in delayed gratification, that this life is a \"boot camp\" for the next, which she calls \"service,\" and that finally in the third life are the rewards. She insists on waiting for sex with Odd until marriage, hoping to make their first time together a meaningful experience and to not bring the memories of her abuse on their bed. She also is the only person who knows everything about Odd seeing the dead.\n\nChief Wyatt Porter\n\nThe Chief helps Odd many times, acting almost as a surrogate father. He is one of the few people who knows Odd sees the dead but he does not know all of Odd's secrets. He is shot 4 times by one of the antagonists who would later shoot people at the mall, but survives.\n\nRobert Thomas \"Fungus Man\" Robertson\n\nFungus Man or Robert Thomas Robertson is initially portrayed as the main antagonist. He comes to Pico Mundo surrounded by bodachs and immediately Odd is suspicious of him. Little is explained about Robertson directly. Odd finds that he is obsessed with serial killers as evidenced by the files he keeps on them. Robertson was approached by Eckles, Varner, and Gosset a few months before the incident at the Green Moon Mall, having met them at a satanic cult gathering. They were interested only in his mother's money. Eckles, Varner, and Gosset killed Robertson's mother (with his permission) and gave him her ears as a trophy. Robertson is murdered by one of his conspirators when they find out that Odd's attention is being drawn towards them and their plans. Robertson then becomes one of the lingering dead and stalks Odd for a short time as a poltergeist. When Robertson's ghost confronts Odd at his home, he goes into an uncontrollable rage, destroying much of the kitchen. Odd leaves him there in the house where he is assumed to still be haunting.\n\nBern Eckles, Simon Varner, and Kevin Gosset\n\nThese three had conspired with Robert Thomas Robertson to have a mass killing at the mall. The three had gotten involved in ritualistic satanism as teenagers and first killed when they were 15 on a \"dare.\" They pledged their loyalty to their \"dark god,\" vowing to go into careers in which they could promote satanism and chaos. Varner and Eckles became cops, while Gosset became a school teacher. Varner had killed Robert Thomas Robertson after he found out that Odd had been in Robertson's house and suspected him, he then tried to frame Odd for the murder. Eckles and Varner were the two gunmen that Odd subdued; Eckles first with the bat then Varner with a shot to the shoulder and head. Gosset had shot Odd twice in the back, Odd managed to pull the wires out of the bomb, thereby disarming it as he fell to the ground. Gosset later told everything that had happened between all the conspirators. They called the atrocity \"just another way of worshipping.\"\n\nLittle Ozzie\nNicknamed 'little' despite being larger than his father, Ozzie has a 6th finger on his left hand and has published many very successful detective novels. He has a pet cat named Terrible Chester who Ozzie claims is over 50 years old, and has pictures to prove it. Terrible Chester does not like Odd and Little Ozzie is one of the few people who knows about Odd's 'Gifts'.\n\nOdd Thomas film adaptation\n\nNovelist Dean Koontz told San Diego Comic-Con attendees on July 26, 2008, that he had a movie script adapted from his book Odd Thomas and he's very pleased with the results. Koontz also teased that an unnamed actor has signed on to play the title character, but refused to reveal any further details. Koontz added that after reading the script, which was written by an unnamed screenwriter, he 'fell over' because it was 'so perfect.'\n\nThe unnamed writer was confirmed in November 2010 to be American filmmaker Stephen Sommers, who also handled the directing. The film was produced independently by Howard Kaplan and John Baldecchi.\n\nIt was announced in February 2011 that Anton Yelchin was cast to play the title role. After being delayed by a series of lawsuits, The Movie Insider reported that the film adaptation was scheduled for release in the United States on April 5, 2013.\n\nThe movie won the Saturn Award for Best DVD/Blu-Ray release in 2015 from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror Films.\n\nReference list\n\nExternal links\n\nOdd Thomas Book Review\n\nNovels by Dean Koontz\n2003 American novels\nAmerican horror novels\nAmerican novels adapted into films\nNovels set in California\nNovels about precognition\n\nsv:Odd Thomas",
"Odd Is on Our Side is the second graphic novel featuring Dean Koontz's character Odd Thomas. It was released in October 2010. It is written by Fred Van Lente and Koontz, with illustrations by Queenie Chan in a manga style.\n\nPlot summary\n\nIt is Halloween in Pico Mundo, California, and there is a whiff of something wicked in the autumn air. While the town prepares for its annual festivities, young fry cook Odd Thomas cannot shake the feeling that make-believe goblins and ghouls are not the only things on the prowl. And he should know, since he can see what others cannot: the spirits of the restless dead. But even his frequent visitor, the specter of Elvis Presley, cannot seem to point Odd in the right direction.\n\nWith the help of his gun-toting girlfriend, Stormy, Odd is out to uncover the terrible truth. Is something sinister afoot in the remote barn guarded by devilish masked men? Has All Hallows Eve mischief taken a malevolent turn? Or is the pleading ghost of a trick-or-treater a frightening omen of doom?\n\nCharacters\n\nOdd Thomas\nOdd Thomas is the protagonist of the Odd Thomas series. He is a short-order cook at the Pico Mundo grill, who has the ability to see the lingering dead. He uses this ability to try and bring peace to the ghosts he encounters, so that they can move on to the next life. Traumatic childhood experiences left him extremely uncomfortable with guns, so he relies on his resourcefulness to escape the sometimes hostile situations in which he finds himself.\n\nStormy Llewellyn\nStormy Llewellyn is Odd's girlfriend and soulmate. She grew up in an orphanage, except for a six-month stint in which she was adopted by a family, only to be sexually abused. Stormy intends to marry Odd, but she is waiting until she overcomes her traumatic past. She does not share Odd's fear of guns, and carries a pistol with which she provides backup for Odd on his adventures.\n\nChief Wyatt Porter\nWyatt Porter is the Chief of Police in Pico Mundo, and serves as a father figure to Odd. He is one of the few people who are aware of Odd's abilities, and has sometimes been able to catch elusive criminals with Odd's paranormal help.\n\nAnachronisms\nThis graphic novel contradicts events in future novels, such as mentioning a Nintendo Wii, released four years after the first novel and Stormy's death.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n \n\n2010 graphic novels\nAmerican graphic novels\nComics based on fiction\nComics by Fred Van Lente\nNovels by Dean Koontz\nOriginal English-language manga\nDel Rey Manga\nFiction books about precognition\nHalloween novels"
]
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[
"Jesus Is Just Alright",
"The Byrds' version"
]
| C_a8750731ab7a44e48f44bb2f36b8268b_1 | When did The Byrds cover the song? | 1 | When did The Byrds cover the song "Jesus Is Just Alright"? | Jesus Is Just Alright | The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. The song was introduced to The Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when The Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, The Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement. "Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971. CANNOTANSWER | recorded on June 17, 1969 | "Jesus Is Just Alright" is a gospel song written by Art Reynolds and first recorded by Reynolds' own group, The Art Reynolds Singers, on their 1966 album, Tellin' It Like It Is.
The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right", which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including the Byrds, Underground Sunshine, the Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, the Ventures, DC Talk, Stryper, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).
The first cover version of the song was recorded by the Los Angeles band the Byrds on their 1969 album, Ballad of Easy Rider. The song was later recorded by The Doobie Brothers, who included it on their 1972 album, Toulouse Street. The Doobie Brothers' version of the song was released as a single in November 1972 and it became a hit in the United States, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1973, American rock band Exile released their self titled debut album which included a cover. In 1992, the Christian rock and hip hop group DC Talk released a version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" on their Free at Last album. The song has also been covered by Robert Randolph on his Colorblind album, with guest artist Eric Clapton and Stryper's 2013 release, No More Hell to Pay.
The Byrds' version
The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, the Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by the Byrds' own recording.
The song was introduced to the Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when the Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, the Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement.
"Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of the Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971, but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.
The Doobie Brothers' version
The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was first released on their second album, Toulouse Street, in 1972. It was subsequently released in November 1972 as the second single from the album (b/w "Rockin' Down the Highway") and went on to become a U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973. The single featured a shorter, edited version of the song compared to the one included on the album. The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was one of a number of religiously-themed songs to reach the U.S. charts between 1969 and 1973. The song, along with its B-side, continues to be a staple of playlists on classic rock radio stations.
The band first became aware of "Jesus Is Just Alright" after hearing the Byrds' version and before long the song had been added to the Doobie Brothers' own live repertoire. As a result, the song's musical arrangement is very similar to the one used by the Byrds, although the Doobie Brothers' rendition does include an extra bridge that the band added themselves. In 2007, bassist Tiran Porter claimed that the idea of adding a slow bridge was his, including the lyrics "Jesus is my friend", but due to the high vocal range demanded, guitarist Patrick Simmons sang lead instead of him. Although none of the individual band members were religiously inclined, the song went on to become very popular among Christians during the early 1970s, particularly those within the hippie counterculture that were involved with the Jesus movement.
In addition to its appearance on Toulouse Street, the song can also be found on a number of Doobie Brothers' compilations, including Best of The Doobies, Listen to the Music: The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin': 1970–2000, Greatest Hits, and The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers. Live recordings of the song appear on the Farewell Tour, Rockin' down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, and Live at Wolf Trap albums.
Personnel
Patrick Simmons — guitars, lead vocals
Tom Johnston – guitars, backing vocals
Tiran Porter – bass, backing vocals
John (Little John) Hartman – drums, percussion
Michael Hossack – drums
Additional personnel
Bill Payne – organ
Ted Templeman – percussion
DC Talk's version
"Jesus Is Just Alright" is a Dove Award-winning single by Christian rock and hip hop band, DC Talk. It was the lead single for their 1992 platinum-selling and Grammy Award-winning album, Free at Last. The band's primary songwriter, TobyMac (Toby McKeehan), retained the song's chorus but added a number of new verses consisting of his own lyrics. These lyrics were rapped, as was usual with DC Talk's songs of the period, with the lead vocal alternating between McKeehan's rapped verses and the sung chorus provided by Kevin Max (then known as Kevin Smith) and Michael Tait.
DC Talk's version also includes subtle lyric alterations, with the line "Jesus is just alright" being intermittently changed to "Jesus is still alright". Thus, DC Talk's recording can be seen as something of an update on the previous version. McKeehan changed the line in an attempt to express his feeling that Jesus was still alright with him even if many others did not share his beliefs. The song's lyrics also comment on the lack of acceptance and recognition that faith-based music often receives from mainstream radio. In addition to being musically based upon the earlier Byrds and Doobie Brothers' recordings, DC Talk's version of the song also features samples of Madonna's hit single "Vogue" and the Snap! song "The Power".
In the audio commentary of the Free at Last – The Movie bonus DVD, Tait identified "Jesus Is Just Alright" as the song that DC Talk have performed most in their live shows. It has been played at every concert since 1992 and is the only song to be played on each of their four major headlining tours: Free At Last (1994), Jesus Freak – The Tour (Spring 1996), The Supernatural Experience (Spring 1999), and An Evening with DC Talk (Spring 2001).
The song's music video was shot entirely in muted sepia-tone and featured DC Talk singing around three crosses in a desert, surrounded by musicians and dancers. It concludes with the band walking off into the desert sunset.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1994, "Jesus Is Just Alright" was awarded the Dove Award for Best Rock Recorded Song. DC Talk also became one of the first contemporary Christian acts to perform on late-night television when, on November 12, 1993, the band performed "Jesus Is Just Alright" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CD single track listing
US radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
"Yo! Ho Ho" – 4:14
"Two Honks and a Negro" – 0:19
"Free at Last Album Spot" – 1:01
Japanese radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
References
Notes
Citations
1969 singles
1972 singles
1992 singles
The Byrds songs
The Doobie Brothers songs
DC Talk songs
1966 songs
Capitol Records singles
Columbia Records singles
Warner Records singles
ForeFront Records singles
Songs about Jesus | true | [
"\"Triad\" is a song written by singer-songwriter David Crosby in 1967 about a ménage à trois. It was recorded by the Byrds that year, while Crosby was a member of the band, but their version went unreleased at the time and was not issued until twenty years later. Jefferson Airplane released a version of the song in 1968 on their Crown of Creation album and a live version performed by Crosby was included on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 4 Way Street in 1971.\n\nComposition and recording\n\"Triad\" was written while Crosby was a member of the rock band the Byrds, who were at that time recording their fifth studio album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers. The song's lyrics concern a ménage à trois and were largely inspired by the sexual freedom that Crosby enjoyed at his home in Beverly Glen in Los Angeles. Byrds biographer Johnny Rogan has described the song's subject matter as being perfectly in keeping with the \"free love\" hippie philosophies of the day. The song also alludes to author Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, with references to \"sister lovers\" and \"water brothers\".\n\nAlthough the Byrds did record \"Triad\" and performed it live during a September 1967 engagement at the Whisky a Go Go, it was not included on The Notorious Byrd Brothers album. According to Crosby, bandmates Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman felt that its subject matter was too controversial, with McGuinn allegedly deriding the song as a \"freak-out orgy tune\". However, this has since been denied by Hillman, who has stated, \"I don't think it was a moral decision. The song just didn't work that well. David was drifting and bored and wanted to do something else, and that song just added fuel to the fire.\"\n\nThere had been growing animosity between Crosby and the rest of the band throughout 1967, which, coupled with the discord over \"Triad\", contributed to McGuinn and Hillman's decision to fire him from the band in October of that year.\n\nReleases\nFollowing his departure from the Byrds, Crosby gave the song to the band Jefferson Airplane, who included a recording of it on their 1968 album, Crown of Creation. This version also appears on Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick's compilation album The Best of Grace Slick.\n\nA live recording of \"Triad\" performed by Crosby himself was later included on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 1971 album, 4 Way Street.\n\nThe Byrds recording of the song remained unreleased for twenty years until the 1987 archival album Never Before was issued. It also appears on The Byrds box set from 1990, as a bonus track on the 1997 Columbia/Legacy reissue of The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and on the 2006 There Is a Season box set.\n\nCover versions\nIn addition to the cover by Jefferson Airplane, actress and singer Sally Kellerman recorded the song in 1973 and released it as a single. The Icicle Works recorded \"Triad\" as a medley with another Byrds' song (\"Chestnut Mare\") on the 1989 Byrds' tribute album Time Between – A Tribute to The Byrds.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n 1998 live recording of \"Triad\" by CPR. Recorded during the group's summer 1998 tour at a club called Mars, somewhere in Florida.\n\n1967 songs\nThe Byrds songs\nJefferson Airplane songs\nSongs written by David Crosby\nSong recordings produced by Al Schmitt\nCrosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs\nSongs about sexuality",
"\"All I Really Want to Do\" is a song written by Bob Dylan and featured on his Tom Wilson-produced 1964 album, Another Side of Bob Dylan (see 1964 in music). It is arguably one of the most popular songs that Dylan wrote in the period immediately after he abandoned topical songwriting. Within a year of its release on Another Side of Bob Dylan, it had also become one of Dylan's most familiar songs to pop and rock audiences, due to hit cover versions by Cher and the Byrds.\n\nSong information\n\"All I Really Want to Do\" was first released on Dylan's 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan. The song was also included on the Dylan compilations Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II in 1971 and the 3-disc edition of Dylan in 2007. In addition, two live versions of the song have been released: one, recorded in 1978, on Bob Dylan at Budokan and the other, recorded in 1964, on The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall.\n\nDylan wrote the song in 1964 and recorded it in one take on June 9, 1964. Like other songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan, \"All I Really Want to Do\" was inspired by Dylan's breakup with Suze Rotolo. \"All I Really Want to Do\" opens the album with a different attitude than Dylan's previous album, The Times They Are a-Changin'; a playful song about a relationship rather than a finger-pointing political song. Musically simple, though playful, \"All I Really Want to Do\" is essentially a list of things, physical and psychological, that Dylan does not want to do or be to the listener (perhaps a woman, but just as likely his audience as a whole). Dylan laughs at some of his own jokes in the song, as he parodies typical \"boy meets girl\" love songs. One interpretation of the song is that it is a parody of male responses to early feminist conversations. Along with another Another Side of Bob Dylan song, \"It Ain't Me, Babe,\" \"All I Really Want to Do\" questioned the usual assumptions of relationships between men and women, rejecting possessiveness and machismo. The song's chorus features Dylan singing in a high, keening yodel, likely inspired by Hank Williams or Ramblin' Jack Elliott, while disingenuously claiming that all he wants to do is to be friends. \"All I Really Want to Do\" sees Dylan experimenting with the conventions of the romantic pop song by constructing rhymes within lines and also rhyming the end of every line with the end of the following line.\n\nThe first known live concert performance of \"All I Really Want to Do\" was at the Newport Folk Festival on July 26, 1964. It remained part of Dylan's concert set list for his all acoustic shows in 1965. It returned to Dylan's concert sets in 1978, when Dylan sang it at the end of most shows to the melody of Simon and Garfunkel's \"The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)\". For those shows, he often revised the lyrics, incorporating mischievous verses such as:\n\nCher version\n\n\"All I Really Want to Do\" is Cher's debut single. Released in May 1965, it reached #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and #9 on the UK singles chart. Cher's recording of the song also charted in several other countries during 1965. Cher's version was involved in a chart battle with the Byrds' recording of \"All I Really Want to Do\" when both versions entered the Billboard Hot 100 during the same week.\n\nBackground and release\nThe initial idea to cover the song came when Cher heard the Byrds perform it during their pre-fame residency at Ciro's nightclub on the Sunset Strip in March 1965. This caused a minor controversy when it was alleged by the Byrds and their management that Cher and her husband, Sonny Bono, had taped one of the Byrds' appearances at Ciro's without permission, in order to utilize some of the band's material for their own releases. However, Cher's version is, in fact, quite different from the Byrds' recording and lacks the Beatlesque bridge that remained unique to their version. In her version, Cher imitates Sonny on alternating lines of the song, to make it sound like a Sonny and Cher song. Ultimately, Cher's cover was the more successful in the U.S., reaching the Billboard top 20, while the Byrds' single faltered at #40. The reverse was true in the UK, where the Byrds' single reached #4.\n\nLive performances and promotion\n Living Proof: The Farewell Tour (2002–2005)\n Cher at the Colosseum (2008–2011)\n Classic Cher (2017–2018) (dropped from the setlist after the ninth leg)\n\nCharts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nThe Byrds' version\n\n\"All I Really Want to Do\" was the second single by the American folk rock band the Byrds, and was released on June 14, 1965, by Columbia Records (see 1965 in music). The song was also included on the band's debut album, Mr. Tambourine Man, which was released on June 21, 1965. The version of the song released as a single is a different vocal take to the version found on the Mr. Tambourine Man album, as evidenced by the slight lyrical variations in the song's first verse and the different running times the two versions have; the single is 2:02 minutes in length while the album version is slightly longer at 2:04. The single reached #40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #4 on the UK Singles Chart.\n\nThe single was rush-released by the band's record label, Columbia Records, when it transpired that Cher was about to issue a rival cover version of the song on the Imperial label (see above). However, the Byrds and their management were largely unconcerned about Cher's imminent release, feeling that there was sufficient room in the charts for both versions. In fact, the Byrds were reluctant to release another Dylan-penned single at all, feeling that it was somewhat formulaic. However, Columbia was insistent, believing that in the wake of the Byrds' debut single, \"Mr. Tambourine Man\", another Dylan cover equaled an instant hit. A chart battle ensued, largely instigated by the music press and Columbia (who were determined to bury Cher's release), but ultimately the single stalled at #40 on the U.S. charts, while Cher's cover reached #15. The reverse was true in the UK, however, where the Byrds' version became the fastest selling single in CBS Records' history, finally reaching #4 while Cher's recording peaked at #9.\n\nThe Byrds' version of the song is noticeably different in structure to Dylan's. It begins with Jim McGuinn's jangling guitar introduction (played on a 12-string Rickenbacker guitar) and features a substantially changed, ascending melody progression in the chorus, made more attractive by the band's angelic harmonies. In addition, the band completely changed the melody to one of the song's verses, in order to turn it into a Beatlesque, minor-key bridge. Although McGuinn sang lead on most of the song, rhythm guitarist David Crosby sang lead on the middle eight.\n\nReaction to the single in the press was generally positive, with Billboard magazine commenting \"another hot pop, folk-flavoured Bob Dylan tune is offered by the dynamic group.\" Cash Box said that \"the rousing, rhythmic Bob Dylan-penned romancer is given a funky soulful sendoff\" and that it should become a hit similar to \"Mr. Tambourine Man.\" In the UK, Penny Valentine, writing in Disc, opined \"I think this is a marvelous song, but, Byrds fan though I have always been, I prefer the Sonny & Cher recording.\" In the NME, Derek Johnson also praised the single, predicting it would be a UK number one, and commenting \"The pattern is much the same as before, with those familiar high-register harmonies – clearly influenced by the West Coast surf sound...coupled with strident twangs throughout, rattling tambourines, and crashing cymbals.\"\n\nIn addition to appearing on the Byrds' debut album, the song is included on several Byrds' compilation albums, including The Byrds' Greatest Hits; The Original Singles: 1965–1967, Volume 1; The Byrds; The Essential Byrds; The Byrds Play Dylan; and There Is a Season.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nFull lyrics from Official Site\n\n1964 songs\n1965 debut singles\nSongs written by Bob Dylan\nBob Dylan songs\nCher songs\nSong recordings with Wall of Sound arrangements\nThe Byrds songs\nThe McCoys songs\nSong recordings produced by Tom Wilson (record producer)\nSong recordings produced by Terry Melcher\nWorld Party songs\nList songs\nColumbia Records singles\nImperial Records singles"
]
|
[
"Jesus Is Just Alright",
"The Byrds' version",
"When did The Byrds cover the song?",
"recorded on June 17, 1969"
]
| C_a8750731ab7a44e48f44bb2f36b8268b_1 | Was it released on an album? | 2 | Was "Jesus Is Just Alright" released on an album? | Jesus Is Just Alright | The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. The song was introduced to The Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when The Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, The Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement. "Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971. CANNOTANSWER | It was first released as part of that album | "Jesus Is Just Alright" is a gospel song written by Art Reynolds and first recorded by Reynolds' own group, The Art Reynolds Singers, on their 1966 album, Tellin' It Like It Is.
The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right", which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including the Byrds, Underground Sunshine, the Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, the Ventures, DC Talk, Stryper, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).
The first cover version of the song was recorded by the Los Angeles band the Byrds on their 1969 album, Ballad of Easy Rider. The song was later recorded by The Doobie Brothers, who included it on their 1972 album, Toulouse Street. The Doobie Brothers' version of the song was released as a single in November 1972 and it became a hit in the United States, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1973, American rock band Exile released their self titled debut album which included a cover. In 1992, the Christian rock and hip hop group DC Talk released a version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" on their Free at Last album. The song has also been covered by Robert Randolph on his Colorblind album, with guest artist Eric Clapton and Stryper's 2013 release, No More Hell to Pay.
The Byrds' version
The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, the Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by the Byrds' own recording.
The song was introduced to the Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when the Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, the Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement.
"Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of the Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971, but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.
The Doobie Brothers' version
The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was first released on their second album, Toulouse Street, in 1972. It was subsequently released in November 1972 as the second single from the album (b/w "Rockin' Down the Highway") and went on to become a U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973. The single featured a shorter, edited version of the song compared to the one included on the album. The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was one of a number of religiously-themed songs to reach the U.S. charts between 1969 and 1973. The song, along with its B-side, continues to be a staple of playlists on classic rock radio stations.
The band first became aware of "Jesus Is Just Alright" after hearing the Byrds' version and before long the song had been added to the Doobie Brothers' own live repertoire. As a result, the song's musical arrangement is very similar to the one used by the Byrds, although the Doobie Brothers' rendition does include an extra bridge that the band added themselves. In 2007, bassist Tiran Porter claimed that the idea of adding a slow bridge was his, including the lyrics "Jesus is my friend", but due to the high vocal range demanded, guitarist Patrick Simmons sang lead instead of him. Although none of the individual band members were religiously inclined, the song went on to become very popular among Christians during the early 1970s, particularly those within the hippie counterculture that were involved with the Jesus movement.
In addition to its appearance on Toulouse Street, the song can also be found on a number of Doobie Brothers' compilations, including Best of The Doobies, Listen to the Music: The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin': 1970–2000, Greatest Hits, and The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers. Live recordings of the song appear on the Farewell Tour, Rockin' down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, and Live at Wolf Trap albums.
Personnel
Patrick Simmons — guitars, lead vocals
Tom Johnston – guitars, backing vocals
Tiran Porter – bass, backing vocals
John (Little John) Hartman – drums, percussion
Michael Hossack – drums
Additional personnel
Bill Payne – organ
Ted Templeman – percussion
DC Talk's version
"Jesus Is Just Alright" is a Dove Award-winning single by Christian rock and hip hop band, DC Talk. It was the lead single for their 1992 platinum-selling and Grammy Award-winning album, Free at Last. The band's primary songwriter, TobyMac (Toby McKeehan), retained the song's chorus but added a number of new verses consisting of his own lyrics. These lyrics were rapped, as was usual with DC Talk's songs of the period, with the lead vocal alternating between McKeehan's rapped verses and the sung chorus provided by Kevin Max (then known as Kevin Smith) and Michael Tait.
DC Talk's version also includes subtle lyric alterations, with the line "Jesus is just alright" being intermittently changed to "Jesus is still alright". Thus, DC Talk's recording can be seen as something of an update on the previous version. McKeehan changed the line in an attempt to express his feeling that Jesus was still alright with him even if many others did not share his beliefs. The song's lyrics also comment on the lack of acceptance and recognition that faith-based music often receives from mainstream radio. In addition to being musically based upon the earlier Byrds and Doobie Brothers' recordings, DC Talk's version of the song also features samples of Madonna's hit single "Vogue" and the Snap! song "The Power".
In the audio commentary of the Free at Last – The Movie bonus DVD, Tait identified "Jesus Is Just Alright" as the song that DC Talk have performed most in their live shows. It has been played at every concert since 1992 and is the only song to be played on each of their four major headlining tours: Free At Last (1994), Jesus Freak – The Tour (Spring 1996), The Supernatural Experience (Spring 1999), and An Evening with DC Talk (Spring 2001).
The song's music video was shot entirely in muted sepia-tone and featured DC Talk singing around three crosses in a desert, surrounded by musicians and dancers. It concludes with the band walking off into the desert sunset.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1994, "Jesus Is Just Alright" was awarded the Dove Award for Best Rock Recorded Song. DC Talk also became one of the first contemporary Christian acts to perform on late-night television when, on November 12, 1993, the band performed "Jesus Is Just Alright" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CD single track listing
US radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
"Yo! Ho Ho" – 4:14
"Two Honks and a Negro" – 0:19
"Free at Last Album Spot" – 1:01
Japanese radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
References
Notes
Citations
1969 singles
1972 singles
1992 singles
The Byrds songs
The Doobie Brothers songs
DC Talk songs
1966 songs
Capitol Records singles
Columbia Records singles
Warner Records singles
ForeFront Records singles
Songs about Jesus | true | [
"The Broad Street Bully is the fifth studio album by rapper Beanie Sigel. It was released on September 1, 2009 without promotion, just a video for the song \"The Ghetto\". The album was on the Billboard 200 charts for 2 weeks. In the first week, it debuted at #77 selling 6,500 copies. The week after, it fell down to #115 selling an additional 4,000 copies.\n\nBackground\nThe album was released on Siccness.net (Siccness Records) and was the first time Sigel released an album on an independent label. The album was originally named The Focus but the title was then changed to The Broad Street Bully. The album had been described by the label to be \"like a mixtape\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\n2009 albums\nBeanie Sigel albums",
"Orange Ball (オレンジボール), an indies mini-album, was Orange Range's first release. It was originally released nationally on February 22, 2002 and an Okinawa-only release was released on April 21, 2002. Kirikirimai was later rerecorded and released on their album 1st Contact.\n\nTrack listing\nSoujuuko (奏重鼓)\nGadget Groove (ガジェットグルーヴ)\nKirikirimai (キリキリマイ)\nFlower Garden (フラワーガーデン)\nChuudoku (中毒)\nVelocity (ベロシティー)\nFunk Tune (ファンクテューン)\nSoujuuko: RKDRMX- (奏重鼓)\n\n2002 albums\nOrange Range albums"
]
|
[
"Jesus Is Just Alright",
"The Byrds' version",
"When did The Byrds cover the song?",
"recorded on June 17, 1969",
"Was it released on an album?",
"It was first released as part of that album"
]
| C_a8750731ab7a44e48f44bb2f36b8268b_1 | Was it popular? | 3 | Was "Jesus Is Just Alright"popular? | Jesus Is Just Alright | The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. The song was introduced to The Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when The Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, The Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement. "Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971. CANNOTANSWER | The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. | "Jesus Is Just Alright" is a gospel song written by Art Reynolds and first recorded by Reynolds' own group, The Art Reynolds Singers, on their 1966 album, Tellin' It Like It Is.
The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right", which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including the Byrds, Underground Sunshine, the Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, the Ventures, DC Talk, Stryper, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).
The first cover version of the song was recorded by the Los Angeles band the Byrds on their 1969 album, Ballad of Easy Rider. The song was later recorded by The Doobie Brothers, who included it on their 1972 album, Toulouse Street. The Doobie Brothers' version of the song was released as a single in November 1972 and it became a hit in the United States, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1973, American rock band Exile released their self titled debut album which included a cover. In 1992, the Christian rock and hip hop group DC Talk released a version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" on their Free at Last album. The song has also been covered by Robert Randolph on his Colorblind album, with guest artist Eric Clapton and Stryper's 2013 release, No More Hell to Pay.
The Byrds' version
The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, the Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by the Byrds' own recording.
The song was introduced to the Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when the Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, the Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement.
"Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of the Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971, but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.
The Doobie Brothers' version
The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was first released on their second album, Toulouse Street, in 1972. It was subsequently released in November 1972 as the second single from the album (b/w "Rockin' Down the Highway") and went on to become a U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973. The single featured a shorter, edited version of the song compared to the one included on the album. The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was one of a number of religiously-themed songs to reach the U.S. charts between 1969 and 1973. The song, along with its B-side, continues to be a staple of playlists on classic rock radio stations.
The band first became aware of "Jesus Is Just Alright" after hearing the Byrds' version and before long the song had been added to the Doobie Brothers' own live repertoire. As a result, the song's musical arrangement is very similar to the one used by the Byrds, although the Doobie Brothers' rendition does include an extra bridge that the band added themselves. In 2007, bassist Tiran Porter claimed that the idea of adding a slow bridge was his, including the lyrics "Jesus is my friend", but due to the high vocal range demanded, guitarist Patrick Simmons sang lead instead of him. Although none of the individual band members were religiously inclined, the song went on to become very popular among Christians during the early 1970s, particularly those within the hippie counterculture that were involved with the Jesus movement.
In addition to its appearance on Toulouse Street, the song can also be found on a number of Doobie Brothers' compilations, including Best of The Doobies, Listen to the Music: The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin': 1970–2000, Greatest Hits, and The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers. Live recordings of the song appear on the Farewell Tour, Rockin' down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, and Live at Wolf Trap albums.
Personnel
Patrick Simmons — guitars, lead vocals
Tom Johnston – guitars, backing vocals
Tiran Porter – bass, backing vocals
John (Little John) Hartman – drums, percussion
Michael Hossack – drums
Additional personnel
Bill Payne – organ
Ted Templeman – percussion
DC Talk's version
"Jesus Is Just Alright" is a Dove Award-winning single by Christian rock and hip hop band, DC Talk. It was the lead single for their 1992 platinum-selling and Grammy Award-winning album, Free at Last. The band's primary songwriter, TobyMac (Toby McKeehan), retained the song's chorus but added a number of new verses consisting of his own lyrics. These lyrics were rapped, as was usual with DC Talk's songs of the period, with the lead vocal alternating between McKeehan's rapped verses and the sung chorus provided by Kevin Max (then known as Kevin Smith) and Michael Tait.
DC Talk's version also includes subtle lyric alterations, with the line "Jesus is just alright" being intermittently changed to "Jesus is still alright". Thus, DC Talk's recording can be seen as something of an update on the previous version. McKeehan changed the line in an attempt to express his feeling that Jesus was still alright with him even if many others did not share his beliefs. The song's lyrics also comment on the lack of acceptance and recognition that faith-based music often receives from mainstream radio. In addition to being musically based upon the earlier Byrds and Doobie Brothers' recordings, DC Talk's version of the song also features samples of Madonna's hit single "Vogue" and the Snap! song "The Power".
In the audio commentary of the Free at Last – The Movie bonus DVD, Tait identified "Jesus Is Just Alright" as the song that DC Talk have performed most in their live shows. It has been played at every concert since 1992 and is the only song to be played on each of their four major headlining tours: Free At Last (1994), Jesus Freak – The Tour (Spring 1996), The Supernatural Experience (Spring 1999), and An Evening with DC Talk (Spring 2001).
The song's music video was shot entirely in muted sepia-tone and featured DC Talk singing around three crosses in a desert, surrounded by musicians and dancers. It concludes with the band walking off into the desert sunset.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1994, "Jesus Is Just Alright" was awarded the Dove Award for Best Rock Recorded Song. DC Talk also became one of the first contemporary Christian acts to perform on late-night television when, on November 12, 1993, the band performed "Jesus Is Just Alright" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CD single track listing
US radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
"Yo! Ho Ho" – 4:14
"Two Honks and a Negro" – 0:19
"Free at Last Album Spot" – 1:01
Japanese radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
References
Notes
Citations
1969 singles
1972 singles
1992 singles
The Byrds songs
The Doobie Brothers songs
DC Talk songs
1966 songs
Capitol Records singles
Columbia Records singles
Warner Records singles
ForeFront Records singles
Songs about Jesus | false | [
"Diário Popular was a Portuguese language daily newspaper published in Lisbon, Portugal, between 1942 and 1990.\n\nHistory and profile\nDiário Popular was first published on 22 September 1942. Its headquarters was in Lisbon. The paper was one of two Portuguese newspapers published in Angola during the colonial rule. The other was Jornal de Notícias. In the 1960s Diário Popular was acquired by the Balsemão family.\n\nDiário Popular was the organizer of the first journalism program in Portugal which was held in 1966. In the late 1960s the paper was acquired by the Quina group, a family company. In 1971 it was one of two Portuguese best-selling newspapers.\n\nDiário Popular belonged to the Banco Borges and Irmão, a bank, before the Carnation revolution. The paper was nationalized following the revolution in 1974 along with other private dailies and publications. It was controlled by the communists and adopted a communist stance in October 1975. In May 1978 the paper had a left-wing political stance.\n\nDiário Popular sold 73,000 copies in October 1975 and 66,000 copies in May 1978.\n\nDiário Popular was privatized in 1989 and was acquired by a company, Projectos e Estudos de Imprensa (PEI), which also became the owner of the sports paper Record. The company was headed by Pedro Santana Lopes, a member of the Social Democratic Party. The paper ceased publication in 1990.\n\nSee also\n List of newspapers in Portugal\n\nReferences\n\n1942 establishments in Portugal\n1990 disestablishments in Portugal\nPopular\nNewspapers published in Lisbon\nNewspapers established in 1942\nPopular\nPublications disestablished in 1990",
"CPB Bank was the Greek branch of Cyprus Popular Bank.\nThe bank was founded under the name Marfin Egnatia Bank. It was formed by the consolidation of Marfin Investment Group's Egnatia, Laiki and Marfin Banks and was a 95%-owned subsidiary of Marfin Popular Bank (later renamed to Cyprus Popular Bank).\nIn 2011 it was converted to a branch of Cyprus Popular Bank.\nIn early 2013, the bank was renamed Laiki Bank only to change its name once again in March of the same year to CPB Bank.\nOn 26 March 2013 its liabilities and assets were bought by Piraeus Bank.\n\nReferences\n\nDefunct banks of Greece\nBanks disestablished in 2013"
]
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[
"Jesus Is Just Alright",
"The Byrds' version",
"When did The Byrds cover the song?",
"recorded on June 17, 1969",
"Was it released on an album?",
"It was first released as part of that album",
"Was it popular?",
"The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom."
]
| C_a8750731ab7a44e48f44bb2f36b8268b_1 | What did critics say about their version? | 4 | What did critics say about The Burds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright"? | Jesus Is Just Alright | The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. The song was introduced to The Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when The Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, The Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement. "Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971. CANNOTANSWER | " became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 | "Jesus Is Just Alright" is a gospel song written by Art Reynolds and first recorded by Reynolds' own group, The Art Reynolds Singers, on their 1966 album, Tellin' It Like It Is.
The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right", which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including the Byrds, Underground Sunshine, the Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, the Ventures, DC Talk, Stryper, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).
The first cover version of the song was recorded by the Los Angeles band the Byrds on their 1969 album, Ballad of Easy Rider. The song was later recorded by The Doobie Brothers, who included it on their 1972 album, Toulouse Street. The Doobie Brothers' version of the song was released as a single in November 1972 and it became a hit in the United States, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1973, American rock band Exile released their self titled debut album which included a cover. In 1992, the Christian rock and hip hop group DC Talk released a version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" on their Free at Last album. The song has also been covered by Robert Randolph on his Colorblind album, with guest artist Eric Clapton and Stryper's 2013 release, No More Hell to Pay.
The Byrds' version
The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, the Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by the Byrds' own recording.
The song was introduced to the Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when the Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, the Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement.
"Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of the Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971, but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.
The Doobie Brothers' version
The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was first released on their second album, Toulouse Street, in 1972. It was subsequently released in November 1972 as the second single from the album (b/w "Rockin' Down the Highway") and went on to become a U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973. The single featured a shorter, edited version of the song compared to the one included on the album. The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was one of a number of religiously-themed songs to reach the U.S. charts between 1969 and 1973. The song, along with its B-side, continues to be a staple of playlists on classic rock radio stations.
The band first became aware of "Jesus Is Just Alright" after hearing the Byrds' version and before long the song had been added to the Doobie Brothers' own live repertoire. As a result, the song's musical arrangement is very similar to the one used by the Byrds, although the Doobie Brothers' rendition does include an extra bridge that the band added themselves. In 2007, bassist Tiran Porter claimed that the idea of adding a slow bridge was his, including the lyrics "Jesus is my friend", but due to the high vocal range demanded, guitarist Patrick Simmons sang lead instead of him. Although none of the individual band members were religiously inclined, the song went on to become very popular among Christians during the early 1970s, particularly those within the hippie counterculture that were involved with the Jesus movement.
In addition to its appearance on Toulouse Street, the song can also be found on a number of Doobie Brothers' compilations, including Best of The Doobies, Listen to the Music: The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin': 1970–2000, Greatest Hits, and The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers. Live recordings of the song appear on the Farewell Tour, Rockin' down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, and Live at Wolf Trap albums.
Personnel
Patrick Simmons — guitars, lead vocals
Tom Johnston – guitars, backing vocals
Tiran Porter – bass, backing vocals
John (Little John) Hartman – drums, percussion
Michael Hossack – drums
Additional personnel
Bill Payne – organ
Ted Templeman – percussion
DC Talk's version
"Jesus Is Just Alright" is a Dove Award-winning single by Christian rock and hip hop band, DC Talk. It was the lead single for their 1992 platinum-selling and Grammy Award-winning album, Free at Last. The band's primary songwriter, TobyMac (Toby McKeehan), retained the song's chorus but added a number of new verses consisting of his own lyrics. These lyrics were rapped, as was usual with DC Talk's songs of the period, with the lead vocal alternating between McKeehan's rapped verses and the sung chorus provided by Kevin Max (then known as Kevin Smith) and Michael Tait.
DC Talk's version also includes subtle lyric alterations, with the line "Jesus is just alright" being intermittently changed to "Jesus is still alright". Thus, DC Talk's recording can be seen as something of an update on the previous version. McKeehan changed the line in an attempt to express his feeling that Jesus was still alright with him even if many others did not share his beliefs. The song's lyrics also comment on the lack of acceptance and recognition that faith-based music often receives from mainstream radio. In addition to being musically based upon the earlier Byrds and Doobie Brothers' recordings, DC Talk's version of the song also features samples of Madonna's hit single "Vogue" and the Snap! song "The Power".
In the audio commentary of the Free at Last – The Movie bonus DVD, Tait identified "Jesus Is Just Alright" as the song that DC Talk have performed most in their live shows. It has been played at every concert since 1992 and is the only song to be played on each of their four major headlining tours: Free At Last (1994), Jesus Freak – The Tour (Spring 1996), The Supernatural Experience (Spring 1999), and An Evening with DC Talk (Spring 2001).
The song's music video was shot entirely in muted sepia-tone and featured DC Talk singing around three crosses in a desert, surrounded by musicians and dancers. It concludes with the band walking off into the desert sunset.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1994, "Jesus Is Just Alright" was awarded the Dove Award for Best Rock Recorded Song. DC Talk also became one of the first contemporary Christian acts to perform on late-night television when, on November 12, 1993, the band performed "Jesus Is Just Alright" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CD single track listing
US radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
"Yo! Ho Ho" – 4:14
"Two Honks and a Negro" – 0:19
"Free at Last Album Spot" – 1:01
Japanese radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
References
Notes
Citations
1969 singles
1972 singles
1992 singles
The Byrds songs
The Doobie Brothers songs
DC Talk songs
1966 songs
Capitol Records singles
Columbia Records singles
Warner Records singles
ForeFront Records singles
Songs about Jesus | true | [
"\"Insane\" is a song by British band Texas and was the fifth and final single to be released from their fourth studio album White on Blonde. It was released as a double A-side with \"Say What You Want (All Day, Every Day)\" in 1998. The song was later included on their 2000 compilation album The Greatest Hits.\n\nTrack listings\nUK CD1 \n \"Insane\" – 4:45\n \"Say What You Want (All Day, Every Day)\" – 4:06\n \"Polo Mint City\" (Full version) – 2:50\n \"Say What You Want (All Day, Every Day)\" (Trailermen mix) – 8:38\n\nUK CD2 \n \"Say What You Want (All Day, Every Day)\" (extended version) – 5:02\n \"Insane\" (The Second Scroll) – 6:33\n \"Say What You Want (All Day, Every Day)\" (RZA instrumental) – 5:13\n \"Insane\" (The Second Scroll dub) – 6:35\n\n UK cassette single \n \"Say What You Want (All Day, Every Day)\" – 4:06\n \"Insane\" – 4:45\n\nCharts\nAll entries charted as a double A-side with \"Say What You Want (All Day, Every Day)\".\n\nReferences\n\nTexas (band) songs\n1998 singles\nSong recordings produced by Mike Hedges\nSongs written by Johnny McElhone\nSongs written by Sharleen Spiteri",
"\"What Will Mary Say\" is a song written by Eddie Snyder and Paul Vance. It was originally performed and issued as a single by Mark Dinning in 1961, but did not chart. Two years later, the song was recorded and released by Johnny Mathis, who made the song a popular hit. Mathis' version of \"What Will Mary Say\" (arranged by Don Costa and produced by Ernie Altschuler) reached #3 on the adult contemporary chart, #9 on the U.S. pop chart, #21 on the U.S. R&B chart, and #49 on the UK Singles Chart in 1963.\n\nThe song is about an affair, in which the singer wants to end it, fearing that his original lover would be angry and walk out on him. This song features the sounds of a spoken woman, repeatedly pleading: \"Don't Go\".\n\nThe song ranked #65 on Billboard magazine's Top 100 singles of 1963.\n\nOther versions\nLawrence Welk released a version of the song on his 1963 album 1963's Early Hits.\nJoey Powers released a version of the song on his 1964 album with Bobby Bare and Roy Orbison entitled Special Delivery from Bobby Bare...Joey Powers...Roy Orbison.\nJay Black released a version of the song as a single in 1967, but it did not chart.\nGene Thomas released a version of the song as a single in 1967, but it did not chart.\nDavid Geddes released a version of the song on his 1975 album Run Joey Run.\nBarry Biggs released a version of the song on his 1976 album Mr. Biggs.\n\nReferences\n\n1961 songs\n1963 singles\n1967 singles\nSongs written by Eddie Snyder\nSongs written by Paul Vance\nJohnny Mathis songs\nColumbia Records singles\nUnited Artists Records singles"
]
|
[
"Jesus Is Just Alright",
"The Byrds' version",
"When did The Byrds cover the song?",
"recorded on June 17, 1969",
"Was it released on an album?",
"It was first released as part of that album",
"Was it popular?",
"The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom.",
"What did critics say about their version?",
"\" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971"
]
| C_a8750731ab7a44e48f44bb2f36b8268b_1 | Did audiences like the song? | 5 | Did audiences like "Jesus Is Just Alright"? | Jesus Is Just Alright | The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. The song was introduced to The Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when The Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, The Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement. "Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | "Jesus Is Just Alright" is a gospel song written by Art Reynolds and first recorded by Reynolds' own group, The Art Reynolds Singers, on their 1966 album, Tellin' It Like It Is.
The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right", which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including the Byrds, Underground Sunshine, the Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, the Ventures, DC Talk, Stryper, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).
The first cover version of the song was recorded by the Los Angeles band the Byrds on their 1969 album, Ballad of Easy Rider. The song was later recorded by The Doobie Brothers, who included it on their 1972 album, Toulouse Street. The Doobie Brothers' version of the song was released as a single in November 1972 and it became a hit in the United States, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1973, American rock band Exile released their self titled debut album which included a cover. In 1992, the Christian rock and hip hop group DC Talk released a version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" on their Free at Last album. The song has also been covered by Robert Randolph on his Colorblind album, with guest artist Eric Clapton and Stryper's 2013 release, No More Hell to Pay.
The Byrds' version
The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, the Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by the Byrds' own recording.
The song was introduced to the Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when the Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, the Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement.
"Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of the Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971, but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.
The Doobie Brothers' version
The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was first released on their second album, Toulouse Street, in 1972. It was subsequently released in November 1972 as the second single from the album (b/w "Rockin' Down the Highway") and went on to become a U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973. The single featured a shorter, edited version of the song compared to the one included on the album. The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was one of a number of religiously-themed songs to reach the U.S. charts between 1969 and 1973. The song, along with its B-side, continues to be a staple of playlists on classic rock radio stations.
The band first became aware of "Jesus Is Just Alright" after hearing the Byrds' version and before long the song had been added to the Doobie Brothers' own live repertoire. As a result, the song's musical arrangement is very similar to the one used by the Byrds, although the Doobie Brothers' rendition does include an extra bridge that the band added themselves. In 2007, bassist Tiran Porter claimed that the idea of adding a slow bridge was his, including the lyrics "Jesus is my friend", but due to the high vocal range demanded, guitarist Patrick Simmons sang lead instead of him. Although none of the individual band members were religiously inclined, the song went on to become very popular among Christians during the early 1970s, particularly those within the hippie counterculture that were involved with the Jesus movement.
In addition to its appearance on Toulouse Street, the song can also be found on a number of Doobie Brothers' compilations, including Best of The Doobies, Listen to the Music: The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin': 1970–2000, Greatest Hits, and The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers. Live recordings of the song appear on the Farewell Tour, Rockin' down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, and Live at Wolf Trap albums.
Personnel
Patrick Simmons — guitars, lead vocals
Tom Johnston – guitars, backing vocals
Tiran Porter – bass, backing vocals
John (Little John) Hartman – drums, percussion
Michael Hossack – drums
Additional personnel
Bill Payne – organ
Ted Templeman – percussion
DC Talk's version
"Jesus Is Just Alright" is a Dove Award-winning single by Christian rock and hip hop band, DC Talk. It was the lead single for their 1992 platinum-selling and Grammy Award-winning album, Free at Last. The band's primary songwriter, TobyMac (Toby McKeehan), retained the song's chorus but added a number of new verses consisting of his own lyrics. These lyrics were rapped, as was usual with DC Talk's songs of the period, with the lead vocal alternating between McKeehan's rapped verses and the sung chorus provided by Kevin Max (then known as Kevin Smith) and Michael Tait.
DC Talk's version also includes subtle lyric alterations, with the line "Jesus is just alright" being intermittently changed to "Jesus is still alright". Thus, DC Talk's recording can be seen as something of an update on the previous version. McKeehan changed the line in an attempt to express his feeling that Jesus was still alright with him even if many others did not share his beliefs. The song's lyrics also comment on the lack of acceptance and recognition that faith-based music often receives from mainstream radio. In addition to being musically based upon the earlier Byrds and Doobie Brothers' recordings, DC Talk's version of the song also features samples of Madonna's hit single "Vogue" and the Snap! song "The Power".
In the audio commentary of the Free at Last – The Movie bonus DVD, Tait identified "Jesus Is Just Alright" as the song that DC Talk have performed most in their live shows. It has been played at every concert since 1992 and is the only song to be played on each of their four major headlining tours: Free At Last (1994), Jesus Freak – The Tour (Spring 1996), The Supernatural Experience (Spring 1999), and An Evening with DC Talk (Spring 2001).
The song's music video was shot entirely in muted sepia-tone and featured DC Talk singing around three crosses in a desert, surrounded by musicians and dancers. It concludes with the band walking off into the desert sunset.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1994, "Jesus Is Just Alright" was awarded the Dove Award for Best Rock Recorded Song. DC Talk also became one of the first contemporary Christian acts to perform on late-night television when, on November 12, 1993, the band performed "Jesus Is Just Alright" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CD single track listing
US radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
"Yo! Ho Ho" – 4:14
"Two Honks and a Negro" – 0:19
"Free at Last Album Spot" – 1:01
Japanese radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
References
Notes
Citations
1969 singles
1972 singles
1992 singles
The Byrds songs
The Doobie Brothers songs
DC Talk songs
1966 songs
Capitol Records singles
Columbia Records singles
Warner Records singles
ForeFront Records singles
Songs about Jesus | false | [
"\"Come Closer\" is a 1964 song and single by Dee Clark, written by Bob Gaudio of the Four Seasons. The single was one of Clark's career bests, and broke him into Chicago and other soul markets, but failed to impact on white audiences. The female vocal trio Jessica James and the Outlaws covered the song the next year on the B-side of their \"Give Her Up Baby\".\n\nClark's song lyrics begin \"I never met a girl like you..\", while Jessica James' lyrics begin \"Never met a guy like you.\" The refrain \"Come come come closer, come closer to me\" is the same in both versions.\n\nReferences\n\n1964 songs\nSongs written by Bob Gaudio",
"\"I See Love\" is a song by British DJ and record producer Jonas Blue, featuring vocals from American singer Joe Jonas from the bands DNCE (Joe was in this band when this song released; now on hiatus) and Jonas Brothers (The brothers were on hiatus when this song was released; now reunited). It was released as a digital download on 29 June 2018 via Virgin EMI Records as the seventh single from his compilation album released on 9 November 2018 Blue. The song features on the films Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation and The Queen's Corgi. As of July 3, 2019, this is Joe’s last single released, alone or as a featured artist, as he and his brothers, Nick and Kevin, reunited to record hit songs like \"Sucker\", \"Cool\", and \"Only Human\".\n\nBackground\nSpring Aspers, Head of Sony Motion Pictures Music Group said \"Jonas Blue is a world-renowned talent and we’re thrilled to have him be part of the family. His collaboration with Joe Jonas on 'I See Love' perfectly captures the summer, tropical vibe of our film and we’re excited for audiences to hear this song and join us on our epic summer adventure! We're also delighted for the chance to work with Joe Jonas not only for 'I See Love' but on our film. Joe joined the Hotel Transylvania family as the voice of Kraken, a loving blue sea creature that only wishes to sing and perform for everyone onboard the Legacy cruise ship, and we know audiences will fall in love with his character – and song – just like we did!\".\n\nCritical reception\nPhil Knott from Billboard said \"The song captures the feeling of being on summer vacation and follows the animated cast through various scenes that will be included in the film, hitting theaters July 13\".\n\nOfficial video\nA clip in the movie for the song with the lyrics displayed in different places with cool effects to accompany the release of \"I See Love\" was first released onto YouTube on 29 June 2018 at a total length of two minutes and fifty-two seconds.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n \n\n2018 songs\n2018 singles\nHotel Transylvania songs\nJonas Blue songs\nJoe Jonas songs\nSongs written by Jonas Blue\nSongs written by Mr Hudson\nSongs written by Louis Schoorl\nSongs written by Mitch Allan"
]
|
[
"Jesus Is Just Alright",
"The Byrds' version",
"When did The Byrds cover the song?",
"recorded on June 17, 1969",
"Was it released on an album?",
"It was first released as part of that album",
"Was it popular?",
"The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom.",
"What did critics say about their version?",
"\" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971",
"Did audiences like the song?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_a8750731ab7a44e48f44bb2f36b8268b_1 | Was their version different than the original? | 6 | Was the Byrds version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" different than the original? | Jesus Is Just Alright | The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. The song was introduced to The Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when The Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, The Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement. "Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | "Jesus Is Just Alright" is a gospel song written by Art Reynolds and first recorded by Reynolds' own group, The Art Reynolds Singers, on their 1966 album, Tellin' It Like It Is.
The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right", which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including the Byrds, Underground Sunshine, the Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, the Ventures, DC Talk, Stryper, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).
The first cover version of the song was recorded by the Los Angeles band the Byrds on their 1969 album, Ballad of Easy Rider. The song was later recorded by The Doobie Brothers, who included it on their 1972 album, Toulouse Street. The Doobie Brothers' version of the song was released as a single in November 1972 and it became a hit in the United States, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1973, American rock band Exile released their self titled debut album which included a cover. In 1992, the Christian rock and hip hop group DC Talk released a version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" on their Free at Last album. The song has also been covered by Robert Randolph on his Colorblind album, with guest artist Eric Clapton and Stryper's 2013 release, No More Hell to Pay.
The Byrds' version
The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, the Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by the Byrds' own recording.
The song was introduced to the Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when the Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, the Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement.
"Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of the Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971, but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.
The Doobie Brothers' version
The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was first released on their second album, Toulouse Street, in 1972. It was subsequently released in November 1972 as the second single from the album (b/w "Rockin' Down the Highway") and went on to become a U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973. The single featured a shorter, edited version of the song compared to the one included on the album. The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was one of a number of religiously-themed songs to reach the U.S. charts between 1969 and 1973. The song, along with its B-side, continues to be a staple of playlists on classic rock radio stations.
The band first became aware of "Jesus Is Just Alright" after hearing the Byrds' version and before long the song had been added to the Doobie Brothers' own live repertoire. As a result, the song's musical arrangement is very similar to the one used by the Byrds, although the Doobie Brothers' rendition does include an extra bridge that the band added themselves. In 2007, bassist Tiran Porter claimed that the idea of adding a slow bridge was his, including the lyrics "Jesus is my friend", but due to the high vocal range demanded, guitarist Patrick Simmons sang lead instead of him. Although none of the individual band members were religiously inclined, the song went on to become very popular among Christians during the early 1970s, particularly those within the hippie counterculture that were involved with the Jesus movement.
In addition to its appearance on Toulouse Street, the song can also be found on a number of Doobie Brothers' compilations, including Best of The Doobies, Listen to the Music: The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin': 1970–2000, Greatest Hits, and The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers. Live recordings of the song appear on the Farewell Tour, Rockin' down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, and Live at Wolf Trap albums.
Personnel
Patrick Simmons — guitars, lead vocals
Tom Johnston – guitars, backing vocals
Tiran Porter – bass, backing vocals
John (Little John) Hartman – drums, percussion
Michael Hossack – drums
Additional personnel
Bill Payne – organ
Ted Templeman – percussion
DC Talk's version
"Jesus Is Just Alright" is a Dove Award-winning single by Christian rock and hip hop band, DC Talk. It was the lead single for their 1992 platinum-selling and Grammy Award-winning album, Free at Last. The band's primary songwriter, TobyMac (Toby McKeehan), retained the song's chorus but added a number of new verses consisting of his own lyrics. These lyrics were rapped, as was usual with DC Talk's songs of the period, with the lead vocal alternating between McKeehan's rapped verses and the sung chorus provided by Kevin Max (then known as Kevin Smith) and Michael Tait.
DC Talk's version also includes subtle lyric alterations, with the line "Jesus is just alright" being intermittently changed to "Jesus is still alright". Thus, DC Talk's recording can be seen as something of an update on the previous version. McKeehan changed the line in an attempt to express his feeling that Jesus was still alright with him even if many others did not share his beliefs. The song's lyrics also comment on the lack of acceptance and recognition that faith-based music often receives from mainstream radio. In addition to being musically based upon the earlier Byrds and Doobie Brothers' recordings, DC Talk's version of the song also features samples of Madonna's hit single "Vogue" and the Snap! song "The Power".
In the audio commentary of the Free at Last – The Movie bonus DVD, Tait identified "Jesus Is Just Alright" as the song that DC Talk have performed most in their live shows. It has been played at every concert since 1992 and is the only song to be played on each of their four major headlining tours: Free At Last (1994), Jesus Freak – The Tour (Spring 1996), The Supernatural Experience (Spring 1999), and An Evening with DC Talk (Spring 2001).
The song's music video was shot entirely in muted sepia-tone and featured DC Talk singing around three crosses in a desert, surrounded by musicians and dancers. It concludes with the band walking off into the desert sunset.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1994, "Jesus Is Just Alright" was awarded the Dove Award for Best Rock Recorded Song. DC Talk also became one of the first contemporary Christian acts to perform on late-night television when, on November 12, 1993, the band performed "Jesus Is Just Alright" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CD single track listing
US radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
"Yo! Ho Ho" – 4:14
"Two Honks and a Negro" – 0:19
"Free at Last Album Spot" – 1:01
Japanese radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
References
Notes
Citations
1969 singles
1972 singles
1992 singles
The Byrds songs
The Doobie Brothers songs
DC Talk songs
1966 songs
Capitol Records singles
Columbia Records singles
Warner Records singles
ForeFront Records singles
Songs about Jesus | false | [
"Present – The Very Best of Steeleye Span is the 17th studio album by Steeleye Span, released in 2002. The album contains new recordings of previously released songs.\n\nThe project began with a poll on Peter Knight's website, asking fans about which of the band's songs they would most like to see new versions of. At the time the poll was taken, the band was a state of near-collapse. Personal tensions during the recording of Bedlam Born had led to the departure of Gay Woods and Tim Harries, and health problems had induced Bob Johnson into retirement. When the poll was completed, Knight persuaded several past members of the band, Maddy Prior, Rick Kemp and Liam Genockey, to return to the studio; and he also coaxed Johnson out of retirement. The newly reformed line-up, similar to the band's famous mid-1970s membership, released the results as a two-disc set in 2002.\n\nThe majority of the songs are modest variations on the original versions. For example, songs such as \"Sir James the Rose\", \"Black Jack Davey\", \"All Around My Hat\", and \"King Henry\" are not radically different from their original studio versions, although there are changes in orchestration, particularly the general addition of the octave violin to many of the songs. Maddy Prior often modifies her singing style or emphasizes different words from the original version. About the only substantial change in \"Gaudete\" is the pronunciation of some of the Latin. On \"Cam Ye O'er Frae France\", Prior enunciates more, making the lyrics much more intelligible than on the Parcel of Rogues version. \"Rosebud in June\" is slightly faster than the original; and Prior sings the whole piece unaccompanied, while the original features the whole band singing on the chorus. The version of \"One Misty Moisty Morning\" is very similar to the studio version, but much slower than the way the band normally play it live. A few songs are given brief instrumental endings.\n\nHowever, a few of the songs are quite different from their original version. The studio version of \"Hard Times of Old England\" is very upbeat, in contrast with the song's lyrics about economic hardship; but the new version is much slower and more melancholy, almost as if it were being sung in a church, with Prior being backed up by Knight playing an organ. Perhaps the biggest change is on \"When I Was On Horseback\". The original version, from Ten Man Mop, or Mr. Reservoir Butler Rides Again, is a slow, sorrowful funeral tune, but the new version is a mid-tempo rock piece, with a driving violin, a brisk guitar line, and a strong drum beat. \"Blackleg Miner\" gets a second makeover; although the new version is closer to the version on Back in Line than the original on Hark! The Village Wait, it is distinct from both earlier versions, with Kemp's slap bass and a strong violin line.\n\n\"Let Her Go Down\" employs a different set of lyrics from the version on Sails of Silver, reportedly closer to what Knight had originally intended for the song. This song is the only non-traditional piece on the album.\n\nThe original version of \"Thomas the Rhymer\" was a six-minute song that alternated rock and acoustic elements. However, when Now We Are Six was released in America, the band substituted a three-minute version of the song that was more thoroughly rock-style, and which was judged to be more radio-friendly. Almost all the subsequent re-releases of Now We Are Six contained the three-minute version of the song. On this album, however, the band chose to go back to the six-minute version, which is how they had normally played the song in concert; they offered a variation on the song's acoustic moments, while keeping the rock moments relatively intact. Until the release of the compilation A Parcel of Steeleye Span, this was the most easily available version of the original six-minute form of the song.\n\nThe album includes one song the band had never recorded before, \"Lyke-Wake Dirge\". This was a song that the band had frequently performed live (for example, during their US tour in support of Jethro Tull, the band processed onto stage singing this song a cappella), but only now got around to offering a recording of it.\n\nThe song selection very heavily leans toward the band's mid-1970s heyday, with one song from Hark! The Village Wait; one from Ten Man Mop; four from Below the Salt; three from Parcel of Rogues; two from Now We Are Six; one from Commoners Crown; three from All Around My Hat; and one each from Rocket Cottage and Sails of Silver. The band's later work, from Tempted and Tried, Time, Horkstow Grange and Bedlam Born, is entirely passed over. Assuming that the contents of the album substantially represent fan opinion from the poll, this would suggest that the band's fans have a strong preference for the band's mid-1970s material.\n\nAccording to the liner notes, the album's title is a three-sided pun, playing on the different meanings of 'present', including 'a gift', 'now', and 'here'.\n\nPersonnel\nMaddy Prior - vocals\nRick Kemp - bass, vocals, guitar\nPeter Knight - organ, mandolin, octave violin, violin, electric violin, vocals, piano\nBob Johnson - acoustic guitar, electric guitar, vocals\nLiam Genockey - drums, cymbals\n\nTrack listing\nDisc 1:\n\"Sir James the Rose\"\n\"Hard Times of Old England\"\n\"Cam Ye O'er Frae France\"\n\"Thomas the Rhymer\"\n\"Lyke-Wake Dirge\"\n\"Black Jack Davey\"\n\"Two Magicians\"\n\"Blackleg Miner\"\n\"All Around My Hat\"\n\nDisc 2:\n\"When I Was On Horseback\"\n\"John Barleycorn\"\n\"Long Lankin\" (Roud 6, Child 93)\n\"One Misty Moisty Morning\"\n\"Let Her Go Down\"\n\"Gaudete\"\n\"The Weaver and the Factory Maid\"\n\"Drink Down the Moon\"\n\"King Henry\"\n\"Rosebud in June (hidden track)\"\n\nSteeleye Span albums\n2002 albums",
"Best of Rockers 'n' Ballads is a compilation album by the German hard rock band Scorpions, released in 1989. All songs on this album are from their tenure with Mercury Records, from 1979 to 1988, in addition to rare or never-before released material.\n\nBackground\n\nThe record was released with different track listings in different regions: At all the compilation features several rare or completely unreleased tracks: There are remixes of \"Big City Nights\", \"Lovedrive\", \"Holiday\" and \"Is There Anybody There\", which were previously unreleased. Also included are two different versions of \"Hey You\". While the European pressing features a previously unreleased remix of the song, the US and Japanese editions feature the original version, which was released in 1980 as a single. So far it's still the only CD pressing where you can find the original version of \"Hey You\". Another rarity was a cover of The Who's \"I Can't Explain\", which was also included on that same year's Stairway to Heaven/Highway to Hell charity compilation album.\nThe European CD edition also includes one more rarity: the version of \"China White\", which features a different solo, a solo that was just released on US editions of Blackout before.\n\nThe track listing and individual running times differ between the US, European and Asian editions. While the European pressing features 14 or 15 tracks, the original version of \"Hey You\" is missing and replaced by a remix. The US and Japanese version just feature twelve tracks and omit the re-recorded version of \"Is There Anybody There?\" as well as \"Another Piece of Meat\" and \"China White\", but it includes the longer, original version of \"Hey You\". The European edition was re-released with the title The Essential Scorpions in 2003.\n\nBest of Rockers 'n' Ballads reached platinum status in the United States, and is the Scorpions' only compilation album to be certified at least gold by the RIAA there.\n\nTrack listing\n\nEuropean edition\n\nUS and Japanese edition\n\nCharts\n\nAlbum\n\nSingles\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\nScorpions (band) compilation albums\n1989 compilation albums\nMercury Records compilation albums"
]
|
[
"Jesus Is Just Alright",
"The Byrds' version",
"When did The Byrds cover the song?",
"recorded on June 17, 1969",
"Was it released on an album?",
"It was first released as part of that album",
"Was it popular?",
"The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom.",
"What did critics say about their version?",
"\" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971",
"Did audiences like the song?",
"I don't know.",
"Was their version different than the original?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_a8750731ab7a44e48f44bb2f36b8268b_1 | What else was notable about their version? | 7 | What else was notable about the Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" besides becoming a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971? | Jesus Is Just Alright | The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. The song was introduced to The Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when The Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, The Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement. "Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971. CANNOTANSWER | Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. | "Jesus Is Just Alright" is a gospel song written by Art Reynolds and first recorded by Reynolds' own group, The Art Reynolds Singers, on their 1966 album, Tellin' It Like It Is.
The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right", which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including the Byrds, Underground Sunshine, the Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, the Ventures, DC Talk, Stryper, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).
The first cover version of the song was recorded by the Los Angeles band the Byrds on their 1969 album, Ballad of Easy Rider. The song was later recorded by The Doobie Brothers, who included it on their 1972 album, Toulouse Street. The Doobie Brothers' version of the song was released as a single in November 1972 and it became a hit in the United States, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1973, American rock band Exile released their self titled debut album which included a cover. In 1992, the Christian rock and hip hop group DC Talk released a version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" on their Free at Last album. The song has also been covered by Robert Randolph on his Colorblind album, with guest artist Eric Clapton and Stryper's 2013 release, No More Hell to Pay.
The Byrds' version
The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, the Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by the Byrds' own recording.
The song was introduced to the Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when the Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, the Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement.
"Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of the Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971, but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.
The Doobie Brothers' version
The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was first released on their second album, Toulouse Street, in 1972. It was subsequently released in November 1972 as the second single from the album (b/w "Rockin' Down the Highway") and went on to become a U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973. The single featured a shorter, edited version of the song compared to the one included on the album. The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was one of a number of religiously-themed songs to reach the U.S. charts between 1969 and 1973. The song, along with its B-side, continues to be a staple of playlists on classic rock radio stations.
The band first became aware of "Jesus Is Just Alright" after hearing the Byrds' version and before long the song had been added to the Doobie Brothers' own live repertoire. As a result, the song's musical arrangement is very similar to the one used by the Byrds, although the Doobie Brothers' rendition does include an extra bridge that the band added themselves. In 2007, bassist Tiran Porter claimed that the idea of adding a slow bridge was his, including the lyrics "Jesus is my friend", but due to the high vocal range demanded, guitarist Patrick Simmons sang lead instead of him. Although none of the individual band members were religiously inclined, the song went on to become very popular among Christians during the early 1970s, particularly those within the hippie counterculture that were involved with the Jesus movement.
In addition to its appearance on Toulouse Street, the song can also be found on a number of Doobie Brothers' compilations, including Best of The Doobies, Listen to the Music: The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin': 1970–2000, Greatest Hits, and The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers. Live recordings of the song appear on the Farewell Tour, Rockin' down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, and Live at Wolf Trap albums.
Personnel
Patrick Simmons — guitars, lead vocals
Tom Johnston – guitars, backing vocals
Tiran Porter – bass, backing vocals
John (Little John) Hartman – drums, percussion
Michael Hossack – drums
Additional personnel
Bill Payne – organ
Ted Templeman – percussion
DC Talk's version
"Jesus Is Just Alright" is a Dove Award-winning single by Christian rock and hip hop band, DC Talk. It was the lead single for their 1992 platinum-selling and Grammy Award-winning album, Free at Last. The band's primary songwriter, TobyMac (Toby McKeehan), retained the song's chorus but added a number of new verses consisting of his own lyrics. These lyrics were rapped, as was usual with DC Talk's songs of the period, with the lead vocal alternating between McKeehan's rapped verses and the sung chorus provided by Kevin Max (then known as Kevin Smith) and Michael Tait.
DC Talk's version also includes subtle lyric alterations, with the line "Jesus is just alright" being intermittently changed to "Jesus is still alright". Thus, DC Talk's recording can be seen as something of an update on the previous version. McKeehan changed the line in an attempt to express his feeling that Jesus was still alright with him even if many others did not share his beliefs. The song's lyrics also comment on the lack of acceptance and recognition that faith-based music often receives from mainstream radio. In addition to being musically based upon the earlier Byrds and Doobie Brothers' recordings, DC Talk's version of the song also features samples of Madonna's hit single "Vogue" and the Snap! song "The Power".
In the audio commentary of the Free at Last – The Movie bonus DVD, Tait identified "Jesus Is Just Alright" as the song that DC Talk have performed most in their live shows. It has been played at every concert since 1992 and is the only song to be played on each of their four major headlining tours: Free At Last (1994), Jesus Freak – The Tour (Spring 1996), The Supernatural Experience (Spring 1999), and An Evening with DC Talk (Spring 2001).
The song's music video was shot entirely in muted sepia-tone and featured DC Talk singing around three crosses in a desert, surrounded by musicians and dancers. It concludes with the band walking off into the desert sunset.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1994, "Jesus Is Just Alright" was awarded the Dove Award for Best Rock Recorded Song. DC Talk also became one of the first contemporary Christian acts to perform on late-night television when, on November 12, 1993, the band performed "Jesus Is Just Alright" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CD single track listing
US radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
"Yo! Ho Ho" – 4:14
"Two Honks and a Negro" – 0:19
"Free at Last Album Spot" – 1:01
Japanese radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
References
Notes
Citations
1969 singles
1972 singles
1992 singles
The Byrds songs
The Doobie Brothers songs
DC Talk songs
1966 songs
Capitol Records singles
Columbia Records singles
Warner Records singles
ForeFront Records singles
Songs about Jesus | true | [
"\"What Else Is There?\" is the third single from the Norwegian duo Röyksopp's second album The Understanding. It features the vocals of Karin Dreijer from the Swedish electronica duo The Knife. The album was released in the UK with the help of Astralwerks.\n\nThe single was used in an O2 television advertisement in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia during 2008. It was also used in the 2006 film Cashback and the 2007 film, Meet Bill. Trentemøller's remix of \"What Else is There?\" was featured in an episode of the HBO show Entourage.\n\nThe song was covered by extreme metal band Enslaved as a bonus track for their album E.\n\nThe song was listed as the 375th best song of the 2000s by Pitchfork Media.\n\nOfficial versions\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Album Version) – 5:17\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Radio Edit) – 3:38\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Jacques Lu Cont Radio Mix) – 3:46\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Vocal Version) – 8:03\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Dub Version) – 7:51\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Mix) – 8:25\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Edit) – 4:50\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Remix) (Radio Edit) – 3:06\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Trentemøller Remix) – 7:42\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Vitalic Remix) – 5:14\n\nResponse\nThe single was officially released on 5 December 2005 in the UK. The single had a limited release on 21 November 2005 to promote the upcoming album. On the UK Singles Chart, it peaked at number 32, while on the UK Dance Chart, it reached number one.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was directed by Martin de Thurah. It features Norwegian model Marianne Schröder who is shown lip-syncing Dreijer's voice. Schröder is depicted as a floating woman traveling across stormy landscapes and within empty houses. Dreijer makes a cameo appearance as a woman wearing an Elizabethan ruff while dining alone at a festive table.\n\nMovie spots\n\nThe song is also featured in the movie Meet Bill as characters played by Jessica Alba and Aaron Eckhart smoke marijuana while listening to it. It is also part of the end credits music of the film Cashback.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2005 singles\nRöyksopp songs\nAstralwerks singles\nSongs written by Svein Berge\nSongs written by Torbjørn Brundtland\n2004 songs\nSongs written by Roger Greenaway\nSongs written by Olof Dreijer\nSongs written by Karin Dreijer",
"\"What About Us\" is a single released by British-Irish girl group the Saturdays. Their first international single, it is the lead single from their first American-only release EP, Chasing the Saturdays (2013). It also acts as the second single from their fourth studio album Living for the Weekend (2013). The single was first released in the United States and Canada on 18 December 2012 via digital download, before being released in the United Kingdom on 16 March 2013 via CD single and digital download. The single was written by Camille Purcell, Ollie Jacobs, Philip Jacobs. There are two different versions of the track which have been recorded and released: a solo version, which was released exclusively in the US and Canada, and a version featuring Jamaican rapper Sean Paul, which was released internationally. Music critics gave the song positive feedback, but questioned the heavily auto-tuned chorus and the move away from the group's traditional sound.\n\nA music video was released for the song was published and released via the Saturdays' Vevo account on 11 January 2013. The video was filmed in Los Angeles, where the band were filming their US reality series, Chasing the Saturdays, which is broadcast through E!. An acoustic version of \"Somebody Else's Life\", which can be heard on the opening titles of the show, was released as a B-side. The Saturdays went on to a promotional tour in order to get the song \"out there\" in the United States, and appeared on a number of different chat shows including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Jeff Probst Show, Fashion Police, Chelsea Lately and The Today Show in New York City. They later went on to a promotional tour in the UK, visiting radio stations around the country.\n\n\"What About Us\" gained commercial success, debuted at number one on the UK Singles Chart to become the Saturdays' twelfth UK top 10 single and first ever number-one. In Ireland, the song debuted at number six on the Irish Singles Chart, gaining the group their fifth top 10 single there. With first-week sales of 114,000 copies and 40,000 copies more sold than their closest competitor to number one, \"What About Us\" was the fastest-selling single of 2013 in the UK until it was overtaken by Naughty Boy's \"La La La\" two months later. In December 2013, it was announced as the eleventh fastest-selling single of the year overall. As of August 2014, the song has sold over 400,000 copies in the UK. On 23 December 2013, Mollie King posted a photo on Instagram of her holding a 500,000 sales plaque from their record label, with the message that \"What About Us\" had sold over 500,000 copies in UK and USA, with 120,000 copies in the US alone even without charting on the Billboard Hot 100.\n\nBackground \n\nIn 2012, it was announced that the Saturdays had received an offer to star in their own reality television programme, Chasing the Saturdays, broadcast through E! Network. While filming their show, the band began visiting the recording studio, where they began work with Rodney \"Darkchild\" Jerkins.\n\nThe Saturdays felt comfortable with their US labels, and thanked them for not only giving them a chance in North America, but for making them feel at ease and welcome which took a lot of \"weight of our shoulders\". The band said they have always respected the labels due to the massive success they've had with artists. The band had been working with Demi Lovato in the recording studio.\n\nComposition\n\n\"What About Us\" was written and produced by Ollie Jacobs and acts as the Saturdays first single to be released in North America where it could appear on the Billboard Hot 100 and Canadian Hot 100. In America its release coincided with their TV show, Chasing the Saturdays. The track is the band's fourteenth single to be released in the United Kingdom and Ireland and the track is a dance-pop song. Before the release of the song, Mollie King said that the band were excited to share the track as they had the song \"for months\" She said: \"I can't wait for everyone to hear it and to get to perform it. I'm just so excited about this one, I think it's going down really well.\" The band said they didn't want to change their type of music just for the American public and would stick to their roots and the genre they enjoyed to perform. King spoke: \"We've always made a point that we don't want to change to go to America. We wanted to go over as we are and if they like us, they like us and if they don't, they don't!\" King said that the track is reggae pop music, a little different from what band usually record, but the track is still really \"dancey\" and \"upbeat\", as well a good song to dance to on either stage or at a club. When Una Healy was asked what the song was about she said that she \"did not know\" what the song was exactly about. \"To be honest I was trying to figure out the other day what exactly it's about. I could bullshit away telling you, but I really don't know. But I think it's all about someone driving you crazy.\" She said she \"thinks\" that 'What About Us' part means \"me and you getting together\". She did point out that she did know that the song was about \"making you happy\" and that the track was good for the summer and will get you on the dancefloor. The band teased saying that \"What About Us\" is a pop track, and that is a good indication of what the expect from the album, and that they've paired up with Diane Warren to record a few ballads and not just pop tracks. \"What About Us\" is the only collaboration on the album.\n\nRelease\n\"What About Us\" was confirmed as the Saturdays' first single to be released in North America, and would be released on 18 December 2012 to coincide with their American reality show, Chasing the Saturdays. It was also revealed that the track would be released as the lead single from the band's North America released only Extended play, Chasing the Saturdays, which was named after the show. Some critics said that releasing \"What About Us\" from an EP for the US market was a \"wise decision\". One critic said: For, throwing out a traditional release on the back of a show that isn't (yet) a hit would ultimately be setting them up for failure. What's more, the EP allows their \"storyline\" for the next season of the show (should there be one) to revolve around recording an album. In the United Kingdom, it was revealed that \"What About Us\" would be the follow-up single from \"30 Days\" in the UK and Ireland, and therefore would not be the lead single from the band's fourth studio album. The band announced that before the release of the album, there would be another single release from the album. The follow-up single was revealed to be titled \"Gentleman\".\n\nJust like all the band's previous singles, the record was accepted by all A-Lists at radio stations. The UK and Ireland version of the track features a guest rap from Sean Paul. Whereas the North American version does not feature vocals from Sean Paul and only vocals from the band. The original version of the track last 3 minutes and 24 seconds, whereas the version which features Sean Paul lasts 3 minutes and 40 seconds. The single was released with B-side, an Acoustic version of a brand new track, \"Somebody Else's Life\", which is the opening theme to Chasing the Saturdays. \"What About Us\" was released as a digital download EP, and this featured the single version which features Sean Paul, the solo version and the B-side track. Upon the release in North America, there was a digital remixes EP which featured remixes of \"What About Us\" by a number of DJs including: Seamus Haji, Guy Scheiman, the Buzz Junkies and 2nd Adventure and this was also made available to purchase on 18 December 2012. While in the UK, the CD single was made available to be from stores from 18 March 2013. On the CD single featured \"What About Us\", the B-side \"Somebody Else's Life\".\n\nThe band decided to release \"What About Us\" differently between the United Kingdom and the United States, \"What About Us\" was released onto the charts without any airplay and without a music video accompanying the release, something the band experienced in the UK, with \"Notorious\". Whereas in the UK, \"What About Us\" was released with airplay and the music video being released before the release of the single. During this time, Frankie Sandford became ambassadors for mental health after Sandford battled depression. The band said they choose \"What About Us\" to be the lead single in the US and follow-up single from \"30 Days\" because they all loved it once they demoed it and it gave them a \"really good feeling\" They also said it is a fresh start for a new album, with a \"reggae vibe\", but still a pop record. The Saturdays said that Sean Paul was \"perfect\" for the UK version of the song. They said that he was \"just so nice\" and that he would be present during some of the promotional performances when the single was released.\n\nCritical reception\nRobert Copsey of Digital Spy said that Rochelle Humes asks in a \"curious Jamaican-flecked timbre\" during the intro of \"What About Us\". During the lyrics \"Oh why are we are waiting so long I'm suffocating\", and he went on to say that it is in reference to \"man-related drama\" and also pointing out that there is plenty of that on their reality series, Chasing the Saturdays. Copsey later went on to tip the band for their first number-one single as he said: \"but we suspect it could also be a sly wink at their enduring quest for a number one single\". He said that track was \"radio-friendly\" due to the \"trace beats\" and \"demanding their contrary lover to give up the hard-to-get schtick sharpish\". Although he didn't think that the song was \"original\" enough for the band, but is \"strangely addictive\" and he would be happy to see the song at the top of the charts.\n\n4Music described the song as a \"electro-pop affair with a bucket-load of synths thrown in for good measure. It's quite good, but we wonder if they should reconsider this single choice if they truly want to launch an invasion on America's charts.\" Idolator wrote a mixed review criticizing the track for lacking the group's signature style; \"While the beat is pounding enough to nab the girls a chart hit, it doesn’t feel true to the spirit of The Sats. Then again, maybe it isn’t supposed to.\" Jessica Sager from PopCrush also touched on the departure from their original sound; \"It’s a pretty big departure from their usual sugary oeuvre, but not necessarily in a bad way.\" She went on to praise Sean Paul's feature; \"His presence on the track gives it an air of authenticity and fun, but pretty much only during his own verses and interjections.\" However, she criticised the mediocre attempt at dialect the groups sing in throughout the track; \"When the Saturdays try to emulate island tones, it sounds a little awkward and they start out like that right off the bat, but go in and out of the undistinguished dialect throughout the song.\" She also felt that the heavily Auto-Tuned chorus was not need; \"The Auto-Tune seems extraneous, because the Saturdays can actually sing well without it.\" She end the review by labeling their latest effort as \"generic\" and \"not the best the Saturdays have to offer\", also rating it two and a half stars out of five.\n\nCommercial reception\n\"What About Us\" debuted at number 44 on the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart for the week dated 8 December 2012. This marks their first ever chart entry in the United States and it has since peaked at number twenty-seven. The song debuted at number 79 on the Canadian Hot 100, becoming the highest Canadian debut for a new artist in 2013.\n\nThe Saturdays admitted that they did not want to get their hopes up on debuting at number one on the UK Singles Charts due to being beaten to number-one three times before with \"Forever Is Over\", \"Just Can't Get Enough\" and \"Missing You\", after being number one on the Official Chart Update. During the latter two occasions, it was rapper Flo Rida who had pushed them back to numbers two and three respectively. It was revealed that the Saturdays had knocked Justin Timberlake's \"Mirrors\" off the number-one spot on the UK Singles Chart. This became the band's first ever number-one single in the United Kingdom, it also became Sean Paul's second number one in the United Kingdom after being featured on \"Breathe\" in 2003. For every one copy that Timberlake's \"Mirrors\" sold, the Saturdays sold two more copies of \"What About Us\". \"What About Us\" sold 114,000 copies in the first week of release, making it, at the time, the fastest selling single of 2013. The track sold 40,000 copies more than Timberlake, who was pushed back to number-two on the UK Singles Charts. The band said they were thrilled to be the UK's number-one with \"What About Us\". They went on to thanking their fans for supporting the single and supporting them for the past five years.\n\n\"What About Us\" debuted at number six on the Irish Singles Chart, marking the band's fifth top ten single in that country. \"What About Us\" made its debut at number thirty-six on the New Zealand Singles Chart.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video for \"What About Us\" was filmed during the summer of 2012 in Los Angeles, while the Saturdays were filming their reality television series. The North American version of the video was released via the Saturdays' official Vevo account on YouTube on 11 January 2013. A variant of the video, featuring vocals and additional scenes of the women with Sean Paul, was later released on 5 February 2013.\n\nLive performances and promotion\nThe Saturdays appeared in a number of nightclubs throughout 2012 in the United States performing \"What About Us\" along other hits. On 14 January 2013, the group made their first televised performance of the single on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It was their first performance done on American television. On 16 January, the girls performed \"What About Us\" on The Today Show in New York City. Along with the performances, they appeared on chat shows such as Chelsea Lately, Daybreak, Fashion Police, Lorraine, The Jeff Probst Show, Loose Women, Alan Carr: Chatty Man, Sunday Brunch and What's Cooking? to promote the single.\n\nTrack listings\nUS digital download\n\"What About Us\" - 3:24\n\nCD Single - UK Version Only\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) - 3:40\n\"What About Us\" - 3:24\n\"Somebody Else's Life\" (Acoustic) - 3:18\n\nUS Digital remixes EP\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Radio Edit) - 3:06\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Club Mix) - 6:35\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Dub) - 6:49\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Radio Edit) - 3:59\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Club Mix) - 7:35\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Dub) - 7:20\n\"What About Us\" (The Buzz Junkies Radio Edit) - 3:23\n\"What About Us\" (The Buzz Junkies Club Mix) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Radio Edit) - 4:24\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Club Mix) - 6:36\n\nEurope and Oceania EP - digital download\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) - 3:40\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) [The Buzz Junkies Radio Edit] - 3:23\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) [Seamus Haji Radio Edit] - 3:37\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Radio Edit) - 3:58\n\"What About Us\" (Extended Mix) - 3:49 (only available through pre-order)\n\nUK Digital Remixes EP\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Club Mix) - 7:35\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Club Mix) - 6:36\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Club Mix) - 6:35\n\"What About Us\" (The Buzz Junkies Club Mix) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Radio Edit) - 4:24\n\nRevamped Version\n\"What About Us\" - 3:24\n\"Somebody Else's Life\" (Acoustic) - 3:18\n\"What About Us\" (Extended Mix) - 3:49\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Radio Edit) - 4:24\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Radio Edit) - 3:58\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) [The Buzz Junkies Radio Edit] - 3:23\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) [Seamus Haji Radio Edit] - 3:37\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Club Mix) - 6:36\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Club Mix) - 7:35\n\"What About Us\" (The Buzz Junkies Club Mix) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Club Mix) - 6:35\n\nCredits and personnel\n\"What About Us\" was recorded at Rollover Studios in London.\n\nOllie Jacobs a.k.a. Art Bastian ~ Songwriter, Producer, Vocal Producer, Mix Engineer\n\nPhillip Jacobs ~ co-writer\nCamille Purcell ~ co-writer\nThe Saturdays ~ vocals\nSean Paul ~ guest vocalist\n\nCharts and certifications\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nRelease and radio history\n\nSee also\n\nList of UK Singles Chart number ones of the 2010s\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n feat. Sean Paul\n\nThe Saturdays songs\nSean Paul songs\n2012 singles\nDance-pop songs\nNumber-one singles in Scotland\nUK Singles Chart number-one singles\nSongs written by Camille Purcell\n2012 songs\nFascination Records singles\nSongs written by Ollie Jacobs"
]
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[
"Jesus Is Just Alright",
"The Byrds' version",
"When did The Byrds cover the song?",
"recorded on June 17, 1969",
"Was it released on an album?",
"It was first released as part of that album",
"Was it popular?",
"The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom.",
"What did critics say about their version?",
"\" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971",
"Did audiences like the song?",
"I don't know.",
"Was their version different than the original?",
"I don't know.",
"What else was notable about their version?",
"Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording."
]
| C_a8750731ab7a44e48f44bb2f36b8268b_1 | Was The Doobie Brothers' version successful? | 8 | Was The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" successful? | Jesus Is Just Alright | The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, The Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by The Byrds' own recording. The song was introduced to The Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when The Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, The Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement. "Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of The Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971 but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | "Jesus Is Just Alright" is a gospel song written by Art Reynolds and first recorded by Reynolds' own group, The Art Reynolds Singers, on their 1966 album, Tellin' It Like It Is.
The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right", which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including the Byrds, Underground Sunshine, the Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, the Ventures, DC Talk, Stryper, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).
The first cover version of the song was recorded by the Los Angeles band the Byrds on their 1969 album, Ballad of Easy Rider. The song was later recorded by The Doobie Brothers, who included it on their 1972 album, Toulouse Street. The Doobie Brothers' version of the song was released as a single in November 1972 and it became a hit in the United States, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1973, American rock band Exile released their self titled debut album which included a cover. In 1992, the Christian rock and hip hop group DC Talk released a version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" on their Free at Last album. The song has also been covered by Robert Randolph on his Colorblind album, with guest artist Eric Clapton and Stryper's 2013 release, No More Hell to Pay.
The Byrds' version
The Byrds' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was recorded on June 17, 1969 during the sessions for the band's eighth studio album, Ballad of Easy Rider. It was first released as part of that album but was subsequently issued as a single on December 15, 1969. The single stalled at No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Despite this lack of commercial success, the Doobie Brothers' later hit version of the song featured an arrangement that was heavily influenced by the Byrds' own recording.
The song was introduced to the Byrds by the band's drummer, Gene Parsons, who had been present in the studio when the Art Reynolds Singers had recorded it. The Byrds had added the song to their live concert repertoire some months prior to the start of the Ballad of Easy Rider recording sessions and it had quickly become an audience favorite. In concert, the Byrds rendition of "Jesus Is Just Alright" began with a wordless vocal introduction that built up and led into the first iteration of the song's chorus. This distinctive vocal arrangement had been devised by Parsons but once the band were in the studio, record producer Terry Melcher dispensed with this extended intro, choosing instead to give the song a more pop-oriented arrangement.
"Jesus Is Just Alright" became a staple of the Byrds' concert repertoire between 1969 and 1971, but appears to have been performed only rarely after that. Additionally, the band performed the song on the U.S. television programs Memphis Talent Party and The Midnight Special in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Besides its appearance on the Ballad of Easy Rider album, "Jesus Is Just Alright" can also be found on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season. Live recordings of the song are included on the expanded edition of The Byrds' (Untitled) album as well as on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.
The Doobie Brothers' version
The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was first released on their second album, Toulouse Street, in 1972. It was subsequently released in November 1972 as the second single from the album (b/w "Rockin' Down the Highway") and went on to become a U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973. The single featured a shorter, edited version of the song compared to the one included on the album. The Doobie Brothers' version of "Jesus Is Just Alright" was one of a number of religiously-themed songs to reach the U.S. charts between 1969 and 1973. The song, along with its B-side, continues to be a staple of playlists on classic rock radio stations.
The band first became aware of "Jesus Is Just Alright" after hearing the Byrds' version and before long the song had been added to the Doobie Brothers' own live repertoire. As a result, the song's musical arrangement is very similar to the one used by the Byrds, although the Doobie Brothers' rendition does include an extra bridge that the band added themselves. In 2007, bassist Tiran Porter claimed that the idea of adding a slow bridge was his, including the lyrics "Jesus is my friend", but due to the high vocal range demanded, guitarist Patrick Simmons sang lead instead of him. Although none of the individual band members were religiously inclined, the song went on to become very popular among Christians during the early 1970s, particularly those within the hippie counterculture that were involved with the Jesus movement.
In addition to its appearance on Toulouse Street, the song can also be found on a number of Doobie Brothers' compilations, including Best of The Doobies, Listen to the Music: The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin': 1970–2000, Greatest Hits, and The Very Best of The Doobie Brothers. Live recordings of the song appear on the Farewell Tour, Rockin' down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, and Live at Wolf Trap albums.
Personnel
Patrick Simmons — guitars, lead vocals
Tom Johnston – guitars, backing vocals
Tiran Porter – bass, backing vocals
John (Little John) Hartman – drums, percussion
Michael Hossack – drums
Additional personnel
Bill Payne – organ
Ted Templeman – percussion
DC Talk's version
"Jesus Is Just Alright" is a Dove Award-winning single by Christian rock and hip hop band, DC Talk. It was the lead single for their 1992 platinum-selling and Grammy Award-winning album, Free at Last. The band's primary songwriter, TobyMac (Toby McKeehan), retained the song's chorus but added a number of new verses consisting of his own lyrics. These lyrics were rapped, as was usual with DC Talk's songs of the period, with the lead vocal alternating between McKeehan's rapped verses and the sung chorus provided by Kevin Max (then known as Kevin Smith) and Michael Tait.
DC Talk's version also includes subtle lyric alterations, with the line "Jesus is just alright" being intermittently changed to "Jesus is still alright". Thus, DC Talk's recording can be seen as something of an update on the previous version. McKeehan changed the line in an attempt to express his feeling that Jesus was still alright with him even if many others did not share his beliefs. The song's lyrics also comment on the lack of acceptance and recognition that faith-based music often receives from mainstream radio. In addition to being musically based upon the earlier Byrds and Doobie Brothers' recordings, DC Talk's version of the song also features samples of Madonna's hit single "Vogue" and the Snap! song "The Power".
In the audio commentary of the Free at Last – The Movie bonus DVD, Tait identified "Jesus Is Just Alright" as the song that DC Talk have performed most in their live shows. It has been played at every concert since 1992 and is the only song to be played on each of their four major headlining tours: Free At Last (1994), Jesus Freak – The Tour (Spring 1996), The Supernatural Experience (Spring 1999), and An Evening with DC Talk (Spring 2001).
The song's music video was shot entirely in muted sepia-tone and featured DC Talk singing around three crosses in a desert, surrounded by musicians and dancers. It concludes with the band walking off into the desert sunset.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1994, "Jesus Is Just Alright" was awarded the Dove Award for Best Rock Recorded Song. DC Talk also became one of the first contemporary Christian acts to perform on late-night television when, on November 12, 1993, the band performed "Jesus Is Just Alright" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CD single track listing
US radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
"Yo! Ho Ho" – 4:14
"Two Honks and a Negro" – 0:19
"Free at Last Album Spot" – 1:01
Japanese radio promo
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (album version) – 4:41
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Funky, Wit Less Rap) – 4:08
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Still Funky, Wit No Rap) – 3:38
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (With Original Blues Bridge) – 4:51
"Jesus Is Just Alright" (Reprise) – 1:03
References
Notes
Citations
1969 singles
1972 singles
1992 singles
The Byrds songs
The Doobie Brothers songs
DC Talk songs
1966 songs
Capitol Records singles
Columbia Records singles
Warner Records singles
ForeFront Records singles
Songs about Jesus | false | [
"\"Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While)\" is a song written by the premier Motown songwriting/production team of the 1960s Holland–Dozier–Holland. The first hit recording was sung by Kim Weston in 1965. It was most popular in 1975 when it was recorded by the Doobie Brothers.\n\nEarly versions\nEddie Holland of Holland-Dozier-Holland made the original recording of \"Take Me in Your Arms\" in 1964. This version was not released commercially until 2005. Holland-Dozier-Holland had Kim Weston record the song in 1965 and her version was released that September. Mike Terry is the baritone sax player. It peaked at number 4 on the R&B chart in Billboard and at number 50 on the Hot 100. In 1967, Holland-Dozier-Holland had the Isley Brothers recorded the song. Their version released in March 1968 and reached number 121 in the U.S. and 22 on the R&B chart.\n\nThe American jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears released a version of the song on the album BST4 in June 1971. \n\nJermaine Jackson released \"Take Me in Your Arms\" for his first solo album, Jermaine, released in 1972. The track, produced by Hal Davis, was the B-side for Jackson's record \"Daddy's Home\".\n\nThe Doobie Brothers\nThe Doobie Brothers recorded \"Take Me in Your Arms\" for their 1975 Stampede album. Tom Johnston, who was then the Doobies' frontman, later recalled, \"I had been a fan of that song since it came out somewhere in the '60s. I just loved that song. So somewhere around '72 I started lobbying to get the band to do a cover of that. And I didn't get anywhere until '75. Then finally in 1975 we actually did it.\"\n\nDoobies member Jeff Baxter said of their recording, \"That song was like a dream come true for us. Every musician I've ever known has at some point wanted to achieve Motown's technically slick soul sound - it's so dynamic. We sat down to try to duplicate it, and to see if our version could emerge as a successful single.\" According to Doobies member Patrick Simmons, \"At first the band sounded like the Grateful Dead doing the Four Tops, but gradually it came together quite accurately.\" Motown veteran Paul Riser was enlisted to arrange the track.\n\nReleased as the lead single of Stampede on April 23, 1975, \"Take Me in Your Arms\" reached a United States Hot 100 peak of number 11 that June. \"Take Me in Your Arms\" gave the Doobie Brothers their only chart hit in France, where it reached number 37. The track also charted in the UK at number 29, matching the chart peak of the Doobie Brothers' only other original release Top 30 hit \"Listen to the Music\" (The Doobie Brothers reached number 7 in the UK in 1993 with a remixed version of their 1973 single \"Long Train Runnin'\") and in Australia at number 34.\n\nOther notable versions\n\"Take Me in Your Arms\" was also released in 1975 by the Canadian singer Charity Brown whose version, produced by Harry Hinde, was arranged by the Motown veteran Tom Baird. The Charity Brown rendering reached number 5 in Canada in May 1975. Brown's single was given a May 1975 release in the UK where it failed to chart. The track appeared on Brown's 1975 album Charity Brown.\n\nChart performance\n\nWeekly charts\nKim Weston\n\nIsley Brothers\n\nCharity Brown\n\nYear-end charts\n\nDoobie Brothers\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\nSongs about body parts\n1964 songs\n1965 singles\n1967 singles\n1975 singles\nThe Doobie Brothers songs\nThe Isley Brothers songs\nSongs written by Holland–Dozier–Holland\nSong recordings produced by Ted Templeman\nMotown singles\nGordy Records singles\nWarner Records singles\nSong recordings produced by Hal Davis",
"\"What a Fool Believes\" is a song written by Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins. The best-known version was recorded by the Doobie Brothers (with McDonald singing lead vocals) for their 1978 album Minute by Minute. Debuting at number 73 on January 20, 1979, the single reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 14, 1979, for one week. The song received Grammy Awards in 1980 for both Song of the Year and Record of the Year.\n\nThe song was one of the few non-disco No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 during the first eight months of 1979. The lyrics tell a story of a man who is reunited with an old love interest and attempts to rekindle a romantic relationship with her before discovering that one never really existed.\n\nIt was claimed that Michael Jackson contributed at least one backing track to the original Doobie Brothers recording, but was not credited for having done so. This was later denied by the band.\n\nOriginal Kenny Loggins version\n\nKenny Loggins, co-writer of the song, released his version of \"What a Fool Believes\" five months prior to the Doobie Brothers version on his second album Nightwatch, released on July 12, 1978.\n\nThe Doobie Brothers version\nIn December 1978, five months after Loggins' original recording was released, The Doobie Brothers (with McDonald on vocals) included a cover version on their album Minute by Minute, with their version being released as a single the following month. This is the best-known version of the song, debuting at number 73 on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 20, 1979, and then reaching number one on April 14, 1979, for one week. \nThis version received Grammy Awards in 1980 for both Song of the Year and Record of the Year.\n\nReception\nBillboard magazine praised the vocal performance, synthesizers and production. The reviewer described the song as building from a melodic first verse \"to a heart warming hook chorus\". Cash Box said it has an \"easy funk backing, strings overhead and characteristically unique vocals which soar upwards.\"\n\nPersonnel\nPatrick Simmons – guitar\nJeff \"Skunk\" Baxter – guitar\nMichael McDonald – keyboards, synthesizers, lead and backing vocals\nTiran Porter – bass guitar\nKeith Knudsen, Ted Templeman – drums\n\nAdditional players\nBill Payne – synthesizer (with Michael McDonald)\nBobby LaKind – congas\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nOther versions by Loggins and McDonald\nA live version appears on Loggins' 1980 album Kenny Loggins Alive. Loggins' original version switches several of the gender pronouns, so that it is sung largely from the perspective of the woman in the encounter.\n\nA reissue of the single was released in 1987 credited to the Doobie Brothers featuring Michael McDonald. It was included on McDonald's 1986 compilation album Sweet Freedom and was credited here as Michael McDonald with the Doobie Brothers. It reached No. 57 on the UK Singles Chart in January 1987.\n\nThere is a Loggins/McDonald live duet on Loggins' 1993 album Outside: From the Redwoods.\n\nWarner Brothers also released a 12-inch single disco version by the Doobie Brothers in 1978 (backed with \"Don't Stop to Watch the Wheels\"), which peaked at number 40 on Billboards Disco Action Chart in April 1979. Mixed by disco producer Jim Burgess, at 5:31 the song is considerably longer than the 3:41 versions on the 7-inch single and the Minute by Minute LP. The 12-inch version also has a more pronounced bass-driven drumbeat.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.discomusic.com/records-more/257_0_2_0_C/|title=What A Fool Believes (12\")|website=Discomusic.com|quotation=They comment: Disco from an unlikely artist ... \"What A Fool Believes\" was remixed by the late Jim Burgess to enhance its dance floor appeal. Another good Doobie Brothers 12 inch release was \"Real Love\"}}</ref>\n\nMatt Bianco version\n\nBritish band Matt Bianco released their version of \"What a Fool Believes\" as a single in 1991. It is from their fourth album Samba in Your Casa. The single reached No. 23 on the Irish Singles Chart in early 1992.\n\nTrack listing\nA. \"What a Fool Believes\" (mixed by Bobby Summerfield)\nB1. \"Samba in Your Casa\" (Cashassa Mix) (mixed by Bobby Summerfield)\nB2. \"Say It's Not Too Late\"\n\nOther cover versions\nNumerous cover versions of the song have been recorded, including:\n1980: Aretha Franklin – from the album Aretha, No. 46 in the UK\n1991: George Michael – from Live in Birmingham, a 1991 live bootleg\n1997: The Wades – from The Feel Good Factor1998: Peter Cox – a top 40 hit in the UK, from the 1998 reissue of his self-titled debut solo album\n2000: Self – from Gizmodgery2013: Unchain – from Love & Groove Delivery2014: The Doobie Brothers featuring Sara Evans – from their studio album Southbound''\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\n1978 songs\n1979 singles\nThe Doobie Brothers songs\nKenny Loggins songs\nBillboard Hot 100 number-one singles\nCashbox number-one singles\nGrammy Award for Record of the Year\nGrammy Award for Song of the Year\nSongs written by Kenny Loggins\nSongs written by Michael McDonald (musician)\n1991 singles\nMatt Bianco songs\nWarner Records singles\nEast West Records singles\nGrammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)\nSong recordings produced by Ted Templeman\nRPM Top Singles number-one singles"
]
|
[
"John Maynard Keynes",
"Neo-Keynesian economics"
]
| C_9bf402fc7c2f4638b09e96b6644fd310_1 | What is Neo-Keynesian economics? | 1 | What is Neo-Keynesian economics? | John Maynard Keynes | The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments - the convertibility of banknotes into gold - but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was absolutely necessary. In January 1915, Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble - with difficulty - a small supply of Spanish pesetas. The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive. On the introduction of military conscription in 1916 he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work. In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold. During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches. As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions - a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the final outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proved correct by events. The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase." In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years. By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism. In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. CANNOTANSWER | they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, | John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and that labour costs and wages were rigid downwards, which means the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in late 1936. By the late 1930s, leading Western economies had begun adopting Keynes's policy recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946. As a leader of the British delegation, Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II but was overruled by the American delegation on several aspects.
Keynes's influence started to wane in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists, who disputed the ability of government to favourably regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy. However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 sparked a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008 by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.
When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it stated that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Early life and education
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, to an upper-middle-class family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge and his mother, Florence Ada Keynes, a local social reformer. Keynes was the first born, and was followed by two more children – Margaret Neville Keynes in 1885 and Geoffrey Keynes in 1887. Geoffrey became a surgeon and Margaret married the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill, although she had many affairs with women, notably Eglantyne Jebb.
According to the economic historian and biographer Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's parents were loving and attentive. They remained in the same house throughout their lives, where the children were always welcome to return. Keynes received considerable support from his father, including expert coaching to help him pass his scholarship exams and financial help both as a young man and when his assets were nearly wiped out at the onset of Great Depression in 1929. Keynes's mother made her children's interests her own, and according to Skidelsky, "because she could grow up with her children, they never outgrew home".
In January 1889 at the age of five and a half, Keynes started at the kindergarten of the Perse School for Girls for five mornings a week. He quickly showed a talent for arithmetic, but his health was poor leading to several long absences. He was tutored at home by a governess, Beatrice Mackintosh, and his mother. In January 1892, at eight and a half, he started as a day pupil at St Faith's preparatory school. By 1894, Keynes was top of his class and excelling at mathematics. In 1896, St Faith's headmaster, Ralph Goodchild, wrote that Keynes was "head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school" and was confident that Keynes could get a scholarship to Eton.
In 1897, Keynes won a King's Scholarship to Eton College, where he displayed talent in a wide range of subjects, particularly mathematics, classics and history: in 1901, he was awarded the Tomline Prize for mathematics. At Eton, Keynes experienced the first "love of his life" in Dan Macmillan, older brother of the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Despite his middle-class background, Keynes mixed easily with upper-class pupils.
In 1902 Keynes left Eton for King's College, Cambridge, after receiving a scholarship for this also to read mathematics. Alfred Marshall begged Keynes to become an economist,
although Keynes's own inclinations drew him towards philosophy – especially the ethical system of G. E. Moore. Keynes was elected to the University Pitt Club and was an active member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students. Like many members, Keynes retained a bond to the club after graduating and continued to attend occasional meetings throughout his life. Before leaving Cambridge, Keynes became the President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Liberal Club. He was said to be an atheist.
In May 1904, he received a first-class BA in mathematics. Aside from a few months spent on holidays with family and friends, Keynes continued to involve himself with the university over the next two years. He took part in debates, further studied philosophy and attended economics lectures informally as a graduate student for one term, which constituted his only formal education in the subject. He took civil service exams in 1906.
The economist Harry Johnson wrote that the optimism imparted by Keynes's early life is a key to understanding his later thinking.
Keynes was always confident he could find a solution to whatever problem he turned his attention to and retained a lasting faith in the ability of government officials to do good.
Keynes's optimism was also cultural, in two senses: he was of the last generation raised by an empire still at the height of its power and was also of the last generation who felt entitled to govern by culture, rather than by expertise. According to Skidelsky, the sense of cultural unity current in Britain from the 19th century to the end of World War I provided a framework with which the well-educated could set various spheres of knowledge in relation to each other and life, enabling them to confidently draw from different fields when addressing practical problems.
Career
In October 1906 Keynes's Civil Service career began as a clerk in the India Office. He enjoyed his work at first, but by 1908 had become bored and resigned his position to return to Cambridge and work on probability theory, through a lectureship in economics at first funded personally by economists Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou; he became a fellow of King's College in 1909.
By 1909 Keynes had also published his first professional economics article in The Economic Journal, about the effect of a recent global economic downturn on India. He founded the Political Economy Club, a weekly discussion group. Keynes's earnings rose further as he began to take on pupils for private tuition.
In 1911 Keynes was made the editor of The Economic Journal. By 1913 he had published his first book, Indian Currency and Finance. He was then appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance – the same topic as his book – where Keynes showed considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems. His written work was published under the name "J M Keynes", though to his family and friends he was known as Maynard. (His father, John Neville Keynes, was also always known by his middle name).
First World War
The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments – the convertibility of banknotes into gold – but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was necessary.
In January 1915 Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble – with difficulty – a small supply of Spanish pesetas.
The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive.
On the introduction of military conscription in 1916, he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work.
In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that had a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold.
Versailles peace conference
Keynes's experience at Versailles was influential in shaping his future outlook, yet it was not a successful one. Keynes's main interest had been in trying to prevent Germany's compensation payments being set so high it would traumatize innocent German people, damage the nation's ability to pay and sharply limit its ability to buy exports from other countries – thus hurting not just Germany's economy but that of the wider world.
Unfortunately for Keynes, conservative powers in the coalition that emerged from the 1918 coupon election were able to ensure that both Keynes himself and the Treasury were largely excluded from formal high-level talks concerning reparations. Their place was taken by the Heavenly Twins – the judge Lord Sumner and the banker Lord Cunliffe whose nickname derived from the "astronomically" high war compensation they wanted to demand from Germany. Keynes was forced to try to exert influence mostly from behind the scenes.
The three principal players at Versailles were Britain's Lloyd George, France's Clemenceau and America's President Wilson.
It was only Lloyd George to whom Keynes had much direct access; until the 1918 election he had some sympathy with Keynes's view but while campaigning had found his speeches were only well received by the public if he promised to harshly punish Germany, and had therefore committed his delegation to extracting high payments.
Lloyd George did, however, win some loyalty from Keynes with his actions at the Paris conference by intervening against the French to ensure the dispatch of much-needed food supplies to German civilians. Clemenceau also pushed for substantial reparations, though not as high as those proposed by the British, while on security grounds, France argued for an even more severe settlement than Britain.
Wilson initially favoured relatively lenient treatment of Germany – he feared too harsh conditions could foment the rise of extremism and wanted Germany to be left sufficient capital to pay for imports. To Keynes's dismay, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to pressure Wilson to agree to include pensions in the reparations bill.
Towards the end of the conference, Keynes came up with a plan that he argued would not only help Germany and other impoverished central European powers but also be good for the world economy as a whole. It involved the radical writing down of war debts, which would have had the possible effect of increasing international trade all round, but at the same time thrown over two thirds of the cost of European reconstruction on the United States.
Lloyd George agreed it might be acceptable to the British electorate. However, America was against the plan; the US was then the largest creditor, and by this time Wilson had started to believe in the merits of a harsh peace and thought that his country had already made excessive sacrifices. Hence despite his best efforts, the result of the conference was a treaty which disgusted Keynes both on moral and economic grounds and led to his resignation from the Treasury.
In June 1919 he turned down an offer to become chairman of the British Bank of Northern Commerce, a job that promised a salary of £2000 in return for a morning per week of work.
Keynes's analysis on the predicted damaging effects of the treaty appeared in the highly influential book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. This work has been described as Keynes's best book, where he was able to bring all his gifts to bear – his passion as well as his skill as an economist. In addition to economic analysis, the book contained appeals to the reader's sense of compassion:
Also present was striking imagery such as "year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled" along with bold predictions which were later justified by events:
Keynes's followers assert that his predictions of disaster were borne out when the German economy suffered the hyperinflation of 1923, and again by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the outbreak of the Second World War. However, historian Ruth Henig claims that "most historians of the Paris peace conference now take the view that, in economic terms, the treaty was not unduly harsh on Germany and that, while obligations and damages were inevitably much stressed in the debates at Paris to satisfy electors reading the daily newspapers, the intention was quietly to give Germany substantial help towards paying her bills, and to meet many of the German objections by amendments to the way the reparations schedule was in practice carried out".
Only a small fraction of reparations was ever paid. In fact, historian Stephen A. Schuker demonstrates in American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33, that the capital inflow from American loans substantially exceeded German out payments so that, on a net basis, Germany received support equal to four times the amount of the post-Second World War Marshall Plan.
Schuker also shows that, in the years after Versailles, Keynes became an informal reparations adviser to the German government, wrote one of the major German reparation notes, and supported the hyperinflation on political grounds. Nevertheless, The Economic Consequences of the Peace gained Keynes international fame, even though it also caused him to be regarded as anti-establishment – it was not until after the outbreak of the Second World War that Keynes was offered a directorship of a major British Bank, or an acceptable offer to return to government with a formal job. However, Keynes was still able to influence government policy making through his network of contacts, his published works and by serving on government committees; this included attending high-level policy meetings as a consultant.
In the 1920s
Keynes had completed his A Treatise on Probability before the war but published it in 1921. The work was a notable contribution to the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of probability theory, championing the important view that probabilities were no more or less than truth values intermediate between simple truth and falsity. Keynes developed the first upper-lower probabilistic interval approach to probability in chapters 15 and 17 of this book, as well as having developed the first decision weight approach with his conventional coefficient of risk and weight, c, in chapter 26. In addition to his academic work, the 1920s saw Keynes active as a journalist selling his work internationally and working in London as a financial consultant. In 1924 Keynes wrote an obituary for his former tutor
Alfred Marshall which Joseph Schumpeter called "the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read."
Mary Paley Marshall was "entranced" by the memorial, while Lytton Strachey rated it as one of Keynes's "best works".
In 1922 Keynes continued to advocate reduction of German reparations with A Revision of the Treaty. He attacked the post-World War I deflation policies with A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923 – a trenchant argument that countries should target stability of domestic prices, avoiding deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate. Britain suffered from high unemployment through most of the 1920s, leading Keynes to recommend the depreciation of sterling to boost jobs by making British exports more affordable. From 1924 he was also advocating a fiscal response, where the government could create jobs by spending on public works. During the 1920s Keynes's pro stimulus views had only limited effect on policy makers and mainstream academic opinion – according to Hyman Minsky one reason was that at this time his theoretical justification was "muddled". The Tract had also called for an end to the gold standard. Keynes advised it was no longer a net benefit for countries such as Britain to participate in the gold standard, as it ran counter to the need for domestic policy autonomy. It could force countries to pursue deflationary policies at exactly the time when expansionary measures were called for to address rising unemployment. The Treasury and Bank of England were still in favour of the gold standard and in 1925 they were able to convince the then Chancellor Winston Churchill to re-establish it, which had a depressing effect on British industry. Keynes responded by writing The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill and continued to argue against the gold standard until Britain finally abandoned it in 1931.
During the Great Depression
Keynes had begun a theoretical work to examine the relationship between unemployment, money, and prices back in the 1920s. The work, Treatise on Money, was published in 1930 in two volumes. A central idea of the work was that if the amount of money being saved exceeds the amount being invested – which can happen if interest rates are too high – then unemployment will rise. This is in part a result of people not wanting to spend too high a proportion of what employers pay out, making it difficult, in aggregate, for employers to make a profit. Another key theme of the book is the unreliability of financial indices for representing an accurate – or indeed meaningful – indication of general shifts in purchasing power of currencies over time. In particular, he criticised the justification of Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 at pre-war valuation by reference to the wholesale price index. He argued that the index understated the effects of changes in the costs of services and labour.
Keynes was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures during the Great Depression. He believed that budget deficits during recessions were a good thing and a natural product of an economic slump. He wrote, "For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature's remedy, so to speak, for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as the present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill."
At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly counter-cyclical public spending. The Means to Prosperity contains one of the first mentions of the multiplier effect. While it was addressed chiefly to the British Government, it also contained advice for other nations affected by the global recession. A copy was sent to the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other world leaders. The work was taken seriously by both the American and British governments, and according to Robert Skidelsky, helped pave the way for the later acceptance of Keynesian ideas, though it had little immediate practical influence. In the 1933 London Economic Conference opinions remained too diverse for a unified course of action to be agreed upon.
Keynesian-like policies were adopted by Sweden and Germany, but Sweden was seen as too small to command much attention, and Keynes was deliberately silent about the successful efforts of Germany as he was dismayed by its imperialist ambitions and its treatment of Jews. Apart from Great Britain, Keynes's attention was primarily focused on the United States. In 1931, he received considerable support for his views on counter-cyclical public spending in Chicago, then America's foremost center for economic views alternative to the mainstream. However, orthodox economic opinion remained generally hostile regarding fiscal intervention to mitigate the depression, until just before the outbreak of war. In late 1933 Keynes was persuaded by Felix Frankfurter to address President Roosevelt directly, which he did by letters and face to face in 1934, after which the two men spoke highly of each other. However, according to Skidelsky, the consensus is that Keynes's efforts began to have a more than marginal influence on US economic policy only after 1939.
Keynes's magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936. It was researched and indexed by one of Keynes's favourite students, later the economist David Bensusan-Butt. The work served as a theoretical justification for the interventionist policies Keynes favoured for tackling a recession. Although Keynes stated in his preface that his General Theory was only secondarily concerned with the “applications of this theory to practice,” the circumstances of its publication were such that his suggestions shaped the course of the 1930s. In addition, Keynes introduced the world to a new interpretation of taxation: since the legal tender is now defined by the state, inflation becomes “taxation by currency depreciation”. This hidden tax meant a) that the standard of value should be governed by deliberate decision; and (b) that it was possible to maintain a middle course between deflation and inflation. This novel interpretation was inspired by the desperate search for control over the economy which permeated the academic world after the Depression. The General Theory challenged the earlier neoclassical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. In doing so Keynes was partly setting himself against his former teachers Marshall and Pigou. Keynes believed the classical theory was a "special case" that applied only to the particular conditions present in the 19th century, his theory being the general one. Classical economists had believed in Say's law, which, simply put, states that "supply creates its demand", and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs. An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness – the recognition that in reality workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue that it is rational for them to do so. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of "aggregate demand" and "aggregate supply" may lead to stable unemployment equilibria – and in those cases, it is on the state, not the market, that economies must depend for their salvation.
The General Theory argues that demand, not supply, is the key variable governing the overall level of economic activity. Aggregate demand, which equals total un-hoarded income in a society, is defined by the sum of consumption and investment. In a state of unemployment and unused production capacity, one can enhance employment and total income only by first increasing expenditures for either consumption or investment. Without government intervention to increase expenditure, an economy can remain trapped in a low-employment equilibrium. The demonstration of this possibility has been described as the revolutionary formal achievement of the work.
The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. "Let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth," he wrote in 1928. "With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments. It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them."
The General Theory is often viewed as the foundation of modern macroeconomics. Few senior American economists agreed with Keynes through most of the 1930s.
Yet his ideas were soon to achieve widespread acceptance, with eminent American professors such as Alvin Hansen agreeing with the General Theory before the outbreak of World War II.
Keynes himself had only limited participation in the theoretical debates that followed the publication of the General Theory as he suffered a heart attack in 1937, requiring him to take long periods of rest. Among others, Hyman Minsky and Post-Keynesian economists have argued that as result, Keynes's ideas were diluted by those keen to compromise with classical economists or to render his concepts with mathematical models like the IS–LM model (which, they argue, distort Keynes's ideas). Keynes began to recover in 1939, but for the rest of his life his professional energies were directed largely towards the practical side of economics: the problems of ensuring optimum allocation of resources for the war efforts, post-war negotiations with America, and the new international financial order that was presented at the Bretton Woods Conference.
In the General Theory and later, Keynes responded to the socialists who argued, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, that capitalism caused war. He argued that if capitalism were managed domestically and internationally (with coordinated international Keynesian policies, an international monetary system that did not pit the interests of countries against one another, and a high degree of freedom of trade), then this system of managed capitalism could promote peace rather than conflict between countries. His plans during World War II for post-war international economic institutions and policies (which contributed to the creation at Bretton Woods of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and later to the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and eventually the World Trade Organization) were aimed to give effect to this vision.
Although Keynes has been widely criticised – especially by members of the Chicago school of economics – for advocating irresponsible government spending financed by borrowing, in fact he was a firm believer in balanced budgets and regarded the proposals for programs of public works during the Great Depression as an exceptional measure to meet the needs of exceptional circumstances.
Second World War
During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post-war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches.
As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions – a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proven correct by events.
The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase."
Postwar
After the war, Keynes continued to represent the United Kingdom in international negotiations despite his deteriorating health. He succeeded in obtaining preferential terms from the United States for new and outstanding debts to facilitate the rebuilding of the British economy.
Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of social economics and advisor to the Bank of England, of his hopes that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" could help Britain out of the economic hole it was in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."
Legacy
Keynesian ascendancy 1939–79
From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes provided the main inspiration for economic policymakers in Europe, America and much of the rest of the world. While economists and policymakers had become increasingly won over to Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after the outbreak of World War II that governments started to borrow money for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (then a US government official charged with controlling inflation), in the rebound of the economy from wartime spending, "one could not have had a better demonstration of the Keynesian ideas."
The Keynesian Revolution was associated with the rise of modern liberalism in the West during the post-war period. Keynesian ideas became so popular that some scholars point to Keynes as representing the ideals of modern liberalism, as Adam Smith represented the ideals of classical liberalism. After the war, Winston Churchill attempted to check the rise of Keynesian policy-making in the United Kingdom and used rhetoric critical of the mixed economy in his 1945 election campaign. Despite his popularity as a war hero, Churchill suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee, whose government's economic policy continued to be influenced by Keynes's ideas.
Neo-Keynesian economics
In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years.
By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism.
In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Multiplier
The concept of multiplier was first developed by R. F. Kahn in his article "The relation of home investment to unemployment" In the economic journal of June 1931. Kahn multiplier was the employment multiplier while as Keynes took the idea from Kahn and formulated the investment multiplier.
Keynesian economics out of favour 1979–2007
Keynesian economics were officially discarded by the British Government in 1979, but forces had begun to gather against Keynes's ideas over 30 years earlier. Friedrich Hayek had formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, with the explicit intention of nurturing intellectual currents to one day displace Keynesianism and other similar influences. Its members included the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises along with the then young Milton Friedman. Initially the society had little impact on the wider world – according to Hayek it was as if Keynes had been raised to sainthood after his death and that people refused to allow his work to be questioned.
Friedman however began to emerge as a formidable critic of Keynesian economics from the mid-1950s, and especially after his 1963 publication of A Monetary History of the United States.
On the practical side of economic life, "big government" had appeared to be firmly entrenched in the 1950s, but the balance began to shift towards the power of private interests in the 1960s. Keynes had written against the folly of allowing "decadent and selfish" speculators and financiers the kind of influence they had enjoyed after World War I. For two decades after World War II the public opinion was strongly against private speculators, the disparaging label "Gnomes of Zürich" being typical of how they were described during this period. International speculation was severely restricted by the capital controls in place after Bretton Woods. According to the journalists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, 1968 was the pivotal year when power shifted in favour of private agents such as currency speculators. As the key 1968 event Elliott and Atkinson picked out America's suspension of the conversion of the dollar into gold except on request of foreign governments, which they identified as the beginning of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system.
Criticisms of Keynes's ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s, as they were then able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. Keynes himself included few formulas and no explicit mathematical models in his General Theory. For economists such as Hyman Minsky, Keynes's limited use of mathematics was partly the result of his scepticism about whether phenomena as inherently uncertain as economic activity could ever be adequately captured by mathematical models. Nevertheless, many models were developed by Keynesian economists, with a famous example being the Phillips curve which predicted an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. It implied that unemployment could be reduced by government stimulus with a calculable cost to inflation. In 1968, Milton Friedman published a paper arguing that the fixed relationship implied by the Philips curve did not exist.
Friedman suggested that sustained Keynesian policies could lead to both unemployment and inflation rising at once – a phenomenon that soon became known as stagflation. In the early 1970s stagflation appeared in both the US and Britain just as Friedman had predicted, with economic conditions deteriorating further after the 1973 oil crisis. Aided by the prestige gained from his successful forecast, Friedman led increasingly successful criticisms against the Keynesian consensus, convincing not only academics and politicians but also much of the general public with his radio and television broadcasts. The academic credibility of Keynesian economics was further undermined by additional criticism from other monetarists trained in the Chicago school of economics, by the Lucas critique and by criticisms from Hayek's Austrian School. So successful were these criticisms that by 1980 Robert Lucas claimed economists would often take offence if described as Keynesians.
Keynesian principles fared increasingly poorly on the practical side of economics – by 1979 they had been displaced by monetarism as the primary influence on Anglo-American economic policy. However, many officials on both sides of the Atlantic retained a preference for Keynes, and in 1984 the Federal Reserve officially discarded monetarism, after which Keynesian principles made a partial comeback as an influence on policy making.
Not all academics accepted the criticism against Keynes – Minsky has argued that Keynesian economics had been debased by excessive mixing with neoclassical ideas from the 1950s, and that it was unfortunate that this branch of economics had even continued to be called "Keynesian". Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner argued it was not so much excessive Keynesian activism that caused the economic problems of the 1970s but the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls, which allowed capital flight from regulated economies into unregulated economies in a fashion similar to Gresham's law phenomenon (where weak currencies undermine strong currencies).
Historian Peter Pugh has stated that a key cause of the economic problems afflicting America in the 1970s was the refusal to raise taxes to finance the Vietnam War, which was against Keynesian advice.
A more typical response was to accept some elements of the criticisms while refining Keynesian economic theories to defend them against arguments that would invalidate the whole Keynesian framework – the resulting body of work largely composing New Keynesian economics. In 1992 Alan Blinder wrote about a "Keynesian Restoration", as work based on Keynes's ideas had to some extent become fashionable once again in academia, though in the mainstream it was highly synthesised with monetarism and other neoclassical thinking. In the world of policy making, free market influences broadly sympathetic to monetarism have remained very strong at government level – in powerful normative institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and US Treasury, and in prominent opinion-forming media such as the Financial Times and The Economist.
Keynesian resurgence 2008–09
The global financial crisis of 2007–08 led to public skepticism about the free market consensus even from some on the economic right. In March 2008, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, announced the death of the dream of global free-market capitalism. In the same month macroeconomist James K. Galbraith used the 25th Annual Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture to launch a sweeping attack against the consensus for monetarist economics and argued that Keynesian economics were far more relevant for tackling the emerging crises.
Economist Robert J. Shiller had begun advocating robust government intervention to tackle the financial crises, specifically citing Keynes.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman also actively argued the case for vigorous Keynesian intervention in the economy in his columns for The New York Times.
Other prominent economic commentators who have argued for Keynesian government intervention to mitigate the financial crisis include George Akerlof, J. Bradford DeLong,
Robert Reich,
and Joseph Stiglitz.
Newspapers and other media have also cited work relating to Keynes by Hyman Minsky, Robert Skidelsky, Donald Markwell
and Axel Leijonhufvud.
A series of major bailouts were pursued during the financial crisis, starting on 7 September with the announcement that the U.S. Government was to nationalise the two government-sponsored enterprises which oversaw most of the U.S. subprime mortgage market – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In October, Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to Keynes as he announced plans for substantial fiscal stimulus to head off the worst effects of recession, in accordance with Keynesian economic thought. Similar policies have been adopted by other governments worldwide.
This is in stark contrast to the action imposed on Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when it was forced by the IMF to close 16 banks at the same time, prompting a bank run.
Much of the post-crisis discussion reflected Keynes's advocacy of international coordination of fiscal or monetary stimulus, and of international economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which many had argued should be reformed as a "new Bretton Woods", and should have been even before the crises broke out.
The IMF and United Nations economists advocated a coordinated international approach to fiscal stimulus.
Donald Markwell argued that in the absence of such an international approach, there would be a risk of worsening international relations and possibly even world war arising from economic factors similar to those present during the depression of the 1930s.
By the end of December 2008, the Financial Times reported that "the sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy is a stunning reversal of the orthodoxy of the past several decades."
In December 2008, Paul Krugman released his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, arguing that economic conditions similar to those that existed during the earlier part of the 20th century had returned, making Keynesian policy prescriptions more relevant than ever. In February 2009 Robert J. Shiller and George Akerlof published Animal Spirits, a book where they argue the current US stimulus package is too small as it does not take into account Keynes's insight on the importance of confidence and expectations in determining the future behaviour of businesspeople and other economic agents.
In the March 2009 speech entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, came out in favour of Keynes's idea of a centrally managed global reserve currency. Zhou argued that it was unfortunate that part of the reason for the Bretton Woods system breaking down was the failure to adopt Keynes's bancor. Zhou proposed a gradual move towards increased use of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs).
Although Zhou's ideas had not been broadly accepted, leaders meeting in April at the 2009 G-20 London summit agreed to allow $250 billion of special drawing rights to be created by the IMF, to be distributed globally. Stimulus plans were credited for contributing to a better than expected economic outlook by both the OECD
and the IMF, in reports published in June and July 2009. Both organisations warned global leaders that recovery was likely to be slow, so counter recessionary measures ought not be rolled back too early.
While the need for stimulus measures was broadly accepted among policy makers, there had been much debate over how to fund the spending. Some leaders and institutions, such as Angela Merkel
and the European Central Bank,
expressed concern over the potential impact on inflation, national debt and the risk that a too large stimulus will create an unsustainable recovery.
Among professional economists the revival of Keynesian economics has been even more divisive. Although many economists, such as George Akerlof, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, and Joseph Stiglitz, supported Keynesian stimulus, others did not believe higher government spending would help the United States economy recover from the Great Recession. Some economists, such as Robert Lucas, questioned the theoretical basis for stimulus packages. Others, like Robert Barro and Gary Becker, say that empirical evidence for beneficial effects from Keynesian stimulus does not exist. However, there is a growing academic literature that shows that fiscal expansion helps an economy grow in the near term, and that certain types of fiscal stimulus are particularly effective.
Overall views
John Maynard Keynes had a drastically different upbringing and motives for his philosophical and economic contributions. Rather than writing with the mindset of being upset at the current system, Keynes instead produced his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with the intention of solving the then current issue which was plaguing the whole world, The Great Depression. When he wrote this, one theme that occurs numerous times is his view on how individuals should save during a time of economic downturn or recession. His answer was that people tend to save more in these times, which he thought could be very harmful if there is no government intervention because individuals and businesses are too scared or have the inability to invest in new ideas and jobs due to the state of the economy. This issue was especially prevalent during The Great Depression because individuals were saving their money and businesses were not investing which was keeping that particular recession around as long as it did and made the unemployment rate go from around 4 percent all the way to around twenty five percent. The individuals were saving with the hopes that the recession would not be very long, which then caused it to get worse due to lack of stimulation in the economy. In order to get out of this cycle, Keynes argued that it was the government alone that would be able to solve this problem and break the United States particularly and the whole world out of The Great Depression. Keynes, normally an endorser of free market capitalism realised that this recession was a special case in that it had potential to be inescapable. The government did eventually do this with president Franklin Roosevelt introducing The New Deal, which was a relief program set up where the federal budget was increased with the purpose of getting the economy out of the recession by injecting money manually from these government aid programs.“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”(Keynes). Keynes is highlighting the fact that people are used to making certain decisions during different times of the business cycle, and also that individuals and businesses needed to change the way they were viewing saving money so that the country could get out of the recession. It is clear that Keynes had a different approach to economic thought from Marx because he was writing with the intention of solving the current world problem, The Great Depression, rather than critiquing the unfairness in the current system.
Praise
On a personal level, Keynes's charm was such that he was generally well received wherever he went – even those who found themselves on the wrong side of his occasionally sharp tongue rarely bore a grudge. Keynes's speech at the closing of the Bretton Woods negotiations was received with a lasting standing ovation, rare in international relations, as the delegates acknowledged the scale of his achievements made despite poor health.
Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek was Keynes's most prominent contemporary critic, with sharply opposing views on the economy. Yet after Keynes's death, he wrote: "He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him." A colleague Nicholas Davenport recalled, "There were deep emotional forces about Maynard ... One could sense his humanity. There was nothing of the cold intellectual about him."
Lionel Robbins, former head of the economics department at the London School of Economics, who engaged in many heated debates with Keynes in the 1930s, had this to say after observing Keynes in early negotiations with the Americans while drawing up plans for Bretton Woods:
Douglas LePan, an official from the Canadian High Commission, wrote:
Bertrand Russell named Keynes one of the most intelligent people he had ever known, commenting:
Keynes's obituary in The Times included the comment: "There is the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes ... He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good."
Critiques
As a man of the centre described by some as having the greatest impact of any 20th-century economist, Keynes attracted considerable criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. In the 1920s, Keynes was seen as anti-establishment and was mainly attacked from the right. In the "red 1930s", many young economists favoured Marxist views, even in Cambridge, and while Keynes was engaging principally with the right to try to persuade them of the merits of more progressive policy, the most vociferous criticism against him came from the left, who saw him as a supporter of capitalism. From the 1950s and onwards, most of the attacks against Keynes have again been from the right.
In 1931 Friedrich Hayek extensively critiqued Keynes's 1930 Treatise on Money. After reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Keynes wrote to Hayek "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it", but concluded the letter with the recommendation: On the pressing issue of the time, whether deficit spending could lift a country from depression, Keynes replied to Hayek's criticism in the following way:
Asked why Keynes expressed "moral and philosophical" agreement with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Hayek stated:
According to some observers, Hayek felt that the post-World War II "Keynesian orthodoxy" gave too much power to the state, and that such policies would lead toward socialism.
While Milton Friedman described The General Theory as "a great book", he argues that its implicit separation of nominal from real magnitudes is neither possible nor desirable. Macroeconomic policy, Friedman argues, can reliably influence only the nominal. He and other monetarists have consequently argued that Keynesian economics can result in stagflation, the combination of low growth and high inflation that developed economies suffered in the early 1970s. More to Friedman's taste was the Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), which he regarded as Keynes's best work because of its focus on maintaining domestic price stability.
Joseph Schumpeter was an economist of the same age as Keynes and one of his main rivals. He was among the first reviewers to argue that Keynes's General Theory was not a general theory, but a special case. He said the work expressed "the attitude of a decaying civilisation". After Keynes's death Schumpeter wrote a brief biographical piece Keynes the Economist – on a personal level he was very positive about Keynes as a man, praising his pleasant nature, courtesy and kindness. He assessed some of Keynes's biographical and editorial work as among the best he'd ever seen. Yet Schumpeter remained critical about Keynes's economics, linking Keynes's childlessness to what Schumpeter saw as an essentially short-term view. He considered Keynes to have a kind of unconscious patriotism that caused him to fail to understand the problems of other nations. For Schumpeter "Practical Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and becomes poisonous as it dies."
"Schumpeter admired and envied Keynes, but when Keynes died in 1946, Schumpeter's obituary gave Keynes the same off-key, perfunctory treatment he would later give Adam Smith in the History of Economic Analysis, the "discredit of not adding a single innovation to the techniques of economic analysis".
President Harry S. Truman was sceptical of Keynesian theorizing: "Nobody can ever convince me that government can spend a dollar that it's not got," he told Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian economist who chaired Truman's Council of Economic Advisers.
Views on race
Keynes sometimes explained the mass murder that took place during the first years of communist Russia on a racial basis, as part of the "Russian and Jewish nature", rather than as a result of the communist rule. After a trip to Russia, he wrote in his Short View of Russia that there is "beastliness on the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied together". He also wrote that "out of the cruelty and stupidity of the Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but (...) beneath the cruelty and stupidity of the New Russia a speck of the ideal may lie hid."
Some critics have sought to show that Keynes had sympathies towards Nazism, and a number of writers have described him as antisemitic. Keynes's private letters contain portraits and descriptions, some of which can be characterized as antisemitic, while others as philosemitic.
Scholars have suggested that these reflect clichés current at the time that he accepted uncritically, rather than any racism. On several occasions Keynes used his influence to help his Jewish friends, most notably when he successfully lobbied for Ludwig Wittgenstein to be allowed residency in the United Kingdom, explicitly in order to rescue him from being deported to Nazi-occupied Austria. Keynes was a supporter of Zionism, serving on committees supporting the cause.
Allegations that he was racist or had totalitarian beliefs have been rejected by Robert Skidelsky and other biographers. Professor Gordon Fletcher wrote that "the suggestion of a link between Keynes and any support of totalitarianism cannot be sustained". Once the aggressive tendencies of the Nazis towards Jews and other minorities had become apparent, Keynes made clear his loathing of Nazism. As a lifelong pacifist he had initially favoured peaceful containment of Nazi Germany, yet he began to advocate a forceful resolution while many conservatives were still arguing for appeasement. After the war started he roundly criticised the Left for losing their nerve to confront Hitler:
Views on inflation
Keynes has been characterised as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation. He had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the two evils, it is "better to disappoint the rentier" than to inflict pain on working class families. He also supported the German hyperinflation as a way to get free from reparations obligations. However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he wrote:
Views on free trade and protectionism
The turning point of the Great Depression
At the beginning of his career, Keynes was an economist close to Alfred Marshall, deeply convinced of the benefits of free trade. From the crisis of 1929 onwards, noting the commitment of the British authorities to defend the gold parity of the pound sterling and the rigidity of nominal wages, he gradually adhered to protectionist measures.
On 5 November 1929, when heard by the Macmillan Committee to bring the British economy out of the crisis, Keynes indicated that the introduction of tariffs on imports would help to rebalance the trade balance. The committee's report states in a section entitled "import control and export aid", that in an economy where there is not full employment, the introduction of tariffs can improve production and employment. Thus the reduction of the trade deficit favours the country's growth.
In January 1930, in the Economic Advisory Council, Keynes proposed the introduction of a system of protection to reduce imports. In the autumn of 1930, he proposed a uniform tariff of 10% on all imports and subsidies of the same rate for all exports. In the Treatise on Money, published in the autumn of 1930, he took up the idea of tariffs or other trade restrictions with the aim of reducing the volume of imports and rebalancing the balance of trade.
On 7 March 1931, in the New Statesman and Nation, he wrote an article entitled Proposal for a Tariff Revenue. He pointed out that the reduction of wages led to a reduction in national demand which constrained markets. Instead, he proposes the idea of an expansionary policy combined with a tariff system to neutralise the effects on the balance of trade. The application of customs tariffs seemed to him "unavoidable, whoever the Chancellor of the Exchequer might be".Thus, for Keynes, an economic recovery policy is only fully effective if the trade deficit is eliminated. He proposed a 15% tax on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and 5% on certain foodstuffs and raw materials, with others needed for exports exempted (wool, cotton).
In 1932, in an article entitled The Pro- and Anti-Tariffs, published in The Listener, he envisaged the protection of farmers and certain sectors such as the automobile and iron and steel industries, considering them indispensable to Britain.
The critique of the theory of comparative advantage
In the post-crisis situation of 1929, Keynes judged the assumptions of the free trade model unrealistic. He criticised, for example, the neoclassical assumption of wage adjustment.
As early as 1930, in a note to the Economic Advisory Council, he doubted the intensity of the gain from specialisation in the case of manufactured goods. While participating in the MacMillan Committee, he admitted that he no longer "believed in a very high degree of national specialisation" and refused to "abandon any industry which is unable, for the moment, to survive". He also criticised the static dimension of the theory of comparative advantage, which, in his view, by fixing comparative advantages definitively, led in practice to a waste of national resources.
In the Daily Mail of 13 March 1931, he called the assumption of perfect sectoral labour mobility "nonsense" since it states that a person made unemployed contributes to a reduction in the wage rate until he finds a job. But for Keynes, this change of job may involve costs (job search, training) and is not always possible. Generally speaking, for Keynes, the assumptions of full employment and automatic return to equilibrium discredit the theory of comparative advantage.
In July 1933, he published an article in the New Statesman and Nation entitled National Self-Sufficiency, in which he criticised the argument of the specialisation of economies, which is the basis of free trade. He thus proposed the search for a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Instead of the specialisation of economies advocated by the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, he prefers the maintenance of a diversity of activities for nations. In it he refutes the principle of peacemaking trade. His vision of trade became that of a system where foreign capitalists compete for new markets. He defends the idea of producing on national soil when possible and reasonable and expresses sympathy for the advocates of protectionism.
He notes in National Self-Sufficiency:
He also writes in National Self-Sufficiency:
Later, Keynes had a written correspondence with James Meade centred on the issue of import restrictions. Keynes and Meade discussed the best choice between quota and tariff. In March 1944 Keynes began a discussion with Marcus Fleming after the latter had written an article entitled Quotas versus depreciation. On this occasion, we see that he has definitely taken a protectionist stance after the Great Depression. He considered that quotas could be more effective than currency depreciation in dealing with external imbalances. Thus, for Keynes, currency depreciation was no longer sufficient and protectionist measures became necessary to avoid trade deficits. To avoid the return of crises due to a self-regulating economic system, it seemed essential to him to regulate trade and stop free trade (deregulation of foreign trade).
He points out that countries that import more than they export weaken their economies. When the trade deficit increases, unemployment rises and GDP slows down. And surplus countries exert a "negative externality" on their trading partners. They get richer at the expense of others and destroy the output of their trading partners. John Maynard Keynes believed that the products of surplus countries should be taxed to avoid trade imbalances. Thus he no longer believes in the theory of comparative advantage (on which free trade is based) which states that the trade deficit does not matter, since trade is mutually beneficial.
This also explains his desire to replace the liberalisation of international trade (Free Trade) with a regulatory system aimed at eliminating trade imbalances in his proposals for the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Views on trade imbalances
Keynes was the principal author of a proposal – the so-called Keynes Plan – for an International Clearing Union. The two governing principles of the plan were that the problem of settling outstanding balances should be solved by "creating" additional "international money", and that debtor and creditor should be treated almost alike as disturbers of equilibrium. In the event, though, the plans were rejected, in part because "American opinion was naturally reluctant to accept the principle of equality of treatment so novel in debtor-creditor relationships".
The new system is not founded on free-trade (liberalisation of foreign trade) but rather on the regulation of international trade, in order to eliminate trade imbalances: the nations with a surplus would have an incentive to reduce it, and in doing so they would automatically clear other nations deficits. He proposed a global bank that would issue its currency – the bancor – which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange and would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus. Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union. He pointed out that surpluses lead to weak global aggregate demand – countries running surpluses exert a "negative externality" on trading partners, and posed, far more than those in deficit, a threat to global prosperity.
In his 1933 Yale Review article "National Self-Sufficiency," he already highlighted the problems created by free trade. His view, supported by many economists and commentators at the time, was that creditor nations may be just as responsible as debtor nations for disequilibrium in exchanges and that both should be under an obligation to bring trade back into a state of balance. Failure for them to do so could have serious consequences. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, then editor of The Economist, "If the economic relationships between nations are not, by one means or another, brought fairly close to balance, then there is no set of financial arrangements that can rescue the world from the impoverishing results of chaos."
These ideas were informed by events prior to the Great Depression when – in the opinion of Keynes and others – international lending, primarily by the U.S., exceeded the capacity of sound investment and so got diverted into non-productive and speculative uses, which in turn invited default and a sudden stop to the process of lending.
Influenced by Keynes, economics texts in the immediate post-war period put a significant emphasis on balance in trade. For example, the second edition of the popular introductory textbook, An Outline of Money, devoted the last three of its ten chapters to questions of foreign exchange management and in particular the "problem of balance". However, in more recent years, since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the increasing influence of Monetarist schools of thought in the 1980s, and particularly in the face of large sustained trade imbalances, these concerns – and particularly concerns about the destabilising effects of large trade surpluses – have largely disappeared from mainstream economics discourse and Keynes's insights have slipped from view. They are receiving some attention again in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08.
Personal life
Relationships
Keynes's early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men. Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan. Keynes was open about his affairs, and from 1901 to 1915 kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters. Keynes's relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortunate, as Macmillan's company first published his tract Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell. The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey, though they were for the most part love rivals, not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse, and as with Grant, fell out with a jealous Strachey for it. Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".
Political opponents have used Keynes's sexuality to attack his academic work. One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long-term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.
Keynes's friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began pursuing affairs with women, demonstrating himself to be bisexual. Ray Costelloe (who later married Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes. In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take."
Marriage
In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen "very much in love" with Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina and one of the stars of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the early years of his courtship, he maintained an affair with a younger man, Sebastian Sprott, in tandem with Lopokova, but eventually chose Lopokova exclusively. They were married in 1925, with Keynes's former lover Duncan Grant as best man. "What a marriage of beauty and brains, the fair Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes" was said at the time. Keynes later commented to Strachey that beauty and intelligence were rarely found in the same person, and that only in Duncan Grant had he found the combination. The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes "a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied".
The couple hoped to have children but this did not happen.
Among Keynes's Bloomsbury friends, Lopokova was, at least initially, subjected to criticism for her manners, mode of conversation, and supposedly humble social origins – the last of the ostensible causes being particularly noted in the letters of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf. In her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf bases the character of Rezia Warren Smith on Lopokova. E. M. Forster later wrote in contrition about "Lydia Keynes, every whose word should be recorded": "How we all used to underestimate her".
Support for the arts
Keynes thought that the pursuit of money for its own sake was a pathological condition, and that the proper aim of work is to provide leisure. He wanted shorter working hours and longer holidays for all.
Keynes was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution to become one of the major British stages outside London.
Keynes's interest in classical opera and dance led him to support the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadler's Wells. During the war, as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the war, Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was its founding chairman in 1946. From the start, the two organisations that received the largest grants from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells.
Keynes built up a substantial collection of fine art, including works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat (some of which can now be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum). He enjoyed collecting books; he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. In part on the basis of these papers, Keynes wrote of Newton as "the last of the magicians."
Philosophical views
Keynes, like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, was greatly influenced by the philosophy of G.E. Moore, which in 1938 he described as "still my religion under the surface". According to Moore, states of mind were the only valuable things in themselves, the most important being "the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects". Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote of how Virginia Woolf, Keynes, and T. S. Eliot discussed religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality.
Keynes may have been confirmed, but according to Cambridge University he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death. According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind" but also added that he came to "value it for social and moral reasons" later in life. Another biographer writes that he "broke the family faith and became a 'ferocious agnostic during his time at Eton. One Cambridge acquaintance remembered him as "an atheist with a devotion to King's chapel". At Cambridge, he was strongly associated with the Cambridge Heretics Society, an avowed atheist group which promoted secularism and humanism.
Investments
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000 – equivalent to about £20.5 million ($27.1 million) in 2018. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various charities and philanthropies, and his ethic which made him reluctant to sell on a falling market, in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump.
Keynes managed the endowment of King's College, Cambridge starting in the 1920s, initially with an unsuccessful strategy based on market timing but later shifting to focus in the publicly traded stock of small and medium size companies that paid large dividends. This was a controversial decision at the time, as stocks were considered high-risk and the centuries-old endowment had traditionally been invested in agricultural land and fixed income assets like bonds. Keynes was granted permission to invest a small minority of assets in stocks, and his adroit management resulted this portion of the endowment growing to become the majority of the endowment's assets. The active component of his portfolio outperformed a British equity index by an average of 6% to 8% a year over a quarter century, earning him favourable mention by later investors such as Warren Buffett and George Soros. Joel Tillinghast of Fidelity Investments describes Keynes as an early practitioner of value investing, a school of thought formalized in the U.S. by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia Business School during the 1920s and '30s. However, Keynes is believed to have developed his ideas independently. Keynes also regarded as a pioneer of financial diversification as he recognized the importance of holding assets with "opposed risks" as he wrote "since they are likely to move in opposite directions when there are general fluctuations"; and also as an early international investor who avoided home country bias by investing substantially in stocks outside the United Kingdom. Ken Fisher characterized Keynes as an exception to the rule that economists usually make horrible investors.
Political life
Keynes was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from about 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasions in 1920. From 1926, when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economic policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third-party status by the growing workers-oriented Labour Party.
In 1939 Keynes had the option to enter Parliament as an independent MP with the University of Cambridge seat. A by-election for the seat was to be held due to the illness of an elderly Tory, and the master of Magdalene College had obtained agreement that none of the major parties would field a candidate if Keynes chose to stand. Keynes declined the invitation as he felt he would wield greater influence on events if he remained a free agent.
Keynes was a proponent of eugenics. He served as director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. As late as 1946, shortly before his death, Keynes declared eugenics to be "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists."
Keynes once remarked that "the youth had no religion save communism and this was worse than nothing." Marxism "was founded upon nothing better than a misunderstanding of Ricardo", and, given time, he (Keynes) "would deal thoroughly with the Marxists" and other economists to solve the economic problems their theories "threaten to cause".
In 1931 Keynes had the following to say on Leninism:
Keynes was a firm supporter of women's rights and in 1932 became vice-chairman of the Marie Stopes Society which provided birth control education. He also campaigned against job discrimination against women and unequal pay. He was an outspoken campaigner for reform of the laws against homosexuality.
Heraldic arms
Death
Throughout his life, Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends; even when his health was poor, he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college. Helping to set up the Bretton Woods system, he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. In 1946, Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal. They began during negotiations for the Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as "absolute hell". A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946, at the age of 62. Against his wishes (he wanted his ashes to be deposited in the crypt at King's), his ashes were scattered on the Downs above Tilton.
Both of Keynes's parents outlived him: his father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and his mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010), a physiologist, and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003), an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes had no children; his widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981.
Cultural representations
In John Buchan's novel Island of Sheep (1936) the character of the financier Barralty is based on Keynes.
In the film Wittgenstein (1993), directed by Derek Jarman, Keynes was played by John Quentin.
The docudrama Paris 1919, based around Margaret MacMillan's book, featured Paul Bandey as Keynes.
In the BBC series about the Bloomsbury Group, Life In Squares, Keynes was portrayed by Edmund Kingsley.
The novel Mr Keynes' Revolution (2020) by E. J. Barnes is about Keynes' life in the 1920s.
Love Letters, based on the correspondence of Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, was performed by Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham-Carter at Charleston in 2021.
Publications
Books
1913 Indian Currency and Finance
1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace
1921 A Treatise on Probability
1922 Revision of the Treaty
1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform
1926 The End of Laissez-Faire
1930 A Treatise on Money
1931 Essays in Persuasion
1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
1940 How to Pay for the War: A radical plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
1949 Two Memoirs. Ed. by David Garnett (On Carl Melchior and G. E. Moore.)
Articles and pamphlets
(A partial list.)
1915 The Economics of War in Germany
1922 The Inflation of Currency as a Method of Taxation
1925 Am I a Liberal?
1926 Laissez-Faire and Communism
1929 Can Lloyd George Do It?
1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
1931 The End of the Gold Standard (Sunday Express)
1931 The Great Slump of 1930
1933 The Means to Prosperity
1933 An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (New York Times)
1933 Essays in Biography
1937 The General Theory of Employment
See also
References
Notes and citations
Sources
Backhouse, Roger E. and Bateman, Bradley W.. Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes. 2011
Barnett, Vincent. John Maynard Keynes. London: Routledge, 2013. .
Beaudreau, Bernard C.. The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes: How the Second Industrial Revolution Passed Great Britain By. iUniverse, 2006,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury, 2009,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist, Bloomsbury Press, 2009
Markwell, Donald. John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace. Oxford University Press, 2006. . .
Markwell, Donald. Keynes and Australia . Reserve Bank of Australia, 2000.
Keynes, Milo (ed). Essays on John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge University Press, 1975. .
Moggridge, Donald Edward. Keynes. Macmillan, 1980. .
Patinkin, Don. "Keynes, John Maynard." In: The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1987, pp. 19–41. . .
Schuker, Stephen A. "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33." Princeton Studies in International Finance, No. 61, 1988.
Schuker, Stephen A. "J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations." Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 25, Nos. 3/4, 2014. .
Blaug, Mark. "Recent Biographies of Keynes." Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, September 1994, pp. 1204-1215. .
Buchanan, James M. and Richard E. Wagner. Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 8. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008.
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Davidson, Paul. John Maynard Keynes (Great Thinkers in Economics). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. .
Dimand, Robert W. and Harald Hagemann, eds. The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes (Edward Elgar, 20190 + 670 pp. online review
Harrod, R. F.. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. Macmillan, 1951. .
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. (2005)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920. (1986)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (1994)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946.
Temin, Peter, and David Vines. Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy. MIT Press, 2014.
Wapshott, Nicholas. Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (2011)
Primary sources
External links
Professor Robert Skidelsky explains Keynes theories video
Professor Robert Skidelsky on economist Keynes video
Churchill, Keynes & The Gold Standard – UK Parliament Living Heritage
Correspondence with John Maynard, Baron Keynes, four volumes held at The British Library
Treaty of Versailles & Keynes – UK Parliament Living Heritage
John Maynard Keynes on Google Scholar
Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926)
Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Keynes, The raising of prices (1933)
Keynes, National Self-Sufficiency (1933)
Keynes, An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (1933)
Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
Interactive E-Book John Maynard Keynes: The Lives of a Mind (2016). The Keynes Centre at University College Cork
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"Post-Keynesian economics is a school of economic thought with its origins in The General Theory of John Maynard Keynes, with subsequent development influenced to a large degree by Michał Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor, Sidney Weintraub, Paul Davidson, Piero Sraffa and Jan Kregel. Historian Robert Skidelsky argues that the post-Keynesian school has remained closest to the spirit of Keynes' original work. It is a heterodox approach to economics.\n\nIntroduction\nThe term \"post-Keynesian\" was first used to refer to a distinct school of economic thought by Eichner and Kregel (1975) and by the establishment of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 1978. Prior to 1975, and occasionally in more recent work, post-Keynesian could simply mean economics carried out after 1936, the date of Keynes's General Theory.\n\nPost-Keynesian economists are united in maintaining that Keynes' theory is seriously misrepresented by the two other principal Keynesian schools: neo-Keynesian economics, which was orthodox in the 1950s and 60s, and new Keynesian economics, which together with various strands of neoclassical economics has been dominant in mainstream macroeconomics since the 1980s. Post-Keynesian economics can be seen as an attempt to rebuild economic theory in the light of Keynes' ideas and insights. However, even in the early years, post-Keynesians such as Joan Robinson sought to distance themselves from Keynes, and much current post-Keynesian thought cannot be found in Keynes. Some post-Keynesians took a more progressive view than Keynes himself, with greater emphases on worker-friendly policies and redistribution. Robinson, Paul Davidson and Hyman Minsky emphasized the effects on the economy of practical differences between different types of investments, in contrast to Keynes' more abstract treatment.\n\nThe theoretical foundation of post-Keynesian economics is the principle of effective demand, that demand matters in the long as well as the short run, so that a competitive market economy has no natural or automatic tendency towards full employment. Contrary to the views of new Keynesian economists working in the neoclassical tradition, post-Keynesians do not accept that the theoretical basis of the market's failure to provide full employment is rigid or sticky prices or wages. Post-Keynesians typically reject the IS–LM model of John Hicks, which is very influential in neo-Keynesian economics, because they argue endogenous bank lending to be more significant than central banks' money supply for the interest rate.\n\nThe contribution of post-Keynesian economics has extended beyond the theory of aggregate employment to theories of income distribution, growth, trade and development in which money demand plays a key role, whereas in neoclassical economics these are determined by the forces of technology, preferences and endowment. In the field of monetary theory, post-Keynesian economists were among the first to emphasise that money supply responds to the demand for bank credit, so that a central bank cannot control the quantity of money, but only manage the interest rate by managing the quantity of monetary reserves.\n\nThis view has largely been incorporated into mainstream economics and monetary policy, which now targets the interest rate as an instrument, rather than attempting to accurately control the quantity of money. In the field of finance, Hyman Minsky put forward a theory of financial crisis based on financial fragility, which has received renewed attention.\n\nStrands \nThere are a number of strands to post-Keynesian theory with different emphases. Joan Robinson regarded Michał Kalecki's theory of effective demand to be superior to Keynes' theories. Kalecki's theory is based on a class division between workers and capitalists and imperfect competition. Robinson also led the critique of the use of aggregate production functions based on homogeneous capital – the Cambridge capital controversy – winning the argument but not the battle. The writings of Piero Sraffa were a significant influence on the post-Keynesian position in this debate, though Sraffa and his neo-Ricardian followers drew more inspiration from David Ricardo than Keynes. Much of Nicholas Kaldor's work was based on the ideas of increasing returns to scale, path dependence, and the key differences between the primary and industrial sectors.\n\nPaul Davidson follows Keynes closely in placing time and uncertainty at the centre of theory, from which flow the nature of money and of a monetary economy. Monetary circuit theory, originally developed in continental Europe, places particular emphasis on the distinctive role of money as means of payment. Each of these strands continues to see further development by later generations of economists.\n\nModern Monetary Theory is a relatively recent offshoot influenced by the macroeconomic modelling of Wynne Godley and Hyman Minsky's ideas on the labour market, as well as chartalism and functional finance.\n\nRecent work in post-Keynesian economics has attempted to provide micro-foundations for capacity underutilization as a coordination failure (economics), justifying government intervention in the form of aggregate demand stimulus.\n\nCurrent work\n\nJournals \nMuch post-Keynesian research is published in the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE), the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (founded by Sidney Weintraub and Paul Davidson), the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the Review of Political Economy, and the Journal of Economic Issues (JEI).\n\nUnited Kingdom \nThere is also a United Kingdom academic association, the Post Keynesian Economics Society (PKES). This was previously called the Post Keynesian Economics Study Group (PKSG) but changed its name in 2018. In the UK, post-Keynesian economists can be found in:\n SOAS University of London\n University of Greenwich\n University of Leeds\n Kingston University\n King's College London, International Political Economy\n Goldsmiths, University of London\n University of the West of England, Bristol \n University of Hertfordshire\n Cambridge University, Land Economy \n Birmingham City University\n University College London, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose\n Open University\n University of Winchester\n\nUnited States \nIn the United States, there are several universities with a post-Keynesian bent:\n The New School, New York City\n The University of Massachusetts Amherst\n The University of Utah, Salt Lake City\n Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania\n Denison University, Granville, Ohio\n Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York\n University of Missouri–Kansas City\n University of Denver\n Colorado State University, Fort Collins\n The University of Massachusetts Boston\n John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York, New York City\n\nNetherlands \n Erasmus University, Rotterdam\n International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague\n University of Groningen, Groningen\n\nFrance \nSorbonne Paris North University\n\nCanada \n\nIn Canada, post-Keynesians can be found at the University of Ottawa and Laurentian University.\n\nGermany \n\nIn Germany, post-Keynesianism is very strong at the Berlin School of Economics and Law and its master's degree course: International Economics [M.A.]. Many German Post-Keynesians are organized in the Forum Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies.\n\nAustralia\n\nUniversity of Newcastle \nThe University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, houses the post-Keynesian think-tank the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE).\n\nMajor post-Keynesian economists\n\nMajor post-Keynesian economists of the first and second generations after Keynes include:\n\n Victoria Chick\n Alfred Eichner\n James Crotty\n Paul Davidson\n Wynne Godley\n Geoff Harcourt\n Donald J. Harris\n Michael Hudson\n Nicholas Kaldor\n Michał Kalecki\n Frederic S. Lee\n Augusto Graziani\n Steve Keen\n Jan Kregel\n Marc Lavoie\n Paolo Leon\n Abba P. Lerner\n Hyman Minsky\n Basil Moore\n Edward J. Nell\n Luigi Pasinetti\n Joan Robinson\n George Shackle\n Anthony Thirlwall\n Fernando Vianello\n William Vickrey\n L. Randall Wray\n Dimitri B. Papadimitriou\n Sidney Weintraub\n\nSee also\n Keynesian economics\n Neo-Keynesian economics\n New Keynesian economics\n Disequilibrium macroeconomics\n Endogenous money\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n \n Holt, Ric; Pressman, Steven (2006). Empirical Post Keynesian Economics: Looking at the Real World. M.E. Sharpe.\n\nExternal links\n Structure of Post Keynesian Economics-Geoff Harcourt\n William Vickrey -----Fifteen Fatal Fallacies of Financial Fundamentalism: A Disquisition on Demand Side Economics\n Presentation of post Keynesian economics Marc Lavoie\n Samuelson and the Keynes/Post Keynesian Revolution:by Paul Davidson\nProfessor L. Randall Wray:Why The Federal Budget Is Not Like a Household Budget\nPost-Keynesian economics: towards coherence Cambridge Journal of Economics\n\n \nKeynesian economics",
"The Review of Keynesian Economics is a quarterly double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal covering Keynesian and Post-Keynesian economics, although it is also open to other heterodox traditions. It is published by Edward Elgar Publishing and was established in 2012. Created by Louis-Philippe Rochon, the founding editors-in-chief were Thomas Palley (New America Foundation), Louis-Philippe Rochon (Laurentian University), and Matías Vernengo (Bucknell University). Rochon is now Editor Emeritus.\n\nAbstracting and indexing \nThe journal is abstracted and indexed in:\n Research Papers in Economics\n Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences\n Social Sciences Citation Index\n EconLit\n Business Source Complete\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\nEconomics journals\nKeynesian economics\nPost-Keynesian economics\nEnglish-language journals\nPublications established in 2012"
]
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[
"John Maynard Keynes",
"Neo-Keynesian economics",
"What is Neo-Keynesian economics?",
"they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics,"
]
| C_9bf402fc7c2f4638b09e96b6644fd310_1 | What is Keynesian analysis? | 2 | What is Keynesian analysis? | John Maynard Keynes | The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments - the convertibility of banknotes into gold - but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was absolutely necessary. In January 1915, Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble - with difficulty - a small supply of Spanish pesetas. The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive. On the introduction of military conscription in 1916 he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work. In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold. During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches. As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions - a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the final outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proved correct by events. The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase." In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years. By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism. In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. CANNOTANSWER | The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. | John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and that labour costs and wages were rigid downwards, which means the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in late 1936. By the late 1930s, leading Western economies had begun adopting Keynes's policy recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946. As a leader of the British delegation, Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II but was overruled by the American delegation on several aspects.
Keynes's influence started to wane in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists, who disputed the ability of government to favourably regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy. However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 sparked a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008 by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.
When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it stated that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Early life and education
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, to an upper-middle-class family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge and his mother, Florence Ada Keynes, a local social reformer. Keynes was the first born, and was followed by two more children – Margaret Neville Keynes in 1885 and Geoffrey Keynes in 1887. Geoffrey became a surgeon and Margaret married the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill, although she had many affairs with women, notably Eglantyne Jebb.
According to the economic historian and biographer Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's parents were loving and attentive. They remained in the same house throughout their lives, where the children were always welcome to return. Keynes received considerable support from his father, including expert coaching to help him pass his scholarship exams and financial help both as a young man and when his assets were nearly wiped out at the onset of Great Depression in 1929. Keynes's mother made her children's interests her own, and according to Skidelsky, "because she could grow up with her children, they never outgrew home".
In January 1889 at the age of five and a half, Keynes started at the kindergarten of the Perse School for Girls for five mornings a week. He quickly showed a talent for arithmetic, but his health was poor leading to several long absences. He was tutored at home by a governess, Beatrice Mackintosh, and his mother. In January 1892, at eight and a half, he started as a day pupil at St Faith's preparatory school. By 1894, Keynes was top of his class and excelling at mathematics. In 1896, St Faith's headmaster, Ralph Goodchild, wrote that Keynes was "head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school" and was confident that Keynes could get a scholarship to Eton.
In 1897, Keynes won a King's Scholarship to Eton College, where he displayed talent in a wide range of subjects, particularly mathematics, classics and history: in 1901, he was awarded the Tomline Prize for mathematics. At Eton, Keynes experienced the first "love of his life" in Dan Macmillan, older brother of the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Despite his middle-class background, Keynes mixed easily with upper-class pupils.
In 1902 Keynes left Eton for King's College, Cambridge, after receiving a scholarship for this also to read mathematics. Alfred Marshall begged Keynes to become an economist,
although Keynes's own inclinations drew him towards philosophy – especially the ethical system of G. E. Moore. Keynes was elected to the University Pitt Club and was an active member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students. Like many members, Keynes retained a bond to the club after graduating and continued to attend occasional meetings throughout his life. Before leaving Cambridge, Keynes became the President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Liberal Club. He was said to be an atheist.
In May 1904, he received a first-class BA in mathematics. Aside from a few months spent on holidays with family and friends, Keynes continued to involve himself with the university over the next two years. He took part in debates, further studied philosophy and attended economics lectures informally as a graduate student for one term, which constituted his only formal education in the subject. He took civil service exams in 1906.
The economist Harry Johnson wrote that the optimism imparted by Keynes's early life is a key to understanding his later thinking.
Keynes was always confident he could find a solution to whatever problem he turned his attention to and retained a lasting faith in the ability of government officials to do good.
Keynes's optimism was also cultural, in two senses: he was of the last generation raised by an empire still at the height of its power and was also of the last generation who felt entitled to govern by culture, rather than by expertise. According to Skidelsky, the sense of cultural unity current in Britain from the 19th century to the end of World War I provided a framework with which the well-educated could set various spheres of knowledge in relation to each other and life, enabling them to confidently draw from different fields when addressing practical problems.
Career
In October 1906 Keynes's Civil Service career began as a clerk in the India Office. He enjoyed his work at first, but by 1908 had become bored and resigned his position to return to Cambridge and work on probability theory, through a lectureship in economics at first funded personally by economists Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou; he became a fellow of King's College in 1909.
By 1909 Keynes had also published his first professional economics article in The Economic Journal, about the effect of a recent global economic downturn on India. He founded the Political Economy Club, a weekly discussion group. Keynes's earnings rose further as he began to take on pupils for private tuition.
In 1911 Keynes was made the editor of The Economic Journal. By 1913 he had published his first book, Indian Currency and Finance. He was then appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance – the same topic as his book – where Keynes showed considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems. His written work was published under the name "J M Keynes", though to his family and friends he was known as Maynard. (His father, John Neville Keynes, was also always known by his middle name).
First World War
The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments – the convertibility of banknotes into gold – but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was necessary.
In January 1915 Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble – with difficulty – a small supply of Spanish pesetas.
The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive.
On the introduction of military conscription in 1916, he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work.
In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that had a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold.
Versailles peace conference
Keynes's experience at Versailles was influential in shaping his future outlook, yet it was not a successful one. Keynes's main interest had been in trying to prevent Germany's compensation payments being set so high it would traumatize innocent German people, damage the nation's ability to pay and sharply limit its ability to buy exports from other countries – thus hurting not just Germany's economy but that of the wider world.
Unfortunately for Keynes, conservative powers in the coalition that emerged from the 1918 coupon election were able to ensure that both Keynes himself and the Treasury were largely excluded from formal high-level talks concerning reparations. Their place was taken by the Heavenly Twins – the judge Lord Sumner and the banker Lord Cunliffe whose nickname derived from the "astronomically" high war compensation they wanted to demand from Germany. Keynes was forced to try to exert influence mostly from behind the scenes.
The three principal players at Versailles were Britain's Lloyd George, France's Clemenceau and America's President Wilson.
It was only Lloyd George to whom Keynes had much direct access; until the 1918 election he had some sympathy with Keynes's view but while campaigning had found his speeches were only well received by the public if he promised to harshly punish Germany, and had therefore committed his delegation to extracting high payments.
Lloyd George did, however, win some loyalty from Keynes with his actions at the Paris conference by intervening against the French to ensure the dispatch of much-needed food supplies to German civilians. Clemenceau also pushed for substantial reparations, though not as high as those proposed by the British, while on security grounds, France argued for an even more severe settlement than Britain.
Wilson initially favoured relatively lenient treatment of Germany – he feared too harsh conditions could foment the rise of extremism and wanted Germany to be left sufficient capital to pay for imports. To Keynes's dismay, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to pressure Wilson to agree to include pensions in the reparations bill.
Towards the end of the conference, Keynes came up with a plan that he argued would not only help Germany and other impoverished central European powers but also be good for the world economy as a whole. It involved the radical writing down of war debts, which would have had the possible effect of increasing international trade all round, but at the same time thrown over two thirds of the cost of European reconstruction on the United States.
Lloyd George agreed it might be acceptable to the British electorate. However, America was against the plan; the US was then the largest creditor, and by this time Wilson had started to believe in the merits of a harsh peace and thought that his country had already made excessive sacrifices. Hence despite his best efforts, the result of the conference was a treaty which disgusted Keynes both on moral and economic grounds and led to his resignation from the Treasury.
In June 1919 he turned down an offer to become chairman of the British Bank of Northern Commerce, a job that promised a salary of £2000 in return for a morning per week of work.
Keynes's analysis on the predicted damaging effects of the treaty appeared in the highly influential book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. This work has been described as Keynes's best book, where he was able to bring all his gifts to bear – his passion as well as his skill as an economist. In addition to economic analysis, the book contained appeals to the reader's sense of compassion:
Also present was striking imagery such as "year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled" along with bold predictions which were later justified by events:
Keynes's followers assert that his predictions of disaster were borne out when the German economy suffered the hyperinflation of 1923, and again by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the outbreak of the Second World War. However, historian Ruth Henig claims that "most historians of the Paris peace conference now take the view that, in economic terms, the treaty was not unduly harsh on Germany and that, while obligations and damages were inevitably much stressed in the debates at Paris to satisfy electors reading the daily newspapers, the intention was quietly to give Germany substantial help towards paying her bills, and to meet many of the German objections by amendments to the way the reparations schedule was in practice carried out".
Only a small fraction of reparations was ever paid. In fact, historian Stephen A. Schuker demonstrates in American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33, that the capital inflow from American loans substantially exceeded German out payments so that, on a net basis, Germany received support equal to four times the amount of the post-Second World War Marshall Plan.
Schuker also shows that, in the years after Versailles, Keynes became an informal reparations adviser to the German government, wrote one of the major German reparation notes, and supported the hyperinflation on political grounds. Nevertheless, The Economic Consequences of the Peace gained Keynes international fame, even though it also caused him to be regarded as anti-establishment – it was not until after the outbreak of the Second World War that Keynes was offered a directorship of a major British Bank, or an acceptable offer to return to government with a formal job. However, Keynes was still able to influence government policy making through his network of contacts, his published works and by serving on government committees; this included attending high-level policy meetings as a consultant.
In the 1920s
Keynes had completed his A Treatise on Probability before the war but published it in 1921. The work was a notable contribution to the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of probability theory, championing the important view that probabilities were no more or less than truth values intermediate between simple truth and falsity. Keynes developed the first upper-lower probabilistic interval approach to probability in chapters 15 and 17 of this book, as well as having developed the first decision weight approach with his conventional coefficient of risk and weight, c, in chapter 26. In addition to his academic work, the 1920s saw Keynes active as a journalist selling his work internationally and working in London as a financial consultant. In 1924 Keynes wrote an obituary for his former tutor
Alfred Marshall which Joseph Schumpeter called "the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read."
Mary Paley Marshall was "entranced" by the memorial, while Lytton Strachey rated it as one of Keynes's "best works".
In 1922 Keynes continued to advocate reduction of German reparations with A Revision of the Treaty. He attacked the post-World War I deflation policies with A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923 – a trenchant argument that countries should target stability of domestic prices, avoiding deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate. Britain suffered from high unemployment through most of the 1920s, leading Keynes to recommend the depreciation of sterling to boost jobs by making British exports more affordable. From 1924 he was also advocating a fiscal response, where the government could create jobs by spending on public works. During the 1920s Keynes's pro stimulus views had only limited effect on policy makers and mainstream academic opinion – according to Hyman Minsky one reason was that at this time his theoretical justification was "muddled". The Tract had also called for an end to the gold standard. Keynes advised it was no longer a net benefit for countries such as Britain to participate in the gold standard, as it ran counter to the need for domestic policy autonomy. It could force countries to pursue deflationary policies at exactly the time when expansionary measures were called for to address rising unemployment. The Treasury and Bank of England were still in favour of the gold standard and in 1925 they were able to convince the then Chancellor Winston Churchill to re-establish it, which had a depressing effect on British industry. Keynes responded by writing The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill and continued to argue against the gold standard until Britain finally abandoned it in 1931.
During the Great Depression
Keynes had begun a theoretical work to examine the relationship between unemployment, money, and prices back in the 1920s. The work, Treatise on Money, was published in 1930 in two volumes. A central idea of the work was that if the amount of money being saved exceeds the amount being invested – which can happen if interest rates are too high – then unemployment will rise. This is in part a result of people not wanting to spend too high a proportion of what employers pay out, making it difficult, in aggregate, for employers to make a profit. Another key theme of the book is the unreliability of financial indices for representing an accurate – or indeed meaningful – indication of general shifts in purchasing power of currencies over time. In particular, he criticised the justification of Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 at pre-war valuation by reference to the wholesale price index. He argued that the index understated the effects of changes in the costs of services and labour.
Keynes was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures during the Great Depression. He believed that budget deficits during recessions were a good thing and a natural product of an economic slump. He wrote, "For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature's remedy, so to speak, for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as the present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill."
At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly counter-cyclical public spending. The Means to Prosperity contains one of the first mentions of the multiplier effect. While it was addressed chiefly to the British Government, it also contained advice for other nations affected by the global recession. A copy was sent to the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other world leaders. The work was taken seriously by both the American and British governments, and according to Robert Skidelsky, helped pave the way for the later acceptance of Keynesian ideas, though it had little immediate practical influence. In the 1933 London Economic Conference opinions remained too diverse for a unified course of action to be agreed upon.
Keynesian-like policies were adopted by Sweden and Germany, but Sweden was seen as too small to command much attention, and Keynes was deliberately silent about the successful efforts of Germany as he was dismayed by its imperialist ambitions and its treatment of Jews. Apart from Great Britain, Keynes's attention was primarily focused on the United States. In 1931, he received considerable support for his views on counter-cyclical public spending in Chicago, then America's foremost center for economic views alternative to the mainstream. However, orthodox economic opinion remained generally hostile regarding fiscal intervention to mitigate the depression, until just before the outbreak of war. In late 1933 Keynes was persuaded by Felix Frankfurter to address President Roosevelt directly, which he did by letters and face to face in 1934, after which the two men spoke highly of each other. However, according to Skidelsky, the consensus is that Keynes's efforts began to have a more than marginal influence on US economic policy only after 1939.
Keynes's magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936. It was researched and indexed by one of Keynes's favourite students, later the economist David Bensusan-Butt. The work served as a theoretical justification for the interventionist policies Keynes favoured for tackling a recession. Although Keynes stated in his preface that his General Theory was only secondarily concerned with the “applications of this theory to practice,” the circumstances of its publication were such that his suggestions shaped the course of the 1930s. In addition, Keynes introduced the world to a new interpretation of taxation: since the legal tender is now defined by the state, inflation becomes “taxation by currency depreciation”. This hidden tax meant a) that the standard of value should be governed by deliberate decision; and (b) that it was possible to maintain a middle course between deflation and inflation. This novel interpretation was inspired by the desperate search for control over the economy which permeated the academic world after the Depression. The General Theory challenged the earlier neoclassical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. In doing so Keynes was partly setting himself against his former teachers Marshall and Pigou. Keynes believed the classical theory was a "special case" that applied only to the particular conditions present in the 19th century, his theory being the general one. Classical economists had believed in Say's law, which, simply put, states that "supply creates its demand", and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs. An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness – the recognition that in reality workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue that it is rational for them to do so. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of "aggregate demand" and "aggregate supply" may lead to stable unemployment equilibria – and in those cases, it is on the state, not the market, that economies must depend for their salvation.
The General Theory argues that demand, not supply, is the key variable governing the overall level of economic activity. Aggregate demand, which equals total un-hoarded income in a society, is defined by the sum of consumption and investment. In a state of unemployment and unused production capacity, one can enhance employment and total income only by first increasing expenditures for either consumption or investment. Without government intervention to increase expenditure, an economy can remain trapped in a low-employment equilibrium. The demonstration of this possibility has been described as the revolutionary formal achievement of the work.
The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. "Let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth," he wrote in 1928. "With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments. It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them."
The General Theory is often viewed as the foundation of modern macroeconomics. Few senior American economists agreed with Keynes through most of the 1930s.
Yet his ideas were soon to achieve widespread acceptance, with eminent American professors such as Alvin Hansen agreeing with the General Theory before the outbreak of World War II.
Keynes himself had only limited participation in the theoretical debates that followed the publication of the General Theory as he suffered a heart attack in 1937, requiring him to take long periods of rest. Among others, Hyman Minsky and Post-Keynesian economists have argued that as result, Keynes's ideas were diluted by those keen to compromise with classical economists or to render his concepts with mathematical models like the IS–LM model (which, they argue, distort Keynes's ideas). Keynes began to recover in 1939, but for the rest of his life his professional energies were directed largely towards the practical side of economics: the problems of ensuring optimum allocation of resources for the war efforts, post-war negotiations with America, and the new international financial order that was presented at the Bretton Woods Conference.
In the General Theory and later, Keynes responded to the socialists who argued, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, that capitalism caused war. He argued that if capitalism were managed domestically and internationally (with coordinated international Keynesian policies, an international monetary system that did not pit the interests of countries against one another, and a high degree of freedom of trade), then this system of managed capitalism could promote peace rather than conflict between countries. His plans during World War II for post-war international economic institutions and policies (which contributed to the creation at Bretton Woods of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and later to the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and eventually the World Trade Organization) were aimed to give effect to this vision.
Although Keynes has been widely criticised – especially by members of the Chicago school of economics – for advocating irresponsible government spending financed by borrowing, in fact he was a firm believer in balanced budgets and regarded the proposals for programs of public works during the Great Depression as an exceptional measure to meet the needs of exceptional circumstances.
Second World War
During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post-war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches.
As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions – a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proven correct by events.
The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase."
Postwar
After the war, Keynes continued to represent the United Kingdom in international negotiations despite his deteriorating health. He succeeded in obtaining preferential terms from the United States for new and outstanding debts to facilitate the rebuilding of the British economy.
Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of social economics and advisor to the Bank of England, of his hopes that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" could help Britain out of the economic hole it was in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."
Legacy
Keynesian ascendancy 1939–79
From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes provided the main inspiration for economic policymakers in Europe, America and much of the rest of the world. While economists and policymakers had become increasingly won over to Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after the outbreak of World War II that governments started to borrow money for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (then a US government official charged with controlling inflation), in the rebound of the economy from wartime spending, "one could not have had a better demonstration of the Keynesian ideas."
The Keynesian Revolution was associated with the rise of modern liberalism in the West during the post-war period. Keynesian ideas became so popular that some scholars point to Keynes as representing the ideals of modern liberalism, as Adam Smith represented the ideals of classical liberalism. After the war, Winston Churchill attempted to check the rise of Keynesian policy-making in the United Kingdom and used rhetoric critical of the mixed economy in his 1945 election campaign. Despite his popularity as a war hero, Churchill suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee, whose government's economic policy continued to be influenced by Keynes's ideas.
Neo-Keynesian economics
In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years.
By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism.
In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Multiplier
The concept of multiplier was first developed by R. F. Kahn in his article "The relation of home investment to unemployment" In the economic journal of June 1931. Kahn multiplier was the employment multiplier while as Keynes took the idea from Kahn and formulated the investment multiplier.
Keynesian economics out of favour 1979–2007
Keynesian economics were officially discarded by the British Government in 1979, but forces had begun to gather against Keynes's ideas over 30 years earlier. Friedrich Hayek had formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, with the explicit intention of nurturing intellectual currents to one day displace Keynesianism and other similar influences. Its members included the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises along with the then young Milton Friedman. Initially the society had little impact on the wider world – according to Hayek it was as if Keynes had been raised to sainthood after his death and that people refused to allow his work to be questioned.
Friedman however began to emerge as a formidable critic of Keynesian economics from the mid-1950s, and especially after his 1963 publication of A Monetary History of the United States.
On the practical side of economic life, "big government" had appeared to be firmly entrenched in the 1950s, but the balance began to shift towards the power of private interests in the 1960s. Keynes had written against the folly of allowing "decadent and selfish" speculators and financiers the kind of influence they had enjoyed after World War I. For two decades after World War II the public opinion was strongly against private speculators, the disparaging label "Gnomes of Zürich" being typical of how they were described during this period. International speculation was severely restricted by the capital controls in place after Bretton Woods. According to the journalists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, 1968 was the pivotal year when power shifted in favour of private agents such as currency speculators. As the key 1968 event Elliott and Atkinson picked out America's suspension of the conversion of the dollar into gold except on request of foreign governments, which they identified as the beginning of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system.
Criticisms of Keynes's ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s, as they were then able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. Keynes himself included few formulas and no explicit mathematical models in his General Theory. For economists such as Hyman Minsky, Keynes's limited use of mathematics was partly the result of his scepticism about whether phenomena as inherently uncertain as economic activity could ever be adequately captured by mathematical models. Nevertheless, many models were developed by Keynesian economists, with a famous example being the Phillips curve which predicted an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. It implied that unemployment could be reduced by government stimulus with a calculable cost to inflation. In 1968, Milton Friedman published a paper arguing that the fixed relationship implied by the Philips curve did not exist.
Friedman suggested that sustained Keynesian policies could lead to both unemployment and inflation rising at once – a phenomenon that soon became known as stagflation. In the early 1970s stagflation appeared in both the US and Britain just as Friedman had predicted, with economic conditions deteriorating further after the 1973 oil crisis. Aided by the prestige gained from his successful forecast, Friedman led increasingly successful criticisms against the Keynesian consensus, convincing not only academics and politicians but also much of the general public with his radio and television broadcasts. The academic credibility of Keynesian economics was further undermined by additional criticism from other monetarists trained in the Chicago school of economics, by the Lucas critique and by criticisms from Hayek's Austrian School. So successful were these criticisms that by 1980 Robert Lucas claimed economists would often take offence if described as Keynesians.
Keynesian principles fared increasingly poorly on the practical side of economics – by 1979 they had been displaced by monetarism as the primary influence on Anglo-American economic policy. However, many officials on both sides of the Atlantic retained a preference for Keynes, and in 1984 the Federal Reserve officially discarded monetarism, after which Keynesian principles made a partial comeback as an influence on policy making.
Not all academics accepted the criticism against Keynes – Minsky has argued that Keynesian economics had been debased by excessive mixing with neoclassical ideas from the 1950s, and that it was unfortunate that this branch of economics had even continued to be called "Keynesian". Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner argued it was not so much excessive Keynesian activism that caused the economic problems of the 1970s but the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls, which allowed capital flight from regulated economies into unregulated economies in a fashion similar to Gresham's law phenomenon (where weak currencies undermine strong currencies).
Historian Peter Pugh has stated that a key cause of the economic problems afflicting America in the 1970s was the refusal to raise taxes to finance the Vietnam War, which was against Keynesian advice.
A more typical response was to accept some elements of the criticisms while refining Keynesian economic theories to defend them against arguments that would invalidate the whole Keynesian framework – the resulting body of work largely composing New Keynesian economics. In 1992 Alan Blinder wrote about a "Keynesian Restoration", as work based on Keynes's ideas had to some extent become fashionable once again in academia, though in the mainstream it was highly synthesised with monetarism and other neoclassical thinking. In the world of policy making, free market influences broadly sympathetic to monetarism have remained very strong at government level – in powerful normative institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and US Treasury, and in prominent opinion-forming media such as the Financial Times and The Economist.
Keynesian resurgence 2008–09
The global financial crisis of 2007–08 led to public skepticism about the free market consensus even from some on the economic right. In March 2008, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, announced the death of the dream of global free-market capitalism. In the same month macroeconomist James K. Galbraith used the 25th Annual Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture to launch a sweeping attack against the consensus for monetarist economics and argued that Keynesian economics were far more relevant for tackling the emerging crises.
Economist Robert J. Shiller had begun advocating robust government intervention to tackle the financial crises, specifically citing Keynes.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman also actively argued the case for vigorous Keynesian intervention in the economy in his columns for The New York Times.
Other prominent economic commentators who have argued for Keynesian government intervention to mitigate the financial crisis include George Akerlof, J. Bradford DeLong,
Robert Reich,
and Joseph Stiglitz.
Newspapers and other media have also cited work relating to Keynes by Hyman Minsky, Robert Skidelsky, Donald Markwell
and Axel Leijonhufvud.
A series of major bailouts were pursued during the financial crisis, starting on 7 September with the announcement that the U.S. Government was to nationalise the two government-sponsored enterprises which oversaw most of the U.S. subprime mortgage market – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In October, Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to Keynes as he announced plans for substantial fiscal stimulus to head off the worst effects of recession, in accordance with Keynesian economic thought. Similar policies have been adopted by other governments worldwide.
This is in stark contrast to the action imposed on Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when it was forced by the IMF to close 16 banks at the same time, prompting a bank run.
Much of the post-crisis discussion reflected Keynes's advocacy of international coordination of fiscal or monetary stimulus, and of international economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which many had argued should be reformed as a "new Bretton Woods", and should have been even before the crises broke out.
The IMF and United Nations economists advocated a coordinated international approach to fiscal stimulus.
Donald Markwell argued that in the absence of such an international approach, there would be a risk of worsening international relations and possibly even world war arising from economic factors similar to those present during the depression of the 1930s.
By the end of December 2008, the Financial Times reported that "the sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy is a stunning reversal of the orthodoxy of the past several decades."
In December 2008, Paul Krugman released his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, arguing that economic conditions similar to those that existed during the earlier part of the 20th century had returned, making Keynesian policy prescriptions more relevant than ever. In February 2009 Robert J. Shiller and George Akerlof published Animal Spirits, a book where they argue the current US stimulus package is too small as it does not take into account Keynes's insight on the importance of confidence and expectations in determining the future behaviour of businesspeople and other economic agents.
In the March 2009 speech entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, came out in favour of Keynes's idea of a centrally managed global reserve currency. Zhou argued that it was unfortunate that part of the reason for the Bretton Woods system breaking down was the failure to adopt Keynes's bancor. Zhou proposed a gradual move towards increased use of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs).
Although Zhou's ideas had not been broadly accepted, leaders meeting in April at the 2009 G-20 London summit agreed to allow $250 billion of special drawing rights to be created by the IMF, to be distributed globally. Stimulus plans were credited for contributing to a better than expected economic outlook by both the OECD
and the IMF, in reports published in June and July 2009. Both organisations warned global leaders that recovery was likely to be slow, so counter recessionary measures ought not be rolled back too early.
While the need for stimulus measures was broadly accepted among policy makers, there had been much debate over how to fund the spending. Some leaders and institutions, such as Angela Merkel
and the European Central Bank,
expressed concern over the potential impact on inflation, national debt and the risk that a too large stimulus will create an unsustainable recovery.
Among professional economists the revival of Keynesian economics has been even more divisive. Although many economists, such as George Akerlof, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, and Joseph Stiglitz, supported Keynesian stimulus, others did not believe higher government spending would help the United States economy recover from the Great Recession. Some economists, such as Robert Lucas, questioned the theoretical basis for stimulus packages. Others, like Robert Barro and Gary Becker, say that empirical evidence for beneficial effects from Keynesian stimulus does not exist. However, there is a growing academic literature that shows that fiscal expansion helps an economy grow in the near term, and that certain types of fiscal stimulus are particularly effective.
Overall views
John Maynard Keynes had a drastically different upbringing and motives for his philosophical and economic contributions. Rather than writing with the mindset of being upset at the current system, Keynes instead produced his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with the intention of solving the then current issue which was plaguing the whole world, The Great Depression. When he wrote this, one theme that occurs numerous times is his view on how individuals should save during a time of economic downturn or recession. His answer was that people tend to save more in these times, which he thought could be very harmful if there is no government intervention because individuals and businesses are too scared or have the inability to invest in new ideas and jobs due to the state of the economy. This issue was especially prevalent during The Great Depression because individuals were saving their money and businesses were not investing which was keeping that particular recession around as long as it did and made the unemployment rate go from around 4 percent all the way to around twenty five percent. The individuals were saving with the hopes that the recession would not be very long, which then caused it to get worse due to lack of stimulation in the economy. In order to get out of this cycle, Keynes argued that it was the government alone that would be able to solve this problem and break the United States particularly and the whole world out of The Great Depression. Keynes, normally an endorser of free market capitalism realised that this recession was a special case in that it had potential to be inescapable. The government did eventually do this with president Franklin Roosevelt introducing The New Deal, which was a relief program set up where the federal budget was increased with the purpose of getting the economy out of the recession by injecting money manually from these government aid programs.“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”(Keynes). Keynes is highlighting the fact that people are used to making certain decisions during different times of the business cycle, and also that individuals and businesses needed to change the way they were viewing saving money so that the country could get out of the recession. It is clear that Keynes had a different approach to economic thought from Marx because he was writing with the intention of solving the current world problem, The Great Depression, rather than critiquing the unfairness in the current system.
Praise
On a personal level, Keynes's charm was such that he was generally well received wherever he went – even those who found themselves on the wrong side of his occasionally sharp tongue rarely bore a grudge. Keynes's speech at the closing of the Bretton Woods negotiations was received with a lasting standing ovation, rare in international relations, as the delegates acknowledged the scale of his achievements made despite poor health.
Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek was Keynes's most prominent contemporary critic, with sharply opposing views on the economy. Yet after Keynes's death, he wrote: "He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him." A colleague Nicholas Davenport recalled, "There were deep emotional forces about Maynard ... One could sense his humanity. There was nothing of the cold intellectual about him."
Lionel Robbins, former head of the economics department at the London School of Economics, who engaged in many heated debates with Keynes in the 1930s, had this to say after observing Keynes in early negotiations with the Americans while drawing up plans for Bretton Woods:
Douglas LePan, an official from the Canadian High Commission, wrote:
Bertrand Russell named Keynes one of the most intelligent people he had ever known, commenting:
Keynes's obituary in The Times included the comment: "There is the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes ... He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good."
Critiques
As a man of the centre described by some as having the greatest impact of any 20th-century economist, Keynes attracted considerable criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. In the 1920s, Keynes was seen as anti-establishment and was mainly attacked from the right. In the "red 1930s", many young economists favoured Marxist views, even in Cambridge, and while Keynes was engaging principally with the right to try to persuade them of the merits of more progressive policy, the most vociferous criticism against him came from the left, who saw him as a supporter of capitalism. From the 1950s and onwards, most of the attacks against Keynes have again been from the right.
In 1931 Friedrich Hayek extensively critiqued Keynes's 1930 Treatise on Money. After reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Keynes wrote to Hayek "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it", but concluded the letter with the recommendation: On the pressing issue of the time, whether deficit spending could lift a country from depression, Keynes replied to Hayek's criticism in the following way:
Asked why Keynes expressed "moral and philosophical" agreement with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Hayek stated:
According to some observers, Hayek felt that the post-World War II "Keynesian orthodoxy" gave too much power to the state, and that such policies would lead toward socialism.
While Milton Friedman described The General Theory as "a great book", he argues that its implicit separation of nominal from real magnitudes is neither possible nor desirable. Macroeconomic policy, Friedman argues, can reliably influence only the nominal. He and other monetarists have consequently argued that Keynesian economics can result in stagflation, the combination of low growth and high inflation that developed economies suffered in the early 1970s. More to Friedman's taste was the Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), which he regarded as Keynes's best work because of its focus on maintaining domestic price stability.
Joseph Schumpeter was an economist of the same age as Keynes and one of his main rivals. He was among the first reviewers to argue that Keynes's General Theory was not a general theory, but a special case. He said the work expressed "the attitude of a decaying civilisation". After Keynes's death Schumpeter wrote a brief biographical piece Keynes the Economist – on a personal level he was very positive about Keynes as a man, praising his pleasant nature, courtesy and kindness. He assessed some of Keynes's biographical and editorial work as among the best he'd ever seen. Yet Schumpeter remained critical about Keynes's economics, linking Keynes's childlessness to what Schumpeter saw as an essentially short-term view. He considered Keynes to have a kind of unconscious patriotism that caused him to fail to understand the problems of other nations. For Schumpeter "Practical Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and becomes poisonous as it dies."
"Schumpeter admired and envied Keynes, but when Keynes died in 1946, Schumpeter's obituary gave Keynes the same off-key, perfunctory treatment he would later give Adam Smith in the History of Economic Analysis, the "discredit of not adding a single innovation to the techniques of economic analysis".
President Harry S. Truman was sceptical of Keynesian theorizing: "Nobody can ever convince me that government can spend a dollar that it's not got," he told Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian economist who chaired Truman's Council of Economic Advisers.
Views on race
Keynes sometimes explained the mass murder that took place during the first years of communist Russia on a racial basis, as part of the "Russian and Jewish nature", rather than as a result of the communist rule. After a trip to Russia, he wrote in his Short View of Russia that there is "beastliness on the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied together". He also wrote that "out of the cruelty and stupidity of the Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but (...) beneath the cruelty and stupidity of the New Russia a speck of the ideal may lie hid."
Some critics have sought to show that Keynes had sympathies towards Nazism, and a number of writers have described him as antisemitic. Keynes's private letters contain portraits and descriptions, some of which can be characterized as antisemitic, while others as philosemitic.
Scholars have suggested that these reflect clichés current at the time that he accepted uncritically, rather than any racism. On several occasions Keynes used his influence to help his Jewish friends, most notably when he successfully lobbied for Ludwig Wittgenstein to be allowed residency in the United Kingdom, explicitly in order to rescue him from being deported to Nazi-occupied Austria. Keynes was a supporter of Zionism, serving on committees supporting the cause.
Allegations that he was racist or had totalitarian beliefs have been rejected by Robert Skidelsky and other biographers. Professor Gordon Fletcher wrote that "the suggestion of a link between Keynes and any support of totalitarianism cannot be sustained". Once the aggressive tendencies of the Nazis towards Jews and other minorities had become apparent, Keynes made clear his loathing of Nazism. As a lifelong pacifist he had initially favoured peaceful containment of Nazi Germany, yet he began to advocate a forceful resolution while many conservatives were still arguing for appeasement. After the war started he roundly criticised the Left for losing their nerve to confront Hitler:
Views on inflation
Keynes has been characterised as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation. He had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the two evils, it is "better to disappoint the rentier" than to inflict pain on working class families. He also supported the German hyperinflation as a way to get free from reparations obligations. However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he wrote:
Views on free trade and protectionism
The turning point of the Great Depression
At the beginning of his career, Keynes was an economist close to Alfred Marshall, deeply convinced of the benefits of free trade. From the crisis of 1929 onwards, noting the commitment of the British authorities to defend the gold parity of the pound sterling and the rigidity of nominal wages, he gradually adhered to protectionist measures.
On 5 November 1929, when heard by the Macmillan Committee to bring the British economy out of the crisis, Keynes indicated that the introduction of tariffs on imports would help to rebalance the trade balance. The committee's report states in a section entitled "import control and export aid", that in an economy where there is not full employment, the introduction of tariffs can improve production and employment. Thus the reduction of the trade deficit favours the country's growth.
In January 1930, in the Economic Advisory Council, Keynes proposed the introduction of a system of protection to reduce imports. In the autumn of 1930, he proposed a uniform tariff of 10% on all imports and subsidies of the same rate for all exports. In the Treatise on Money, published in the autumn of 1930, he took up the idea of tariffs or other trade restrictions with the aim of reducing the volume of imports and rebalancing the balance of trade.
On 7 March 1931, in the New Statesman and Nation, he wrote an article entitled Proposal for a Tariff Revenue. He pointed out that the reduction of wages led to a reduction in national demand which constrained markets. Instead, he proposes the idea of an expansionary policy combined with a tariff system to neutralise the effects on the balance of trade. The application of customs tariffs seemed to him "unavoidable, whoever the Chancellor of the Exchequer might be".Thus, for Keynes, an economic recovery policy is only fully effective if the trade deficit is eliminated. He proposed a 15% tax on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and 5% on certain foodstuffs and raw materials, with others needed for exports exempted (wool, cotton).
In 1932, in an article entitled The Pro- and Anti-Tariffs, published in The Listener, he envisaged the protection of farmers and certain sectors such as the automobile and iron and steel industries, considering them indispensable to Britain.
The critique of the theory of comparative advantage
In the post-crisis situation of 1929, Keynes judged the assumptions of the free trade model unrealistic. He criticised, for example, the neoclassical assumption of wage adjustment.
As early as 1930, in a note to the Economic Advisory Council, he doubted the intensity of the gain from specialisation in the case of manufactured goods. While participating in the MacMillan Committee, he admitted that he no longer "believed in a very high degree of national specialisation" and refused to "abandon any industry which is unable, for the moment, to survive". He also criticised the static dimension of the theory of comparative advantage, which, in his view, by fixing comparative advantages definitively, led in practice to a waste of national resources.
In the Daily Mail of 13 March 1931, he called the assumption of perfect sectoral labour mobility "nonsense" since it states that a person made unemployed contributes to a reduction in the wage rate until he finds a job. But for Keynes, this change of job may involve costs (job search, training) and is not always possible. Generally speaking, for Keynes, the assumptions of full employment and automatic return to equilibrium discredit the theory of comparative advantage.
In July 1933, he published an article in the New Statesman and Nation entitled National Self-Sufficiency, in which he criticised the argument of the specialisation of economies, which is the basis of free trade. He thus proposed the search for a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Instead of the specialisation of economies advocated by the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, he prefers the maintenance of a diversity of activities for nations. In it he refutes the principle of peacemaking trade. His vision of trade became that of a system where foreign capitalists compete for new markets. He defends the idea of producing on national soil when possible and reasonable and expresses sympathy for the advocates of protectionism.
He notes in National Self-Sufficiency:
He also writes in National Self-Sufficiency:
Later, Keynes had a written correspondence with James Meade centred on the issue of import restrictions. Keynes and Meade discussed the best choice between quota and tariff. In March 1944 Keynes began a discussion with Marcus Fleming after the latter had written an article entitled Quotas versus depreciation. On this occasion, we see that he has definitely taken a protectionist stance after the Great Depression. He considered that quotas could be more effective than currency depreciation in dealing with external imbalances. Thus, for Keynes, currency depreciation was no longer sufficient and protectionist measures became necessary to avoid trade deficits. To avoid the return of crises due to a self-regulating economic system, it seemed essential to him to regulate trade and stop free trade (deregulation of foreign trade).
He points out that countries that import more than they export weaken their economies. When the trade deficit increases, unemployment rises and GDP slows down. And surplus countries exert a "negative externality" on their trading partners. They get richer at the expense of others and destroy the output of their trading partners. John Maynard Keynes believed that the products of surplus countries should be taxed to avoid trade imbalances. Thus he no longer believes in the theory of comparative advantage (on which free trade is based) which states that the trade deficit does not matter, since trade is mutually beneficial.
This also explains his desire to replace the liberalisation of international trade (Free Trade) with a regulatory system aimed at eliminating trade imbalances in his proposals for the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Views on trade imbalances
Keynes was the principal author of a proposal – the so-called Keynes Plan – for an International Clearing Union. The two governing principles of the plan were that the problem of settling outstanding balances should be solved by "creating" additional "international money", and that debtor and creditor should be treated almost alike as disturbers of equilibrium. In the event, though, the plans were rejected, in part because "American opinion was naturally reluctant to accept the principle of equality of treatment so novel in debtor-creditor relationships".
The new system is not founded on free-trade (liberalisation of foreign trade) but rather on the regulation of international trade, in order to eliminate trade imbalances: the nations with a surplus would have an incentive to reduce it, and in doing so they would automatically clear other nations deficits. He proposed a global bank that would issue its currency – the bancor – which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange and would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus. Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union. He pointed out that surpluses lead to weak global aggregate demand – countries running surpluses exert a "negative externality" on trading partners, and posed, far more than those in deficit, a threat to global prosperity.
In his 1933 Yale Review article "National Self-Sufficiency," he already highlighted the problems created by free trade. His view, supported by many economists and commentators at the time, was that creditor nations may be just as responsible as debtor nations for disequilibrium in exchanges and that both should be under an obligation to bring trade back into a state of balance. Failure for them to do so could have serious consequences. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, then editor of The Economist, "If the economic relationships between nations are not, by one means or another, brought fairly close to balance, then there is no set of financial arrangements that can rescue the world from the impoverishing results of chaos."
These ideas were informed by events prior to the Great Depression when – in the opinion of Keynes and others – international lending, primarily by the U.S., exceeded the capacity of sound investment and so got diverted into non-productive and speculative uses, which in turn invited default and a sudden stop to the process of lending.
Influenced by Keynes, economics texts in the immediate post-war period put a significant emphasis on balance in trade. For example, the second edition of the popular introductory textbook, An Outline of Money, devoted the last three of its ten chapters to questions of foreign exchange management and in particular the "problem of balance". However, in more recent years, since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the increasing influence of Monetarist schools of thought in the 1980s, and particularly in the face of large sustained trade imbalances, these concerns – and particularly concerns about the destabilising effects of large trade surpluses – have largely disappeared from mainstream economics discourse and Keynes's insights have slipped from view. They are receiving some attention again in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08.
Personal life
Relationships
Keynes's early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men. Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan. Keynes was open about his affairs, and from 1901 to 1915 kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters. Keynes's relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortunate, as Macmillan's company first published his tract Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell. The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey, though they were for the most part love rivals, not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse, and as with Grant, fell out with a jealous Strachey for it. Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".
Political opponents have used Keynes's sexuality to attack his academic work. One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long-term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.
Keynes's friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began pursuing affairs with women, demonstrating himself to be bisexual. Ray Costelloe (who later married Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes. In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take."
Marriage
In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen "very much in love" with Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina and one of the stars of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the early years of his courtship, he maintained an affair with a younger man, Sebastian Sprott, in tandem with Lopokova, but eventually chose Lopokova exclusively. They were married in 1925, with Keynes's former lover Duncan Grant as best man. "What a marriage of beauty and brains, the fair Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes" was said at the time. Keynes later commented to Strachey that beauty and intelligence were rarely found in the same person, and that only in Duncan Grant had he found the combination. The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes "a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied".
The couple hoped to have children but this did not happen.
Among Keynes's Bloomsbury friends, Lopokova was, at least initially, subjected to criticism for her manners, mode of conversation, and supposedly humble social origins – the last of the ostensible causes being particularly noted in the letters of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf. In her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf bases the character of Rezia Warren Smith on Lopokova. E. M. Forster later wrote in contrition about "Lydia Keynes, every whose word should be recorded": "How we all used to underestimate her".
Support for the arts
Keynes thought that the pursuit of money for its own sake was a pathological condition, and that the proper aim of work is to provide leisure. He wanted shorter working hours and longer holidays for all.
Keynes was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution to become one of the major British stages outside London.
Keynes's interest in classical opera and dance led him to support the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadler's Wells. During the war, as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the war, Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was its founding chairman in 1946. From the start, the two organisations that received the largest grants from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells.
Keynes built up a substantial collection of fine art, including works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat (some of which can now be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum). He enjoyed collecting books; he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. In part on the basis of these papers, Keynes wrote of Newton as "the last of the magicians."
Philosophical views
Keynes, like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, was greatly influenced by the philosophy of G.E. Moore, which in 1938 he described as "still my religion under the surface". According to Moore, states of mind were the only valuable things in themselves, the most important being "the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects". Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote of how Virginia Woolf, Keynes, and T. S. Eliot discussed religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality.
Keynes may have been confirmed, but according to Cambridge University he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death. According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind" but also added that he came to "value it for social and moral reasons" later in life. Another biographer writes that he "broke the family faith and became a 'ferocious agnostic during his time at Eton. One Cambridge acquaintance remembered him as "an atheist with a devotion to King's chapel". At Cambridge, he was strongly associated with the Cambridge Heretics Society, an avowed atheist group which promoted secularism and humanism.
Investments
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000 – equivalent to about £20.5 million ($27.1 million) in 2018. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various charities and philanthropies, and his ethic which made him reluctant to sell on a falling market, in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump.
Keynes managed the endowment of King's College, Cambridge starting in the 1920s, initially with an unsuccessful strategy based on market timing but later shifting to focus in the publicly traded stock of small and medium size companies that paid large dividends. This was a controversial decision at the time, as stocks were considered high-risk and the centuries-old endowment had traditionally been invested in agricultural land and fixed income assets like bonds. Keynes was granted permission to invest a small minority of assets in stocks, and his adroit management resulted this portion of the endowment growing to become the majority of the endowment's assets. The active component of his portfolio outperformed a British equity index by an average of 6% to 8% a year over a quarter century, earning him favourable mention by later investors such as Warren Buffett and George Soros. Joel Tillinghast of Fidelity Investments describes Keynes as an early practitioner of value investing, a school of thought formalized in the U.S. by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia Business School during the 1920s and '30s. However, Keynes is believed to have developed his ideas independently. Keynes also regarded as a pioneer of financial diversification as he recognized the importance of holding assets with "opposed risks" as he wrote "since they are likely to move in opposite directions when there are general fluctuations"; and also as an early international investor who avoided home country bias by investing substantially in stocks outside the United Kingdom. Ken Fisher characterized Keynes as an exception to the rule that economists usually make horrible investors.
Political life
Keynes was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from about 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasions in 1920. From 1926, when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economic policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third-party status by the growing workers-oriented Labour Party.
In 1939 Keynes had the option to enter Parliament as an independent MP with the University of Cambridge seat. A by-election for the seat was to be held due to the illness of an elderly Tory, and the master of Magdalene College had obtained agreement that none of the major parties would field a candidate if Keynes chose to stand. Keynes declined the invitation as he felt he would wield greater influence on events if he remained a free agent.
Keynes was a proponent of eugenics. He served as director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. As late as 1946, shortly before his death, Keynes declared eugenics to be "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists."
Keynes once remarked that "the youth had no religion save communism and this was worse than nothing." Marxism "was founded upon nothing better than a misunderstanding of Ricardo", and, given time, he (Keynes) "would deal thoroughly with the Marxists" and other economists to solve the economic problems their theories "threaten to cause".
In 1931 Keynes had the following to say on Leninism:
Keynes was a firm supporter of women's rights and in 1932 became vice-chairman of the Marie Stopes Society which provided birth control education. He also campaigned against job discrimination against women and unequal pay. He was an outspoken campaigner for reform of the laws against homosexuality.
Heraldic arms
Death
Throughout his life, Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends; even when his health was poor, he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college. Helping to set up the Bretton Woods system, he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. In 1946, Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal. They began during negotiations for the Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as "absolute hell". A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946, at the age of 62. Against his wishes (he wanted his ashes to be deposited in the crypt at King's), his ashes were scattered on the Downs above Tilton.
Both of Keynes's parents outlived him: his father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and his mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010), a physiologist, and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003), an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes had no children; his widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981.
Cultural representations
In John Buchan's novel Island of Sheep (1936) the character of the financier Barralty is based on Keynes.
In the film Wittgenstein (1993), directed by Derek Jarman, Keynes was played by John Quentin.
The docudrama Paris 1919, based around Margaret MacMillan's book, featured Paul Bandey as Keynes.
In the BBC series about the Bloomsbury Group, Life In Squares, Keynes was portrayed by Edmund Kingsley.
The novel Mr Keynes' Revolution (2020) by E. J. Barnes is about Keynes' life in the 1920s.
Love Letters, based on the correspondence of Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, was performed by Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham-Carter at Charleston in 2021.
Publications
Books
1913 Indian Currency and Finance
1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace
1921 A Treatise on Probability
1922 Revision of the Treaty
1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform
1926 The End of Laissez-Faire
1930 A Treatise on Money
1931 Essays in Persuasion
1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
1940 How to Pay for the War: A radical plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
1949 Two Memoirs. Ed. by David Garnett (On Carl Melchior and G. E. Moore.)
Articles and pamphlets
(A partial list.)
1915 The Economics of War in Germany
1922 The Inflation of Currency as a Method of Taxation
1925 Am I a Liberal?
1926 Laissez-Faire and Communism
1929 Can Lloyd George Do It?
1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
1931 The End of the Gold Standard (Sunday Express)
1931 The Great Slump of 1930
1933 The Means to Prosperity
1933 An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (New York Times)
1933 Essays in Biography
1937 The General Theory of Employment
See also
References
Notes and citations
Sources
Backhouse, Roger E. and Bateman, Bradley W.. Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes. 2011
Barnett, Vincent. John Maynard Keynes. London: Routledge, 2013. .
Beaudreau, Bernard C.. The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes: How the Second Industrial Revolution Passed Great Britain By. iUniverse, 2006,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury, 2009,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist, Bloomsbury Press, 2009
Markwell, Donald. John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace. Oxford University Press, 2006. . .
Markwell, Donald. Keynes and Australia . Reserve Bank of Australia, 2000.
Keynes, Milo (ed). Essays on John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge University Press, 1975. .
Moggridge, Donald Edward. Keynes. Macmillan, 1980. .
Patinkin, Don. "Keynes, John Maynard." In: The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1987, pp. 19–41. . .
Schuker, Stephen A. "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33." Princeton Studies in International Finance, No. 61, 1988.
Schuker, Stephen A. "J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations." Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 25, Nos. 3/4, 2014. .
Blaug, Mark. "Recent Biographies of Keynes." Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, September 1994, pp. 1204-1215. .
Buchanan, James M. and Richard E. Wagner. Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 8. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008.
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Davidson, Paul. John Maynard Keynes (Great Thinkers in Economics). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. .
Dimand, Robert W. and Harald Hagemann, eds. The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes (Edward Elgar, 20190 + 670 pp. online review
Harrod, R. F.. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. Macmillan, 1951. .
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. (2005)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920. (1986)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (1994)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946.
Temin, Peter, and David Vines. Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy. MIT Press, 2014.
Wapshott, Nicholas. Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (2011)
Primary sources
External links
Professor Robert Skidelsky explains Keynes theories video
Professor Robert Skidelsky on economist Keynes video
Churchill, Keynes & The Gold Standard – UK Parliament Living Heritage
Correspondence with John Maynard, Baron Keynes, four volumes held at The British Library
Treaty of Versailles & Keynes – UK Parliament Living Heritage
John Maynard Keynes on Google Scholar
Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926)
Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Keynes, The raising of prices (1933)
Keynes, National Self-Sufficiency (1933)
Keynes, An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (1933)
Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
Interactive E-Book John Maynard Keynes: The Lives of a Mind (2016). The Keynes Centre at University College Cork
1883 births
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LGBT philosophers | false | [
"Paul Davidson (born October 23, 1930) is an American macroeconomist who has been one of the leading spokesmen of the American branch of the post-Keynesian school in economics. He is a prolific writer and has actively intervened in important debates on economic policy (natural resources, international monetary system, developing countries' debt) from a position that is very critical of mainstream economics.\n\nLife and work\nDavidson did not originally choose economics as a profession. His primary training was in both chemistry and biology, for which he received B.Sc. degrees from Brooklyn College in 1950. He was a graduate student in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, but switched to economics, receiving his MBA from the City University of New York in 1955, and completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1959.\n\nDavidson is Holly Professor of Excellence, Emeritus at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Schwartz Center For Economic Policy Analysis at the New School. Besides the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tennessee, and the New School, Davidson has taught economics at Rutgers University, Bristol University, and the University of Cambridge. In the early 1960s he worked at Continental Oil Company.\n\nDavidson and Sidney Weintraub founded the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 1978. Davidson continues as editor of that journal. He is also a contributor to the Center for Full Employment and Stability. The CFEPS website (see Other Contributors: Paul Davidson ) contains more biographical information about him, as well as a list of his publications, with links to a few.\n\nReferences\n\nMajor publications\n\n \n \n Theories of Aggregate Income Distribution, 1960\n \n \n \n \n Aggregate Supply and Demand Analysis, with E. Smolensky, 1964\n \n \n \n \"The Valuation of Public Goods,\" 1968, in Garnsey and Hibbs (eds.), Social Sciences and the Environment\n \n \n \n \n \n Money and the Real World, 1972\n \n \"Market Disequilibrium Adjustments: Marshall Revisited,\" 1974, Econ Inquiry\n \n \"Post-Keynesian Monetary Theory and Inflation\", 1977, in S. Weintraub (ed.), Modern Economic Thought\n \"A Discussion of Leijonhufvud's Social Consequences of Inflation\", 1977, in Harcourt (ed.), Microfoundations of Macroeconomics\n \"The Carter Energy Proposal\", 1977, Challenge\n \"Money and General Equilibrium,\" 1977, Economie Appliquee\n \n \n \"Post Keynesian Approach to the Theory of Natural Resources\", 1979, Challenge\n \"Monetary Policy, Regulation and International Adjustments,\" with M.A. Miles, 1979, Economies et Societies\n \n \"What Is the Energy Crisis?\", 1979, Challenge\n \"Keynes's Paradigm: A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis\", with J.A. Kregel, 1980, in Nell (ed.), Growth, Property and Profits\n \n \"Keynes's Theory of Employment, Expectations and Indexing\", 1980, Revista de Economia Latinoamericana\n \"Post Keynesian Economics: Solving the Crisis in Economic Theory\", 1981, in Bell and Kristol (eds.), The Crisis in Economic Theory\n \n \"Alfred Marshall is Alive and Well in Post Keynesian Economics\", 1981, IHS Journal\n \"A Critical Analysis of the Monetarist-Rational Expectations Supply Side (Incentive) Economics Approach to Accumulation During a Period of Inflationary Expectations,\" 1981, Kredit und Kapital\n International Money and the Real World, 1982\n \n \"Monetarism and Reagonomics\", 1983, in S. Weintraub and Goodstein (eds.), Reagonomics in the Stagflation Economy\n \n \n \n \n \"The Conventional Wisdom on Deficits Is Wrong\", 1984, Challenge\n \"Incomes Policy as a Social Institution\", 1985, in Maital and Lipnowski (eds.), Macroeconomic Conflict and Social Institutions\n \"Policies For Prices And Incomes\", 1985, in Barrere (ed.), Keynes Today\n \"Financial Markets and Williamson's Theory of Governance: Efficiency vs. Concentration vs. Power\", with G.S. Davidson, 1984, Quarterly Review of Economics and Business\n \n \n \n \"A Post Keynesian View of Theories and Causes of High Real Interest Rates\", 1986, Thames Papers in Political Economy\n \n \n \"Financial Markets, Investment, and Employment\", 1988, in Matzner et al. (eds.), Barriers to Full Employment\n \n \n \"Weitzman's Share Economy And The Aggregate Supply Function\", 1988, in Hamouda and Smithin (eds.), Keynes and Public Policy After Fifty Years\n \"Endogenous Money, The Production Process, And Inflation Analysis\", 1988, Economie Appliquee\n \"A Technical Definition of Uncertainty and the Long Run Non- Neutrality of Money\", 1988, Cambridge JE\n Economics for a Civilized Society, with G. Davidson, 1988\n \"Keynes and Money\" 1989, in Hill (ed.), Keynes, Money, and Monetarism\n \"Prices and Income Policy: An Essay in Honor of Sidney Weintraub\", 1989, in Barrere (ed.), Money, Credit, and Prices in Keynesian Perspective\n \"Patinkin's Interpretation of Keynes and the Keynesian Cross\", 1989, HOPE\n \n \"The Economics of Ignorance Or Ignorance of Economics?\", 1989, Critical Review\n \"Shackle and Keynes vs. Rational Expectations Theory on the Role of Time, Liquidity, and Financial Markets\" 1990, in S. Frowen (ed.), Unknowledge and Choice in Economics\n \"Liquidity Proposals for a New Bretton Woods Plan\", 1990, in Barrere, Keynesian Economic Policies\n \"On Thirlwall's Law\", 1990, Revista de Economia Politica\n Collected Writings of Paul Davidson (2 vols.), 1990–1.\n Controversies in Post Keynesian Economics, 1991\n \n \"Is Probability Theory Relevant For Choice Under Uncertainty?: A Post Keynesian Perspective\", 1991, JEP\n \"What Kind of International Payments System Would Keynes Have Recommended for the Twenty-First Century?\" 1991, in Davidson and Kregel (eds.), Economic Problems of the 1990s\n \"Money: Cause or Effect? Exogenous or Endogenous?\", 1992, in Nell and Semmler (eds.), Nicholas Kaldor and Mainstream Economics\n \"Eichner's Approach to Money and Macroeconomics\", 1992, in Milberg (ed.), The Megacorp and Macrodynamics\n \n \n \n \"Asset Deflation and Financial Fragility\" 1993, in Arestis (ed.), Contemporary Issues in Money and Banking\n Can the Free Market Pick Winners? (editor), 1993\n Growth, Employment and Finance: Economic Reality and Economic Theory, (co-edited with J.A. Kregel), 1994\n \"The Asimakopulos View of Keynes's General Theory\", 1994, in Harcourt and Roncaglia (eds.), Investment and Employment in Theory and Practice\n \"Monetary Theory and Policy In A Global Context With A Large International Debt\" 1994, in Frowen (ed.), Monetary Theory and Monetary Policy\n Post Keynesian Macroeconomic Theory: a foundation for successful economic policies for the Twenty-first Century, 1994\n Economics For A Civilized Society, with Greg Davidson, 1996.\n \"What Are The Essential Characteristics of Post Keynesian Monetary Theory?\", 1996, in G. Deleplace and E. J. Nell (eds.), Money in Motion\n \"The General Theory in An Open Economy,\" 1996, in Harcourt and Riach (eds.), A Second Edition of the General Theory\n \n \n \n \"Is a Plumber Or A Financial Architect Needed to End Global International Liquidity Problems?\", 2000, World Development\n Financial Markets, Money and the Real World, 2002\n \n \n \n \"The Post Keynesian School\", Snowden and Vane (eds.) Modern Macroeconomics, 2005\n \n \n \"Can, Or Should, A Central Bank Inflation Target?\" 2006, JPKE\n \"Keynes and Money\" in Arestis and Sawyer (eds.) Handbook of Alternative Monetary Economics, 2006\n \"Keynes, Post Keynesian Analysis, and the Open Economies of the Twenty-first Century\" Arestis, McCombie and Vickerman (eds.) Growth and Economic Development, 2006\n \"Are We Making Progress Towards A Civilized Society?\", 2007, JPKE\n John Maynard Keynes, 2007\n \"How To Solve The U.S. Housing Problem and Avoid A Recession: A Revived HOLC and FTC\", Schwartz Center For Economic Policy Analysis: Policy Note, 2008.\n \"Securitization, Liquidity, and Market Failure\", 2008, Challenge\n \"Is The Current Financial Distress Caused By The Sub Prime Mortgage Crisis A Minsky moment? Or Is It The Result of Attempting To Securitize Illiquid Non Commercial Mortgage Loans?\", 2008, JPKE\n The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity, 2009\n \n Pdf.\n\nExternal links\n\n Paul Davidson's homepage at the Univ. of Tennessee\n SmartTalk interview on YouTube \n VIdeo interview on WTTW Aug 9, 2011 on the S&P downgrade\n\n1930 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Brooklyn\nPost-Keynesian economists\nEconomic historians\nInstitute for New Economic Thinking\nBrooklyn College alumni",
"Thomas Palley (born March 17, 1956) is an American economist who has served as the chief economist for the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He is currently Schwartz Economic Growth Fellow at the New America Foundation.\n\nCareer \nPalley received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University in 1976. He earned a master's degree in international relations and a PhD in economics from Yale University. Palley founded the Economics for Democratic & Open Societies project. He states its purpose is to \"stimulate public discussion about what kinds of economic arrangements and conditions are needed to promote democracy and open society.\" Palley's previous positions include director of the Open Society Institute’s Globalization Reform Project, and Assistant Director of Public Policy for the AFL-CIO.\n\nHis work has covered macroeconomic theory and policy, international finance and trade, economic development, and labor markets where his approach is Post-Keynesian.\n\nPost-Keynesian work \nAcademically his best known work is the book Post Keynesian Economics: Debt, Distribution, and the Macro Economy. In this book Palley tries to develop Post-Keynesian macroeconomic\nmodels that combine the insights of various 'brands' of Post-Keynesian economics including the following: Yale Keynesianism (James Tobin), Cambridge–UK Keynesianism (Nicholas Kaldor), and American Post-Keynesianism (Paul Davidson, Hyman Minsky).\n\nA critique of the book was written by Basil Moore, also a Post Keynesian economist. Moore argues that Palley succeeds in demonstrating the coherence of Post-Keynesian macroeconomics. This is done via the concepts of effective demand, price-setting, quantity-taking fix-price supply behavior and the ineffectiveness of nominal wage and price adjustments as a means of remedying aggregate demand deficiencies. But Moore raises the criticism that by using neoclassical tools and methodology Palley has failed to take both time and uncertainty (key Post-Keynesian concerns) in a sufficiently serious fashion.\n\nSelected works \n Post Keynesian Economics: Debt, Distribution, and the Macro Economy, Macmillan Press, 1996. Paperback edition, 1996. \n From Financial Crisis to Stagnation: The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economics, Cambridge University Press, 2012, Hardback edition.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n Palley's website and blog\n\n1956 births\n21st-century American economists\nPost-Keynesian economists\nLiving people\nAlumni of the University of Oxford\nYale University alumni"
]
|
[
"John Maynard Keynes",
"Neo-Keynesian economics",
"What is Neo-Keynesian economics?",
"they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics,",
"What is Keynesian analysis?",
"The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies."
]
| C_9bf402fc7c2f4638b09e96b6644fd310_1 | How did he want currency managed? | 3 | How did John Maynard Keynes want currency managed? | John Maynard Keynes | The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments - the convertibility of banknotes into gold - but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was absolutely necessary. In January 1915, Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble - with difficulty - a small supply of Spanish pesetas. The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive. On the introduction of military conscription in 1916 he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work. In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold. During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches. As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions - a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the final outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proved correct by events. The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase." In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years. By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism. In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. CANNOTANSWER | He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions - a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. | John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and that labour costs and wages were rigid downwards, which means the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in late 1936. By the late 1930s, leading Western economies had begun adopting Keynes's policy recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946. As a leader of the British delegation, Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II but was overruled by the American delegation on several aspects.
Keynes's influence started to wane in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists, who disputed the ability of government to favourably regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy. However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 sparked a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008 by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.
When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it stated that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Early life and education
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, to an upper-middle-class family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge and his mother, Florence Ada Keynes, a local social reformer. Keynes was the first born, and was followed by two more children – Margaret Neville Keynes in 1885 and Geoffrey Keynes in 1887. Geoffrey became a surgeon and Margaret married the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill, although she had many affairs with women, notably Eglantyne Jebb.
According to the economic historian and biographer Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's parents were loving and attentive. They remained in the same house throughout their lives, where the children were always welcome to return. Keynes received considerable support from his father, including expert coaching to help him pass his scholarship exams and financial help both as a young man and when his assets were nearly wiped out at the onset of Great Depression in 1929. Keynes's mother made her children's interests her own, and according to Skidelsky, "because she could grow up with her children, they never outgrew home".
In January 1889 at the age of five and a half, Keynes started at the kindergarten of the Perse School for Girls for five mornings a week. He quickly showed a talent for arithmetic, but his health was poor leading to several long absences. He was tutored at home by a governess, Beatrice Mackintosh, and his mother. In January 1892, at eight and a half, he started as a day pupil at St Faith's preparatory school. By 1894, Keynes was top of his class and excelling at mathematics. In 1896, St Faith's headmaster, Ralph Goodchild, wrote that Keynes was "head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school" and was confident that Keynes could get a scholarship to Eton.
In 1897, Keynes won a King's Scholarship to Eton College, where he displayed talent in a wide range of subjects, particularly mathematics, classics and history: in 1901, he was awarded the Tomline Prize for mathematics. At Eton, Keynes experienced the first "love of his life" in Dan Macmillan, older brother of the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Despite his middle-class background, Keynes mixed easily with upper-class pupils.
In 1902 Keynes left Eton for King's College, Cambridge, after receiving a scholarship for this also to read mathematics. Alfred Marshall begged Keynes to become an economist,
although Keynes's own inclinations drew him towards philosophy – especially the ethical system of G. E. Moore. Keynes was elected to the University Pitt Club and was an active member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students. Like many members, Keynes retained a bond to the club after graduating and continued to attend occasional meetings throughout his life. Before leaving Cambridge, Keynes became the President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Liberal Club. He was said to be an atheist.
In May 1904, he received a first-class BA in mathematics. Aside from a few months spent on holidays with family and friends, Keynes continued to involve himself with the university over the next two years. He took part in debates, further studied philosophy and attended economics lectures informally as a graduate student for one term, which constituted his only formal education in the subject. He took civil service exams in 1906.
The economist Harry Johnson wrote that the optimism imparted by Keynes's early life is a key to understanding his later thinking.
Keynes was always confident he could find a solution to whatever problem he turned his attention to and retained a lasting faith in the ability of government officials to do good.
Keynes's optimism was also cultural, in two senses: he was of the last generation raised by an empire still at the height of its power and was also of the last generation who felt entitled to govern by culture, rather than by expertise. According to Skidelsky, the sense of cultural unity current in Britain from the 19th century to the end of World War I provided a framework with which the well-educated could set various spheres of knowledge in relation to each other and life, enabling them to confidently draw from different fields when addressing practical problems.
Career
In October 1906 Keynes's Civil Service career began as a clerk in the India Office. He enjoyed his work at first, but by 1908 had become bored and resigned his position to return to Cambridge and work on probability theory, through a lectureship in economics at first funded personally by economists Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou; he became a fellow of King's College in 1909.
By 1909 Keynes had also published his first professional economics article in The Economic Journal, about the effect of a recent global economic downturn on India. He founded the Political Economy Club, a weekly discussion group. Keynes's earnings rose further as he began to take on pupils for private tuition.
In 1911 Keynes was made the editor of The Economic Journal. By 1913 he had published his first book, Indian Currency and Finance. He was then appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance – the same topic as his book – where Keynes showed considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems. His written work was published under the name "J M Keynes", though to his family and friends he was known as Maynard. (His father, John Neville Keynes, was also always known by his middle name).
First World War
The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments – the convertibility of banknotes into gold – but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was necessary.
In January 1915 Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble – with difficulty – a small supply of Spanish pesetas.
The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive.
On the introduction of military conscription in 1916, he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work.
In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that had a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold.
Versailles peace conference
Keynes's experience at Versailles was influential in shaping his future outlook, yet it was not a successful one. Keynes's main interest had been in trying to prevent Germany's compensation payments being set so high it would traumatize innocent German people, damage the nation's ability to pay and sharply limit its ability to buy exports from other countries – thus hurting not just Germany's economy but that of the wider world.
Unfortunately for Keynes, conservative powers in the coalition that emerged from the 1918 coupon election were able to ensure that both Keynes himself and the Treasury were largely excluded from formal high-level talks concerning reparations. Their place was taken by the Heavenly Twins – the judge Lord Sumner and the banker Lord Cunliffe whose nickname derived from the "astronomically" high war compensation they wanted to demand from Germany. Keynes was forced to try to exert influence mostly from behind the scenes.
The three principal players at Versailles were Britain's Lloyd George, France's Clemenceau and America's President Wilson.
It was only Lloyd George to whom Keynes had much direct access; until the 1918 election he had some sympathy with Keynes's view but while campaigning had found his speeches were only well received by the public if he promised to harshly punish Germany, and had therefore committed his delegation to extracting high payments.
Lloyd George did, however, win some loyalty from Keynes with his actions at the Paris conference by intervening against the French to ensure the dispatch of much-needed food supplies to German civilians. Clemenceau also pushed for substantial reparations, though not as high as those proposed by the British, while on security grounds, France argued for an even more severe settlement than Britain.
Wilson initially favoured relatively lenient treatment of Germany – he feared too harsh conditions could foment the rise of extremism and wanted Germany to be left sufficient capital to pay for imports. To Keynes's dismay, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to pressure Wilson to agree to include pensions in the reparations bill.
Towards the end of the conference, Keynes came up with a plan that he argued would not only help Germany and other impoverished central European powers but also be good for the world economy as a whole. It involved the radical writing down of war debts, which would have had the possible effect of increasing international trade all round, but at the same time thrown over two thirds of the cost of European reconstruction on the United States.
Lloyd George agreed it might be acceptable to the British electorate. However, America was against the plan; the US was then the largest creditor, and by this time Wilson had started to believe in the merits of a harsh peace and thought that his country had already made excessive sacrifices. Hence despite his best efforts, the result of the conference was a treaty which disgusted Keynes both on moral and economic grounds and led to his resignation from the Treasury.
In June 1919 he turned down an offer to become chairman of the British Bank of Northern Commerce, a job that promised a salary of £2000 in return for a morning per week of work.
Keynes's analysis on the predicted damaging effects of the treaty appeared in the highly influential book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. This work has been described as Keynes's best book, where he was able to bring all his gifts to bear – his passion as well as his skill as an economist. In addition to economic analysis, the book contained appeals to the reader's sense of compassion:
Also present was striking imagery such as "year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled" along with bold predictions which were later justified by events:
Keynes's followers assert that his predictions of disaster were borne out when the German economy suffered the hyperinflation of 1923, and again by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the outbreak of the Second World War. However, historian Ruth Henig claims that "most historians of the Paris peace conference now take the view that, in economic terms, the treaty was not unduly harsh on Germany and that, while obligations and damages were inevitably much stressed in the debates at Paris to satisfy electors reading the daily newspapers, the intention was quietly to give Germany substantial help towards paying her bills, and to meet many of the German objections by amendments to the way the reparations schedule was in practice carried out".
Only a small fraction of reparations was ever paid. In fact, historian Stephen A. Schuker demonstrates in American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33, that the capital inflow from American loans substantially exceeded German out payments so that, on a net basis, Germany received support equal to four times the amount of the post-Second World War Marshall Plan.
Schuker also shows that, in the years after Versailles, Keynes became an informal reparations adviser to the German government, wrote one of the major German reparation notes, and supported the hyperinflation on political grounds. Nevertheless, The Economic Consequences of the Peace gained Keynes international fame, even though it also caused him to be regarded as anti-establishment – it was not until after the outbreak of the Second World War that Keynes was offered a directorship of a major British Bank, or an acceptable offer to return to government with a formal job. However, Keynes was still able to influence government policy making through his network of contacts, his published works and by serving on government committees; this included attending high-level policy meetings as a consultant.
In the 1920s
Keynes had completed his A Treatise on Probability before the war but published it in 1921. The work was a notable contribution to the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of probability theory, championing the important view that probabilities were no more or less than truth values intermediate between simple truth and falsity. Keynes developed the first upper-lower probabilistic interval approach to probability in chapters 15 and 17 of this book, as well as having developed the first decision weight approach with his conventional coefficient of risk and weight, c, in chapter 26. In addition to his academic work, the 1920s saw Keynes active as a journalist selling his work internationally and working in London as a financial consultant. In 1924 Keynes wrote an obituary for his former tutor
Alfred Marshall which Joseph Schumpeter called "the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read."
Mary Paley Marshall was "entranced" by the memorial, while Lytton Strachey rated it as one of Keynes's "best works".
In 1922 Keynes continued to advocate reduction of German reparations with A Revision of the Treaty. He attacked the post-World War I deflation policies with A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923 – a trenchant argument that countries should target stability of domestic prices, avoiding deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate. Britain suffered from high unemployment through most of the 1920s, leading Keynes to recommend the depreciation of sterling to boost jobs by making British exports more affordable. From 1924 he was also advocating a fiscal response, where the government could create jobs by spending on public works. During the 1920s Keynes's pro stimulus views had only limited effect on policy makers and mainstream academic opinion – according to Hyman Minsky one reason was that at this time his theoretical justification was "muddled". The Tract had also called for an end to the gold standard. Keynes advised it was no longer a net benefit for countries such as Britain to participate in the gold standard, as it ran counter to the need for domestic policy autonomy. It could force countries to pursue deflationary policies at exactly the time when expansionary measures were called for to address rising unemployment. The Treasury and Bank of England were still in favour of the gold standard and in 1925 they were able to convince the then Chancellor Winston Churchill to re-establish it, which had a depressing effect on British industry. Keynes responded by writing The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill and continued to argue against the gold standard until Britain finally abandoned it in 1931.
During the Great Depression
Keynes had begun a theoretical work to examine the relationship between unemployment, money, and prices back in the 1920s. The work, Treatise on Money, was published in 1930 in two volumes. A central idea of the work was that if the amount of money being saved exceeds the amount being invested – which can happen if interest rates are too high – then unemployment will rise. This is in part a result of people not wanting to spend too high a proportion of what employers pay out, making it difficult, in aggregate, for employers to make a profit. Another key theme of the book is the unreliability of financial indices for representing an accurate – or indeed meaningful – indication of general shifts in purchasing power of currencies over time. In particular, he criticised the justification of Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 at pre-war valuation by reference to the wholesale price index. He argued that the index understated the effects of changes in the costs of services and labour.
Keynes was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures during the Great Depression. He believed that budget deficits during recessions were a good thing and a natural product of an economic slump. He wrote, "For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature's remedy, so to speak, for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as the present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill."
At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly counter-cyclical public spending. The Means to Prosperity contains one of the first mentions of the multiplier effect. While it was addressed chiefly to the British Government, it also contained advice for other nations affected by the global recession. A copy was sent to the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other world leaders. The work was taken seriously by both the American and British governments, and according to Robert Skidelsky, helped pave the way for the later acceptance of Keynesian ideas, though it had little immediate practical influence. In the 1933 London Economic Conference opinions remained too diverse for a unified course of action to be agreed upon.
Keynesian-like policies were adopted by Sweden and Germany, but Sweden was seen as too small to command much attention, and Keynes was deliberately silent about the successful efforts of Germany as he was dismayed by its imperialist ambitions and its treatment of Jews. Apart from Great Britain, Keynes's attention was primarily focused on the United States. In 1931, he received considerable support for his views on counter-cyclical public spending in Chicago, then America's foremost center for economic views alternative to the mainstream. However, orthodox economic opinion remained generally hostile regarding fiscal intervention to mitigate the depression, until just before the outbreak of war. In late 1933 Keynes was persuaded by Felix Frankfurter to address President Roosevelt directly, which he did by letters and face to face in 1934, after which the two men spoke highly of each other. However, according to Skidelsky, the consensus is that Keynes's efforts began to have a more than marginal influence on US economic policy only after 1939.
Keynes's magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936. It was researched and indexed by one of Keynes's favourite students, later the economist David Bensusan-Butt. The work served as a theoretical justification for the interventionist policies Keynes favoured for tackling a recession. Although Keynes stated in his preface that his General Theory was only secondarily concerned with the “applications of this theory to practice,” the circumstances of its publication were such that his suggestions shaped the course of the 1930s. In addition, Keynes introduced the world to a new interpretation of taxation: since the legal tender is now defined by the state, inflation becomes “taxation by currency depreciation”. This hidden tax meant a) that the standard of value should be governed by deliberate decision; and (b) that it was possible to maintain a middle course between deflation and inflation. This novel interpretation was inspired by the desperate search for control over the economy which permeated the academic world after the Depression. The General Theory challenged the earlier neoclassical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. In doing so Keynes was partly setting himself against his former teachers Marshall and Pigou. Keynes believed the classical theory was a "special case" that applied only to the particular conditions present in the 19th century, his theory being the general one. Classical economists had believed in Say's law, which, simply put, states that "supply creates its demand", and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs. An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness – the recognition that in reality workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue that it is rational for them to do so. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of "aggregate demand" and "aggregate supply" may lead to stable unemployment equilibria – and in those cases, it is on the state, not the market, that economies must depend for their salvation.
The General Theory argues that demand, not supply, is the key variable governing the overall level of economic activity. Aggregate demand, which equals total un-hoarded income in a society, is defined by the sum of consumption and investment. In a state of unemployment and unused production capacity, one can enhance employment and total income only by first increasing expenditures for either consumption or investment. Without government intervention to increase expenditure, an economy can remain trapped in a low-employment equilibrium. The demonstration of this possibility has been described as the revolutionary formal achievement of the work.
The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. "Let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth," he wrote in 1928. "With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments. It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them."
The General Theory is often viewed as the foundation of modern macroeconomics. Few senior American economists agreed with Keynes through most of the 1930s.
Yet his ideas were soon to achieve widespread acceptance, with eminent American professors such as Alvin Hansen agreeing with the General Theory before the outbreak of World War II.
Keynes himself had only limited participation in the theoretical debates that followed the publication of the General Theory as he suffered a heart attack in 1937, requiring him to take long periods of rest. Among others, Hyman Minsky and Post-Keynesian economists have argued that as result, Keynes's ideas were diluted by those keen to compromise with classical economists or to render his concepts with mathematical models like the IS–LM model (which, they argue, distort Keynes's ideas). Keynes began to recover in 1939, but for the rest of his life his professional energies were directed largely towards the practical side of economics: the problems of ensuring optimum allocation of resources for the war efforts, post-war negotiations with America, and the new international financial order that was presented at the Bretton Woods Conference.
In the General Theory and later, Keynes responded to the socialists who argued, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, that capitalism caused war. He argued that if capitalism were managed domestically and internationally (with coordinated international Keynesian policies, an international monetary system that did not pit the interests of countries against one another, and a high degree of freedom of trade), then this system of managed capitalism could promote peace rather than conflict between countries. His plans during World War II for post-war international economic institutions and policies (which contributed to the creation at Bretton Woods of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and later to the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and eventually the World Trade Organization) were aimed to give effect to this vision.
Although Keynes has been widely criticised – especially by members of the Chicago school of economics – for advocating irresponsible government spending financed by borrowing, in fact he was a firm believer in balanced budgets and regarded the proposals for programs of public works during the Great Depression as an exceptional measure to meet the needs of exceptional circumstances.
Second World War
During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post-war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches.
As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions – a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proven correct by events.
The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase."
Postwar
After the war, Keynes continued to represent the United Kingdom in international negotiations despite his deteriorating health. He succeeded in obtaining preferential terms from the United States for new and outstanding debts to facilitate the rebuilding of the British economy.
Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of social economics and advisor to the Bank of England, of his hopes that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" could help Britain out of the economic hole it was in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."
Legacy
Keynesian ascendancy 1939–79
From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes provided the main inspiration for economic policymakers in Europe, America and much of the rest of the world. While economists and policymakers had become increasingly won over to Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after the outbreak of World War II that governments started to borrow money for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (then a US government official charged with controlling inflation), in the rebound of the economy from wartime spending, "one could not have had a better demonstration of the Keynesian ideas."
The Keynesian Revolution was associated with the rise of modern liberalism in the West during the post-war period. Keynesian ideas became so popular that some scholars point to Keynes as representing the ideals of modern liberalism, as Adam Smith represented the ideals of classical liberalism. After the war, Winston Churchill attempted to check the rise of Keynesian policy-making in the United Kingdom and used rhetoric critical of the mixed economy in his 1945 election campaign. Despite his popularity as a war hero, Churchill suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee, whose government's economic policy continued to be influenced by Keynes's ideas.
Neo-Keynesian economics
In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years.
By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism.
In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Multiplier
The concept of multiplier was first developed by R. F. Kahn in his article "The relation of home investment to unemployment" In the economic journal of June 1931. Kahn multiplier was the employment multiplier while as Keynes took the idea from Kahn and formulated the investment multiplier.
Keynesian economics out of favour 1979–2007
Keynesian economics were officially discarded by the British Government in 1979, but forces had begun to gather against Keynes's ideas over 30 years earlier. Friedrich Hayek had formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, with the explicit intention of nurturing intellectual currents to one day displace Keynesianism and other similar influences. Its members included the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises along with the then young Milton Friedman. Initially the society had little impact on the wider world – according to Hayek it was as if Keynes had been raised to sainthood after his death and that people refused to allow his work to be questioned.
Friedman however began to emerge as a formidable critic of Keynesian economics from the mid-1950s, and especially after his 1963 publication of A Monetary History of the United States.
On the practical side of economic life, "big government" had appeared to be firmly entrenched in the 1950s, but the balance began to shift towards the power of private interests in the 1960s. Keynes had written against the folly of allowing "decadent and selfish" speculators and financiers the kind of influence they had enjoyed after World War I. For two decades after World War II the public opinion was strongly against private speculators, the disparaging label "Gnomes of Zürich" being typical of how they were described during this period. International speculation was severely restricted by the capital controls in place after Bretton Woods. According to the journalists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, 1968 was the pivotal year when power shifted in favour of private agents such as currency speculators. As the key 1968 event Elliott and Atkinson picked out America's suspension of the conversion of the dollar into gold except on request of foreign governments, which they identified as the beginning of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system.
Criticisms of Keynes's ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s, as they were then able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. Keynes himself included few formulas and no explicit mathematical models in his General Theory. For economists such as Hyman Minsky, Keynes's limited use of mathematics was partly the result of his scepticism about whether phenomena as inherently uncertain as economic activity could ever be adequately captured by mathematical models. Nevertheless, many models were developed by Keynesian economists, with a famous example being the Phillips curve which predicted an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. It implied that unemployment could be reduced by government stimulus with a calculable cost to inflation. In 1968, Milton Friedman published a paper arguing that the fixed relationship implied by the Philips curve did not exist.
Friedman suggested that sustained Keynesian policies could lead to both unemployment and inflation rising at once – a phenomenon that soon became known as stagflation. In the early 1970s stagflation appeared in both the US and Britain just as Friedman had predicted, with economic conditions deteriorating further after the 1973 oil crisis. Aided by the prestige gained from his successful forecast, Friedman led increasingly successful criticisms against the Keynesian consensus, convincing not only academics and politicians but also much of the general public with his radio and television broadcasts. The academic credibility of Keynesian economics was further undermined by additional criticism from other monetarists trained in the Chicago school of economics, by the Lucas critique and by criticisms from Hayek's Austrian School. So successful were these criticisms that by 1980 Robert Lucas claimed economists would often take offence if described as Keynesians.
Keynesian principles fared increasingly poorly on the practical side of economics – by 1979 they had been displaced by monetarism as the primary influence on Anglo-American economic policy. However, many officials on both sides of the Atlantic retained a preference for Keynes, and in 1984 the Federal Reserve officially discarded monetarism, after which Keynesian principles made a partial comeback as an influence on policy making.
Not all academics accepted the criticism against Keynes – Minsky has argued that Keynesian economics had been debased by excessive mixing with neoclassical ideas from the 1950s, and that it was unfortunate that this branch of economics had even continued to be called "Keynesian". Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner argued it was not so much excessive Keynesian activism that caused the economic problems of the 1970s but the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls, which allowed capital flight from regulated economies into unregulated economies in a fashion similar to Gresham's law phenomenon (where weak currencies undermine strong currencies).
Historian Peter Pugh has stated that a key cause of the economic problems afflicting America in the 1970s was the refusal to raise taxes to finance the Vietnam War, which was against Keynesian advice.
A more typical response was to accept some elements of the criticisms while refining Keynesian economic theories to defend them against arguments that would invalidate the whole Keynesian framework – the resulting body of work largely composing New Keynesian economics. In 1992 Alan Blinder wrote about a "Keynesian Restoration", as work based on Keynes's ideas had to some extent become fashionable once again in academia, though in the mainstream it was highly synthesised with monetarism and other neoclassical thinking. In the world of policy making, free market influences broadly sympathetic to monetarism have remained very strong at government level – in powerful normative institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and US Treasury, and in prominent opinion-forming media such as the Financial Times and The Economist.
Keynesian resurgence 2008–09
The global financial crisis of 2007–08 led to public skepticism about the free market consensus even from some on the economic right. In March 2008, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, announced the death of the dream of global free-market capitalism. In the same month macroeconomist James K. Galbraith used the 25th Annual Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture to launch a sweeping attack against the consensus for monetarist economics and argued that Keynesian economics were far more relevant for tackling the emerging crises.
Economist Robert J. Shiller had begun advocating robust government intervention to tackle the financial crises, specifically citing Keynes.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman also actively argued the case for vigorous Keynesian intervention in the economy in his columns for The New York Times.
Other prominent economic commentators who have argued for Keynesian government intervention to mitigate the financial crisis include George Akerlof, J. Bradford DeLong,
Robert Reich,
and Joseph Stiglitz.
Newspapers and other media have also cited work relating to Keynes by Hyman Minsky, Robert Skidelsky, Donald Markwell
and Axel Leijonhufvud.
A series of major bailouts were pursued during the financial crisis, starting on 7 September with the announcement that the U.S. Government was to nationalise the two government-sponsored enterprises which oversaw most of the U.S. subprime mortgage market – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In October, Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to Keynes as he announced plans for substantial fiscal stimulus to head off the worst effects of recession, in accordance with Keynesian economic thought. Similar policies have been adopted by other governments worldwide.
This is in stark contrast to the action imposed on Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when it was forced by the IMF to close 16 banks at the same time, prompting a bank run.
Much of the post-crisis discussion reflected Keynes's advocacy of international coordination of fiscal or monetary stimulus, and of international economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which many had argued should be reformed as a "new Bretton Woods", and should have been even before the crises broke out.
The IMF and United Nations economists advocated a coordinated international approach to fiscal stimulus.
Donald Markwell argued that in the absence of such an international approach, there would be a risk of worsening international relations and possibly even world war arising from economic factors similar to those present during the depression of the 1930s.
By the end of December 2008, the Financial Times reported that "the sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy is a stunning reversal of the orthodoxy of the past several decades."
In December 2008, Paul Krugman released his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, arguing that economic conditions similar to those that existed during the earlier part of the 20th century had returned, making Keynesian policy prescriptions more relevant than ever. In February 2009 Robert J. Shiller and George Akerlof published Animal Spirits, a book where they argue the current US stimulus package is too small as it does not take into account Keynes's insight on the importance of confidence and expectations in determining the future behaviour of businesspeople and other economic agents.
In the March 2009 speech entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, came out in favour of Keynes's idea of a centrally managed global reserve currency. Zhou argued that it was unfortunate that part of the reason for the Bretton Woods system breaking down was the failure to adopt Keynes's bancor. Zhou proposed a gradual move towards increased use of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs).
Although Zhou's ideas had not been broadly accepted, leaders meeting in April at the 2009 G-20 London summit agreed to allow $250 billion of special drawing rights to be created by the IMF, to be distributed globally. Stimulus plans were credited for contributing to a better than expected economic outlook by both the OECD
and the IMF, in reports published in June and July 2009. Both organisations warned global leaders that recovery was likely to be slow, so counter recessionary measures ought not be rolled back too early.
While the need for stimulus measures was broadly accepted among policy makers, there had been much debate over how to fund the spending. Some leaders and institutions, such as Angela Merkel
and the European Central Bank,
expressed concern over the potential impact on inflation, national debt and the risk that a too large stimulus will create an unsustainable recovery.
Among professional economists the revival of Keynesian economics has been even more divisive. Although many economists, such as George Akerlof, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, and Joseph Stiglitz, supported Keynesian stimulus, others did not believe higher government spending would help the United States economy recover from the Great Recession. Some economists, such as Robert Lucas, questioned the theoretical basis for stimulus packages. Others, like Robert Barro and Gary Becker, say that empirical evidence for beneficial effects from Keynesian stimulus does not exist. However, there is a growing academic literature that shows that fiscal expansion helps an economy grow in the near term, and that certain types of fiscal stimulus are particularly effective.
Overall views
John Maynard Keynes had a drastically different upbringing and motives for his philosophical and economic contributions. Rather than writing with the mindset of being upset at the current system, Keynes instead produced his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with the intention of solving the then current issue which was plaguing the whole world, The Great Depression. When he wrote this, one theme that occurs numerous times is his view on how individuals should save during a time of economic downturn or recession. His answer was that people tend to save more in these times, which he thought could be very harmful if there is no government intervention because individuals and businesses are too scared or have the inability to invest in new ideas and jobs due to the state of the economy. This issue was especially prevalent during The Great Depression because individuals were saving their money and businesses were not investing which was keeping that particular recession around as long as it did and made the unemployment rate go from around 4 percent all the way to around twenty five percent. The individuals were saving with the hopes that the recession would not be very long, which then caused it to get worse due to lack of stimulation in the economy. In order to get out of this cycle, Keynes argued that it was the government alone that would be able to solve this problem and break the United States particularly and the whole world out of The Great Depression. Keynes, normally an endorser of free market capitalism realised that this recession was a special case in that it had potential to be inescapable. The government did eventually do this with president Franklin Roosevelt introducing The New Deal, which was a relief program set up where the federal budget was increased with the purpose of getting the economy out of the recession by injecting money manually from these government aid programs.“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”(Keynes). Keynes is highlighting the fact that people are used to making certain decisions during different times of the business cycle, and also that individuals and businesses needed to change the way they were viewing saving money so that the country could get out of the recession. It is clear that Keynes had a different approach to economic thought from Marx because he was writing with the intention of solving the current world problem, The Great Depression, rather than critiquing the unfairness in the current system.
Praise
On a personal level, Keynes's charm was such that he was generally well received wherever he went – even those who found themselves on the wrong side of his occasionally sharp tongue rarely bore a grudge. Keynes's speech at the closing of the Bretton Woods negotiations was received with a lasting standing ovation, rare in international relations, as the delegates acknowledged the scale of his achievements made despite poor health.
Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek was Keynes's most prominent contemporary critic, with sharply opposing views on the economy. Yet after Keynes's death, he wrote: "He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him." A colleague Nicholas Davenport recalled, "There were deep emotional forces about Maynard ... One could sense his humanity. There was nothing of the cold intellectual about him."
Lionel Robbins, former head of the economics department at the London School of Economics, who engaged in many heated debates with Keynes in the 1930s, had this to say after observing Keynes in early negotiations with the Americans while drawing up plans for Bretton Woods:
Douglas LePan, an official from the Canadian High Commission, wrote:
Bertrand Russell named Keynes one of the most intelligent people he had ever known, commenting:
Keynes's obituary in The Times included the comment: "There is the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes ... He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good."
Critiques
As a man of the centre described by some as having the greatest impact of any 20th-century economist, Keynes attracted considerable criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. In the 1920s, Keynes was seen as anti-establishment and was mainly attacked from the right. In the "red 1930s", many young economists favoured Marxist views, even in Cambridge, and while Keynes was engaging principally with the right to try to persuade them of the merits of more progressive policy, the most vociferous criticism against him came from the left, who saw him as a supporter of capitalism. From the 1950s and onwards, most of the attacks against Keynes have again been from the right.
In 1931 Friedrich Hayek extensively critiqued Keynes's 1930 Treatise on Money. After reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Keynes wrote to Hayek "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it", but concluded the letter with the recommendation: On the pressing issue of the time, whether deficit spending could lift a country from depression, Keynes replied to Hayek's criticism in the following way:
Asked why Keynes expressed "moral and philosophical" agreement with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Hayek stated:
According to some observers, Hayek felt that the post-World War II "Keynesian orthodoxy" gave too much power to the state, and that such policies would lead toward socialism.
While Milton Friedman described The General Theory as "a great book", he argues that its implicit separation of nominal from real magnitudes is neither possible nor desirable. Macroeconomic policy, Friedman argues, can reliably influence only the nominal. He and other monetarists have consequently argued that Keynesian economics can result in stagflation, the combination of low growth and high inflation that developed economies suffered in the early 1970s. More to Friedman's taste was the Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), which he regarded as Keynes's best work because of its focus on maintaining domestic price stability.
Joseph Schumpeter was an economist of the same age as Keynes and one of his main rivals. He was among the first reviewers to argue that Keynes's General Theory was not a general theory, but a special case. He said the work expressed "the attitude of a decaying civilisation". After Keynes's death Schumpeter wrote a brief biographical piece Keynes the Economist – on a personal level he was very positive about Keynes as a man, praising his pleasant nature, courtesy and kindness. He assessed some of Keynes's biographical and editorial work as among the best he'd ever seen. Yet Schumpeter remained critical about Keynes's economics, linking Keynes's childlessness to what Schumpeter saw as an essentially short-term view. He considered Keynes to have a kind of unconscious patriotism that caused him to fail to understand the problems of other nations. For Schumpeter "Practical Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and becomes poisonous as it dies."
"Schumpeter admired and envied Keynes, but when Keynes died in 1946, Schumpeter's obituary gave Keynes the same off-key, perfunctory treatment he would later give Adam Smith in the History of Economic Analysis, the "discredit of not adding a single innovation to the techniques of economic analysis".
President Harry S. Truman was sceptical of Keynesian theorizing: "Nobody can ever convince me that government can spend a dollar that it's not got," he told Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian economist who chaired Truman's Council of Economic Advisers.
Views on race
Keynes sometimes explained the mass murder that took place during the first years of communist Russia on a racial basis, as part of the "Russian and Jewish nature", rather than as a result of the communist rule. After a trip to Russia, he wrote in his Short View of Russia that there is "beastliness on the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied together". He also wrote that "out of the cruelty and stupidity of the Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but (...) beneath the cruelty and stupidity of the New Russia a speck of the ideal may lie hid."
Some critics have sought to show that Keynes had sympathies towards Nazism, and a number of writers have described him as antisemitic. Keynes's private letters contain portraits and descriptions, some of which can be characterized as antisemitic, while others as philosemitic.
Scholars have suggested that these reflect clichés current at the time that he accepted uncritically, rather than any racism. On several occasions Keynes used his influence to help his Jewish friends, most notably when he successfully lobbied for Ludwig Wittgenstein to be allowed residency in the United Kingdom, explicitly in order to rescue him from being deported to Nazi-occupied Austria. Keynes was a supporter of Zionism, serving on committees supporting the cause.
Allegations that he was racist or had totalitarian beliefs have been rejected by Robert Skidelsky and other biographers. Professor Gordon Fletcher wrote that "the suggestion of a link between Keynes and any support of totalitarianism cannot be sustained". Once the aggressive tendencies of the Nazis towards Jews and other minorities had become apparent, Keynes made clear his loathing of Nazism. As a lifelong pacifist he had initially favoured peaceful containment of Nazi Germany, yet he began to advocate a forceful resolution while many conservatives were still arguing for appeasement. After the war started he roundly criticised the Left for losing their nerve to confront Hitler:
Views on inflation
Keynes has been characterised as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation. He had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the two evils, it is "better to disappoint the rentier" than to inflict pain on working class families. He also supported the German hyperinflation as a way to get free from reparations obligations. However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he wrote:
Views on free trade and protectionism
The turning point of the Great Depression
At the beginning of his career, Keynes was an economist close to Alfred Marshall, deeply convinced of the benefits of free trade. From the crisis of 1929 onwards, noting the commitment of the British authorities to defend the gold parity of the pound sterling and the rigidity of nominal wages, he gradually adhered to protectionist measures.
On 5 November 1929, when heard by the Macmillan Committee to bring the British economy out of the crisis, Keynes indicated that the introduction of tariffs on imports would help to rebalance the trade balance. The committee's report states in a section entitled "import control and export aid", that in an economy where there is not full employment, the introduction of tariffs can improve production and employment. Thus the reduction of the trade deficit favours the country's growth.
In January 1930, in the Economic Advisory Council, Keynes proposed the introduction of a system of protection to reduce imports. In the autumn of 1930, he proposed a uniform tariff of 10% on all imports and subsidies of the same rate for all exports. In the Treatise on Money, published in the autumn of 1930, he took up the idea of tariffs or other trade restrictions with the aim of reducing the volume of imports and rebalancing the balance of trade.
On 7 March 1931, in the New Statesman and Nation, he wrote an article entitled Proposal for a Tariff Revenue. He pointed out that the reduction of wages led to a reduction in national demand which constrained markets. Instead, he proposes the idea of an expansionary policy combined with a tariff system to neutralise the effects on the balance of trade. The application of customs tariffs seemed to him "unavoidable, whoever the Chancellor of the Exchequer might be".Thus, for Keynes, an economic recovery policy is only fully effective if the trade deficit is eliminated. He proposed a 15% tax on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and 5% on certain foodstuffs and raw materials, with others needed for exports exempted (wool, cotton).
In 1932, in an article entitled The Pro- and Anti-Tariffs, published in The Listener, he envisaged the protection of farmers and certain sectors such as the automobile and iron and steel industries, considering them indispensable to Britain.
The critique of the theory of comparative advantage
In the post-crisis situation of 1929, Keynes judged the assumptions of the free trade model unrealistic. He criticised, for example, the neoclassical assumption of wage adjustment.
As early as 1930, in a note to the Economic Advisory Council, he doubted the intensity of the gain from specialisation in the case of manufactured goods. While participating in the MacMillan Committee, he admitted that he no longer "believed in a very high degree of national specialisation" and refused to "abandon any industry which is unable, for the moment, to survive". He also criticised the static dimension of the theory of comparative advantage, which, in his view, by fixing comparative advantages definitively, led in practice to a waste of national resources.
In the Daily Mail of 13 March 1931, he called the assumption of perfect sectoral labour mobility "nonsense" since it states that a person made unemployed contributes to a reduction in the wage rate until he finds a job. But for Keynes, this change of job may involve costs (job search, training) and is not always possible. Generally speaking, for Keynes, the assumptions of full employment and automatic return to equilibrium discredit the theory of comparative advantage.
In July 1933, he published an article in the New Statesman and Nation entitled National Self-Sufficiency, in which he criticised the argument of the specialisation of economies, which is the basis of free trade. He thus proposed the search for a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Instead of the specialisation of economies advocated by the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, he prefers the maintenance of a diversity of activities for nations. In it he refutes the principle of peacemaking trade. His vision of trade became that of a system where foreign capitalists compete for new markets. He defends the idea of producing on national soil when possible and reasonable and expresses sympathy for the advocates of protectionism.
He notes in National Self-Sufficiency:
He also writes in National Self-Sufficiency:
Later, Keynes had a written correspondence with James Meade centred on the issue of import restrictions. Keynes and Meade discussed the best choice between quota and tariff. In March 1944 Keynes began a discussion with Marcus Fleming after the latter had written an article entitled Quotas versus depreciation. On this occasion, we see that he has definitely taken a protectionist stance after the Great Depression. He considered that quotas could be more effective than currency depreciation in dealing with external imbalances. Thus, for Keynes, currency depreciation was no longer sufficient and protectionist measures became necessary to avoid trade deficits. To avoid the return of crises due to a self-regulating economic system, it seemed essential to him to regulate trade and stop free trade (deregulation of foreign trade).
He points out that countries that import more than they export weaken their economies. When the trade deficit increases, unemployment rises and GDP slows down. And surplus countries exert a "negative externality" on their trading partners. They get richer at the expense of others and destroy the output of their trading partners. John Maynard Keynes believed that the products of surplus countries should be taxed to avoid trade imbalances. Thus he no longer believes in the theory of comparative advantage (on which free trade is based) which states that the trade deficit does not matter, since trade is mutually beneficial.
This also explains his desire to replace the liberalisation of international trade (Free Trade) with a regulatory system aimed at eliminating trade imbalances in his proposals for the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Views on trade imbalances
Keynes was the principal author of a proposal – the so-called Keynes Plan – for an International Clearing Union. The two governing principles of the plan were that the problem of settling outstanding balances should be solved by "creating" additional "international money", and that debtor and creditor should be treated almost alike as disturbers of equilibrium. In the event, though, the plans were rejected, in part because "American opinion was naturally reluctant to accept the principle of equality of treatment so novel in debtor-creditor relationships".
The new system is not founded on free-trade (liberalisation of foreign trade) but rather on the regulation of international trade, in order to eliminate trade imbalances: the nations with a surplus would have an incentive to reduce it, and in doing so they would automatically clear other nations deficits. He proposed a global bank that would issue its currency – the bancor – which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange and would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus. Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union. He pointed out that surpluses lead to weak global aggregate demand – countries running surpluses exert a "negative externality" on trading partners, and posed, far more than those in deficit, a threat to global prosperity.
In his 1933 Yale Review article "National Self-Sufficiency," he already highlighted the problems created by free trade. His view, supported by many economists and commentators at the time, was that creditor nations may be just as responsible as debtor nations for disequilibrium in exchanges and that both should be under an obligation to bring trade back into a state of balance. Failure for them to do so could have serious consequences. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, then editor of The Economist, "If the economic relationships between nations are not, by one means or another, brought fairly close to balance, then there is no set of financial arrangements that can rescue the world from the impoverishing results of chaos."
These ideas were informed by events prior to the Great Depression when – in the opinion of Keynes and others – international lending, primarily by the U.S., exceeded the capacity of sound investment and so got diverted into non-productive and speculative uses, which in turn invited default and a sudden stop to the process of lending.
Influenced by Keynes, economics texts in the immediate post-war period put a significant emphasis on balance in trade. For example, the second edition of the popular introductory textbook, An Outline of Money, devoted the last three of its ten chapters to questions of foreign exchange management and in particular the "problem of balance". However, in more recent years, since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the increasing influence of Monetarist schools of thought in the 1980s, and particularly in the face of large sustained trade imbalances, these concerns – and particularly concerns about the destabilising effects of large trade surpluses – have largely disappeared from mainstream economics discourse and Keynes's insights have slipped from view. They are receiving some attention again in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08.
Personal life
Relationships
Keynes's early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men. Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan. Keynes was open about his affairs, and from 1901 to 1915 kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters. Keynes's relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortunate, as Macmillan's company first published his tract Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell. The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey, though they were for the most part love rivals, not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse, and as with Grant, fell out with a jealous Strachey for it. Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".
Political opponents have used Keynes's sexuality to attack his academic work. One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long-term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.
Keynes's friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began pursuing affairs with women, demonstrating himself to be bisexual. Ray Costelloe (who later married Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes. In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take."
Marriage
In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen "very much in love" with Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina and one of the stars of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the early years of his courtship, he maintained an affair with a younger man, Sebastian Sprott, in tandem with Lopokova, but eventually chose Lopokova exclusively. They were married in 1925, with Keynes's former lover Duncan Grant as best man. "What a marriage of beauty and brains, the fair Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes" was said at the time. Keynes later commented to Strachey that beauty and intelligence were rarely found in the same person, and that only in Duncan Grant had he found the combination. The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes "a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied".
The couple hoped to have children but this did not happen.
Among Keynes's Bloomsbury friends, Lopokova was, at least initially, subjected to criticism for her manners, mode of conversation, and supposedly humble social origins – the last of the ostensible causes being particularly noted in the letters of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf. In her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf bases the character of Rezia Warren Smith on Lopokova. E. M. Forster later wrote in contrition about "Lydia Keynes, every whose word should be recorded": "How we all used to underestimate her".
Support for the arts
Keynes thought that the pursuit of money for its own sake was a pathological condition, and that the proper aim of work is to provide leisure. He wanted shorter working hours and longer holidays for all.
Keynes was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution to become one of the major British stages outside London.
Keynes's interest in classical opera and dance led him to support the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadler's Wells. During the war, as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the war, Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was its founding chairman in 1946. From the start, the two organisations that received the largest grants from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells.
Keynes built up a substantial collection of fine art, including works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat (some of which can now be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum). He enjoyed collecting books; he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. In part on the basis of these papers, Keynes wrote of Newton as "the last of the magicians."
Philosophical views
Keynes, like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, was greatly influenced by the philosophy of G.E. Moore, which in 1938 he described as "still my religion under the surface". According to Moore, states of mind were the only valuable things in themselves, the most important being "the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects". Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote of how Virginia Woolf, Keynes, and T. S. Eliot discussed religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality.
Keynes may have been confirmed, but according to Cambridge University he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death. According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind" but also added that he came to "value it for social and moral reasons" later in life. Another biographer writes that he "broke the family faith and became a 'ferocious agnostic during his time at Eton. One Cambridge acquaintance remembered him as "an atheist with a devotion to King's chapel". At Cambridge, he was strongly associated with the Cambridge Heretics Society, an avowed atheist group which promoted secularism and humanism.
Investments
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000 – equivalent to about £20.5 million ($27.1 million) in 2018. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various charities and philanthropies, and his ethic which made him reluctant to sell on a falling market, in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump.
Keynes managed the endowment of King's College, Cambridge starting in the 1920s, initially with an unsuccessful strategy based on market timing but later shifting to focus in the publicly traded stock of small and medium size companies that paid large dividends. This was a controversial decision at the time, as stocks were considered high-risk and the centuries-old endowment had traditionally been invested in agricultural land and fixed income assets like bonds. Keynes was granted permission to invest a small minority of assets in stocks, and his adroit management resulted this portion of the endowment growing to become the majority of the endowment's assets. The active component of his portfolio outperformed a British equity index by an average of 6% to 8% a year over a quarter century, earning him favourable mention by later investors such as Warren Buffett and George Soros. Joel Tillinghast of Fidelity Investments describes Keynes as an early practitioner of value investing, a school of thought formalized in the U.S. by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia Business School during the 1920s and '30s. However, Keynes is believed to have developed his ideas independently. Keynes also regarded as a pioneer of financial diversification as he recognized the importance of holding assets with "opposed risks" as he wrote "since they are likely to move in opposite directions when there are general fluctuations"; and also as an early international investor who avoided home country bias by investing substantially in stocks outside the United Kingdom. Ken Fisher characterized Keynes as an exception to the rule that economists usually make horrible investors.
Political life
Keynes was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from about 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasions in 1920. From 1926, when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economic policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third-party status by the growing workers-oriented Labour Party.
In 1939 Keynes had the option to enter Parliament as an independent MP with the University of Cambridge seat. A by-election for the seat was to be held due to the illness of an elderly Tory, and the master of Magdalene College had obtained agreement that none of the major parties would field a candidate if Keynes chose to stand. Keynes declined the invitation as he felt he would wield greater influence on events if he remained a free agent.
Keynes was a proponent of eugenics. He served as director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. As late as 1946, shortly before his death, Keynes declared eugenics to be "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists."
Keynes once remarked that "the youth had no religion save communism and this was worse than nothing." Marxism "was founded upon nothing better than a misunderstanding of Ricardo", and, given time, he (Keynes) "would deal thoroughly with the Marxists" and other economists to solve the economic problems their theories "threaten to cause".
In 1931 Keynes had the following to say on Leninism:
Keynes was a firm supporter of women's rights and in 1932 became vice-chairman of the Marie Stopes Society which provided birth control education. He also campaigned against job discrimination against women and unequal pay. He was an outspoken campaigner for reform of the laws against homosexuality.
Heraldic arms
Death
Throughout his life, Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends; even when his health was poor, he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college. Helping to set up the Bretton Woods system, he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. In 1946, Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal. They began during negotiations for the Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as "absolute hell". A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946, at the age of 62. Against his wishes (he wanted his ashes to be deposited in the crypt at King's), his ashes were scattered on the Downs above Tilton.
Both of Keynes's parents outlived him: his father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and his mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010), a physiologist, and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003), an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes had no children; his widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981.
Cultural representations
In John Buchan's novel Island of Sheep (1936) the character of the financier Barralty is based on Keynes.
In the film Wittgenstein (1993), directed by Derek Jarman, Keynes was played by John Quentin.
The docudrama Paris 1919, based around Margaret MacMillan's book, featured Paul Bandey as Keynes.
In the BBC series about the Bloomsbury Group, Life In Squares, Keynes was portrayed by Edmund Kingsley.
The novel Mr Keynes' Revolution (2020) by E. J. Barnes is about Keynes' life in the 1920s.
Love Letters, based on the correspondence of Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, was performed by Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham-Carter at Charleston in 2021.
Publications
Books
1913 Indian Currency and Finance
1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace
1921 A Treatise on Probability
1922 Revision of the Treaty
1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform
1926 The End of Laissez-Faire
1930 A Treatise on Money
1931 Essays in Persuasion
1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
1940 How to Pay for the War: A radical plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
1949 Two Memoirs. Ed. by David Garnett (On Carl Melchior and G. E. Moore.)
Articles and pamphlets
(A partial list.)
1915 The Economics of War in Germany
1922 The Inflation of Currency as a Method of Taxation
1925 Am I a Liberal?
1926 Laissez-Faire and Communism
1929 Can Lloyd George Do It?
1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
1931 The End of the Gold Standard (Sunday Express)
1931 The Great Slump of 1930
1933 The Means to Prosperity
1933 An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (New York Times)
1933 Essays in Biography
1937 The General Theory of Employment
See also
References
Notes and citations
Sources
Backhouse, Roger E. and Bateman, Bradley W.. Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes. 2011
Barnett, Vincent. John Maynard Keynes. London: Routledge, 2013. .
Beaudreau, Bernard C.. The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes: How the Second Industrial Revolution Passed Great Britain By. iUniverse, 2006,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury, 2009,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist, Bloomsbury Press, 2009
Markwell, Donald. John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace. Oxford University Press, 2006. . .
Markwell, Donald. Keynes and Australia . Reserve Bank of Australia, 2000.
Keynes, Milo (ed). Essays on John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge University Press, 1975. .
Moggridge, Donald Edward. Keynes. Macmillan, 1980. .
Patinkin, Don. "Keynes, John Maynard." In: The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1987, pp. 19–41. . .
Schuker, Stephen A. "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33." Princeton Studies in International Finance, No. 61, 1988.
Schuker, Stephen A. "J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations." Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 25, Nos. 3/4, 2014. .
Blaug, Mark. "Recent Biographies of Keynes." Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, September 1994, pp. 1204-1215. .
Buchanan, James M. and Richard E. Wagner. Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 8. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008.
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Davidson, Paul. John Maynard Keynes (Great Thinkers in Economics). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. .
Dimand, Robert W. and Harald Hagemann, eds. The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes (Edward Elgar, 20190 + 670 pp. online review
Harrod, R. F.. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. Macmillan, 1951. .
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. (2005)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920. (1986)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (1994)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946.
Temin, Peter, and David Vines. Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy. MIT Press, 2014.
Wapshott, Nicholas. Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (2011)
Primary sources
External links
Professor Robert Skidelsky explains Keynes theories video
Professor Robert Skidelsky on economist Keynes video
Churchill, Keynes & The Gold Standard – UK Parliament Living Heritage
Correspondence with John Maynard, Baron Keynes, four volumes held at The British Library
Treaty of Versailles & Keynes – UK Parliament Living Heritage
John Maynard Keynes on Google Scholar
Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926)
Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Keynes, The raising of prices (1933)
Keynes, National Self-Sufficiency (1933)
Keynes, An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (1933)
Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
Interactive E-Book John Maynard Keynes: The Lives of a Mind (2016). The Keynes Centre at University College Cork
1883 births
1946 deaths
20th-century British writers
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LGBT philosophers | false | [
"Stageit is a web-based performance venue headquartered in Hollywood, California. It hosts paid performances by musical artists who perform live via webcam. Artists choose when they want to perform, for how long, and how much they want to charge. The performances are not archived or duplicated for distribution.\n\nStageit currency \nIn order to purchase tickets to Stageit performances or to tip, users must first purchase Stageit's currency, called \"notes.\" One Stageit \"note\" is equivalent to ten cents. The performing artist decides how many notes a performance will cost.\n\nLive performances \nOnce a user purchases a ticket to a Stageit performance, they can join other audience members awaiting showtime in an online chat, which continues during the performance itself. Performances on Stageit last for up to thirty minutes. At the end of that time, artists are given the option to perform an additional twenty-minute encore set.\n\nNotable artists \nNotable Stageit artists include:\n\n Jimmy Buffett\n Sara Bareilles\n Indigo Girls \n Tom Morello \n Jason Mraz \n Bonnie Raitt \n Blood on the Dance Floor \n Art Smith \n Jake Owen \n John Oates \n Hawthorne Heights\n Jordan Rudess \n Matt Nathanson \n Terry Bozzio \n Lee DeWyze \n Kottonmouth Kings \n Better Than Ezra \n Ryan Cabrera \n David Banner \n Jay Sean\n Kris Allen \n Joshua Radin \n Trey Songz \n Rick Springfield \n Plain White T's\n Debbie Gibson\n Korn\n Lisa Loeb\n Bowling For Soup \n Howie D \n Pomplamoose \n Tiffany Alvord \n Lacuna Coil \n Mayday Parade \n Less Than Jake \n Stryper \n The Ready Set \n Bob Schneider \n Tyler Ward \n Tyler Hilton\n Kane\n Justin Furstenfeld\n\nSee also\nSpreecast\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\nAmerican music websites",
"The Tripartite Agreement was an international monetary agreement entered into by the United States, France, and Great Britain in September 1936. The purpose of the agreement was to stabilize their nations' currencies both at home and in the international exchange markets after the collapse of the international monetary system during the Great Depression.\n\nHistory\nDuring the Great Depression, international monetary cooperation collapsed among liberal states. Following suspension of the gold standard by Great Britain in 1931 and the United States in 1933, a serious imbalance developed between their currencies and those of the gold bloc countries, particularly France. The devaluation of the dollar and the pound sterling raised import prices and lowered export prices in the United States and Great Britain.\n\nIn the United States and Great Britain sound money advocates were divided between those favoring reforms to stabilize the currency and others who called for an end to the gold standard and a managed currency.\n\nAgreement\nThe Tripartite Agreement was informal and provisional. Subscribing nations agreed to refrain from competitive depreciation to maintain currency values at existing levels, as long as that attempt did not interfere seriously with internal prosperity. France devalued its currency as part of the agreement. The remaining gold bloc nations, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, also subscribed to the agreement.\n\nSubscribing nations agreed to sell one another gold in the seller's currency at a price agreed in advance. The agreement stabilized exchange rates, ending the currency war of 1931 to 1936,\nbut it failed to help the recovery of world trade.\n\nSee also\nGold standard\nLondon Gold Pool\n\nReferences\n\nForeign exchange market\nGold standard\n1936 in economics"
]
|
[
"John Maynard Keynes",
"Neo-Keynesian economics",
"What is Neo-Keynesian economics?",
"they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics,",
"What is Keynesian analysis?",
"The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies.",
"How did he want currency managed?",
"He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions - a world central bank and the International Clearing Union."
]
| C_9bf402fc7c2f4638b09e96b6644fd310_1 | Were his economic views popular? | 4 | Were John Maynard Keynes' economic views popular? | John Maynard Keynes | The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments - the convertibility of banknotes into gold - but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was absolutely necessary. In January 1915, Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble - with difficulty - a small supply of Spanish pesetas. The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive. On the introduction of military conscription in 1916 he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work. In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold. During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches. As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions - a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the final outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proved correct by events. The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase." In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years. By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism. In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. CANNOTANSWER | By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world | John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and that labour costs and wages were rigid downwards, which means the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in late 1936. By the late 1930s, leading Western economies had begun adopting Keynes's policy recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946. As a leader of the British delegation, Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II but was overruled by the American delegation on several aspects.
Keynes's influence started to wane in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists, who disputed the ability of government to favourably regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy. However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 sparked a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008 by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.
When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it stated that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Early life and education
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, to an upper-middle-class family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge and his mother, Florence Ada Keynes, a local social reformer. Keynes was the first born, and was followed by two more children – Margaret Neville Keynes in 1885 and Geoffrey Keynes in 1887. Geoffrey became a surgeon and Margaret married the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill, although she had many affairs with women, notably Eglantyne Jebb.
According to the economic historian and biographer Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's parents were loving and attentive. They remained in the same house throughout their lives, where the children were always welcome to return. Keynes received considerable support from his father, including expert coaching to help him pass his scholarship exams and financial help both as a young man and when his assets were nearly wiped out at the onset of Great Depression in 1929. Keynes's mother made her children's interests her own, and according to Skidelsky, "because she could grow up with her children, they never outgrew home".
In January 1889 at the age of five and a half, Keynes started at the kindergarten of the Perse School for Girls for five mornings a week. He quickly showed a talent for arithmetic, but his health was poor leading to several long absences. He was tutored at home by a governess, Beatrice Mackintosh, and his mother. In January 1892, at eight and a half, he started as a day pupil at St Faith's preparatory school. By 1894, Keynes was top of his class and excelling at mathematics. In 1896, St Faith's headmaster, Ralph Goodchild, wrote that Keynes was "head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school" and was confident that Keynes could get a scholarship to Eton.
In 1897, Keynes won a King's Scholarship to Eton College, where he displayed talent in a wide range of subjects, particularly mathematics, classics and history: in 1901, he was awarded the Tomline Prize for mathematics. At Eton, Keynes experienced the first "love of his life" in Dan Macmillan, older brother of the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Despite his middle-class background, Keynes mixed easily with upper-class pupils.
In 1902 Keynes left Eton for King's College, Cambridge, after receiving a scholarship for this also to read mathematics. Alfred Marshall begged Keynes to become an economist,
although Keynes's own inclinations drew him towards philosophy – especially the ethical system of G. E. Moore. Keynes was elected to the University Pitt Club and was an active member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students. Like many members, Keynes retained a bond to the club after graduating and continued to attend occasional meetings throughout his life. Before leaving Cambridge, Keynes became the President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Liberal Club. He was said to be an atheist.
In May 1904, he received a first-class BA in mathematics. Aside from a few months spent on holidays with family and friends, Keynes continued to involve himself with the university over the next two years. He took part in debates, further studied philosophy and attended economics lectures informally as a graduate student for one term, which constituted his only formal education in the subject. He took civil service exams in 1906.
The economist Harry Johnson wrote that the optimism imparted by Keynes's early life is a key to understanding his later thinking.
Keynes was always confident he could find a solution to whatever problem he turned his attention to and retained a lasting faith in the ability of government officials to do good.
Keynes's optimism was also cultural, in two senses: he was of the last generation raised by an empire still at the height of its power and was also of the last generation who felt entitled to govern by culture, rather than by expertise. According to Skidelsky, the sense of cultural unity current in Britain from the 19th century to the end of World War I provided a framework with which the well-educated could set various spheres of knowledge in relation to each other and life, enabling them to confidently draw from different fields when addressing practical problems.
Career
In October 1906 Keynes's Civil Service career began as a clerk in the India Office. He enjoyed his work at first, but by 1908 had become bored and resigned his position to return to Cambridge and work on probability theory, through a lectureship in economics at first funded personally by economists Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou; he became a fellow of King's College in 1909.
By 1909 Keynes had also published his first professional economics article in The Economic Journal, about the effect of a recent global economic downturn on India. He founded the Political Economy Club, a weekly discussion group. Keynes's earnings rose further as he began to take on pupils for private tuition.
In 1911 Keynes was made the editor of The Economic Journal. By 1913 he had published his first book, Indian Currency and Finance. He was then appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance – the same topic as his book – where Keynes showed considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems. His written work was published under the name "J M Keynes", though to his family and friends he was known as Maynard. (His father, John Neville Keynes, was also always known by his middle name).
First World War
The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments – the convertibility of banknotes into gold – but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was necessary.
In January 1915 Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble – with difficulty – a small supply of Spanish pesetas.
The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive.
On the introduction of military conscription in 1916, he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work.
In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that had a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold.
Versailles peace conference
Keynes's experience at Versailles was influential in shaping his future outlook, yet it was not a successful one. Keynes's main interest had been in trying to prevent Germany's compensation payments being set so high it would traumatize innocent German people, damage the nation's ability to pay and sharply limit its ability to buy exports from other countries – thus hurting not just Germany's economy but that of the wider world.
Unfortunately for Keynes, conservative powers in the coalition that emerged from the 1918 coupon election were able to ensure that both Keynes himself and the Treasury were largely excluded from formal high-level talks concerning reparations. Their place was taken by the Heavenly Twins – the judge Lord Sumner and the banker Lord Cunliffe whose nickname derived from the "astronomically" high war compensation they wanted to demand from Germany. Keynes was forced to try to exert influence mostly from behind the scenes.
The three principal players at Versailles were Britain's Lloyd George, France's Clemenceau and America's President Wilson.
It was only Lloyd George to whom Keynes had much direct access; until the 1918 election he had some sympathy with Keynes's view but while campaigning had found his speeches were only well received by the public if he promised to harshly punish Germany, and had therefore committed his delegation to extracting high payments.
Lloyd George did, however, win some loyalty from Keynes with his actions at the Paris conference by intervening against the French to ensure the dispatch of much-needed food supplies to German civilians. Clemenceau also pushed for substantial reparations, though not as high as those proposed by the British, while on security grounds, France argued for an even more severe settlement than Britain.
Wilson initially favoured relatively lenient treatment of Germany – he feared too harsh conditions could foment the rise of extremism and wanted Germany to be left sufficient capital to pay for imports. To Keynes's dismay, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to pressure Wilson to agree to include pensions in the reparations bill.
Towards the end of the conference, Keynes came up with a plan that he argued would not only help Germany and other impoverished central European powers but also be good for the world economy as a whole. It involved the radical writing down of war debts, which would have had the possible effect of increasing international trade all round, but at the same time thrown over two thirds of the cost of European reconstruction on the United States.
Lloyd George agreed it might be acceptable to the British electorate. However, America was against the plan; the US was then the largest creditor, and by this time Wilson had started to believe in the merits of a harsh peace and thought that his country had already made excessive sacrifices. Hence despite his best efforts, the result of the conference was a treaty which disgusted Keynes both on moral and economic grounds and led to his resignation from the Treasury.
In June 1919 he turned down an offer to become chairman of the British Bank of Northern Commerce, a job that promised a salary of £2000 in return for a morning per week of work.
Keynes's analysis on the predicted damaging effects of the treaty appeared in the highly influential book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. This work has been described as Keynes's best book, where he was able to bring all his gifts to bear – his passion as well as his skill as an economist. In addition to economic analysis, the book contained appeals to the reader's sense of compassion:
Also present was striking imagery such as "year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled" along with bold predictions which were later justified by events:
Keynes's followers assert that his predictions of disaster were borne out when the German economy suffered the hyperinflation of 1923, and again by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the outbreak of the Second World War. However, historian Ruth Henig claims that "most historians of the Paris peace conference now take the view that, in economic terms, the treaty was not unduly harsh on Germany and that, while obligations and damages were inevitably much stressed in the debates at Paris to satisfy electors reading the daily newspapers, the intention was quietly to give Germany substantial help towards paying her bills, and to meet many of the German objections by amendments to the way the reparations schedule was in practice carried out".
Only a small fraction of reparations was ever paid. In fact, historian Stephen A. Schuker demonstrates in American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33, that the capital inflow from American loans substantially exceeded German out payments so that, on a net basis, Germany received support equal to four times the amount of the post-Second World War Marshall Plan.
Schuker also shows that, in the years after Versailles, Keynes became an informal reparations adviser to the German government, wrote one of the major German reparation notes, and supported the hyperinflation on political grounds. Nevertheless, The Economic Consequences of the Peace gained Keynes international fame, even though it also caused him to be regarded as anti-establishment – it was not until after the outbreak of the Second World War that Keynes was offered a directorship of a major British Bank, or an acceptable offer to return to government with a formal job. However, Keynes was still able to influence government policy making through his network of contacts, his published works and by serving on government committees; this included attending high-level policy meetings as a consultant.
In the 1920s
Keynes had completed his A Treatise on Probability before the war but published it in 1921. The work was a notable contribution to the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of probability theory, championing the important view that probabilities were no more or less than truth values intermediate between simple truth and falsity. Keynes developed the first upper-lower probabilistic interval approach to probability in chapters 15 and 17 of this book, as well as having developed the first decision weight approach with his conventional coefficient of risk and weight, c, in chapter 26. In addition to his academic work, the 1920s saw Keynes active as a journalist selling his work internationally and working in London as a financial consultant. In 1924 Keynes wrote an obituary for his former tutor
Alfred Marshall which Joseph Schumpeter called "the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read."
Mary Paley Marshall was "entranced" by the memorial, while Lytton Strachey rated it as one of Keynes's "best works".
In 1922 Keynes continued to advocate reduction of German reparations with A Revision of the Treaty. He attacked the post-World War I deflation policies with A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923 – a trenchant argument that countries should target stability of domestic prices, avoiding deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate. Britain suffered from high unemployment through most of the 1920s, leading Keynes to recommend the depreciation of sterling to boost jobs by making British exports more affordable. From 1924 he was also advocating a fiscal response, where the government could create jobs by spending on public works. During the 1920s Keynes's pro stimulus views had only limited effect on policy makers and mainstream academic opinion – according to Hyman Minsky one reason was that at this time his theoretical justification was "muddled". The Tract had also called for an end to the gold standard. Keynes advised it was no longer a net benefit for countries such as Britain to participate in the gold standard, as it ran counter to the need for domestic policy autonomy. It could force countries to pursue deflationary policies at exactly the time when expansionary measures were called for to address rising unemployment. The Treasury and Bank of England were still in favour of the gold standard and in 1925 they were able to convince the then Chancellor Winston Churchill to re-establish it, which had a depressing effect on British industry. Keynes responded by writing The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill and continued to argue against the gold standard until Britain finally abandoned it in 1931.
During the Great Depression
Keynes had begun a theoretical work to examine the relationship between unemployment, money, and prices back in the 1920s. The work, Treatise on Money, was published in 1930 in two volumes. A central idea of the work was that if the amount of money being saved exceeds the amount being invested – which can happen if interest rates are too high – then unemployment will rise. This is in part a result of people not wanting to spend too high a proportion of what employers pay out, making it difficult, in aggregate, for employers to make a profit. Another key theme of the book is the unreliability of financial indices for representing an accurate – or indeed meaningful – indication of general shifts in purchasing power of currencies over time. In particular, he criticised the justification of Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 at pre-war valuation by reference to the wholesale price index. He argued that the index understated the effects of changes in the costs of services and labour.
Keynes was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures during the Great Depression. He believed that budget deficits during recessions were a good thing and a natural product of an economic slump. He wrote, "For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature's remedy, so to speak, for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as the present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill."
At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly counter-cyclical public spending. The Means to Prosperity contains one of the first mentions of the multiplier effect. While it was addressed chiefly to the British Government, it also contained advice for other nations affected by the global recession. A copy was sent to the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other world leaders. The work was taken seriously by both the American and British governments, and according to Robert Skidelsky, helped pave the way for the later acceptance of Keynesian ideas, though it had little immediate practical influence. In the 1933 London Economic Conference opinions remained too diverse for a unified course of action to be agreed upon.
Keynesian-like policies were adopted by Sweden and Germany, but Sweden was seen as too small to command much attention, and Keynes was deliberately silent about the successful efforts of Germany as he was dismayed by its imperialist ambitions and its treatment of Jews. Apart from Great Britain, Keynes's attention was primarily focused on the United States. In 1931, he received considerable support for his views on counter-cyclical public spending in Chicago, then America's foremost center for economic views alternative to the mainstream. However, orthodox economic opinion remained generally hostile regarding fiscal intervention to mitigate the depression, until just before the outbreak of war. In late 1933 Keynes was persuaded by Felix Frankfurter to address President Roosevelt directly, which he did by letters and face to face in 1934, after which the two men spoke highly of each other. However, according to Skidelsky, the consensus is that Keynes's efforts began to have a more than marginal influence on US economic policy only after 1939.
Keynes's magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936. It was researched and indexed by one of Keynes's favourite students, later the economist David Bensusan-Butt. The work served as a theoretical justification for the interventionist policies Keynes favoured for tackling a recession. Although Keynes stated in his preface that his General Theory was only secondarily concerned with the “applications of this theory to practice,” the circumstances of its publication were such that his suggestions shaped the course of the 1930s. In addition, Keynes introduced the world to a new interpretation of taxation: since the legal tender is now defined by the state, inflation becomes “taxation by currency depreciation”. This hidden tax meant a) that the standard of value should be governed by deliberate decision; and (b) that it was possible to maintain a middle course between deflation and inflation. This novel interpretation was inspired by the desperate search for control over the economy which permeated the academic world after the Depression. The General Theory challenged the earlier neoclassical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. In doing so Keynes was partly setting himself against his former teachers Marshall and Pigou. Keynes believed the classical theory was a "special case" that applied only to the particular conditions present in the 19th century, his theory being the general one. Classical economists had believed in Say's law, which, simply put, states that "supply creates its demand", and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs. An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness – the recognition that in reality workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue that it is rational for them to do so. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of "aggregate demand" and "aggregate supply" may lead to stable unemployment equilibria – and in those cases, it is on the state, not the market, that economies must depend for their salvation.
The General Theory argues that demand, not supply, is the key variable governing the overall level of economic activity. Aggregate demand, which equals total un-hoarded income in a society, is defined by the sum of consumption and investment. In a state of unemployment and unused production capacity, one can enhance employment and total income only by first increasing expenditures for either consumption or investment. Without government intervention to increase expenditure, an economy can remain trapped in a low-employment equilibrium. The demonstration of this possibility has been described as the revolutionary formal achievement of the work.
The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. "Let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth," he wrote in 1928. "With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments. It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them."
The General Theory is often viewed as the foundation of modern macroeconomics. Few senior American economists agreed with Keynes through most of the 1930s.
Yet his ideas were soon to achieve widespread acceptance, with eminent American professors such as Alvin Hansen agreeing with the General Theory before the outbreak of World War II.
Keynes himself had only limited participation in the theoretical debates that followed the publication of the General Theory as he suffered a heart attack in 1937, requiring him to take long periods of rest. Among others, Hyman Minsky and Post-Keynesian economists have argued that as result, Keynes's ideas were diluted by those keen to compromise with classical economists or to render his concepts with mathematical models like the IS–LM model (which, they argue, distort Keynes's ideas). Keynes began to recover in 1939, but for the rest of his life his professional energies were directed largely towards the practical side of economics: the problems of ensuring optimum allocation of resources for the war efforts, post-war negotiations with America, and the new international financial order that was presented at the Bretton Woods Conference.
In the General Theory and later, Keynes responded to the socialists who argued, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, that capitalism caused war. He argued that if capitalism were managed domestically and internationally (with coordinated international Keynesian policies, an international monetary system that did not pit the interests of countries against one another, and a high degree of freedom of trade), then this system of managed capitalism could promote peace rather than conflict between countries. His plans during World War II for post-war international economic institutions and policies (which contributed to the creation at Bretton Woods of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and later to the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and eventually the World Trade Organization) were aimed to give effect to this vision.
Although Keynes has been widely criticised – especially by members of the Chicago school of economics – for advocating irresponsible government spending financed by borrowing, in fact he was a firm believer in balanced budgets and regarded the proposals for programs of public works during the Great Depression as an exceptional measure to meet the needs of exceptional circumstances.
Second World War
During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post-war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches.
As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions – a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proven correct by events.
The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase."
Postwar
After the war, Keynes continued to represent the United Kingdom in international negotiations despite his deteriorating health. He succeeded in obtaining preferential terms from the United States for new and outstanding debts to facilitate the rebuilding of the British economy.
Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of social economics and advisor to the Bank of England, of his hopes that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" could help Britain out of the economic hole it was in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."
Legacy
Keynesian ascendancy 1939–79
From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes provided the main inspiration for economic policymakers in Europe, America and much of the rest of the world. While economists and policymakers had become increasingly won over to Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after the outbreak of World War II that governments started to borrow money for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (then a US government official charged with controlling inflation), in the rebound of the economy from wartime spending, "one could not have had a better demonstration of the Keynesian ideas."
The Keynesian Revolution was associated with the rise of modern liberalism in the West during the post-war period. Keynesian ideas became so popular that some scholars point to Keynes as representing the ideals of modern liberalism, as Adam Smith represented the ideals of classical liberalism. After the war, Winston Churchill attempted to check the rise of Keynesian policy-making in the United Kingdom and used rhetoric critical of the mixed economy in his 1945 election campaign. Despite his popularity as a war hero, Churchill suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee, whose government's economic policy continued to be influenced by Keynes's ideas.
Neo-Keynesian economics
In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years.
By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism.
In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Multiplier
The concept of multiplier was first developed by R. F. Kahn in his article "The relation of home investment to unemployment" In the economic journal of June 1931. Kahn multiplier was the employment multiplier while as Keynes took the idea from Kahn and formulated the investment multiplier.
Keynesian economics out of favour 1979–2007
Keynesian economics were officially discarded by the British Government in 1979, but forces had begun to gather against Keynes's ideas over 30 years earlier. Friedrich Hayek had formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, with the explicit intention of nurturing intellectual currents to one day displace Keynesianism and other similar influences. Its members included the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises along with the then young Milton Friedman. Initially the society had little impact on the wider world – according to Hayek it was as if Keynes had been raised to sainthood after his death and that people refused to allow his work to be questioned.
Friedman however began to emerge as a formidable critic of Keynesian economics from the mid-1950s, and especially after his 1963 publication of A Monetary History of the United States.
On the practical side of economic life, "big government" had appeared to be firmly entrenched in the 1950s, but the balance began to shift towards the power of private interests in the 1960s. Keynes had written against the folly of allowing "decadent and selfish" speculators and financiers the kind of influence they had enjoyed after World War I. For two decades after World War II the public opinion was strongly against private speculators, the disparaging label "Gnomes of Zürich" being typical of how they were described during this period. International speculation was severely restricted by the capital controls in place after Bretton Woods. According to the journalists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, 1968 was the pivotal year when power shifted in favour of private agents such as currency speculators. As the key 1968 event Elliott and Atkinson picked out America's suspension of the conversion of the dollar into gold except on request of foreign governments, which they identified as the beginning of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system.
Criticisms of Keynes's ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s, as they were then able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. Keynes himself included few formulas and no explicit mathematical models in his General Theory. For economists such as Hyman Minsky, Keynes's limited use of mathematics was partly the result of his scepticism about whether phenomena as inherently uncertain as economic activity could ever be adequately captured by mathematical models. Nevertheless, many models were developed by Keynesian economists, with a famous example being the Phillips curve which predicted an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. It implied that unemployment could be reduced by government stimulus with a calculable cost to inflation. In 1968, Milton Friedman published a paper arguing that the fixed relationship implied by the Philips curve did not exist.
Friedman suggested that sustained Keynesian policies could lead to both unemployment and inflation rising at once – a phenomenon that soon became known as stagflation. In the early 1970s stagflation appeared in both the US and Britain just as Friedman had predicted, with economic conditions deteriorating further after the 1973 oil crisis. Aided by the prestige gained from his successful forecast, Friedman led increasingly successful criticisms against the Keynesian consensus, convincing not only academics and politicians but also much of the general public with his radio and television broadcasts. The academic credibility of Keynesian economics was further undermined by additional criticism from other monetarists trained in the Chicago school of economics, by the Lucas critique and by criticisms from Hayek's Austrian School. So successful were these criticisms that by 1980 Robert Lucas claimed economists would often take offence if described as Keynesians.
Keynesian principles fared increasingly poorly on the practical side of economics – by 1979 they had been displaced by monetarism as the primary influence on Anglo-American economic policy. However, many officials on both sides of the Atlantic retained a preference for Keynes, and in 1984 the Federal Reserve officially discarded monetarism, after which Keynesian principles made a partial comeback as an influence on policy making.
Not all academics accepted the criticism against Keynes – Minsky has argued that Keynesian economics had been debased by excessive mixing with neoclassical ideas from the 1950s, and that it was unfortunate that this branch of economics had even continued to be called "Keynesian". Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner argued it was not so much excessive Keynesian activism that caused the economic problems of the 1970s but the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls, which allowed capital flight from regulated economies into unregulated economies in a fashion similar to Gresham's law phenomenon (where weak currencies undermine strong currencies).
Historian Peter Pugh has stated that a key cause of the economic problems afflicting America in the 1970s was the refusal to raise taxes to finance the Vietnam War, which was against Keynesian advice.
A more typical response was to accept some elements of the criticisms while refining Keynesian economic theories to defend them against arguments that would invalidate the whole Keynesian framework – the resulting body of work largely composing New Keynesian economics. In 1992 Alan Blinder wrote about a "Keynesian Restoration", as work based on Keynes's ideas had to some extent become fashionable once again in academia, though in the mainstream it was highly synthesised with monetarism and other neoclassical thinking. In the world of policy making, free market influences broadly sympathetic to monetarism have remained very strong at government level – in powerful normative institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and US Treasury, and in prominent opinion-forming media such as the Financial Times and The Economist.
Keynesian resurgence 2008–09
The global financial crisis of 2007–08 led to public skepticism about the free market consensus even from some on the economic right. In March 2008, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, announced the death of the dream of global free-market capitalism. In the same month macroeconomist James K. Galbraith used the 25th Annual Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture to launch a sweeping attack against the consensus for monetarist economics and argued that Keynesian economics were far more relevant for tackling the emerging crises.
Economist Robert J. Shiller had begun advocating robust government intervention to tackle the financial crises, specifically citing Keynes.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman also actively argued the case for vigorous Keynesian intervention in the economy in his columns for The New York Times.
Other prominent economic commentators who have argued for Keynesian government intervention to mitigate the financial crisis include George Akerlof, J. Bradford DeLong,
Robert Reich,
and Joseph Stiglitz.
Newspapers and other media have also cited work relating to Keynes by Hyman Minsky, Robert Skidelsky, Donald Markwell
and Axel Leijonhufvud.
A series of major bailouts were pursued during the financial crisis, starting on 7 September with the announcement that the U.S. Government was to nationalise the two government-sponsored enterprises which oversaw most of the U.S. subprime mortgage market – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In October, Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to Keynes as he announced plans for substantial fiscal stimulus to head off the worst effects of recession, in accordance with Keynesian economic thought. Similar policies have been adopted by other governments worldwide.
This is in stark contrast to the action imposed on Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when it was forced by the IMF to close 16 banks at the same time, prompting a bank run.
Much of the post-crisis discussion reflected Keynes's advocacy of international coordination of fiscal or monetary stimulus, and of international economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which many had argued should be reformed as a "new Bretton Woods", and should have been even before the crises broke out.
The IMF and United Nations economists advocated a coordinated international approach to fiscal stimulus.
Donald Markwell argued that in the absence of such an international approach, there would be a risk of worsening international relations and possibly even world war arising from economic factors similar to those present during the depression of the 1930s.
By the end of December 2008, the Financial Times reported that "the sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy is a stunning reversal of the orthodoxy of the past several decades."
In December 2008, Paul Krugman released his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, arguing that economic conditions similar to those that existed during the earlier part of the 20th century had returned, making Keynesian policy prescriptions more relevant than ever. In February 2009 Robert J. Shiller and George Akerlof published Animal Spirits, a book where they argue the current US stimulus package is too small as it does not take into account Keynes's insight on the importance of confidence and expectations in determining the future behaviour of businesspeople and other economic agents.
In the March 2009 speech entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, came out in favour of Keynes's idea of a centrally managed global reserve currency. Zhou argued that it was unfortunate that part of the reason for the Bretton Woods system breaking down was the failure to adopt Keynes's bancor. Zhou proposed a gradual move towards increased use of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs).
Although Zhou's ideas had not been broadly accepted, leaders meeting in April at the 2009 G-20 London summit agreed to allow $250 billion of special drawing rights to be created by the IMF, to be distributed globally. Stimulus plans were credited for contributing to a better than expected economic outlook by both the OECD
and the IMF, in reports published in June and July 2009. Both organisations warned global leaders that recovery was likely to be slow, so counter recessionary measures ought not be rolled back too early.
While the need for stimulus measures was broadly accepted among policy makers, there had been much debate over how to fund the spending. Some leaders and institutions, such as Angela Merkel
and the European Central Bank,
expressed concern over the potential impact on inflation, national debt and the risk that a too large stimulus will create an unsustainable recovery.
Among professional economists the revival of Keynesian economics has been even more divisive. Although many economists, such as George Akerlof, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, and Joseph Stiglitz, supported Keynesian stimulus, others did not believe higher government spending would help the United States economy recover from the Great Recession. Some economists, such as Robert Lucas, questioned the theoretical basis for stimulus packages. Others, like Robert Barro and Gary Becker, say that empirical evidence for beneficial effects from Keynesian stimulus does not exist. However, there is a growing academic literature that shows that fiscal expansion helps an economy grow in the near term, and that certain types of fiscal stimulus are particularly effective.
Overall views
John Maynard Keynes had a drastically different upbringing and motives for his philosophical and economic contributions. Rather than writing with the mindset of being upset at the current system, Keynes instead produced his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with the intention of solving the then current issue which was plaguing the whole world, The Great Depression. When he wrote this, one theme that occurs numerous times is his view on how individuals should save during a time of economic downturn or recession. His answer was that people tend to save more in these times, which he thought could be very harmful if there is no government intervention because individuals and businesses are too scared or have the inability to invest in new ideas and jobs due to the state of the economy. This issue was especially prevalent during The Great Depression because individuals were saving their money and businesses were not investing which was keeping that particular recession around as long as it did and made the unemployment rate go from around 4 percent all the way to around twenty five percent. The individuals were saving with the hopes that the recession would not be very long, which then caused it to get worse due to lack of stimulation in the economy. In order to get out of this cycle, Keynes argued that it was the government alone that would be able to solve this problem and break the United States particularly and the whole world out of The Great Depression. Keynes, normally an endorser of free market capitalism realised that this recession was a special case in that it had potential to be inescapable. The government did eventually do this with president Franklin Roosevelt introducing The New Deal, which was a relief program set up where the federal budget was increased with the purpose of getting the economy out of the recession by injecting money manually from these government aid programs.“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”(Keynes). Keynes is highlighting the fact that people are used to making certain decisions during different times of the business cycle, and also that individuals and businesses needed to change the way they were viewing saving money so that the country could get out of the recession. It is clear that Keynes had a different approach to economic thought from Marx because he was writing with the intention of solving the current world problem, The Great Depression, rather than critiquing the unfairness in the current system.
Praise
On a personal level, Keynes's charm was such that he was generally well received wherever he went – even those who found themselves on the wrong side of his occasionally sharp tongue rarely bore a grudge. Keynes's speech at the closing of the Bretton Woods negotiations was received with a lasting standing ovation, rare in international relations, as the delegates acknowledged the scale of his achievements made despite poor health.
Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek was Keynes's most prominent contemporary critic, with sharply opposing views on the economy. Yet after Keynes's death, he wrote: "He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him." A colleague Nicholas Davenport recalled, "There were deep emotional forces about Maynard ... One could sense his humanity. There was nothing of the cold intellectual about him."
Lionel Robbins, former head of the economics department at the London School of Economics, who engaged in many heated debates with Keynes in the 1930s, had this to say after observing Keynes in early negotiations with the Americans while drawing up plans for Bretton Woods:
Douglas LePan, an official from the Canadian High Commission, wrote:
Bertrand Russell named Keynes one of the most intelligent people he had ever known, commenting:
Keynes's obituary in The Times included the comment: "There is the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes ... He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good."
Critiques
As a man of the centre described by some as having the greatest impact of any 20th-century economist, Keynes attracted considerable criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. In the 1920s, Keynes was seen as anti-establishment and was mainly attacked from the right. In the "red 1930s", many young economists favoured Marxist views, even in Cambridge, and while Keynes was engaging principally with the right to try to persuade them of the merits of more progressive policy, the most vociferous criticism against him came from the left, who saw him as a supporter of capitalism. From the 1950s and onwards, most of the attacks against Keynes have again been from the right.
In 1931 Friedrich Hayek extensively critiqued Keynes's 1930 Treatise on Money. After reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Keynes wrote to Hayek "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it", but concluded the letter with the recommendation: On the pressing issue of the time, whether deficit spending could lift a country from depression, Keynes replied to Hayek's criticism in the following way:
Asked why Keynes expressed "moral and philosophical" agreement with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Hayek stated:
According to some observers, Hayek felt that the post-World War II "Keynesian orthodoxy" gave too much power to the state, and that such policies would lead toward socialism.
While Milton Friedman described The General Theory as "a great book", he argues that its implicit separation of nominal from real magnitudes is neither possible nor desirable. Macroeconomic policy, Friedman argues, can reliably influence only the nominal. He and other monetarists have consequently argued that Keynesian economics can result in stagflation, the combination of low growth and high inflation that developed economies suffered in the early 1970s. More to Friedman's taste was the Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), which he regarded as Keynes's best work because of its focus on maintaining domestic price stability.
Joseph Schumpeter was an economist of the same age as Keynes and one of his main rivals. He was among the first reviewers to argue that Keynes's General Theory was not a general theory, but a special case. He said the work expressed "the attitude of a decaying civilisation". After Keynes's death Schumpeter wrote a brief biographical piece Keynes the Economist – on a personal level he was very positive about Keynes as a man, praising his pleasant nature, courtesy and kindness. He assessed some of Keynes's biographical and editorial work as among the best he'd ever seen. Yet Schumpeter remained critical about Keynes's economics, linking Keynes's childlessness to what Schumpeter saw as an essentially short-term view. He considered Keynes to have a kind of unconscious patriotism that caused him to fail to understand the problems of other nations. For Schumpeter "Practical Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and becomes poisonous as it dies."
"Schumpeter admired and envied Keynes, but when Keynes died in 1946, Schumpeter's obituary gave Keynes the same off-key, perfunctory treatment he would later give Adam Smith in the History of Economic Analysis, the "discredit of not adding a single innovation to the techniques of economic analysis".
President Harry S. Truman was sceptical of Keynesian theorizing: "Nobody can ever convince me that government can spend a dollar that it's not got," he told Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian economist who chaired Truman's Council of Economic Advisers.
Views on race
Keynes sometimes explained the mass murder that took place during the first years of communist Russia on a racial basis, as part of the "Russian and Jewish nature", rather than as a result of the communist rule. After a trip to Russia, he wrote in his Short View of Russia that there is "beastliness on the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied together". He also wrote that "out of the cruelty and stupidity of the Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but (...) beneath the cruelty and stupidity of the New Russia a speck of the ideal may lie hid."
Some critics have sought to show that Keynes had sympathies towards Nazism, and a number of writers have described him as antisemitic. Keynes's private letters contain portraits and descriptions, some of which can be characterized as antisemitic, while others as philosemitic.
Scholars have suggested that these reflect clichés current at the time that he accepted uncritically, rather than any racism. On several occasions Keynes used his influence to help his Jewish friends, most notably when he successfully lobbied for Ludwig Wittgenstein to be allowed residency in the United Kingdom, explicitly in order to rescue him from being deported to Nazi-occupied Austria. Keynes was a supporter of Zionism, serving on committees supporting the cause.
Allegations that he was racist or had totalitarian beliefs have been rejected by Robert Skidelsky and other biographers. Professor Gordon Fletcher wrote that "the suggestion of a link between Keynes and any support of totalitarianism cannot be sustained". Once the aggressive tendencies of the Nazis towards Jews and other minorities had become apparent, Keynes made clear his loathing of Nazism. As a lifelong pacifist he had initially favoured peaceful containment of Nazi Germany, yet he began to advocate a forceful resolution while many conservatives were still arguing for appeasement. After the war started he roundly criticised the Left for losing their nerve to confront Hitler:
Views on inflation
Keynes has been characterised as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation. He had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the two evils, it is "better to disappoint the rentier" than to inflict pain on working class families. He also supported the German hyperinflation as a way to get free from reparations obligations. However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he wrote:
Views on free trade and protectionism
The turning point of the Great Depression
At the beginning of his career, Keynes was an economist close to Alfred Marshall, deeply convinced of the benefits of free trade. From the crisis of 1929 onwards, noting the commitment of the British authorities to defend the gold parity of the pound sterling and the rigidity of nominal wages, he gradually adhered to protectionist measures.
On 5 November 1929, when heard by the Macmillan Committee to bring the British economy out of the crisis, Keynes indicated that the introduction of tariffs on imports would help to rebalance the trade balance. The committee's report states in a section entitled "import control and export aid", that in an economy where there is not full employment, the introduction of tariffs can improve production and employment. Thus the reduction of the trade deficit favours the country's growth.
In January 1930, in the Economic Advisory Council, Keynes proposed the introduction of a system of protection to reduce imports. In the autumn of 1930, he proposed a uniform tariff of 10% on all imports and subsidies of the same rate for all exports. In the Treatise on Money, published in the autumn of 1930, he took up the idea of tariffs or other trade restrictions with the aim of reducing the volume of imports and rebalancing the balance of trade.
On 7 March 1931, in the New Statesman and Nation, he wrote an article entitled Proposal for a Tariff Revenue. He pointed out that the reduction of wages led to a reduction in national demand which constrained markets. Instead, he proposes the idea of an expansionary policy combined with a tariff system to neutralise the effects on the balance of trade. The application of customs tariffs seemed to him "unavoidable, whoever the Chancellor of the Exchequer might be".Thus, for Keynes, an economic recovery policy is only fully effective if the trade deficit is eliminated. He proposed a 15% tax on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and 5% on certain foodstuffs and raw materials, with others needed for exports exempted (wool, cotton).
In 1932, in an article entitled The Pro- and Anti-Tariffs, published in The Listener, he envisaged the protection of farmers and certain sectors such as the automobile and iron and steel industries, considering them indispensable to Britain.
The critique of the theory of comparative advantage
In the post-crisis situation of 1929, Keynes judged the assumptions of the free trade model unrealistic. He criticised, for example, the neoclassical assumption of wage adjustment.
As early as 1930, in a note to the Economic Advisory Council, he doubted the intensity of the gain from specialisation in the case of manufactured goods. While participating in the MacMillan Committee, he admitted that he no longer "believed in a very high degree of national specialisation" and refused to "abandon any industry which is unable, for the moment, to survive". He also criticised the static dimension of the theory of comparative advantage, which, in his view, by fixing comparative advantages definitively, led in practice to a waste of national resources.
In the Daily Mail of 13 March 1931, he called the assumption of perfect sectoral labour mobility "nonsense" since it states that a person made unemployed contributes to a reduction in the wage rate until he finds a job. But for Keynes, this change of job may involve costs (job search, training) and is not always possible. Generally speaking, for Keynes, the assumptions of full employment and automatic return to equilibrium discredit the theory of comparative advantage.
In July 1933, he published an article in the New Statesman and Nation entitled National Self-Sufficiency, in which he criticised the argument of the specialisation of economies, which is the basis of free trade. He thus proposed the search for a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Instead of the specialisation of economies advocated by the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, he prefers the maintenance of a diversity of activities for nations. In it he refutes the principle of peacemaking trade. His vision of trade became that of a system where foreign capitalists compete for new markets. He defends the idea of producing on national soil when possible and reasonable and expresses sympathy for the advocates of protectionism.
He notes in National Self-Sufficiency:
He also writes in National Self-Sufficiency:
Later, Keynes had a written correspondence with James Meade centred on the issue of import restrictions. Keynes and Meade discussed the best choice between quota and tariff. In March 1944 Keynes began a discussion with Marcus Fleming after the latter had written an article entitled Quotas versus depreciation. On this occasion, we see that he has definitely taken a protectionist stance after the Great Depression. He considered that quotas could be more effective than currency depreciation in dealing with external imbalances. Thus, for Keynes, currency depreciation was no longer sufficient and protectionist measures became necessary to avoid trade deficits. To avoid the return of crises due to a self-regulating economic system, it seemed essential to him to regulate trade and stop free trade (deregulation of foreign trade).
He points out that countries that import more than they export weaken their economies. When the trade deficit increases, unemployment rises and GDP slows down. And surplus countries exert a "negative externality" on their trading partners. They get richer at the expense of others and destroy the output of their trading partners. John Maynard Keynes believed that the products of surplus countries should be taxed to avoid trade imbalances. Thus he no longer believes in the theory of comparative advantage (on which free trade is based) which states that the trade deficit does not matter, since trade is mutually beneficial.
This also explains his desire to replace the liberalisation of international trade (Free Trade) with a regulatory system aimed at eliminating trade imbalances in his proposals for the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Views on trade imbalances
Keynes was the principal author of a proposal – the so-called Keynes Plan – for an International Clearing Union. The two governing principles of the plan were that the problem of settling outstanding balances should be solved by "creating" additional "international money", and that debtor and creditor should be treated almost alike as disturbers of equilibrium. In the event, though, the plans were rejected, in part because "American opinion was naturally reluctant to accept the principle of equality of treatment so novel in debtor-creditor relationships".
The new system is not founded on free-trade (liberalisation of foreign trade) but rather on the regulation of international trade, in order to eliminate trade imbalances: the nations with a surplus would have an incentive to reduce it, and in doing so they would automatically clear other nations deficits. He proposed a global bank that would issue its currency – the bancor – which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange and would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus. Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union. He pointed out that surpluses lead to weak global aggregate demand – countries running surpluses exert a "negative externality" on trading partners, and posed, far more than those in deficit, a threat to global prosperity.
In his 1933 Yale Review article "National Self-Sufficiency," he already highlighted the problems created by free trade. His view, supported by many economists and commentators at the time, was that creditor nations may be just as responsible as debtor nations for disequilibrium in exchanges and that both should be under an obligation to bring trade back into a state of balance. Failure for them to do so could have serious consequences. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, then editor of The Economist, "If the economic relationships between nations are not, by one means or another, brought fairly close to balance, then there is no set of financial arrangements that can rescue the world from the impoverishing results of chaos."
These ideas were informed by events prior to the Great Depression when – in the opinion of Keynes and others – international lending, primarily by the U.S., exceeded the capacity of sound investment and so got diverted into non-productive and speculative uses, which in turn invited default and a sudden stop to the process of lending.
Influenced by Keynes, economics texts in the immediate post-war period put a significant emphasis on balance in trade. For example, the second edition of the popular introductory textbook, An Outline of Money, devoted the last three of its ten chapters to questions of foreign exchange management and in particular the "problem of balance". However, in more recent years, since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the increasing influence of Monetarist schools of thought in the 1980s, and particularly in the face of large sustained trade imbalances, these concerns – and particularly concerns about the destabilising effects of large trade surpluses – have largely disappeared from mainstream economics discourse and Keynes's insights have slipped from view. They are receiving some attention again in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08.
Personal life
Relationships
Keynes's early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men. Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan. Keynes was open about his affairs, and from 1901 to 1915 kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters. Keynes's relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortunate, as Macmillan's company first published his tract Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell. The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey, though they were for the most part love rivals, not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse, and as with Grant, fell out with a jealous Strachey for it. Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".
Political opponents have used Keynes's sexuality to attack his academic work. One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long-term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.
Keynes's friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began pursuing affairs with women, demonstrating himself to be bisexual. Ray Costelloe (who later married Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes. In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take."
Marriage
In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen "very much in love" with Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina and one of the stars of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the early years of his courtship, he maintained an affair with a younger man, Sebastian Sprott, in tandem with Lopokova, but eventually chose Lopokova exclusively. They were married in 1925, with Keynes's former lover Duncan Grant as best man. "What a marriage of beauty and brains, the fair Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes" was said at the time. Keynes later commented to Strachey that beauty and intelligence were rarely found in the same person, and that only in Duncan Grant had he found the combination. The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes "a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied".
The couple hoped to have children but this did not happen.
Among Keynes's Bloomsbury friends, Lopokova was, at least initially, subjected to criticism for her manners, mode of conversation, and supposedly humble social origins – the last of the ostensible causes being particularly noted in the letters of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf. In her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf bases the character of Rezia Warren Smith on Lopokova. E. M. Forster later wrote in contrition about "Lydia Keynes, every whose word should be recorded": "How we all used to underestimate her".
Support for the arts
Keynes thought that the pursuit of money for its own sake was a pathological condition, and that the proper aim of work is to provide leisure. He wanted shorter working hours and longer holidays for all.
Keynes was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution to become one of the major British stages outside London.
Keynes's interest in classical opera and dance led him to support the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadler's Wells. During the war, as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the war, Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was its founding chairman in 1946. From the start, the two organisations that received the largest grants from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells.
Keynes built up a substantial collection of fine art, including works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat (some of which can now be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum). He enjoyed collecting books; he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. In part on the basis of these papers, Keynes wrote of Newton as "the last of the magicians."
Philosophical views
Keynes, like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, was greatly influenced by the philosophy of G.E. Moore, which in 1938 he described as "still my religion under the surface". According to Moore, states of mind were the only valuable things in themselves, the most important being "the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects". Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote of how Virginia Woolf, Keynes, and T. S. Eliot discussed religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality.
Keynes may have been confirmed, but according to Cambridge University he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death. According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind" but also added that he came to "value it for social and moral reasons" later in life. Another biographer writes that he "broke the family faith and became a 'ferocious agnostic during his time at Eton. One Cambridge acquaintance remembered him as "an atheist with a devotion to King's chapel". At Cambridge, he was strongly associated with the Cambridge Heretics Society, an avowed atheist group which promoted secularism and humanism.
Investments
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000 – equivalent to about £20.5 million ($27.1 million) in 2018. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various charities and philanthropies, and his ethic which made him reluctant to sell on a falling market, in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump.
Keynes managed the endowment of King's College, Cambridge starting in the 1920s, initially with an unsuccessful strategy based on market timing but later shifting to focus in the publicly traded stock of small and medium size companies that paid large dividends. This was a controversial decision at the time, as stocks were considered high-risk and the centuries-old endowment had traditionally been invested in agricultural land and fixed income assets like bonds. Keynes was granted permission to invest a small minority of assets in stocks, and his adroit management resulted this portion of the endowment growing to become the majority of the endowment's assets. The active component of his portfolio outperformed a British equity index by an average of 6% to 8% a year over a quarter century, earning him favourable mention by later investors such as Warren Buffett and George Soros. Joel Tillinghast of Fidelity Investments describes Keynes as an early practitioner of value investing, a school of thought formalized in the U.S. by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia Business School during the 1920s and '30s. However, Keynes is believed to have developed his ideas independently. Keynes also regarded as a pioneer of financial diversification as he recognized the importance of holding assets with "opposed risks" as he wrote "since they are likely to move in opposite directions when there are general fluctuations"; and also as an early international investor who avoided home country bias by investing substantially in stocks outside the United Kingdom. Ken Fisher characterized Keynes as an exception to the rule that economists usually make horrible investors.
Political life
Keynes was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from about 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasions in 1920. From 1926, when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economic policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third-party status by the growing workers-oriented Labour Party.
In 1939 Keynes had the option to enter Parliament as an independent MP with the University of Cambridge seat. A by-election for the seat was to be held due to the illness of an elderly Tory, and the master of Magdalene College had obtained agreement that none of the major parties would field a candidate if Keynes chose to stand. Keynes declined the invitation as he felt he would wield greater influence on events if he remained a free agent.
Keynes was a proponent of eugenics. He served as director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. As late as 1946, shortly before his death, Keynes declared eugenics to be "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists."
Keynes once remarked that "the youth had no religion save communism and this was worse than nothing." Marxism "was founded upon nothing better than a misunderstanding of Ricardo", and, given time, he (Keynes) "would deal thoroughly with the Marxists" and other economists to solve the economic problems their theories "threaten to cause".
In 1931 Keynes had the following to say on Leninism:
Keynes was a firm supporter of women's rights and in 1932 became vice-chairman of the Marie Stopes Society which provided birth control education. He also campaigned against job discrimination against women and unequal pay. He was an outspoken campaigner for reform of the laws against homosexuality.
Heraldic arms
Death
Throughout his life, Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends; even when his health was poor, he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college. Helping to set up the Bretton Woods system, he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. In 1946, Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal. They began during negotiations for the Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as "absolute hell". A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946, at the age of 62. Against his wishes (he wanted his ashes to be deposited in the crypt at King's), his ashes were scattered on the Downs above Tilton.
Both of Keynes's parents outlived him: his father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and his mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010), a physiologist, and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003), an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes had no children; his widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981.
Cultural representations
In John Buchan's novel Island of Sheep (1936) the character of the financier Barralty is based on Keynes.
In the film Wittgenstein (1993), directed by Derek Jarman, Keynes was played by John Quentin.
The docudrama Paris 1919, based around Margaret MacMillan's book, featured Paul Bandey as Keynes.
In the BBC series about the Bloomsbury Group, Life In Squares, Keynes was portrayed by Edmund Kingsley.
The novel Mr Keynes' Revolution (2020) by E. J. Barnes is about Keynes' life in the 1920s.
Love Letters, based on the correspondence of Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, was performed by Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham-Carter at Charleston in 2021.
Publications
Books
1913 Indian Currency and Finance
1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace
1921 A Treatise on Probability
1922 Revision of the Treaty
1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform
1926 The End of Laissez-Faire
1930 A Treatise on Money
1931 Essays in Persuasion
1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
1940 How to Pay for the War: A radical plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
1949 Two Memoirs. Ed. by David Garnett (On Carl Melchior and G. E. Moore.)
Articles and pamphlets
(A partial list.)
1915 The Economics of War in Germany
1922 The Inflation of Currency as a Method of Taxation
1925 Am I a Liberal?
1926 Laissez-Faire and Communism
1929 Can Lloyd George Do It?
1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
1931 The End of the Gold Standard (Sunday Express)
1931 The Great Slump of 1930
1933 The Means to Prosperity
1933 An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (New York Times)
1933 Essays in Biography
1937 The General Theory of Employment
See also
References
Notes and citations
Sources
Backhouse, Roger E. and Bateman, Bradley W.. Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes. 2011
Barnett, Vincent. John Maynard Keynes. London: Routledge, 2013. .
Beaudreau, Bernard C.. The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes: How the Second Industrial Revolution Passed Great Britain By. iUniverse, 2006,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury, 2009,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist, Bloomsbury Press, 2009
Markwell, Donald. John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace. Oxford University Press, 2006. . .
Markwell, Donald. Keynes and Australia . Reserve Bank of Australia, 2000.
Keynes, Milo (ed). Essays on John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge University Press, 1975. .
Moggridge, Donald Edward. Keynes. Macmillan, 1980. .
Patinkin, Don. "Keynes, John Maynard." In: The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1987, pp. 19–41. . .
Schuker, Stephen A. "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33." Princeton Studies in International Finance, No. 61, 1988.
Schuker, Stephen A. "J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations." Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 25, Nos. 3/4, 2014. .
Blaug, Mark. "Recent Biographies of Keynes." Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, September 1994, pp. 1204-1215. .
Buchanan, James M. and Richard E. Wagner. Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 8. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008.
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Davidson, Paul. John Maynard Keynes (Great Thinkers in Economics). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. .
Dimand, Robert W. and Harald Hagemann, eds. The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes (Edward Elgar, 20190 + 670 pp. online review
Harrod, R. F.. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. Macmillan, 1951. .
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. (2005)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920. (1986)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (1994)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946.
Temin, Peter, and David Vines. Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy. MIT Press, 2014.
Wapshott, Nicholas. Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (2011)
Primary sources
External links
Professor Robert Skidelsky explains Keynes theories video
Professor Robert Skidelsky on economist Keynes video
Churchill, Keynes & The Gold Standard – UK Parliament Living Heritage
Correspondence with John Maynard, Baron Keynes, four volumes held at The British Library
Treaty of Versailles & Keynes – UK Parliament Living Heritage
John Maynard Keynes on Google Scholar
Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926)
Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Keynes, The raising of prices (1933)
Keynes, National Self-Sufficiency (1933)
Keynes, An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (1933)
Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
Interactive E-Book John Maynard Keynes: The Lives of a Mind (2016). The Keynes Centre at University College Cork
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LGBT philosophers | true | [
"Broadus Mitchell (December 27, 1892 – April 28, 1988) was a historian, professor, and author. He taught economics at Johns Hopkins University from 1919 to 1939, Occidental College 1939–1941, New York University 1942–1949, Rutgers 1949–1958, and Hofstra 1958–1967. Representing the Socialist Party, Dr. Mitchell ran for governor of Maryland in 1939.\n\nBackground\nMitchell was born in Georgetown, Kentucky. He attended the University of South Carolina, graduating in 1913, and went on to study at Johns Hopkins University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1918.\n\nMitchell wrote numerous books on the economic history of the South, including The rise of Cotton Mills in the South (1921), William Gregg, Factory Master of the Old South (1928), and The Industrial Revolution of the South (1930). His 1924 book Frederick Law Olmsted, a critic of the Old South reviews in hindsight the prescient feature stories the young Olmsted wrote based on a tour through the southern states just before the Civil War. In 1962 Dr. Mitchell wrote a two-volume biography titled: Alexander Hamilton. He subsequently wrote four more books on Hamilton's life and influence.\n\nThroughout his tenure at Hopkins from 1919 to 1939 there were two recurring issues that landed Mitchell in trouble with the university and opened him up to criticism: his radical political and economic views as a socialist, and his outspoken stance supporting equal rights along racial lines. During his time as Professor at Johns Hopkins University those views eventually led to his resignation (1938) over the university's refusal to admit an African American student into the graduate school.\n\nMitchell ran for governor in 1934 representing the Socialist party, receiving 6,773 votes representing 1.32% of the popular vote.\n\nMitchell died at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Tarrytown, New York.\n\nPublications\n \n \n \n (co-authored with Louise Pearson Mitchell) \n Volume 9 of Economic History of the United States: Holt Rinehart and Winston series.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Mitchell, Broadus (1966) Great Economists in their Times \n Mitchell, Broadus (1930) The Industrial Revolution in the South\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n \nOral History Interview with Broadus Mitchell from Oral Histories of the American South\n\n1892 births\n1988 deaths\n20th-century American historians\nAmerican male non-fiction writers\n20th-century American economists\nJohns Hopkins University faculty\nPeople from Georgetown, Kentucky\nSocialist Party of America politicians from Maryland\nEconomists from Kentucky\n20th-century American male writers",
"The Eight Views of Korea are a collection of the beautiful scenery of Korea, that are known today and that have been defined in the past.\n\nThey were defined after the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang of the Song Dynasty of China.\n\nGeneral\nThe Eight Views of Korea are a collection of the beautiful scenery of Korea, that are now understood to be as follows: \n\n Mount Kumgang (금강산, 金剛山)\n Hallasan (한라산, 漢拏山)\n Seokguram (석굴암, 石窟庵)\n Haeundae (해운대, 海雲臺)\n Pujon Highland (부전고원, 赴戰高原)\n Pyongyang (평양, 平壤) \n Baekdu Mountain (백두산, 白頭山)\n Yalu River (압록강, 鴨緑江)\n\nThese Eight Views were sung in a popular song called \"the Song of the Eight Views of Korea\".\n\nSee also\n Eight Views of Danyang\n Eight Views of Pyongyang\n\nReferences\n\nArts in Korea\nGeography of Korea\nTourist attractions in North Korea\nTourist attractions in South Korea"
]
|
[
"John Maynard Keynes",
"Neo-Keynesian economics",
"What is Neo-Keynesian economics?",
"they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics,",
"What is Keynesian analysis?",
"The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies.",
"How did he want currency managed?",
"He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions - a world central bank and the International Clearing Union.",
"Were his economic views popular?",
"By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world"
]
| C_9bf402fc7c2f4638b09e96b6644fd310_1 | What did his critics say? | 5 | What did John Maynard Keynes' critics say? | John Maynard Keynes | The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments - the convertibility of banknotes into gold - but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was absolutely necessary. In January 1915, Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble - with difficulty - a small supply of Spanish pesetas. The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive. On the introduction of military conscription in 1916 he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work. In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold. During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches. As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions - a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the final outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proved correct by events. The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase." In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years. By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism. In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and that labour costs and wages were rigid downwards, which means the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in late 1936. By the late 1930s, leading Western economies had begun adopting Keynes's policy recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946. As a leader of the British delegation, Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II but was overruled by the American delegation on several aspects.
Keynes's influence started to wane in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists, who disputed the ability of government to favourably regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy. However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 sparked a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008 by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.
When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it stated that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Early life and education
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, to an upper-middle-class family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge and his mother, Florence Ada Keynes, a local social reformer. Keynes was the first born, and was followed by two more children – Margaret Neville Keynes in 1885 and Geoffrey Keynes in 1887. Geoffrey became a surgeon and Margaret married the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill, although she had many affairs with women, notably Eglantyne Jebb.
According to the economic historian and biographer Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's parents were loving and attentive. They remained in the same house throughout their lives, where the children were always welcome to return. Keynes received considerable support from his father, including expert coaching to help him pass his scholarship exams and financial help both as a young man and when his assets were nearly wiped out at the onset of Great Depression in 1929. Keynes's mother made her children's interests her own, and according to Skidelsky, "because she could grow up with her children, they never outgrew home".
In January 1889 at the age of five and a half, Keynes started at the kindergarten of the Perse School for Girls for five mornings a week. He quickly showed a talent for arithmetic, but his health was poor leading to several long absences. He was tutored at home by a governess, Beatrice Mackintosh, and his mother. In January 1892, at eight and a half, he started as a day pupil at St Faith's preparatory school. By 1894, Keynes was top of his class and excelling at mathematics. In 1896, St Faith's headmaster, Ralph Goodchild, wrote that Keynes was "head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school" and was confident that Keynes could get a scholarship to Eton.
In 1897, Keynes won a King's Scholarship to Eton College, where he displayed talent in a wide range of subjects, particularly mathematics, classics and history: in 1901, he was awarded the Tomline Prize for mathematics. At Eton, Keynes experienced the first "love of his life" in Dan Macmillan, older brother of the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Despite his middle-class background, Keynes mixed easily with upper-class pupils.
In 1902 Keynes left Eton for King's College, Cambridge, after receiving a scholarship for this also to read mathematics. Alfred Marshall begged Keynes to become an economist,
although Keynes's own inclinations drew him towards philosophy – especially the ethical system of G. E. Moore. Keynes was elected to the University Pitt Club and was an active member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students. Like many members, Keynes retained a bond to the club after graduating and continued to attend occasional meetings throughout his life. Before leaving Cambridge, Keynes became the President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Liberal Club. He was said to be an atheist.
In May 1904, he received a first-class BA in mathematics. Aside from a few months spent on holidays with family and friends, Keynes continued to involve himself with the university over the next two years. He took part in debates, further studied philosophy and attended economics lectures informally as a graduate student for one term, which constituted his only formal education in the subject. He took civil service exams in 1906.
The economist Harry Johnson wrote that the optimism imparted by Keynes's early life is a key to understanding his later thinking.
Keynes was always confident he could find a solution to whatever problem he turned his attention to and retained a lasting faith in the ability of government officials to do good.
Keynes's optimism was also cultural, in two senses: he was of the last generation raised by an empire still at the height of its power and was also of the last generation who felt entitled to govern by culture, rather than by expertise. According to Skidelsky, the sense of cultural unity current in Britain from the 19th century to the end of World War I provided a framework with which the well-educated could set various spheres of knowledge in relation to each other and life, enabling them to confidently draw from different fields when addressing practical problems.
Career
In October 1906 Keynes's Civil Service career began as a clerk in the India Office. He enjoyed his work at first, but by 1908 had become bored and resigned his position to return to Cambridge and work on probability theory, through a lectureship in economics at first funded personally by economists Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou; he became a fellow of King's College in 1909.
By 1909 Keynes had also published his first professional economics article in The Economic Journal, about the effect of a recent global economic downturn on India. He founded the Political Economy Club, a weekly discussion group. Keynes's earnings rose further as he began to take on pupils for private tuition.
In 1911 Keynes was made the editor of The Economic Journal. By 1913 he had published his first book, Indian Currency and Finance. He was then appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance – the same topic as his book – where Keynes showed considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems. His written work was published under the name "J M Keynes", though to his family and friends he was known as Maynard. (His father, John Neville Keynes, was also always known by his middle name).
First World War
The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments – the convertibility of banknotes into gold – but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was necessary.
In January 1915 Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble – with difficulty – a small supply of Spanish pesetas.
The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive.
On the introduction of military conscription in 1916, he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work.
In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that had a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold.
Versailles peace conference
Keynes's experience at Versailles was influential in shaping his future outlook, yet it was not a successful one. Keynes's main interest had been in trying to prevent Germany's compensation payments being set so high it would traumatize innocent German people, damage the nation's ability to pay and sharply limit its ability to buy exports from other countries – thus hurting not just Germany's economy but that of the wider world.
Unfortunately for Keynes, conservative powers in the coalition that emerged from the 1918 coupon election were able to ensure that both Keynes himself and the Treasury were largely excluded from formal high-level talks concerning reparations. Their place was taken by the Heavenly Twins – the judge Lord Sumner and the banker Lord Cunliffe whose nickname derived from the "astronomically" high war compensation they wanted to demand from Germany. Keynes was forced to try to exert influence mostly from behind the scenes.
The three principal players at Versailles were Britain's Lloyd George, France's Clemenceau and America's President Wilson.
It was only Lloyd George to whom Keynes had much direct access; until the 1918 election he had some sympathy with Keynes's view but while campaigning had found his speeches were only well received by the public if he promised to harshly punish Germany, and had therefore committed his delegation to extracting high payments.
Lloyd George did, however, win some loyalty from Keynes with his actions at the Paris conference by intervening against the French to ensure the dispatch of much-needed food supplies to German civilians. Clemenceau also pushed for substantial reparations, though not as high as those proposed by the British, while on security grounds, France argued for an even more severe settlement than Britain.
Wilson initially favoured relatively lenient treatment of Germany – he feared too harsh conditions could foment the rise of extremism and wanted Germany to be left sufficient capital to pay for imports. To Keynes's dismay, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to pressure Wilson to agree to include pensions in the reparations bill.
Towards the end of the conference, Keynes came up with a plan that he argued would not only help Germany and other impoverished central European powers but also be good for the world economy as a whole. It involved the radical writing down of war debts, which would have had the possible effect of increasing international trade all round, but at the same time thrown over two thirds of the cost of European reconstruction on the United States.
Lloyd George agreed it might be acceptable to the British electorate. However, America was against the plan; the US was then the largest creditor, and by this time Wilson had started to believe in the merits of a harsh peace and thought that his country had already made excessive sacrifices. Hence despite his best efforts, the result of the conference was a treaty which disgusted Keynes both on moral and economic grounds and led to his resignation from the Treasury.
In June 1919 he turned down an offer to become chairman of the British Bank of Northern Commerce, a job that promised a salary of £2000 in return for a morning per week of work.
Keynes's analysis on the predicted damaging effects of the treaty appeared in the highly influential book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. This work has been described as Keynes's best book, where he was able to bring all his gifts to bear – his passion as well as his skill as an economist. In addition to economic analysis, the book contained appeals to the reader's sense of compassion:
Also present was striking imagery such as "year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled" along with bold predictions which were later justified by events:
Keynes's followers assert that his predictions of disaster were borne out when the German economy suffered the hyperinflation of 1923, and again by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the outbreak of the Second World War. However, historian Ruth Henig claims that "most historians of the Paris peace conference now take the view that, in economic terms, the treaty was not unduly harsh on Germany and that, while obligations and damages were inevitably much stressed in the debates at Paris to satisfy electors reading the daily newspapers, the intention was quietly to give Germany substantial help towards paying her bills, and to meet many of the German objections by amendments to the way the reparations schedule was in practice carried out".
Only a small fraction of reparations was ever paid. In fact, historian Stephen A. Schuker demonstrates in American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33, that the capital inflow from American loans substantially exceeded German out payments so that, on a net basis, Germany received support equal to four times the amount of the post-Second World War Marshall Plan.
Schuker also shows that, in the years after Versailles, Keynes became an informal reparations adviser to the German government, wrote one of the major German reparation notes, and supported the hyperinflation on political grounds. Nevertheless, The Economic Consequences of the Peace gained Keynes international fame, even though it also caused him to be regarded as anti-establishment – it was not until after the outbreak of the Second World War that Keynes was offered a directorship of a major British Bank, or an acceptable offer to return to government with a formal job. However, Keynes was still able to influence government policy making through his network of contacts, his published works and by serving on government committees; this included attending high-level policy meetings as a consultant.
In the 1920s
Keynes had completed his A Treatise on Probability before the war but published it in 1921. The work was a notable contribution to the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of probability theory, championing the important view that probabilities were no more or less than truth values intermediate between simple truth and falsity. Keynes developed the first upper-lower probabilistic interval approach to probability in chapters 15 and 17 of this book, as well as having developed the first decision weight approach with his conventional coefficient of risk and weight, c, in chapter 26. In addition to his academic work, the 1920s saw Keynes active as a journalist selling his work internationally and working in London as a financial consultant. In 1924 Keynes wrote an obituary for his former tutor
Alfred Marshall which Joseph Schumpeter called "the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read."
Mary Paley Marshall was "entranced" by the memorial, while Lytton Strachey rated it as one of Keynes's "best works".
In 1922 Keynes continued to advocate reduction of German reparations with A Revision of the Treaty. He attacked the post-World War I deflation policies with A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923 – a trenchant argument that countries should target stability of domestic prices, avoiding deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate. Britain suffered from high unemployment through most of the 1920s, leading Keynes to recommend the depreciation of sterling to boost jobs by making British exports more affordable. From 1924 he was also advocating a fiscal response, where the government could create jobs by spending on public works. During the 1920s Keynes's pro stimulus views had only limited effect on policy makers and mainstream academic opinion – according to Hyman Minsky one reason was that at this time his theoretical justification was "muddled". The Tract had also called for an end to the gold standard. Keynes advised it was no longer a net benefit for countries such as Britain to participate in the gold standard, as it ran counter to the need for domestic policy autonomy. It could force countries to pursue deflationary policies at exactly the time when expansionary measures were called for to address rising unemployment. The Treasury and Bank of England were still in favour of the gold standard and in 1925 they were able to convince the then Chancellor Winston Churchill to re-establish it, which had a depressing effect on British industry. Keynes responded by writing The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill and continued to argue against the gold standard until Britain finally abandoned it in 1931.
During the Great Depression
Keynes had begun a theoretical work to examine the relationship between unemployment, money, and prices back in the 1920s. The work, Treatise on Money, was published in 1930 in two volumes. A central idea of the work was that if the amount of money being saved exceeds the amount being invested – which can happen if interest rates are too high – then unemployment will rise. This is in part a result of people not wanting to spend too high a proportion of what employers pay out, making it difficult, in aggregate, for employers to make a profit. Another key theme of the book is the unreliability of financial indices for representing an accurate – or indeed meaningful – indication of general shifts in purchasing power of currencies over time. In particular, he criticised the justification of Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 at pre-war valuation by reference to the wholesale price index. He argued that the index understated the effects of changes in the costs of services and labour.
Keynes was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures during the Great Depression. He believed that budget deficits during recessions were a good thing and a natural product of an economic slump. He wrote, "For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature's remedy, so to speak, for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as the present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill."
At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly counter-cyclical public spending. The Means to Prosperity contains one of the first mentions of the multiplier effect. While it was addressed chiefly to the British Government, it also contained advice for other nations affected by the global recession. A copy was sent to the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other world leaders. The work was taken seriously by both the American and British governments, and according to Robert Skidelsky, helped pave the way for the later acceptance of Keynesian ideas, though it had little immediate practical influence. In the 1933 London Economic Conference opinions remained too diverse for a unified course of action to be agreed upon.
Keynesian-like policies were adopted by Sweden and Germany, but Sweden was seen as too small to command much attention, and Keynes was deliberately silent about the successful efforts of Germany as he was dismayed by its imperialist ambitions and its treatment of Jews. Apart from Great Britain, Keynes's attention was primarily focused on the United States. In 1931, he received considerable support for his views on counter-cyclical public spending in Chicago, then America's foremost center for economic views alternative to the mainstream. However, orthodox economic opinion remained generally hostile regarding fiscal intervention to mitigate the depression, until just before the outbreak of war. In late 1933 Keynes was persuaded by Felix Frankfurter to address President Roosevelt directly, which he did by letters and face to face in 1934, after which the two men spoke highly of each other. However, according to Skidelsky, the consensus is that Keynes's efforts began to have a more than marginal influence on US economic policy only after 1939.
Keynes's magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936. It was researched and indexed by one of Keynes's favourite students, later the economist David Bensusan-Butt. The work served as a theoretical justification for the interventionist policies Keynes favoured for tackling a recession. Although Keynes stated in his preface that his General Theory was only secondarily concerned with the “applications of this theory to practice,” the circumstances of its publication were such that his suggestions shaped the course of the 1930s. In addition, Keynes introduced the world to a new interpretation of taxation: since the legal tender is now defined by the state, inflation becomes “taxation by currency depreciation”. This hidden tax meant a) that the standard of value should be governed by deliberate decision; and (b) that it was possible to maintain a middle course between deflation and inflation. This novel interpretation was inspired by the desperate search for control over the economy which permeated the academic world after the Depression. The General Theory challenged the earlier neoclassical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. In doing so Keynes was partly setting himself against his former teachers Marshall and Pigou. Keynes believed the classical theory was a "special case" that applied only to the particular conditions present in the 19th century, his theory being the general one. Classical economists had believed in Say's law, which, simply put, states that "supply creates its demand", and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs. An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness – the recognition that in reality workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue that it is rational for them to do so. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of "aggregate demand" and "aggregate supply" may lead to stable unemployment equilibria – and in those cases, it is on the state, not the market, that economies must depend for their salvation.
The General Theory argues that demand, not supply, is the key variable governing the overall level of economic activity. Aggregate demand, which equals total un-hoarded income in a society, is defined by the sum of consumption and investment. In a state of unemployment and unused production capacity, one can enhance employment and total income only by first increasing expenditures for either consumption or investment. Without government intervention to increase expenditure, an economy can remain trapped in a low-employment equilibrium. The demonstration of this possibility has been described as the revolutionary formal achievement of the work.
The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. "Let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth," he wrote in 1928. "With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments. It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them."
The General Theory is often viewed as the foundation of modern macroeconomics. Few senior American economists agreed with Keynes through most of the 1930s.
Yet his ideas were soon to achieve widespread acceptance, with eminent American professors such as Alvin Hansen agreeing with the General Theory before the outbreak of World War II.
Keynes himself had only limited participation in the theoretical debates that followed the publication of the General Theory as he suffered a heart attack in 1937, requiring him to take long periods of rest. Among others, Hyman Minsky and Post-Keynesian economists have argued that as result, Keynes's ideas were diluted by those keen to compromise with classical economists or to render his concepts with mathematical models like the IS–LM model (which, they argue, distort Keynes's ideas). Keynes began to recover in 1939, but for the rest of his life his professional energies were directed largely towards the practical side of economics: the problems of ensuring optimum allocation of resources for the war efforts, post-war negotiations with America, and the new international financial order that was presented at the Bretton Woods Conference.
In the General Theory and later, Keynes responded to the socialists who argued, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, that capitalism caused war. He argued that if capitalism were managed domestically and internationally (with coordinated international Keynesian policies, an international monetary system that did not pit the interests of countries against one another, and a high degree of freedom of trade), then this system of managed capitalism could promote peace rather than conflict between countries. His plans during World War II for post-war international economic institutions and policies (which contributed to the creation at Bretton Woods of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and later to the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and eventually the World Trade Organization) were aimed to give effect to this vision.
Although Keynes has been widely criticised – especially by members of the Chicago school of economics – for advocating irresponsible government spending financed by borrowing, in fact he was a firm believer in balanced budgets and regarded the proposals for programs of public works during the Great Depression as an exceptional measure to meet the needs of exceptional circumstances.
Second World War
During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post-war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches.
As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions – a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proven correct by events.
The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase."
Postwar
After the war, Keynes continued to represent the United Kingdom in international negotiations despite his deteriorating health. He succeeded in obtaining preferential terms from the United States for new and outstanding debts to facilitate the rebuilding of the British economy.
Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of social economics and advisor to the Bank of England, of his hopes that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" could help Britain out of the economic hole it was in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."
Legacy
Keynesian ascendancy 1939–79
From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes provided the main inspiration for economic policymakers in Europe, America and much of the rest of the world. While economists and policymakers had become increasingly won over to Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after the outbreak of World War II that governments started to borrow money for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (then a US government official charged with controlling inflation), in the rebound of the economy from wartime spending, "one could not have had a better demonstration of the Keynesian ideas."
The Keynesian Revolution was associated with the rise of modern liberalism in the West during the post-war period. Keynesian ideas became so popular that some scholars point to Keynes as representing the ideals of modern liberalism, as Adam Smith represented the ideals of classical liberalism. After the war, Winston Churchill attempted to check the rise of Keynesian policy-making in the United Kingdom and used rhetoric critical of the mixed economy in his 1945 election campaign. Despite his popularity as a war hero, Churchill suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee, whose government's economic policy continued to be influenced by Keynes's ideas.
Neo-Keynesian economics
In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years.
By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism.
In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Multiplier
The concept of multiplier was first developed by R. F. Kahn in his article "The relation of home investment to unemployment" In the economic journal of June 1931. Kahn multiplier was the employment multiplier while as Keynes took the idea from Kahn and formulated the investment multiplier.
Keynesian economics out of favour 1979–2007
Keynesian economics were officially discarded by the British Government in 1979, but forces had begun to gather against Keynes's ideas over 30 years earlier. Friedrich Hayek had formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, with the explicit intention of nurturing intellectual currents to one day displace Keynesianism and other similar influences. Its members included the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises along with the then young Milton Friedman. Initially the society had little impact on the wider world – according to Hayek it was as if Keynes had been raised to sainthood after his death and that people refused to allow his work to be questioned.
Friedman however began to emerge as a formidable critic of Keynesian economics from the mid-1950s, and especially after his 1963 publication of A Monetary History of the United States.
On the practical side of economic life, "big government" had appeared to be firmly entrenched in the 1950s, but the balance began to shift towards the power of private interests in the 1960s. Keynes had written against the folly of allowing "decadent and selfish" speculators and financiers the kind of influence they had enjoyed after World War I. For two decades after World War II the public opinion was strongly against private speculators, the disparaging label "Gnomes of Zürich" being typical of how they were described during this period. International speculation was severely restricted by the capital controls in place after Bretton Woods. According to the journalists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, 1968 was the pivotal year when power shifted in favour of private agents such as currency speculators. As the key 1968 event Elliott and Atkinson picked out America's suspension of the conversion of the dollar into gold except on request of foreign governments, which they identified as the beginning of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system.
Criticisms of Keynes's ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s, as they were then able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. Keynes himself included few formulas and no explicit mathematical models in his General Theory. For economists such as Hyman Minsky, Keynes's limited use of mathematics was partly the result of his scepticism about whether phenomena as inherently uncertain as economic activity could ever be adequately captured by mathematical models. Nevertheless, many models were developed by Keynesian economists, with a famous example being the Phillips curve which predicted an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. It implied that unemployment could be reduced by government stimulus with a calculable cost to inflation. In 1968, Milton Friedman published a paper arguing that the fixed relationship implied by the Philips curve did not exist.
Friedman suggested that sustained Keynesian policies could lead to both unemployment and inflation rising at once – a phenomenon that soon became known as stagflation. In the early 1970s stagflation appeared in both the US and Britain just as Friedman had predicted, with economic conditions deteriorating further after the 1973 oil crisis. Aided by the prestige gained from his successful forecast, Friedman led increasingly successful criticisms against the Keynesian consensus, convincing not only academics and politicians but also much of the general public with his radio and television broadcasts. The academic credibility of Keynesian economics was further undermined by additional criticism from other monetarists trained in the Chicago school of economics, by the Lucas critique and by criticisms from Hayek's Austrian School. So successful were these criticisms that by 1980 Robert Lucas claimed economists would often take offence if described as Keynesians.
Keynesian principles fared increasingly poorly on the practical side of economics – by 1979 they had been displaced by monetarism as the primary influence on Anglo-American economic policy. However, many officials on both sides of the Atlantic retained a preference for Keynes, and in 1984 the Federal Reserve officially discarded monetarism, after which Keynesian principles made a partial comeback as an influence on policy making.
Not all academics accepted the criticism against Keynes – Minsky has argued that Keynesian economics had been debased by excessive mixing with neoclassical ideas from the 1950s, and that it was unfortunate that this branch of economics had even continued to be called "Keynesian". Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner argued it was not so much excessive Keynesian activism that caused the economic problems of the 1970s but the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls, which allowed capital flight from regulated economies into unregulated economies in a fashion similar to Gresham's law phenomenon (where weak currencies undermine strong currencies).
Historian Peter Pugh has stated that a key cause of the economic problems afflicting America in the 1970s was the refusal to raise taxes to finance the Vietnam War, which was against Keynesian advice.
A more typical response was to accept some elements of the criticisms while refining Keynesian economic theories to defend them against arguments that would invalidate the whole Keynesian framework – the resulting body of work largely composing New Keynesian economics. In 1992 Alan Blinder wrote about a "Keynesian Restoration", as work based on Keynes's ideas had to some extent become fashionable once again in academia, though in the mainstream it was highly synthesised with monetarism and other neoclassical thinking. In the world of policy making, free market influences broadly sympathetic to monetarism have remained very strong at government level – in powerful normative institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and US Treasury, and in prominent opinion-forming media such as the Financial Times and The Economist.
Keynesian resurgence 2008–09
The global financial crisis of 2007–08 led to public skepticism about the free market consensus even from some on the economic right. In March 2008, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, announced the death of the dream of global free-market capitalism. In the same month macroeconomist James K. Galbraith used the 25th Annual Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture to launch a sweeping attack against the consensus for monetarist economics and argued that Keynesian economics were far more relevant for tackling the emerging crises.
Economist Robert J. Shiller had begun advocating robust government intervention to tackle the financial crises, specifically citing Keynes.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman also actively argued the case for vigorous Keynesian intervention in the economy in his columns for The New York Times.
Other prominent economic commentators who have argued for Keynesian government intervention to mitigate the financial crisis include George Akerlof, J. Bradford DeLong,
Robert Reich,
and Joseph Stiglitz.
Newspapers and other media have also cited work relating to Keynes by Hyman Minsky, Robert Skidelsky, Donald Markwell
and Axel Leijonhufvud.
A series of major bailouts were pursued during the financial crisis, starting on 7 September with the announcement that the U.S. Government was to nationalise the two government-sponsored enterprises which oversaw most of the U.S. subprime mortgage market – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In October, Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to Keynes as he announced plans for substantial fiscal stimulus to head off the worst effects of recession, in accordance with Keynesian economic thought. Similar policies have been adopted by other governments worldwide.
This is in stark contrast to the action imposed on Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when it was forced by the IMF to close 16 banks at the same time, prompting a bank run.
Much of the post-crisis discussion reflected Keynes's advocacy of international coordination of fiscal or monetary stimulus, and of international economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which many had argued should be reformed as a "new Bretton Woods", and should have been even before the crises broke out.
The IMF and United Nations economists advocated a coordinated international approach to fiscal stimulus.
Donald Markwell argued that in the absence of such an international approach, there would be a risk of worsening international relations and possibly even world war arising from economic factors similar to those present during the depression of the 1930s.
By the end of December 2008, the Financial Times reported that "the sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy is a stunning reversal of the orthodoxy of the past several decades."
In December 2008, Paul Krugman released his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, arguing that economic conditions similar to those that existed during the earlier part of the 20th century had returned, making Keynesian policy prescriptions more relevant than ever. In February 2009 Robert J. Shiller and George Akerlof published Animal Spirits, a book where they argue the current US stimulus package is too small as it does not take into account Keynes's insight on the importance of confidence and expectations in determining the future behaviour of businesspeople and other economic agents.
In the March 2009 speech entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, came out in favour of Keynes's idea of a centrally managed global reserve currency. Zhou argued that it was unfortunate that part of the reason for the Bretton Woods system breaking down was the failure to adopt Keynes's bancor. Zhou proposed a gradual move towards increased use of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs).
Although Zhou's ideas had not been broadly accepted, leaders meeting in April at the 2009 G-20 London summit agreed to allow $250 billion of special drawing rights to be created by the IMF, to be distributed globally. Stimulus plans were credited for contributing to a better than expected economic outlook by both the OECD
and the IMF, in reports published in June and July 2009. Both organisations warned global leaders that recovery was likely to be slow, so counter recessionary measures ought not be rolled back too early.
While the need for stimulus measures was broadly accepted among policy makers, there had been much debate over how to fund the spending. Some leaders and institutions, such as Angela Merkel
and the European Central Bank,
expressed concern over the potential impact on inflation, national debt and the risk that a too large stimulus will create an unsustainable recovery.
Among professional economists the revival of Keynesian economics has been even more divisive. Although many economists, such as George Akerlof, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, and Joseph Stiglitz, supported Keynesian stimulus, others did not believe higher government spending would help the United States economy recover from the Great Recession. Some economists, such as Robert Lucas, questioned the theoretical basis for stimulus packages. Others, like Robert Barro and Gary Becker, say that empirical evidence for beneficial effects from Keynesian stimulus does not exist. However, there is a growing academic literature that shows that fiscal expansion helps an economy grow in the near term, and that certain types of fiscal stimulus are particularly effective.
Overall views
John Maynard Keynes had a drastically different upbringing and motives for his philosophical and economic contributions. Rather than writing with the mindset of being upset at the current system, Keynes instead produced his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with the intention of solving the then current issue which was plaguing the whole world, The Great Depression. When he wrote this, one theme that occurs numerous times is his view on how individuals should save during a time of economic downturn or recession. His answer was that people tend to save more in these times, which he thought could be very harmful if there is no government intervention because individuals and businesses are too scared or have the inability to invest in new ideas and jobs due to the state of the economy. This issue was especially prevalent during The Great Depression because individuals were saving their money and businesses were not investing which was keeping that particular recession around as long as it did and made the unemployment rate go from around 4 percent all the way to around twenty five percent. The individuals were saving with the hopes that the recession would not be very long, which then caused it to get worse due to lack of stimulation in the economy. In order to get out of this cycle, Keynes argued that it was the government alone that would be able to solve this problem and break the United States particularly and the whole world out of The Great Depression. Keynes, normally an endorser of free market capitalism realised that this recession was a special case in that it had potential to be inescapable. The government did eventually do this with president Franklin Roosevelt introducing The New Deal, which was a relief program set up where the federal budget was increased with the purpose of getting the economy out of the recession by injecting money manually from these government aid programs.“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”(Keynes). Keynes is highlighting the fact that people are used to making certain decisions during different times of the business cycle, and also that individuals and businesses needed to change the way they were viewing saving money so that the country could get out of the recession. It is clear that Keynes had a different approach to economic thought from Marx because he was writing with the intention of solving the current world problem, The Great Depression, rather than critiquing the unfairness in the current system.
Praise
On a personal level, Keynes's charm was such that he was generally well received wherever he went – even those who found themselves on the wrong side of his occasionally sharp tongue rarely bore a grudge. Keynes's speech at the closing of the Bretton Woods negotiations was received with a lasting standing ovation, rare in international relations, as the delegates acknowledged the scale of his achievements made despite poor health.
Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek was Keynes's most prominent contemporary critic, with sharply opposing views on the economy. Yet after Keynes's death, he wrote: "He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him." A colleague Nicholas Davenport recalled, "There were deep emotional forces about Maynard ... One could sense his humanity. There was nothing of the cold intellectual about him."
Lionel Robbins, former head of the economics department at the London School of Economics, who engaged in many heated debates with Keynes in the 1930s, had this to say after observing Keynes in early negotiations with the Americans while drawing up plans for Bretton Woods:
Douglas LePan, an official from the Canadian High Commission, wrote:
Bertrand Russell named Keynes one of the most intelligent people he had ever known, commenting:
Keynes's obituary in The Times included the comment: "There is the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes ... He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good."
Critiques
As a man of the centre described by some as having the greatest impact of any 20th-century economist, Keynes attracted considerable criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. In the 1920s, Keynes was seen as anti-establishment and was mainly attacked from the right. In the "red 1930s", many young economists favoured Marxist views, even in Cambridge, and while Keynes was engaging principally with the right to try to persuade them of the merits of more progressive policy, the most vociferous criticism against him came from the left, who saw him as a supporter of capitalism. From the 1950s and onwards, most of the attacks against Keynes have again been from the right.
In 1931 Friedrich Hayek extensively critiqued Keynes's 1930 Treatise on Money. After reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Keynes wrote to Hayek "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it", but concluded the letter with the recommendation: On the pressing issue of the time, whether deficit spending could lift a country from depression, Keynes replied to Hayek's criticism in the following way:
Asked why Keynes expressed "moral and philosophical" agreement with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Hayek stated:
According to some observers, Hayek felt that the post-World War II "Keynesian orthodoxy" gave too much power to the state, and that such policies would lead toward socialism.
While Milton Friedman described The General Theory as "a great book", he argues that its implicit separation of nominal from real magnitudes is neither possible nor desirable. Macroeconomic policy, Friedman argues, can reliably influence only the nominal. He and other monetarists have consequently argued that Keynesian economics can result in stagflation, the combination of low growth and high inflation that developed economies suffered in the early 1970s. More to Friedman's taste was the Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), which he regarded as Keynes's best work because of its focus on maintaining domestic price stability.
Joseph Schumpeter was an economist of the same age as Keynes and one of his main rivals. He was among the first reviewers to argue that Keynes's General Theory was not a general theory, but a special case. He said the work expressed "the attitude of a decaying civilisation". After Keynes's death Schumpeter wrote a brief biographical piece Keynes the Economist – on a personal level he was very positive about Keynes as a man, praising his pleasant nature, courtesy and kindness. He assessed some of Keynes's biographical and editorial work as among the best he'd ever seen. Yet Schumpeter remained critical about Keynes's economics, linking Keynes's childlessness to what Schumpeter saw as an essentially short-term view. He considered Keynes to have a kind of unconscious patriotism that caused him to fail to understand the problems of other nations. For Schumpeter "Practical Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and becomes poisonous as it dies."
"Schumpeter admired and envied Keynes, but when Keynes died in 1946, Schumpeter's obituary gave Keynes the same off-key, perfunctory treatment he would later give Adam Smith in the History of Economic Analysis, the "discredit of not adding a single innovation to the techniques of economic analysis".
President Harry S. Truman was sceptical of Keynesian theorizing: "Nobody can ever convince me that government can spend a dollar that it's not got," he told Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian economist who chaired Truman's Council of Economic Advisers.
Views on race
Keynes sometimes explained the mass murder that took place during the first years of communist Russia on a racial basis, as part of the "Russian and Jewish nature", rather than as a result of the communist rule. After a trip to Russia, he wrote in his Short View of Russia that there is "beastliness on the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied together". He also wrote that "out of the cruelty and stupidity of the Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but (...) beneath the cruelty and stupidity of the New Russia a speck of the ideal may lie hid."
Some critics have sought to show that Keynes had sympathies towards Nazism, and a number of writers have described him as antisemitic. Keynes's private letters contain portraits and descriptions, some of which can be characterized as antisemitic, while others as philosemitic.
Scholars have suggested that these reflect clichés current at the time that he accepted uncritically, rather than any racism. On several occasions Keynes used his influence to help his Jewish friends, most notably when he successfully lobbied for Ludwig Wittgenstein to be allowed residency in the United Kingdom, explicitly in order to rescue him from being deported to Nazi-occupied Austria. Keynes was a supporter of Zionism, serving on committees supporting the cause.
Allegations that he was racist or had totalitarian beliefs have been rejected by Robert Skidelsky and other biographers. Professor Gordon Fletcher wrote that "the suggestion of a link between Keynes and any support of totalitarianism cannot be sustained". Once the aggressive tendencies of the Nazis towards Jews and other minorities had become apparent, Keynes made clear his loathing of Nazism. As a lifelong pacifist he had initially favoured peaceful containment of Nazi Germany, yet he began to advocate a forceful resolution while many conservatives were still arguing for appeasement. After the war started he roundly criticised the Left for losing their nerve to confront Hitler:
Views on inflation
Keynes has been characterised as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation. He had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the two evils, it is "better to disappoint the rentier" than to inflict pain on working class families. He also supported the German hyperinflation as a way to get free from reparations obligations. However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he wrote:
Views on free trade and protectionism
The turning point of the Great Depression
At the beginning of his career, Keynes was an economist close to Alfred Marshall, deeply convinced of the benefits of free trade. From the crisis of 1929 onwards, noting the commitment of the British authorities to defend the gold parity of the pound sterling and the rigidity of nominal wages, he gradually adhered to protectionist measures.
On 5 November 1929, when heard by the Macmillan Committee to bring the British economy out of the crisis, Keynes indicated that the introduction of tariffs on imports would help to rebalance the trade balance. The committee's report states in a section entitled "import control and export aid", that in an economy where there is not full employment, the introduction of tariffs can improve production and employment. Thus the reduction of the trade deficit favours the country's growth.
In January 1930, in the Economic Advisory Council, Keynes proposed the introduction of a system of protection to reduce imports. In the autumn of 1930, he proposed a uniform tariff of 10% on all imports and subsidies of the same rate for all exports. In the Treatise on Money, published in the autumn of 1930, he took up the idea of tariffs or other trade restrictions with the aim of reducing the volume of imports and rebalancing the balance of trade.
On 7 March 1931, in the New Statesman and Nation, he wrote an article entitled Proposal for a Tariff Revenue. He pointed out that the reduction of wages led to a reduction in national demand which constrained markets. Instead, he proposes the idea of an expansionary policy combined with a tariff system to neutralise the effects on the balance of trade. The application of customs tariffs seemed to him "unavoidable, whoever the Chancellor of the Exchequer might be".Thus, for Keynes, an economic recovery policy is only fully effective if the trade deficit is eliminated. He proposed a 15% tax on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and 5% on certain foodstuffs and raw materials, with others needed for exports exempted (wool, cotton).
In 1932, in an article entitled The Pro- and Anti-Tariffs, published in The Listener, he envisaged the protection of farmers and certain sectors such as the automobile and iron and steel industries, considering them indispensable to Britain.
The critique of the theory of comparative advantage
In the post-crisis situation of 1929, Keynes judged the assumptions of the free trade model unrealistic. He criticised, for example, the neoclassical assumption of wage adjustment.
As early as 1930, in a note to the Economic Advisory Council, he doubted the intensity of the gain from specialisation in the case of manufactured goods. While participating in the MacMillan Committee, he admitted that he no longer "believed in a very high degree of national specialisation" and refused to "abandon any industry which is unable, for the moment, to survive". He also criticised the static dimension of the theory of comparative advantage, which, in his view, by fixing comparative advantages definitively, led in practice to a waste of national resources.
In the Daily Mail of 13 March 1931, he called the assumption of perfect sectoral labour mobility "nonsense" since it states that a person made unemployed contributes to a reduction in the wage rate until he finds a job. But for Keynes, this change of job may involve costs (job search, training) and is not always possible. Generally speaking, for Keynes, the assumptions of full employment and automatic return to equilibrium discredit the theory of comparative advantage.
In July 1933, he published an article in the New Statesman and Nation entitled National Self-Sufficiency, in which he criticised the argument of the specialisation of economies, which is the basis of free trade. He thus proposed the search for a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Instead of the specialisation of economies advocated by the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, he prefers the maintenance of a diversity of activities for nations. In it he refutes the principle of peacemaking trade. His vision of trade became that of a system where foreign capitalists compete for new markets. He defends the idea of producing on national soil when possible and reasonable and expresses sympathy for the advocates of protectionism.
He notes in National Self-Sufficiency:
He also writes in National Self-Sufficiency:
Later, Keynes had a written correspondence with James Meade centred on the issue of import restrictions. Keynes and Meade discussed the best choice between quota and tariff. In March 1944 Keynes began a discussion with Marcus Fleming after the latter had written an article entitled Quotas versus depreciation. On this occasion, we see that he has definitely taken a protectionist stance after the Great Depression. He considered that quotas could be more effective than currency depreciation in dealing with external imbalances. Thus, for Keynes, currency depreciation was no longer sufficient and protectionist measures became necessary to avoid trade deficits. To avoid the return of crises due to a self-regulating economic system, it seemed essential to him to regulate trade and stop free trade (deregulation of foreign trade).
He points out that countries that import more than they export weaken their economies. When the trade deficit increases, unemployment rises and GDP slows down. And surplus countries exert a "negative externality" on their trading partners. They get richer at the expense of others and destroy the output of their trading partners. John Maynard Keynes believed that the products of surplus countries should be taxed to avoid trade imbalances. Thus he no longer believes in the theory of comparative advantage (on which free trade is based) which states that the trade deficit does not matter, since trade is mutually beneficial.
This also explains his desire to replace the liberalisation of international trade (Free Trade) with a regulatory system aimed at eliminating trade imbalances in his proposals for the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Views on trade imbalances
Keynes was the principal author of a proposal – the so-called Keynes Plan – for an International Clearing Union. The two governing principles of the plan were that the problem of settling outstanding balances should be solved by "creating" additional "international money", and that debtor and creditor should be treated almost alike as disturbers of equilibrium. In the event, though, the plans were rejected, in part because "American opinion was naturally reluctant to accept the principle of equality of treatment so novel in debtor-creditor relationships".
The new system is not founded on free-trade (liberalisation of foreign trade) but rather on the regulation of international trade, in order to eliminate trade imbalances: the nations with a surplus would have an incentive to reduce it, and in doing so they would automatically clear other nations deficits. He proposed a global bank that would issue its currency – the bancor – which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange and would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus. Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union. He pointed out that surpluses lead to weak global aggregate demand – countries running surpluses exert a "negative externality" on trading partners, and posed, far more than those in deficit, a threat to global prosperity.
In his 1933 Yale Review article "National Self-Sufficiency," he already highlighted the problems created by free trade. His view, supported by many economists and commentators at the time, was that creditor nations may be just as responsible as debtor nations for disequilibrium in exchanges and that both should be under an obligation to bring trade back into a state of balance. Failure for them to do so could have serious consequences. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, then editor of The Economist, "If the economic relationships between nations are not, by one means or another, brought fairly close to balance, then there is no set of financial arrangements that can rescue the world from the impoverishing results of chaos."
These ideas were informed by events prior to the Great Depression when – in the opinion of Keynes and others – international lending, primarily by the U.S., exceeded the capacity of sound investment and so got diverted into non-productive and speculative uses, which in turn invited default and a sudden stop to the process of lending.
Influenced by Keynes, economics texts in the immediate post-war period put a significant emphasis on balance in trade. For example, the second edition of the popular introductory textbook, An Outline of Money, devoted the last three of its ten chapters to questions of foreign exchange management and in particular the "problem of balance". However, in more recent years, since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the increasing influence of Monetarist schools of thought in the 1980s, and particularly in the face of large sustained trade imbalances, these concerns – and particularly concerns about the destabilising effects of large trade surpluses – have largely disappeared from mainstream economics discourse and Keynes's insights have slipped from view. They are receiving some attention again in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08.
Personal life
Relationships
Keynes's early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men. Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan. Keynes was open about his affairs, and from 1901 to 1915 kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters. Keynes's relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortunate, as Macmillan's company first published his tract Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell. The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey, though they were for the most part love rivals, not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse, and as with Grant, fell out with a jealous Strachey for it. Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".
Political opponents have used Keynes's sexuality to attack his academic work. One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long-term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.
Keynes's friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began pursuing affairs with women, demonstrating himself to be bisexual. Ray Costelloe (who later married Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes. In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take."
Marriage
In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen "very much in love" with Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina and one of the stars of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the early years of his courtship, he maintained an affair with a younger man, Sebastian Sprott, in tandem with Lopokova, but eventually chose Lopokova exclusively. They were married in 1925, with Keynes's former lover Duncan Grant as best man. "What a marriage of beauty and brains, the fair Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes" was said at the time. Keynes later commented to Strachey that beauty and intelligence were rarely found in the same person, and that only in Duncan Grant had he found the combination. The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes "a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied".
The couple hoped to have children but this did not happen.
Among Keynes's Bloomsbury friends, Lopokova was, at least initially, subjected to criticism for her manners, mode of conversation, and supposedly humble social origins – the last of the ostensible causes being particularly noted in the letters of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf. In her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf bases the character of Rezia Warren Smith on Lopokova. E. M. Forster later wrote in contrition about "Lydia Keynes, every whose word should be recorded": "How we all used to underestimate her".
Support for the arts
Keynes thought that the pursuit of money for its own sake was a pathological condition, and that the proper aim of work is to provide leisure. He wanted shorter working hours and longer holidays for all.
Keynes was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution to become one of the major British stages outside London.
Keynes's interest in classical opera and dance led him to support the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadler's Wells. During the war, as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the war, Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was its founding chairman in 1946. From the start, the two organisations that received the largest grants from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells.
Keynes built up a substantial collection of fine art, including works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat (some of which can now be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum). He enjoyed collecting books; he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. In part on the basis of these papers, Keynes wrote of Newton as "the last of the magicians."
Philosophical views
Keynes, like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, was greatly influenced by the philosophy of G.E. Moore, which in 1938 he described as "still my religion under the surface". According to Moore, states of mind were the only valuable things in themselves, the most important being "the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects". Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote of how Virginia Woolf, Keynes, and T. S. Eliot discussed religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality.
Keynes may have been confirmed, but according to Cambridge University he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death. According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind" but also added that he came to "value it for social and moral reasons" later in life. Another biographer writes that he "broke the family faith and became a 'ferocious agnostic during his time at Eton. One Cambridge acquaintance remembered him as "an atheist with a devotion to King's chapel". At Cambridge, he was strongly associated with the Cambridge Heretics Society, an avowed atheist group which promoted secularism and humanism.
Investments
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000 – equivalent to about £20.5 million ($27.1 million) in 2018. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various charities and philanthropies, and his ethic which made him reluctant to sell on a falling market, in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump.
Keynes managed the endowment of King's College, Cambridge starting in the 1920s, initially with an unsuccessful strategy based on market timing but later shifting to focus in the publicly traded stock of small and medium size companies that paid large dividends. This was a controversial decision at the time, as stocks were considered high-risk and the centuries-old endowment had traditionally been invested in agricultural land and fixed income assets like bonds. Keynes was granted permission to invest a small minority of assets in stocks, and his adroit management resulted this portion of the endowment growing to become the majority of the endowment's assets. The active component of his portfolio outperformed a British equity index by an average of 6% to 8% a year over a quarter century, earning him favourable mention by later investors such as Warren Buffett and George Soros. Joel Tillinghast of Fidelity Investments describes Keynes as an early practitioner of value investing, a school of thought formalized in the U.S. by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia Business School during the 1920s and '30s. However, Keynes is believed to have developed his ideas independently. Keynes also regarded as a pioneer of financial diversification as he recognized the importance of holding assets with "opposed risks" as he wrote "since they are likely to move in opposite directions when there are general fluctuations"; and also as an early international investor who avoided home country bias by investing substantially in stocks outside the United Kingdom. Ken Fisher characterized Keynes as an exception to the rule that economists usually make horrible investors.
Political life
Keynes was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from about 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasions in 1920. From 1926, when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economic policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third-party status by the growing workers-oriented Labour Party.
In 1939 Keynes had the option to enter Parliament as an independent MP with the University of Cambridge seat. A by-election for the seat was to be held due to the illness of an elderly Tory, and the master of Magdalene College had obtained agreement that none of the major parties would field a candidate if Keynes chose to stand. Keynes declined the invitation as he felt he would wield greater influence on events if he remained a free agent.
Keynes was a proponent of eugenics. He served as director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. As late as 1946, shortly before his death, Keynes declared eugenics to be "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists."
Keynes once remarked that "the youth had no religion save communism and this was worse than nothing." Marxism "was founded upon nothing better than a misunderstanding of Ricardo", and, given time, he (Keynes) "would deal thoroughly with the Marxists" and other economists to solve the economic problems their theories "threaten to cause".
In 1931 Keynes had the following to say on Leninism:
Keynes was a firm supporter of women's rights and in 1932 became vice-chairman of the Marie Stopes Society which provided birth control education. He also campaigned against job discrimination against women and unequal pay. He was an outspoken campaigner for reform of the laws against homosexuality.
Heraldic arms
Death
Throughout his life, Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends; even when his health was poor, he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college. Helping to set up the Bretton Woods system, he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. In 1946, Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal. They began during negotiations for the Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as "absolute hell". A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946, at the age of 62. Against his wishes (he wanted his ashes to be deposited in the crypt at King's), his ashes were scattered on the Downs above Tilton.
Both of Keynes's parents outlived him: his father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and his mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010), a physiologist, and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003), an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes had no children; his widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981.
Cultural representations
In John Buchan's novel Island of Sheep (1936) the character of the financier Barralty is based on Keynes.
In the film Wittgenstein (1993), directed by Derek Jarman, Keynes was played by John Quentin.
The docudrama Paris 1919, based around Margaret MacMillan's book, featured Paul Bandey as Keynes.
In the BBC series about the Bloomsbury Group, Life In Squares, Keynes was portrayed by Edmund Kingsley.
The novel Mr Keynes' Revolution (2020) by E. J. Barnes is about Keynes' life in the 1920s.
Love Letters, based on the correspondence of Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, was performed by Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham-Carter at Charleston in 2021.
Publications
Books
1913 Indian Currency and Finance
1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace
1921 A Treatise on Probability
1922 Revision of the Treaty
1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform
1926 The End of Laissez-Faire
1930 A Treatise on Money
1931 Essays in Persuasion
1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
1940 How to Pay for the War: A radical plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
1949 Two Memoirs. Ed. by David Garnett (On Carl Melchior and G. E. Moore.)
Articles and pamphlets
(A partial list.)
1915 The Economics of War in Germany
1922 The Inflation of Currency as a Method of Taxation
1925 Am I a Liberal?
1926 Laissez-Faire and Communism
1929 Can Lloyd George Do It?
1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
1931 The End of the Gold Standard (Sunday Express)
1931 The Great Slump of 1930
1933 The Means to Prosperity
1933 An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (New York Times)
1933 Essays in Biography
1937 The General Theory of Employment
See also
References
Notes and citations
Sources
Backhouse, Roger E. and Bateman, Bradley W.. Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes. 2011
Barnett, Vincent. John Maynard Keynes. London: Routledge, 2013. .
Beaudreau, Bernard C.. The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes: How the Second Industrial Revolution Passed Great Britain By. iUniverse, 2006,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury, 2009,
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist, Bloomsbury Press, 2009
Markwell, Donald. John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace. Oxford University Press, 2006. . .
Markwell, Donald. Keynes and Australia . Reserve Bank of Australia, 2000.
Keynes, Milo (ed). Essays on John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge University Press, 1975. .
Moggridge, Donald Edward. Keynes. Macmillan, 1980. .
Patinkin, Don. "Keynes, John Maynard." In: The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1987, pp. 19–41. . .
Schuker, Stephen A. "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33." Princeton Studies in International Finance, No. 61, 1988.
Schuker, Stephen A. "J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations." Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 25, Nos. 3/4, 2014. .
Blaug, Mark. "Recent Biographies of Keynes." Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, September 1994, pp. 1204-1215. .
Buchanan, James M. and Richard E. Wagner. Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 8. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008.
Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Davidson, Paul. John Maynard Keynes (Great Thinkers in Economics). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. .
Dimand, Robert W. and Harald Hagemann, eds. The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes (Edward Elgar, 20190 + 670 pp. online review
Harrod, R. F.. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. Macmillan, 1951. .
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. (2005)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920. (1986)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (1994)
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946.
Temin, Peter, and David Vines. Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy. MIT Press, 2014.
Wapshott, Nicholas. Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (2011)
Primary sources
External links
Professor Robert Skidelsky explains Keynes theories video
Professor Robert Skidelsky on economist Keynes video
Churchill, Keynes & The Gold Standard – UK Parliament Living Heritage
Correspondence with John Maynard, Baron Keynes, four volumes held at The British Library
Treaty of Versailles & Keynes – UK Parliament Living Heritage
John Maynard Keynes on Google Scholar
Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926)
Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Keynes, The raising of prices (1933)
Keynes, National Self-Sufficiency (1933)
Keynes, An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (1933)
Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
Interactive E-Book John Maynard Keynes: The Lives of a Mind (2016). The Keynes Centre at University College Cork
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LGBT philosophers | false | [
"Say What You Will may refer to:\n\n\"Say What You Will\", a song by For the Fallen Dreams from their 2011 album Back Burner\n\"Say What You Will\", a 2009 song by the Canadian singer Justin Hines\n\"Say What You Will\", a song by James Blake from his 2021 album Friends That Break Your Heart\nSay What You Will, Clarence... Karl Sold the Truck (originally titled Say What You Will...), a 1984 debut studio album by American rock band Soul Asylum.",
"Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies is a book by music journalist Brian Coleman that covers the making of 36 classic hip hop albums, based on interviews with the artists who created them, also providing a track-by-track breakdown for each album entirely in the words of the artists. It was published by Villard/Random House in 2007.\n\nIt is an expanded and updated version of the book Rakim Told Me, also by Brian Coleman, and it features a foreword by Questlove of the Roots.\n\nReception\nThe book received positive reviews from numerous press outlets, such as Entertainment Weekly, AllHipHop, ALARM Magazine, and The Onion/The A.V. Club.\n\nSome criticisms of the book are that it is missing certain classic albums, is missing some tracks from some albums, that it has very few female artists covered, and \"little attention is given to the outlining societal conditions.\"\n\nBrian Coleman explained in interviews that he didn't intentionally leave any album out of the book, but there were difficulties in arranging interviews with certain artists. He also commented he wanted to focus on hip hop artists and what they had to say, rather than on academic subjects surrounding hip hop: \"I don't really wanna read what critics have to say about the stuff. I wanna read what the artist has to say.” He added,\n\nThis approach has been praised by critics—URB commented on his \"mercifully non-academic approach”, and ALARM Magazine said,\n\nSequel\nCheck the Technique Vol. 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies was published in 2014.\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\nColeman, Brian (2007). Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies. New York: Villard/Random House, .\n\nExternal links\nOfficial website\nCheck the Technique on Myspace\n\nHip hop books\n2007 non-fiction books\nVillard (imprint) books"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career"
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | What was his first job? | 1 | What was Buddy Hackett's first job? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"Bildad ( Bildaḏ), the Shuhite, was one of Job's three friends who visited the patriarch in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Job. He was a descendant of Shuah, son of Abraham and Keturah (Genesis 25:1 - 25:2), whose family lived in the deserts of Arabia, or a resident of the district. In speaking with Job, his intent was consolation, but he became an accuser, asking Job what he has done to deserve God's wrath.\n\nSpeeches\nThe three speeches of Bildad are contained in Job 8, Job 18 and Job 25. In substance, they were largely an echo of what had been maintained by Eliphaz the Temanite, the first of Job's friends to speak, but charged with somewhat increased vehemence because he deemed Job's words so impious and wrathful. Bildad was the first to attribute Job's calamity to actual wickedness, albeit indirectly, by accusing his children (who were destroyed, Job 1:19) of sin to warrant their punishment (Job 8:4). His brief third speech, just five verses in length, marked the silencing of the friends.\n\nSee also \nEliphaz\nZophar\n Elihu\n Bildad is also the name of one of the owners of the Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nHebrew Bible people\nBook of Job",
"Job Carr (July 2, 1813 - August 10, 1887) was the founder of Tacoma, Washington, United States.\n\nA Union veteran of the United States Civil War, Carr came west in 1864 to settle on a 168-acre claim in what is now Tacoma.\n\nCarr was the first permanent European American settler in the area. He built a cabin on his claim, which doubled as the United States Post Office when Carr was appointed Postmaster. He was an early promoter of Tacoma as a potential terminus for the Northern Pacific Railroad, and encouraged settlement in the new town.\n\nA replica of his original cabin stands near the original location, and serves as a museum of both Carr and of early Tacoma.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nJob Carr arrives at future site of Tacoma\nJob Carr Cabin Museum\n\n1813 births\n1887 deaths\nPeople from Tacoma, Washington"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club."
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 2 | Besides Hackett's employment at the Pink Elephant, are there any other interesting aspects about Buddy Hackett, Early career? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins."
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | Was it well received? | 3 | Was Hackett's film World of Sports well received? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"The Piano Sonata No. 6, Op. 13, by Samuil Feinberg was composed in 1923. The piece received its premiere on 4 September 1925 at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice. Its premiere was attended by famous composers of the time such as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Feinberg's composition was well-received, and would remain his only piano sonata to receive a wide publication.\n\nHistory\nThe sonata received its premiere on 4 September 1925 at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice, with Feinberg himself as the soloist. The piece was well received and even resulted in some publicity when the Dutch journal De Telegraaf pitted Feinberg's composition against the Piano Sonata of Igor Stravinsky, who was also in attendance of the festival.\n\nStructure and content\nThe 6th sonata encompasses a single movement, usually lasting around 15 minutes\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nFeinberg 06\n1923 compositions",
"Goodnight Already! is a children's book series by American author Jory John, illustrated by Benji Davies and published by HarperCollins. The series includes four books: Goodnight Already! (2014), I Love You Already! (2015), Come Home Already! (2017), and All Right Already! (2018).\n\nGoodnight Already! \nGoodnight Already! was published December 2, 2014.\n\nThe book received positive reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, as well as a mediocre review from Kirkus Reviews. It also received the following accolades:\n\n Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Picture Books (2015)\n E. B. White Read-Aloud Honor Book (2015)\n\nI Love You Already! \nI Love You Already! was published December 22, 2015.\n\nThe book received positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, as well as a mediocre review from Kirkus Reviews.\n\nCome Home Already! \nCome Home Already! was published December 5, 2017.\n\nThe book received a positive review from Kirkus Reviews and was named one of Bank Street College of Education's Best Children's Books of the Year (2018).\n\nAll Right Already! \nAll Right Already! was published November 13, 2018.\n\nThe book received a positive review from School Library Journal.\n\nReferences \n\nHarperCollins books\nSeries of children's books"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins.",
"Was it well received?",
"Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention."
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | What caused his come back? | 4 | What caused Buddy Hackett's come back to film? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"\"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" is a song written by Morris Broadnax, Clarence Paul, and Stevie Wonder. The song was originally recorded by Stevie Wonder in 1967, but his version was not released as a single and did not appear on an album until 1977's anthology Looking Back. The best-known version of this song is the 1973 release by Aretha Franklin, who had a million-selling top 10 hit on Billboard charts. The song reached No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 3 on the Hot 100 chart in 1974. It became an RIAA Gold record.\n\nWith this peak at number three, Franklin became the first artist in the history of the Hot 100 chart to have a hit song peak at each position from one to ten on the chart. To date, only four other artists have achieved this feat: Marvin Gaye in 1983, Madonna in 1996, Drake in 2013, and Taylor Swift in 2015. Aretha's version of the song was ranked by Billboard as the No. 11 song for 1974.\n\nIn the lyrics, the singer has been abandoned by a former partner, but declares determination to contact and win the partner back. Yet there is also evidence that the singer may be naive. The lyrics begin \"Although you don't call anymore, I sit and wait in vain.\" The singer plans some drastic steps, including camping by the partner's steps, rapping on the door and tapping on the window pane. However, the mood of the song and its musical accompaniment is upbeat and optimistic.\n\nPersonnel\nAretha Franklin version\n Aretha Franklin – lead vocals, acoustic piano\n Kenneth Bichel – synthesizer\n Margaret Branch – background vocals\n Ann S. Clark – background vocals\n Donny Hathaway – electric piano\n Hugh McCracken – guitar\n Bernard Purdie – drums\n Chuck Rainey – electric bass\n Pat Smith – background vocals\n Richard Tee – organ played by \n Arif Mardin – horn arrangement, string arrangement\n Joe Farrell – flute\n Gene Orloff – concert master\n\nTrack listing\n7\" single\nA. \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" – 3:25\nB. \"If You Don't Think\" – 3:49\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nMiki Howard version\n\nMiki Howard recorded the song for her 1989 self-titled album. Her version was an R&B hit in 1990 when it peaked at No. 3 on Billboard's Hot Black Singles chart. Mark Romanek directed the video for Howard's rendition.\n\nTrack listings\n7\" single\nA. \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" – 4:03\nB. \"Come Share My Love\" – 4:43\n\n12\" single\nA. \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" (Remix 12\" Version) – 5:22\nB1. \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" (LP Version) – 4:00\nB2. \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" (Remix Dub) – 4:46\n\n12\" single (UK)\nA. \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" (Brixton Bass Mix)\nB1. \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" (LP)\nB2. \"Come Share My Love\" (LP)\n\nCD single\n \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\"\n \"Come Share My Love\"\n \"Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)\" (Brixton Bass Mix)\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nOther cover versions\nIn 1983, Leo Sayer featured a cover on his album Have You Ever Been in Love, and released it as a single, titled \"Till You Come Back to Me\". It reached no. 51 in the UK.\nThe song was again covered in 1983 by Luther Vandross who released it on his album Busy Body as part of a medley with \"Superstar\", as well as its closing track. The medley peaked at no. 87 on the Billboard Hot 100 and no. 5 on the Hot Black Singles chart in 1984.\nRuby Turner recorded the song for her 1988 album The Motown Song Book.\nBasia recorded this song on her 1990 album London Warsaw New York. When released as a single, her version reached no. 33 on Billboard'''s Adult Contemporary chart. The music video for her cover featured footage shot in Seattle, with scenes including the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the landmark Paramount Theatre. The clip was directed by Nick Morris.\nCyndi Lauper covered the song on her 2003 studio album At Last''.\n\nReferences\n\n1967 songs\nAretha Franklin songs\nAtlantic Records singles\nBasia songs\nCyndi Lauper songs\nEpic Records singles\nLeo Sayer songs\nLuther Vandross songs\nMiki Howard songs\nSongs written by Clarence Paul\nSongs written by Morris Broadnax\nSongs written by Stevie Wonder\nSony Music singles\nStevie Wonder songs\nTorch songs",
"\"When You Come Back To Me\" is the first single from Edyta Górniak's second album Edyta. This song reached number 3 position on MTV Asia.\n\nBackground\n\nThe song was written by Christopher Paul Pelcer, Nicol Smith and Robert White Johnson and produced by Christopher Neil.\n\nThe single was released in Poland, Belgium and Sweden. Maxi single includes \"Coming Back To Love\", which was initially released as a bonus track on Japanese edition of the album.\n\nTrack listing\n\nSingle\n\n When You Come Back To Me (4:06)\n I Don't Know What's On Your Mind (4:00)\n\nMaxi single\n\n When You Come Back To Me (4:06)\n I Don't Know What's On Your Mind (4:00)\n Coming Back To Love (4:08) (Non-album track)\n\nMusic video\n\nThe music video for \"When You Come Back To Me\" was shot in the Queen's House of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London by British director Tim MacMillan. It made its world premiere on 6 October 1997 on Polish TV.\n\nThe video includes scenes of Edyta Górniak in the Great Hall of the Queen's House and Edyta re-enacting the role of Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.\n\nThere are two versions of the music video.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n1997 singles\n1998 singles\n1990s ballads\nPop ballads\nSong recordings produced by Christopher Neil\n1997 songs\nEMI Records singles"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins.",
"Was it well received?",
"Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention.",
"What caused his come back?",
"The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953),"
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | Did he have any flops? | 5 | Did Buddy Hackett have any flops in his career? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | false | [
"Flip-flops are a type of light sandal, typically worn as a form of casual footwear. They consist of a flat sole held loosely on the foot by a Y-shaped strap known as a toe thong that passes between the first and second toes and around both sides of the foot or can be a hard base with a strap across all the toes (these can also be called sliders or slides).\n\nThis style of footwear has been worn by the people of many cultures throughout the world, originating as early as the ancient Egyptians in 1,500 B.C. \n\nIn the United States the flip-flop has been popularized from the Japanese zōri, after World War II as soldiers brought them back from Japan. They became a prominent unisex summer footwear starting in the 1960s.\n\nEtymology\nAlthough the Beach Boys 1964 song All Summer Long mentions \"T-shirts, cut-offs, and a pair of thongs\", the term flip-flop has been used in American and British English since the 1960s to describe the thong or no-heel-strap sandal. It is an onomatopoeia of the sound made by the sandals when walking in them. They are called thongs (sometimes pluggers) in Australia, jandals (originally a trademarked name derived from \"Japanese sandals\") in New Zealand, slops or “plakkies” in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and tsinelas in the Philippines (or, in some Visayan localities, \"smagol\", from the word smuggled).\n\nThroughout the world, they are known by a variety of other names, including slippers in the Philippines, Hawaii, Bahamas, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.\n\nIn Russia, Ukraine and post-Soviet countries they are called vietnamki.\n\nHistory\n\nThong sandals have been worn for thousands of years, dating back to pictures of them in ancient Egyptian murals from 4,000 BC. A pair found in Europe was made of papyrus leaves and dated to be approximately 1,500 years old. These early versions of flip-flops were made from a wide variety of materials. Ancient Egyptian sandals were made from papyrus and palm leaves. The Maasai people of Africa made them out of rawhide. In India, they were made from wood. In China and Japan, rice straw was used. The leaves of the sisal plant were used to make twine for sandals in South America, while the natives of Mexico used the yucca plant.\n\nThe Ancient Greeks and Romans wore versions of flip-flops as well. In Greek sandals, the toe strap was worn between the first and second toes, while Roman sandals had the strap between the second and third toes. These differ from the sandals worn by the Mesopotamians, with the strap between the third and fourth toes. In India, a related chappal (\"toe knob\") sandal was common, with no straps but a small knob sitting between the first and second toes. They are known as Padukas.\n\nThe modern flip-flop became popular in the United States as soldiers returning from World War II brought Japanese zōri with them. It caught on in the 1950s during the postwar boom and after the end of hostilities of the Korean War. As they became adopted into American popular culture, the sandals were redesigned and changed into the bright colors that dominated 1950s design. They quickly became popular due to their convenience and comfort, and were popular in beach-themed stores and as summer shoes. During the 1960s, flip-flops became firmly associated with the beach lifestyle of California. As such, they were promoted as primarily a casual accessory, typically worn with shorts, bathing suits, or summer dresses. As they became more popular, some people started wearing them for dressier or more formal occasions.\n\nIn 1962, Alpargatas marketed a version of flip-flops known as Havaianas in Brazil. By 2010, more than 150 million pairs of Havaianas were produced each year. Flip-flops quickly became popular as casual footwear of young adults. Girls would often decorate their flip-flops with metallic finishes, charms, chains, beads, rhinestones, or other jewelry. Modern flip-flops are available in leather, suede, and synthetic materials. Platform and high-heeled variants of the sandals began to appear in the 1990s, and in the late 2010s, kitten heeled \"kit-flops\".\n\nA minor controversy erupted in 2005 when some members of Northwestern University's national champion women's lacrosse team visited the White House wearing flip-flops. The team responded to critics by auctioning off their flip-flops on eBay, raising $1,653 USD for young cancer patient, Jaclyn Murphy of Hopewell Junction, New York, who was befriended by the team. There is still a debate over whether this signaled a fundamental change in American culture — many youth feel that flip-flops are dressier and can be worn in a variety of social contexts, while older generations feel that wearing them at formal occasions signifies laziness and comfort over style. In 2011, while vacationing in his native Hawaii, Barack Obama became the first President of the United States to be photographed wearing a pair of flip-flops. The Dalai Lama of Tibet is also a frequent wearer of flip-flops and has met with several U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama, while wearing the sandals.\n\nWhile exact sales figures for flip-flops are difficult to obtain due to the large number of stores and manufacturers involved, the Atlanta-based company Flip Flop Shops claimed that the shoes were responsible for a $20 billion industry in 2009. Furthermore, sales of flip-flops exceeded those of sneakers for the first time in 2006. If these figures are accurate, it is remarkable considering the low cost of most flip-flops.\n\nDesign and custom\n\nThe modern flip-flop has a very simple design, consisting of a thin rubber sole with two straps running in a Y shape from the sides of the foot to the gap between the big toe and the one beside it. They typically do not have a strap around the heel, although heeled varieties are available, as well as flip-flops designed for sports, which come with added support common to athletic shoes, with the thong between the toes. Most modern flip-flops are inexpensive, costing as little as $5 USD, or less in some parts of the world.\n\nThey are made from a wide variety of materials, as were the ancient thong sandals. The modern sandals are made of more modern materials, such as rubber, foam, plastic, leather, suede, and even fabric. Thongs made of polyurethane have caused some environmental concerns; because polyurethane is a number 7 resin, they can't be easily discarded, and they persist in landfills for a very long time. In response to these concerns, some companies have begun selling flip-flops made from recycled rubber, such as that from used bicycle tires, or even hemp, and some offer a recycling program for used flip flops.\n\nBecause of the strap between the toes, flip-flops are typically not worn with socks. In colder weather, however, some people wear flip-flops with toe socks or merely pull standard socks forward and bunch them up between the toes. The Japanese commonly wear tabi, a type of sock with a single slot for the thong, with their zōri.\n\nHealth and medical implications and injuries\n\nWhile flip-flops do provide the wearer with some mild protection from hazards on the ground, such as hot sand at the beach, glass, thumb tacks or even fungi and wart-causing viruses in locker rooms or community pools, their simple design is responsible for a host of other injuries of the foot and lower leg.\n\nWalking for long periods in flip-flops can be very tough on the feet, resulting in pain in the ankles, legs, and feet. A 2009 study at Auburn University found that flip-flop wearers took shorter steps and their heels hit the ground with less vertical force than those wearing athletic shoes. Individuals with flat feet or other foot issues are advised to wear a shoe with better support.\n\nThe lack of support provided by thong sandals is thought by some to be a major cause of injuries. Some flip-flops have a spongy sole, causing the foot to roll further inward than normal when it hits the ground (over-pronation). Flip-flops can cause a person to overuse the tendons in their feet, resulting in tendonitis.\n\nAnkle sprains or broken bones are also common injuries, due to stepping off a curb or tumbling; the ankle bends, but the flip-flop neither holds on to nor supports it. The straps of the flip-flop may cause frictional issues, such as rubbing, during walking. The open-toed nature of the thongs may result in cuts, scrapes, bruises, or stubbed toes. Despite all of these issues, flip-flops do not have to be avoided completely. Many podiatrists recommend avoiding the inexpensive, drug store varieties and spending more on sandals with thick-cushioned soles, as well as ones that have a strap that's not canvas and that comes back almost to the ankle.\n\nSee also\n Hnyat-phanat (Burmese)\n Sandal\n Slipper\n Slide\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nSandals\n1960s fashion\n1970s fashion\n1980s fashion\n1990s fashion\n2000s fashion\n2010s fashion\n2020s fashion\nAustralian fashion\nAustralian clothing\nShoes\nJapanese inventions",
"In electronics, the Interface Logic Model (ILM) is a technique to model blocks in hierarchal VLSI implementation flow. It is a gate level model of a physical block where only the connections from the inputs to the first stage of flip-flops, and the connections from the last stage of flip-flops to the outputs are in the model, including the flip-flops and the clock tree driving these flip-flops. All other internal flip-flop to flip-flop paths are stripped out of the ILM.\n\nThe advantage of ILM is that the entire path (clock to clock path) is visible at top level for interface nets, unlike traditional block-based hierarchal implementation flow. This gives better accuracy in analysis for interface nets at negligible additional memory and runtime overhead.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nIntroduction to Physical Compiler and ILM Flow\n\nIntegrated circuits\nConceptual models"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins.",
"Was it well received?",
"Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention.",
"What caused his come back?",
"The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953),",
"Did he have any flops?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | did he have any other castings in his early career? | 6 | Besides Walking My Baby Back Home, did Buddy Hackett have any other castings? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"Buckeye Steel Castings was a Columbus, Ohio steelmaker best known today for its longtime president, Samuel P. Bush, who was the grandfather of President George H.W. Bush and great-grandfather of President George W. Bush.\n\nBuckeye, named for the Ohio Buckeye tree, was founded in Columbus as the Murray-Hayden Foundry, which made iron farm implements. Finding success in manufacturing iron railroad car couplers, the name changed to the Buckeye Automatic Car Coupler Company in 1891 and Buckeye Malleable Iron and Coupler Company in 1894. Eventually, demand for stronger coupling assemblies led to a switch to steel and the name Buckeye Steel Castings.\n\nThe business was closely associated with rail baron E.H. Harriman, and for some time, was controlled by Frank Rockefeller, the brother of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. In 1901, Buckeye hired Samuel Prescott \"S.P.\" Bush as general manager. Bush, a graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology, had worked his way up from apprentice mechanic at the locally based Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad to superintendent of motive power at that railroad, and, briefly, the Milwaukee Road. In 1908, Rockefeller departed, and Bush took over as president, a job he would hold until 1928. During this period, Bush became known as a top industrialist and had political influence in Washington, D.C.\n\nBush had an advanced business outlook for his day and implemented many modern management techniques as well as an unusually generous working environment.\n\nIn 1967, the parent company Buckeye International, Inc. was formed, and then was acquired in 1980 by Worthington Industries through a stock merger. Worthington sold Buckeye Steel in 1999, but it went bankrupt in 2002.\n\nThe former president of Worthington, Donald Malenick, formed an investment group to purchase the assets of Buckeye, and has reopened the business as Columbus Steel Castings. Columbus Steel Castings closed in bankruptcy in 2016.\n\nSee also \n Janney coupler\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nColumbus Steel Castings website\nBuckeye Steel Castings Company Stock Certificate\nScientific Management and Welfare Work in Early Twentieth Century American Business: The Buckeye Steel Castings Company - from Ohio History, the scholarly journal of the Ohio Historical Society\n\nAmerican companies established in 1881\nBush family\nRockefeller family\nDefunct companies based in Columbus, Ohio\nSteel companies of the United States\n1881 establishments in Ohio",
"Goodwin Steel Castings Limited is a heavy engineering firm located in Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire, England. The company specialises in the production of large, bespoke, machined steel castings.\n\nHistory\n\nGoodwin Steel Castings has been a supplier of machined castings since 1883. The foundry, with 180 employees, is supported by its sister company, Goodwin International Ltd, located 5 km away which carries out machining, fabrication and assembly work on the castings produced by the foundry. The Goodwin machine shop employs some 270 people in its modern CNC machining facility.\n\nGoodwin Steel Castings Ltd, part of the engineering group Goodwin PLC, is the foremost independent producer of high alloy and high quality integrity castings in the United Kingdom.\n\nThe company has been in the casting industry since its formation in 1883. It is one of the 10 oldest companies listed on the UK Stock Exchange.\n\nIn 1984 Goodwins was the first steel foundry in the world to be awarded accreditation by the British Standards Institution to BS5750 (now ISO9001) for casting production and also for the computer simulation of casting feeding. In 2006 the company was awarded the Queen's Award for International Trade.\n\nCapabilities\nThe company specialises in cast parts for suppliers to the engineering, nuclear, oil, petrochemical, and process industries worldwide.\nMaterials supplied include carbon, low alloy, stainless steel, heat resistant, duplex and super duplex stainless steels and super nickel alloys.\n\nThey supply machined castings from 200 kg to 10,000 kg as single pieces and up to 18,000 kg as fabricated single components. Welded assemblies up to 50,000 kg can be supplied.\n\nSteel and nickel alloys are melted in the electric arc furnace and can be processed through the AOD refining vessel.\n\nApplications\nGoodwin castings are used in a variety of projects. Some of the more high-profile projects are listed below.\n\nBridges\nHardanger Bridge\nOakland Bay Bridge Eastern Span Replacement\nTsing Ma Bridge\nJiangyin Bridge\n\nStructural/Architectural\nFaslane Naval Base\nStratford station\nLudwig Erhard Haus\nPaddington station\n\nPower Generation (including Nuclear)\nPelamis Wave Energy Converter\nSizewell B nuclear power station\nSellafield re-processing plant\n\nOther\n\nDevelopment\nGoodwin have been heavily involved in Nickel alloy development programs for fossil fuel power plants for Advanced Super Critical Applications (A-USC).\nThese projects include:\nThermie AD700\nCOMTES\nPacific Basin 700 research\nEuropean NextGenPower\nMacPlus\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Goodwin Steel Castings\n\nCompanies based in Stoke-on-Trent\nBritish companies established in 1883\nEngineering companies of the United Kingdom\nCompanies listed on the London Stock Exchange\nManufacturing companies established in 1883\n1883 establishments in England"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins.",
"Was it well received?",
"Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention.",
"What caused his come back?",
"The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953),",
"Did he have any flops?",
"I don't know.",
"did he have any other castings in his early career?",
"He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961."
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | Did he appear on any other shows? | 7 | Besides The Perry Como Show, did Buddy Hackett appear on any other shows? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"is a Japanese owarai comedy duo consisting of Osamu Shitara and Yūki Himura.\n\nCareer\nShitara and Himura formed as a comedy unit in 1993 and debuted on stage in 1994. Himura had broken up with his previous partner and Shitara was working as the driver of the comedian Masayuki Watanabe, so they formed a duo after a friend introduced them. They concentrated on skit comedy, developing a theatrical style that emphasized verbal repartee. \n\nIn 2008, they came in second on the nationally televised annual King of Conte skit comedy contest. Up until then, Bananaman had concentrated on live performances and DVD releases, but afterwards began to appear more on television. Himura appeared on the most shows (19) of any comedian during the 2009 New Year's period, and the duo received their own show, Banana Fire, for the first time in April 2009. After that, they became the hosts of several other television shows, including Nogizaka tte Doko? and its successor Nogizaka Kojichū (with Nogizaka46), Banana-juku, and Why Did You Come to Japan?, in addition to appearing as regulars on other shows like Beat Takeshi's Unbelievable. Shitara and Himura also appear by themselves on various programs, with Shitara, for instance, hosting the live news program Nonstop!. \n\nBananaman have also appeared in acting roles on film and television (for instance, Shitara in Kakusho ~ Keishicho Sōsa 3 Ka). In the year 2012, Shitara appeared on more television programs than any other Japanese personality, appearing in 611 programs, 163 with Himura (Himura was ranked 12th with 428 television appearances). Shitara also led the rankings for the first half of 2013.\n\nBananaman are the of the girl group Nogizaka46 and are said to support them like family. The duo are the hosts of Nogizaka's weekly late night variety show, Nogizaka Kojichū, and will occasionally mention the girls in their radio show, BananaMoon Gold. Many Nogizaka46 members also say they listen to Bananaman's radio show and follow their schedules. The two acts often appear in each other's events and regular shows.\n\nMembers \n, born April 23, 1973, in Minano, Saitama\n, born May 14, 1972, in Hiroshima, and moved to Sagamihara, Kanagawa at the age of 3\n\nTelevision\n\nRadio\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n HoriPro com official Homepage\n\nJapanese comedy duos",
"The \"full Ginsburg\" is a buzzword that refers to an appearance by one person on all five American major Sunday morning talk shows on the same day: This Week on ABC, Fox News Sunday, Face the Nation on CBS, Meet the Press on NBC, and Late Edition on CNN. State of the Union replaced Late Edition on CNN in January 2009.\n\nThe term is named for William H. Ginsburg, the lawyer for Monica Lewinsky during the sexual conduct scandal involving President Bill Clinton. Ginsburg was the first person to accomplish this feat, on February 1, 1998.\n\nCompleted full Ginsburgs\n\nPeople who have completed multiple Full Ginsburgs\n\nVariations\nOn September 20, 2009, President Barack Obama, to promote his health care reform proposals, did what The Politico called a \"modified Full Ginsburg\" when he appeared on five programs, opting for Univision's Spanish-language Al Punto to be his fifth program appearance instead of Fox News Sunday.\n\nObama also appeared on Monday, September 9, 2013, with reporters from each of the five networks, plus an extra sixth, to discuss possible military intervention in Syria. He appeared with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room, with ABC's Diane Sawyer on ABC World News, with NBC's Savannah Guthrie on NBC Nightly News, with CBS's Scott Pelley on CBS Evening News and with Fox's Chris Wallace on Fox News's Special Report with Bret Baier, in addition to PBS's Gwen Ifill on PBS NewsHour.\n\nThe first person to appear on all six shows in the same week was former Governor of Florida Jeb Bush, who achieved the feat on March 10, 2013.\n\nFlorida Sen. Marco Rubio became the first person to appear on seven Sunday talk shows the same day, on April 14, 2013: all English-language shows listed above, plus Univision's Al Punto and Telemundo's Enfoque, both American Spanish-language shows.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican political neologisms\n2000s neologisms\nJournalism terminology"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins.",
"Was it well received?",
"Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention.",
"What caused his come back?",
"The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953),",
"Did he have any flops?",
"I don't know.",
"did he have any other castings in his early career?",
"He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961.",
"Did he appear on any other shows?",
"Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows"
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | What type of talk shows? | 8 | What type of shows did Hackett appear on during the 1950s and 1960s? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"Al Punto (, To the Point) is a Sunday morning talk show hosted by Noticiero Univision anchor Jorge Ramos on the Univision network. Until 2012, when Enfoque premiered on Telemundo, it was the only show of its type in the United States that broadcast in the Spanish language.\n\nHistory \nAl Punto debuted on Univision on September 9, 2007 to coincide with the first Spanish language U.S. Presidential Debate hosted by Univision at the University of Miami on the same date. The show's first guests were then Republican National Committee Chairman and Florida Senator Mel Martinez and New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez.\n\nContent\nAl Punto consists of a variety of interviews on issues of importance to the Latin community in the United States.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nUnivision Official Site\nAl Punto Official Site\n\n2007 American television series debuts\n2000s American television talk shows\n2010s American television talk shows\n2000s American television news shows\n2010s American television news shows\nUnivision original programming\n \nAmerican Sunday morning talk shows",
"Main Hoon is an entertainment talk show on TV Asia channel that hosts some of the biggest Bollywood celebrities. It showcases some of the biggest stars in the business and is watched by a wide audience that includes people from the film fraternity.\n\nOverview and concept\nThe show profiles the best of star-makers who made the stars what they are today. These star makers include cinematographers, choreographers, makeup artiste and stylists. The show tells the Masala stories of the biggest Bollywood celebrities.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOfficial Site\n\nIndian television talk shows\nTelevision shows set in Asia\nTelevision talk shows"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins.",
"Was it well received?",
"Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention.",
"What caused his come back?",
"The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953),",
"Did he have any flops?",
"I don't know.",
"did he have any other castings in his early career?",
"He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961.",
"Did he appear on any other shows?",
"Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows",
"What type of talk shows?",
"Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson"
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | Was this a talk show he appear on frequently? | 9 | Did Buddy Hackett appear on Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson frequently? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"Benefis is a weekly one-hour talk show hosted by an Armenian presenter Avet Barseghyan, and airing on Yerevan-based Public Television company of Armenia. The show featured one-on-one interviews with notable residents of Armenia, their best performances, and interesting facts about their lives and creative paths. The talk-show aired every Sunday.\n\nEpisodes\n\nEpisode 1 \nThe episode aired on September 17, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer-songwriter Hayko.\n\nEpisode 2 \nThe episode aired on September 24, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Silva Hakobyan.\n\nEpisode 3 \nThe episode aired on October 1, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Arame.\n\nEpisode 4 \nThe episode aired on October 8, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer-songwriter Forsh.\n\nEpisode 5 \nThe episode aired on October 15, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Varduhi Vardanyan, who died in a car accident on Sevan - Martuni highway on October 15, 2006.\n\nEpisode 6 \nThe episode aired on October 22, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Razmik Amyan, his friend Hayko was also there.\n\nEpisode 7 \nThe episode aired on October 29, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Nune Yesayan.\n\nEpisode 8 \nThe episode aired on November 5, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Hasmik Karapetyan.\n\nEpisode 9 \nThe episode aired on November 19, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Erik.\n\nEpisode 10 \nThe episode aired on November 26, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Arminka.\n\nEpisode 11 \nThe episode aired on December 3, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Emmy.\n\nEpisode 12 \nThe episode aired on December 17, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer SONA.\n\nEpisode 22 \nThe episode aired on April 29, 2017. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Andre.\n\nEpisode 23 \nThe episode aired on May 20, 2017. The talk-show was about Armenian musician and actress Iveta Mukuchyan. The show was also featuring Gohar Gasparyan, Hayk Petrosyan.\n\nEpisode 29 \nThe last episode of the series aired on July 29, 2017 at 22:20 pm. The talk-show was about Armenian musician Avet Barseghyan (the presenter of the show). The episode was hosted by many Armenian well-known artists, such as Aram Mp3 and Gohar Gasparyan.\n\nAwards and nominations\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n Benefis at the Internet Movie Database\n\nArmenia 1 television shows\n2010s Armenian television series\nArmenian-language television shows\nArmenian television talk shows",
"America's Car Show was a weekly American call-in radio program and a magazine format television program focusing on cars and the automotive industry. Callers call into the radio program with their difficult car problems, and host Tom Torbjornsen attempted to lead callers through diagnosis and gives suggestions on how to repair their vehicles. Torbjornsen frequently emphasized that automotive technology has progressed rapidly, and because most cars now have built-in computer diagnostic systems, he warned his listeners to not use \"do it yourself\" remedies and instead have the car taken to a professional, using the advice and diagnosis from his answer to the caller's question as a starting point.\n\nThe show also has interviews with guests in the automotive and related industries. Examples of previous guests in related industries include car sound systems, radar detectors, GPS, electronics, and biodiesel.\n\nTorbjornsen (born July 3, 1956 in Brooklyn) was married twice; he had no children but did have two stepchildren from his second marriage. He died unexpectedly September 16, 2016.\n\nHistory\n\nAmerica's Car Show was based in Buffalo, New York and changed flagship stations frequently during its time on air. For many years, WBEN was the station's flagship. In 2004, however, WBUF went to a hot talk format and convinced Torbjornsen to join WBUF. Six months later, WBUF dumped the talk format and the show was displaced to WECK. Dissatisfied with being placed on an adult standards station, Torbjornsen left CBS Radio's cluster and joined WHLD, which had adopted a progressive talk radio format. This, however, was also short-lived, as when WHLD ran out of money, the talk format was dropped and the show was once again without a flagship. Eventually, the flagship became WWKB. The program also aired on America Right on XM Radio Saturday afternoons.\n\nIn July 2008, Tom Torbjornsen and Syndicated Solutions, the show's distributor, went their separate ways. It was an amicable separation according to Tom, and he planned to pursue other fields of work. Tom changed his mind when XM Radio contacted him stating they wanted him to continue the show just for America Right on XM. Tom agreed, and from July 2008 to January 2009, America's Car Show was exclusively heard every Sunday night on America Right XM 166.\n\nOn January 18, 2009, America's Car Show was moved from its long-time satellite home of America Right, over to Sirius XM Stars Too. Unlike America Right, Stars Too is available to all subscribers on both XM Radio channel 139, and Sirius Radio channel 108, as well as their Canadian platforms, and the online streaming services. The move more than doubled the potential audience of the show to over 20,000,000 subscribers.\n\nTorbjornsen also wrote a weekly column (entitled \"Tom's Corner\") covering similar topics to the radio show; he also hosts two weekly segments on WIVB-TV. He resided in Chautauqua County for most of his adult life.\n\nA longer-form television version of the series launched in September 2012 on WBBZ-TV. As of 2014, the show is no longer listed among WBBZ's offerings.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAmerica's Car Show Web site\n\nAmerican talk radio programs"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins.",
"Was it well received?",
"Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention.",
"What caused his come back?",
"The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953),",
"Did he have any flops?",
"I don't know.",
"did he have any other castings in his early career?",
"He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961.",
"Did he appear on any other shows?",
"Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows",
"What type of talk shows?",
"Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson",
"Was this a talk show he appear on frequently?",
"a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes,"
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | any thing else notable? | 10 | Besides appear on several TV shows and releasing Walking My Baby Back Home, Was there anything else notable about Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | true | [
"White Heat is the self titled debut album of future Switch members Gregory Williams, Bobby DeBarge and Jody Sims. The album was released in 1975 and produced by R&B notable Barry White.\n\nTrack listing\n\nSide A\n\"Take a Look at Yourself (Before You Frown on Someone Else)\"\n\"If That's the Way You Feel (Then Let's Fall in Love)\"\n\"I Love Every Little Thing About You\" originally performed by Stevie Wonder\n\"Talkin'\"\n\nSide B\n\"What a Groove\"\n\"I've Been So Lonely (Without You)\"\n\"You Can Change My Life For Me\"\n\"Funk Freak\"\n\nReferences\n\n1975 debut albums\nRCA Records albums",
"An intrinsic property is a property that an object or a thing has of itself, including its context. An extrinsic (or relational) property is a property that depends on a thing's relationship with other things. For example, mass is an intrinsic property of any physical object, whereas weight is an extrinsic property that varies depending on the strength of the gravitational field in which the respective object is placed. The question of intrinsicality and extrinsicality in empirically observable objects is a significant field of study in ontology, the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being.\n\nCriteria\nDavid Lewis offered a list of criteria that should condense the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties (numbers and italics added):\n\n A sentence or statement or proposition that ascribes intrinsic properties to something is entirely about that thing; whereas an ascription of extrinsic properties to something is not entirely about that thing, though it may well be about some larger whole which includes that thing as part. \n A thing has its intrinsic properties in virtue of the way that thing itself, and nothing else, is. Not so for extrinsic properties, though a thing may well have these in virtue of the way some larger whole is. \n The intrinsic properties of something depend only on that thing; whereas the extrinsic properties of something may depend, wholly or partly, on something else. \n If something has an intrinsic property, then so does any perfect duplicate of that thing; whereas duplicates situated in different surroundings will differ in their extrinsic properties.\n\nValue\nIntrinsic properties are fundamental in understanding Kantian deontological ethics, which is based upon the argument that an action should be viewed on its intrinsic value (the value of the action in itself) with regard to ethics and morality, as opposed to consequentialist utilitarian arguments that an action should be viewed by the value of its outcomes.\n\nIntrinsicism and extrinsicism\n\nIntrinsicism\nIntrinsicism is the belief that value is a non-relational characteristic of an object. This means that an object can not be valuable , good or bad, has a reference to who it is good or bad for, and without reference to the reason it is good or bad. One example of this might be the belief that certain sex acts are intrinsically evil, even if they harm no one.\n\nExtrinsicism\nExtrinsicism is the tendency to place major emphasis on external matters rather than on more profound realities. In terms of morals and ethics, it tends to stress the external observance of laws and precepts, with lesser concern for the ultimate principles underlying moral conduct.\n\nSee also\nBrute fact\nTranscendental\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on intrinsic and extrinsic properties\nThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on intrinsic and extrinsic value\n\nConcepts in metaphysics\nOntology"
]
|
[
"Buddy Hackett",
"Early career",
"What was his first job?",
"Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute \"World of Sports\" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins.",
"Was it well received?",
"Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention.",
"What caused his come back?",
"The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953),",
"Did he have any flops?",
"I don't know.",
"did he have any other castings in his early career?",
"He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961.",
"Did he appear on any other shows?",
"Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows",
"What type of talk shows?",
"Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson",
"Was this a talk show he appear on frequently?",
"a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes,",
"any thing else notable?",
"he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt."
]
| C_648a4ddf31a44a7c87339dba68db02dc_1 | Any other game shows? | 11 | Besides The Perry Como Show and What's My Line, did Buddy Hackett appear on any other TV shows? | Buddy Hackett | Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials. Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh. Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction. Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Buddy Hackett (born Leonard Hacker; August 31, 1924 – June 30, 2003) was an American actor, comedian and singer. His best remembered roles include Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man (1962), Benjy Benjamin in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug (1968), and the voice of Scuttle in The Little Mermaid (1989).
Early life
Hackett was one of two children born into a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, New York. His mother Anna (née Geller) worked in the garment trades while his father Philip Hacker was a furniture upholsterer and part-time inventor. Hackett grew up across from Public School 103 on 54th Street and 14th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and was active in varsity football and drama club at New Utrecht High School. Hackett suffered from Bell's palsy as a child, the lingering effects of which contributed to his distinctive slurred speech and facial expression.
While still a student, Hackett worked as a "tummler" (Yiddish for "tumult maker") entertaining guests in the Catskills Borscht Belt resorts. While there, he began performing stand-up comedy in the resort nightclubs as "Butch Hacker." He appeared first at the Golden Hotel in Hurleyville, New York, claiming later he did not get one single laugh. Following his graduation from high school in 1942, Hackett enlisted in the United States Army and served during World War II for three years in an anti-aircraft battery.
Career
Early career
Hackett's first job after the war was at the Pink Elephant, a Brooklyn club. It was here that he changed his name from Leonard Hacker to Buddy Hackett. He made appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and continued to perform in the Catskills. He acted on Broadway, in Lunatics and Lovers, where Max Liebman saw him and put him in two television specials.
Hackett's movie career began in 1950 with a 10-minute "World of Sports" reel for Columbia Pictures called King of the Pins. The film demonstrated championship bowling techniques, with expert Joe Wilman demonstrating the right way and Hackett (in pantomime) exemplifying the wrong way. There was an anecdote that, because of this appearance, Hackett received an offer to join the Three Stooges from Jules White, the head of Columbia short subject department, in 1952. Curly Howard had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946; his older brother Shemp Howard was intended to replace him only on a temporary basis until he fully recovered, but Curly died in January 1952. It was said Hackett even joined Moe Howard and Larry Fine for a rehearsal, but turned down the offer eventually when he felt he did not fit with the act's comedy style and wanted to develop his own style as a solo act. This rumor was later dismissed as either untrue or unfounded.
Hackett would not return to movies until 1953, after one of his nightclub routines attracted attention. With a rubber band around his head to slant his eyes, Hackett's "The Chinese Waiter" lampooned the heavy dialect, frustration, and communication problems encountered by a busy waiter in a Chinese restaurant: "No, we no have sprit-pea soup ... We gotta wonton, we got eh-roll ... No orda for her, juss orda for you!" The routine was such a hit that Hackett made a recording of it, and was hired to reprise it in the Universal-International musical Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), in which he was third-billed under Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh.
Hackett was an emergency replacement for the similarly built Lou Costello in 1954. Abbott and Costello were set to make a feature-length comedy Fireman, Save My Child, featuring Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Several scenes had been shot with stunt doubles when Lou Costello was forced to withdraw due to illness. Universal-International salvaged the project by hiring Hugh O'Brian and Hackett to take over the Abbott and Costello roles, using already shot footage of the comedy duo in some long shots; Jones and his band became the main attraction.
Hackett became known to a wider audience when he appeared on television in the 1950s and '60s as a frequent guest on variety talk shows hosted by Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, telling brash, often off-color jokes, and mugging at the camera. Hackett was a frequent guest on both the Jack Paar and the Johnny Carson versions of The Tonight Show. According to the board game Trivial Pursuit, Hackett has the distinction of making the most guest appearances in the history of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During this time, he also appeared as a panelist and mystery guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line? and filled in as emcee for the game show Treasure Hunt. He made fifteen guest appearances on NBC-TV's The Perry Como Show between 1955 and 1961. He appeared with his roommate Lenny Bruce on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957-1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.
Hackett appeared twice on ABC's The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. In both episodes, "Bloodlines" (1959) and "The Clarence Bibs Story" (1961), his fellow guest star was Denver Pyle. He was cast as Daniel Malakie in "Bloodlines", the father of three boisterous brothers headed to trouble, and then as Clarence Bibs in the episode of that same name. Bibs is a handyman who after cleaning a gun accidentally kills a notorious outlaw, Longden (X Brands). Then, Longden's former partner, George Tanner (Denver Pyle), comes to town but avoids confrontation with Bibs and accepts the explanation that Wicks' death was accidental.
Stanley
Hackett starred as the title character on NBC-TV's Stanley, a 1956–57 situation comedy which ran for 19 weeks on Monday evenings at 8:30 pm ET. The half-hour series also featured a young Carol Burnett and the voice of Paul Lynde. The Max Liebman produced program aired live before a studio audience and was one of the last sitcoms from New York to do so. Stanley revolved around the adventures of the titular character (Hackett) as the operator of a newsstand in a posh New York City hotel.
Hackett appeared opposite Robert Preston in the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962). In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett was paired with Mickey Rooney, with whom he had also recently made Everything's Ducky (1961), in which they played two sailors who smuggle a talking duck aboard a Navy ship. Children became familiar with him as lovable hippie auto mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz in Disney's The Love Bug (1968).
In 1964, he had a stint on Broadway, appearing with Richard Kiley in I Had a Ball.
He appeared many times on the game show Hollywood Squares in the late 1960s and 1970s. In one episode, Hackett (who was Jewish) was asked which country had the highest ratio of doctors to populace; he answered Israel, or in his words, "The country with the most Jews." Despite the audience roaring with laughter (and Hackett's own belief that the actual answer was Sweden), the answer turned out to be correct. Hackett's regular guest shots on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in the early 1960s were rewarded with a coveted appearance on Paar's final Tonight program on March 29, 1962.
Later career
Hackett continued to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show until Carson left the series in 1992.
In 1974 Hackett published a book of poetry entitled The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett.
In 1978, Hackett delivered a dramatic performance as Lou Costello in the television movie Bud and Lou opposite Harvey Korman as Bud Abbott. The film told the story of Abbott and Costello, and he and Korman did a rendition of the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
In 1979, Hackett was the voice of the groundhog "Pardon Me Pete", and the narrator of the Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost (1979). He starred in the 1980 film Hey Babe!. That same year, he hosted a syndicated revival of the 1950–61 Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life which lasted for one year.
Hackett appeared regularly in TV ads for Tuscan Dairy popsicles and yogurt throughout the 1970s, but his most famous television campaign was for Lay's potato chips ("Nobody can eat just one!") which ran from 1968 to 1971; Hackett had succeeded Bert Lahr as Lay's spokesman. He guest-starred in the Space Rangers episode, "To Be Or Not To Be", as has-been comedian Lenny Hacker, a parody of his stage persona. The character's name was Hackett's own real name. He also appeared on the television series The Love Boat in 1979 (Season 3, Episode 4), playing the part of a cab driver, Mickey, who accepted an offer to join his jilted passenger (Arlene Golonka) on a three-day cruise. In 1987, Hackett appeared on Murder, She Wrote (Season 3, Episode 18). He also appeared in LA Law as a friend of Secretary Roxanne helping her by doing free TV infomercials.
Other
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hackett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.
In April 1998, Hackett guest starred in an episode of LateLine called "Buddy Hackett". The episode focused on a news broadcast paying tribute to Hackett following his death, only to discover that the report of his death was a mistake. Robert Reich and Dick Gephardt also appeared in the episode, paying tribute to Hackett.
In his final years, Hackett had a recurring spot called "Tuesdays with Buddy" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in which he shared stories of his career and delivered some of his comedic routines.
In 1999 he appeared in 13 episodes of Fox's Action TV series as a security guard and chauffeur named Lonnie Dragon.
In 2021, Hackett was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Personal life
On June 12, 1955, Hackett married Sherry Cohen. They lived in Leonia, New Jersey, in the late 1950s. In August 1958, they bought the house previously owned by deceased crime boss Albert Anastasia in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After renovations, they moved in and lived there through most of the 1960s. In 2003, Hackett and his wife established the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California's San Fernando Valley.
Hackett's son, Sandy, followed his father into the comedy world, and for years opened for his father before his performances. Sandy created a one-man stage show about his father after his death.
He was an avid firearms collector and owned a large collection that he sold off in his later years.
Death
In the early 1990s Hackett was diagnosed with severe heart disease, but steadfastly refused to consider bypass surgery; his heart disease was the primary cause of his death. Hackett died on June 30, 2003, at his beach house in Malibu, California, at the age of 78. His son, comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father had been suffering from diabetes for several years and suffered a stroke nearly a week before his death which may have contributed to his demise. Two days later, on July 2, 2003, he was cremated and his ashes were given to family and friends.
Discography
How You Do (Coral CRL 757422)
The Original Chinese Waiter (Dot 3351, reissued as Pickwick SPC 3198)
Ba-Lert
Filmography
Features
Short subjects
References
External links
Disney Legends profile
The final days: Buddy Hackett's last interview
1924 births
2003 deaths
Jewish American military personnel
Jewish American male comedians
United States Army personnel of World War II
American stand-up comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
Deaths from diabetes
Male actors from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
Donaldson Award winners
Jewish American male actors
Jewish male comedians
People from Borough Park, Brooklyn
People from Fort Lee, New Jersey
People from Leonia, New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
Comedians from New York City
20th-century American comedians
21st-century American comedians
New Utrecht High School alumni
United States Army soldiers
20th-century American Jews
21st-century American Jews | false | [
"XYZ is a British game show that aired on BBC1 from 15 November 1993 to 26 January 1994. It is hosted by George Marshall.\n\nFormat\nOn each edition, three contestants played against each other for the chance to play for a major prize.\n\nThe game is played on a board of 24 squares called the \"Alphabank\", of which the 23 squares were the first 23 letters of the alphabet and the 24th square was the 'XYZ' square. The idea of the game was to try to have the longest chain of letters in a row without any breaks in the chain.\n\nExternal links\n\n1990s British game shows\n1993 British television series debuts\n1994 British television series endings\nBBC television game shows\nBritish game shows\nEnglish-language television shows",
"Add a Line was a daytime radio game show which aired on ABC July 4, 1949, to September 26, 1949. The title came from the show's format, which \"called for players to add the final line to a rhyme given to them by the host.\"\n\nThe 30-minute program was broadcast at 2:30 p.m. and other time periods during its run. The host was John Nelson (1915-76), who was heard on other audience participation radio shows, including Bride and Groom and Breakfast at Sardi's. In Radio and Television (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950), Garnet R. Garrison and Giraud Chester noted:\nBy 1949, the give-away programs had taken on the character of a bonanza. One CBS program offered a jackpot of $50,000 to the lucky winner. NBC launched a mammoth quiz called Hollywood Calling to compete with the Jack Benny show. ABC had Stop the Music, Strike It Rich and Add a Line. Mutual, with its Queen for a Day, managed to give away more prizes than any of the other networks.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican game shows\n1940s American radio programs\n1950s American radio programs\nAmerican radio game shows\n1940s American game shows\nABC radio programs"
]
|
[
"Ernie Kovacs",
"TV specials"
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What tv specials was he on? | 1 | What tv specials was Ernie Kovacs on? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | the famous Silent Show ( | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | true | [
"The following is a list of episodes of the CGI-animated television series Bratz. \n\nThe series was first shown as TV specials on , with Livin' It Up with the Bratz and Bratz Glitz 'n' Glamour on Kids' WB and FoxBox, while ending with Lil' Bratz: Party Time on Kids' WB and 4Kids TV on . The TV specials were produced using LightWave 3D software.\n\nThe series premiered on , on 4Kids TV, while ending its broadcast run on 4Kids TV in April 2007. The show is currently airing reruns on Kabillion.\n\nSeries overview\n\nTV Specials (20042006)\n\nSeason 1 (20052006)\n\nSeason 2 (2008)\n\nReferences\n\nEpisodes\nBratz",
"is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Ken Akamatsu. It was adapted into a 24 episode anime series by Xebec, which aired in Japan on TV Tokyo from April 19, 2000 to September 27, 2000. The opening theme was and the closing theme was . Both songs were written by Ritsuko Okazaki and performed by Megumi Hayashibara. The two themes were released as a CD single, which debuted on the Oricon charts at Number 7. A 25th episode was later created and released as a DVD bonus. The series and bonus episode were directed by Yoshiaki Iwasaki, written by Shō Aikawa and featured character designs by Makoto Uno. After the series finished, Christmas and Spring specials followed, and finally a three-part original video animation (OVA) series called Love Hina Again. The series follows the daily life of Keitaro Urashima, the manager of an all-girls dorm, as he attempts to pass the Tokyo University entrance exams and to find the girl he promised to enter Tokyo U with when he was a child.\n\nIn Japan, the series was released on nine DVDs by Starchild Records between August 3, 2000 and April 2, 2001. Several volumes were also released with a bundled character figure for an additional price. The Christmas special was released on July 4, 2001, and the spring special was released on August 1, 2001. Love Hina Again was released as 3 separate DVDs between January 26, 2002 and March 27, 2002. A complete box set containing the entire TV series, the two specials, and the OVA series was released on July 6, 2005.\n\nThe series was originally licensed in North America by Bandai and released across six DVDs from February 19, 2002 to November 19, 2002. The Christmas special was released on December 3, 2002 and followed by the Spring special on March 18, 2003. Love Hina Again was released on September 2, 2003. A box set containing the Christmas and Spring specials and Love Hina Again was released as \"Love Hina Movie Set\" on September 4, 2002. A complete box set of the television series, Christmas Special, Spring Special and Love Hina Again was released on September 28, 2004 as \"Love Hina - Perfect Collection\". A complete box set of the television series was released on June 27, 2006 as \"Love Hina Anime Legends Complete Collection\". In July 2007, Funimation Entertainment announced they had acquired the license to Love Hina after Bandai's license had expired, and a box set of the series over 4 discs was released on February 24, 2009.\n\nIn the United Kingdom, Love Hina is licensed by MVM Films, who released the series on six DVDs between September 6, 2004 and March 7, 2004. A box set was released on May 14, 2007. The Christmas and Spring specials were released out of order, with the Spring special released on May 16, 2005, and the Christmas special on November 7, 2005. Love Hina Again was released on January 8, 2008. A box set containing the Christmas and Spring specials and Love Hina Again was released as \"Love Hina - Specials Collection\" on September 4, 2002.\n\nLove Hina is also licensed in Australia and New Zealand by Madman Entertainment, who released the series across six DVDs between September 18, 2002, and February 11, 2003. A box set was released on December 3, 2003. A box set containing the specials and Love Hina Again was released on March 14, 2007.\n\nEpisodes\n\nTV specials\n\nOVAs \nLove Hina Again\n\nSee also \nList of Love Hina characters\nList of Love Hina chapters\n\nReferences \n\nEpisodes\nLove Hina"
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"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show ("
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What did he do next? | 2 | What did Ernie Kovacs do next, after Silent Show? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | true | [
"Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday? is a 1963 children's book published by Beginner Books and written by Helen Palmer Geisel, the first wife of Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss). Unlike most of the Beginner Books, Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday? did not follow the format of text with inline drawings, being illustrated with black-and-white photographs by Lynn Fayman, featuring a boy named Rawli Davis. It is sometimes misattributed to Dr. Seuss himself. The book's cover features a photograph of a young boy sitting at a breakfast table with a huge pile of pancakes.\n\nActivities mentioned in the book include bowling, water skiing, marching, boxing, and shooting guns with the United States Marines, and eating more spaghetti \"than anyone else has eaten before.\n\nHelen Palmer's photograph-based children's books did not prove to be as popular as the more traditional text-and-illustrations format; however, Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday received positive reviews and was listed by The New York Times as one of the best children's books of 1963. The book is currently out of print.\n\nReferences\n\n1963 children's books\nAmerican picture books",
"Daniel S. Burt is an American author and literary critic.\n\nCareer\n\nDaniel S. Burt, Ph.D. received his doctorate in English and American Literature with a specialization in Victorian fiction from New York University. He taught undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in writing and literature at New York University, Wesleyan University, Trinity College, Northeastern University, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Cape Cod Community College. At Wentworth Institute of Technology, he served as a dean for almost a decade. During his time at New York University, he was director of the NYU in London program, wherein he traveled with students to Russia, Spain, Britain and Ireland. \n\nSince 2003, Burt has served as the Academic Director for the Irish Academic Enrichment Workshops, which are held in Ireland every summer.\n\nBibliography\n\nThe Literary 100: A Ranking Of The Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, And Poets Of All Time. Checkmark Books. October 1, 1999.\nThe Biography Book: A Reader's Guide To Nonfiction, Fictional, And Film Biographies Of More Than 500 Of The Most Fascinating Individuals Of All Time. Oryx Press. February 1, 2001.\nThe Novel 100: A Ranking Of The Greatest Novels Of All Time. Checkmark Books. November 1, 2003.\nThe Chronology of American Literature: America's Literary Achievements from the Colonial Era to Modern Times. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. February 10, 2004.\nThe Drama 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Plays of All Time. Checkmark Books. December 1, 2007.\nThe Handy Literature Answer Book: An Engaging Guide to Unraveling Symbols, Signs and Meanings in Great Works with Deborah G. Felder. Visible Ink Press. July 1, 2018.\n\nWhat Do I Read Next? Series \n\n What Historical Novel Do I Read Next? Gale Cengage.1997.\nWhat Do I Read Next? 2000, Volume 1 with Neil Barron. Gale Cengage. June 1, 2000.\nWhat Fantastic Fiction Do I Read Next? 2001, Volume 1 with Neil Barron and Tom Barton. Gale Cengage. June 1, 2001. \nWhat Do I Read Next? 2003, Volume 2 with Neil Barron and Tom Barton. Gale Cengage. October 17, 20013.\nWhat Do I Read Next? 2005, Volume 1 with Neil Barron and Tom Barton. Thomson Gale. May 27, 2005.\nWhat Do I Read Next? 2005, Volume 2 with Neil Barron. Gale. October 21, 2005. \nWhat Do I Read Next? 2006, Volume 1 with Neil Barron and Tom Barton. Thomson Gale. May 25, 2006.\n What Do I Read Next? 2007, Volume 1 with Natalie Danford and Don D'Ammassa. Gale Cengage. June 8, 2007.\nWhat Do I Read Next? 2007, Volume 2: A Reader's Guide to Current Genre Fiction with Don D'Ammassa, Natalie Danford, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Jim Huang, and Melissa Hudak. Gale Cengage. October 19, 2007. \nWhat Do I Read Next? 2008, Volume 1 with Natalie Danford and Don D'Ammassa. Gale. May 23, 2008. \n What Do I Read Next? 2009. Volume 1 with Michelle Kazensky, Marie Toft, and Hazel Rumney. Gale Cengage. June 12, 2009.\nWhat Do I Read Next? 2010, Volume 1 with Neil Barron. Gale. 2010.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nBibliography on GoodReads\n\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nLiving people\nAmerican male non-fiction writers\nAmerican literary critics\nNew York University alumni\nWesleyan University faculty"
]
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[
"Ernie Kovacs",
"TV specials",
"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show (",
"What did he do next?",
"Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character \"Eugene\", the program"
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What happened with the Eugene character? | 3 | What happened with Ernie Kovacs' Eugene character? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | true | [
"What Really Happened to the Class of '65? is an American anthology drama television series produced and aired in 1977–1978, created by Tony Bill and written by Walter Koenig The series was inspired by the bestselling book What Really Happened to the Class of '65? by David Wallechinsky and Michael Medved. It was produced by George Eckstein.\n\nSummary \nThe drama of the show revolved around the main character, played by Tony Bill, who had graduated from the class of 1965 in Bret Harte High School, and who has now returned as a teacher to the school. The show would begin with his character opening up the old school photo book, flicking to a photo, and pondering what had happened to that particular student. The show would then show the story of that student, with Bill narrating.\n\nThe show featured music from the era, and was described as \"a cross breed between Happy Days and Peyton Place\" The show debuted at 10pm on NBC on December 8, 1977.\n\nGrant High School in Van Nuys was used as a filming location for the series.\n\nCast \nTony Bill played the main character, Sam Ashley. The rest of the cast of the show featured many of the mainstay actors of the 1970s, including Cliff De Young, Leslie Nielsen, John Ritter, Annette O'Toole, Meredith Baxter Birney, John Rubinstein, Jessica Walter, and Paul Burke.\n\nEpisode list\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n What Really Happened to the Class of '65? at The Classic TV Archive\n\n1977 American television series debuts\n1978 American television series endings\n1970s American anthology television series\n1970s American drama television series\n1970s American high school television series\nNBC original programming\nTelevision series based on books\nTelevision shows set in Los Angeles",
"Eugene the Jeep is a character in the Popeye comic strip. A mysterious animal with magical or supernatural abilities, the Jeep first appeared in the March 16, 1936, appearance of Thimble Theatre strip (now simply Popeye). He was also present in animated versions of Popeye's adventures, including three appearances in the Fleischer Studios shorts of the late 1930s/early 1940s, with more extensive appearances in later Popeye cartoons produced for TV.\n\nFictional character biography\n\nOrigin\nIn the August 9, 1936, strip, headlined \"Wha's a Jeep?\" Popeye asks Professor Brainstine what exactly a Jeep is. He gets the following response:\n\nWhen asked if he had any further questions, Popeye, totally unenlightened by this explanation, repeated, \"Wha's a Jeep?\"\n\nThe animated cartoons took the straightforward approach of defining the character as some type of dog. In The Jeep (1938), Popeye presents the animal to Olive Oyl and Swee'Pea with the simple explanation, \"The Jeep's a magical dog and can disappear and things\". In Popeye Presents Eugene the Jeep (1940), it is Popeye who receives the creature from Olive, in a box via a special delivery man (voiced by Pinto Colvig), and with the premise that he had never seen the creature before: \"Well, blow me down! A baby puppy!\"\n\nEugene the Jeep appeared in several Popeye TV series, including Popeye the Sailor (1960-1963), The All-New Popeye Hour (1978-1983) and Popeye and Son (1987). In the latter two series he was voiced by Don Messick.\n\nEugene the Jeep did not appear in the live-action 1980 Popeye movie.\nThe Jeep was included in early drafts of the original screenplay but was soon deemed too difficult and too expensive to render believably, so the character was dropped and elements of the character were given to Swee'Pea. The baby's mysterious ability to answer questions and make predictions through the use of whistles were scenes originally written for Eugene the Jeep.\n\nEugene was slated to appear in the animated Popeye film produced by Sony Pictures Animation but production of the film was cancelled in 2016.\n\nAttributes and abilities\nIn the context of the comic strip, Eugene the Jeep was a gift to Popeye's girlfriend Olive Oyl from her Uncle Ben who found Eugene in Africa. The Jeep is a yellow creature about the size of a dog who walks on his hind legs. He has a bear-like head and ears but a large nose, long tail, and protruding belly. The Jeep's diet consists only of orchids.\n\nAs his language is limited to the word \"jeep\", Eugene primarily communicates through body language. Eugene always tells the truth, even to criminals. He possesses high intelligence, so is able to help humans such as Popeye and Olive Oyl solve complex problems. He makes use of a limited form of teleportation: he can disappear from one place and reappear in another, and can walk through and on walls and ceilings. These teleportation powers are said to stem from the Jeep's ability to cross into the fourth dimension.\nHe also appears in “Popeye & Son” later.\n\nOther uses\nEugene the Jeep is the school mascot for Northeast Dubois High School in Dubois, Indiana, and South Webster High School in South Webster, Ohio, although the Jeep for Northeast Dubois is blue and gray, while South Webster's is red instead of yellow. An old elementary school in Wheatland, Indiana also used the Jeep as its mascot, but this school was consolidated, and the symbol is no longer in use.\n\nMany suggest that soldiers of World War II were so impressed with the new Willys MB light utility vehicle that they informally named it after Eugene the Jeep, as it was \"small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems\".\nOther supposed origins for the vehicle's namesake include GP ('General Purpose'), and the dubious JEEP ('Just Engine & Essential Parts'.)\n\nNotes\n\nExternal links\n Popeye at Don Markstein's Toonopedia\n\nComics characters introduced in 1936\nPopeye characters\nFictional mammals\nFictional characters who can turn invisible\nFictional characters who can turn intangible\nFictional characters who can teleport\nMale characters in animation\nMale characters in comics"
]
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[
"Ernie Kovacs",
"TV specials",
"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show (",
"What did he do next?",
"Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character \"Eugene\", the program",
"What happened with the Eugene character?",
"Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956"
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What was going on with the show? | 4 | What was going on with Ernie Kovacs show in 1956? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | Kovacs's special that received the most attention; | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | false | [
"Going Out with Alan Carr was the incarnation of the Saturday evening show on BBC Radio 2 between 25 April 2009 and 31 March 2012, produced by Open Mike Productions, which also produced Carr's tv series Chatty Man. It was hosted by British comedian Alan Carr, first with Emma Forbes, and then with Melanie Sykes. The final show was broadcast on 31 March 2012, after Carr announced his departure from the network earlier that month, stating that he wanted to reclaim his weekends. They were replaced by Liza Tarbuck on 12 May that year, who remains in the slot today.\n\nHistory\nThe show was launched on 25 April 2009, and was originally presented by Carr alongside Emma Forbes. Forbes unexpectedly quit the show and wider radio station in April 2010 when, after requesting a holiday, the BBC refused her request to present Going Out as usual, despite Melanie Sykes having already been recruited as a stand-in presenter. Sykes was confirmed as Forbes's replacement in May 2010. The final show was broadcast on 31 March 2012, following Carr's decision earlier that month to leave the network. They were both replaced on the 12 May that year by Liza Tarbuck, who continues to host in this time slot to this day.\n\nSince the show ended, Carr and Sykes have returned as a duo to the station as guest hosts, most notably standing in for Graham Norton on his Saturday morning show during the summers of 2017 to 2020, and for Paul O'Grady on his 5pm Sunday teatime show. They also returned to stand in for Tarbuck in their old permanent slot on one occasion in September 2018.\n\nFormat\nThe programme aired on Saturday evenings between 6pm and 8pm, and contained the following features, although not every segment was present in every episode.\n\nWardrobe Disasters: listeners phoned in seeking fashion advice from Alan and Emma/Mel.\nAlan's Telly Quiz: two listeners competed to answer the most questions on television trivia in two minutes and won a \"Going Out With Alan Carr\" rosette. This segment became known for contestants often amassing very low scores.\nCarr-oake (Renamed Paddyoake whenever Patrick Kielty stood in on the show): at the end of the show, a listener dueted with Alan over the phone, and won a Going Out With Alan Carr rosette.\nAlan's Last Dance: Listeners relived the triumph - or the tragedy - of Saturday night dates.\n\nThe second hour was presented under the banner of Party Tunes, where listeners could place requests for classic party songs to be played. Throughout the programme, Carr and Forbes/Sykes would encourage listeners to phone in with mostly amusing stories about a topic on daily life, which was usually related to what was in the week's news.\n\nSpecial Editions\nOn 5 September 2009, the programme was broadcast live from aboard a Blackpool tram as part of Radio 2's 'Live in Blackpool' series. Carr had turned on the famous Blackpool Illuminations the previous night, and the show also contained live music from Mika.\n\nOn Christmas Eve 2009 and again in 2010, a special show entitled 'Alan Carr's Office Party' was broadcast, containing festive music and discussions.\n\nGuest Presenters\nOn occasions when both Carr and Forbes/Sykes were unavailable, comedian Patrick Kielty and Gaby Roslin stood in respectively, with the show renamed Going Out With Patrick and Gaby. Other famous faces to stand in on the show included former Spice Girl Melanie Chisholm, television presenters Kate Thornton and Penny Smith, talent show winner Jodie Prenger, comedian Stephen K. Amos, Christopher Biggins and Anneka Rice.\n\nSee also\nAlan Carr: Chatty Man - Carr's TV chat show\n\nReferences\n\nBBC Radio 2 programmes",
"Viewpoint is an American political talk show broadcast on Current TV in 2012 and 2013. Formerly known as Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer, it was hosted by former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer until January 6, 2013. After that, it was hosted by John Fugelsang. Viewpoint began airing on March 30, 2012 as a replacement to Keith Olbermann, who was dismissed from his show in the same time slot. It was the second television talk show to be hosted by Spitzer, with his previous effort (Parker Spitzer, renamed In the Arena) having aired on CNN.\n\nEliot Spitzer announced on January 6, 2013 that he left the show and the network, saying that \"journalism has been more a matter of projecting a particular approach to covering policies, to covering issues. It was a continuation of what I tried to do in government. And that doesn’t fit with their vision of what [Al Jazeera is] going to do.\" However, he did say that \"I view Al Jazeera as a very serious journalistic outfit\". For the remainder of its run, the show was hosted by comedian John Fugelsang. The show aired its final episode on August 15, 2013. Most of the staff moved to the talk show, Consider This, on Al Jazeera America.\n\nBibliography\nPaterson, David \"Black, Blind, & In Charge: A Story of Visionary Leadership and Overcoming Adversity.\"Skyhorse Publishing. New York, New York, 2020\n\nReferences\n\n2012 American television series debuts\n2010s American television news shows\nEliot Spitzer\nCurrent TV original programming\n2013 American television series endings"
]
|
[
"Ernie Kovacs",
"TV specials",
"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show (",
"What did he do next?",
"Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character \"Eugene\", the program",
"What happened with the Eugene character?",
"Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956",
"What was going on with the show?",
"Kovacs's special that received the most attention;"
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What resulted from the popular show? | 5 | What resulted from the Ernie Kovacs' popular show Silent Show? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | Kovacs received his first movie offer, | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | true | [
"Me TV (known as Мэн патологоанатом Телевизор in Russia, Mnie Telewizja in Poland, and Sa akin Telebisyon in the Philippines), was a popular Nickelodeon interstitial show about children from around world and their many passions, hobbies, and interest. The live action show was shot all over Asia and Europe, where kids were asked to answer everything under the sun from what their favorite foods and movie stars were, to probing questions like \"What would you do if you were President of your country?\" Popular episodes filmed in the Philippines and India included \"What's in your lunchbox?\", \"How do you get to school?\" and \"What would you do if you could design your own uniform\"? The show aired from 1998 to 2001, and 26 episodes were produced in the length of two TV seasons.\n\n1990s Russian television series\n2000s Russian television series\n1998 Russian television series debuts\n2001 Russian television series endings",
"Khit Thit Pyo May (; lit. Girls in New Era) is a popular Burmese live talk show broadcast on MRTV-4. The talk show follows the conversations of beautiful and talented women. The panel covers a wide range of topics but mostly focuses on girls. For instance, the group discusses news and links them to issues that many women find interesting. Experts and celebrities often make guest appearances. The daily TV show is broadcast every morning since 2012.\n\nKhit Thit Pyo May was listed on The Myanmar Times \"Top 10 Myanmar TV Shows\" in 2019.\n\nBroadcast schedule\nMondays live show– meeting with the astrologers for ask about business, health, education, love affair and marriage affair. The astrologer answers what people ask about business, health, education, love affair and marriage affair from phone and Facebook page.\nTuesdays live show– meeting with the doctors for ask about health. The doctor answers what people ask about health from phone and Facebook page.\nWednesdays live show– meeting with successful men or women for ask life improvement. He or she answers what people ask about life improvement from phone and Facebook page.\nThursdays live show– meeting for ask women's beauty and physical activities with related persons. He or she answers what people ask about women's beauty and physical activities from phone and Facebook page.\nFridays live show– meeting with celebrities for ask about art activities. The celebrity answers what people ask about his or her art activities from phone and Facebook page.\nSaturdays live show– meeting with celebrities or famous persons for ask about love affair. The celebrity or famous person answers live what people asking about love affair from phone and Facebook page.\nSundays recorded show– extra day and not live show, talking with famous persons and other information.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nBurmese television series\nTelevision series by MRTV-4"
]
|
[
"Ernie Kovacs",
"TV specials",
"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show (",
"What did he do next?",
"Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character \"Eugene\", the program",
"What happened with the Eugene character?",
"Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956",
"What was going on with the show?",
"Kovacs's special that received the most attention;",
"What resulted from the popular show?",
"Kovacs received his first movie offer,"
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What movie offer did he get? | 6 | What movie offer did Ernie Kovacs get? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | false | [
"How Did This Get Made? is a comedy podcast on the Earwolf network hosted by Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas.\n\nGenerally, How Did This Get Made? is released every two weeks. During the show's off-week, a \".5\" episode is uploaded featuring Scheer announcing the next week's movie, as well as challenges for the fans. In addition to the shows and mini-shows, the How Did This Get Made? stream hosted the first three episodes of Bitch Sesh, the podcast of previous guests Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider, in December 2015. It has also hosted episodes of its own spin-off podcast, the How Did This Get Made? Origin Stories, in which Blake Harris interviews people involved with the films covered by the main show. In December 2017, an episode was recorded for the Pee Cast Blast event, and released exclusively on Stitcher Premium.\n\nEvery episode has featured Paul Scheer as the host of the podcast. The only episode to date in which Scheer hosted remotely was The Smurfs, in which he Skyped in. Raphael has taken extended breaks from the podcast for both filming commitments and maternity leave. Mantzoukas has also missed episodes due to work, but has also Skyped in for various episodes. On the occasions that neither Raphael nor Mantzoukas are available for live appearances, Scheer calls in previous fan-favorite guests for what is known as a How Did This Get Made? All-Stars episode.\n\nList of episodes\n\nMini episodes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n List of How Did This Get Made? episodes\n\nHow Did This Get Made\nHow Did This Get Made",
"Satın Alınan Adam is a Turkish movie directed by Arshavir Alyanak. The film got inspired from a novel.\n\nPlot \nThe main character in the movie is an amateur writer whose marriage was aimed get money for making his dream to come true. Naci who worked for one of the wealthy lawyer got an offer that if he married the daughter of the lawyer Mine, he would be given adequate money and printing press to publish his writings. But according to the deal, the couple must divorce at the end of the year. As he accepted the offer, Naci was able to publish his writings. However, the marriage of Naci and Mine will have unexpected results.\n\nActors \n\n Goksel Arsoy\n Belgin Doruk\n Mualla Fırat\n Nubar Terziyan\n Salih Tozan\n Mümtaz Ener\n Semih Sezerli\n Necdet Tosun\n\nReferences \n\nTurkish-language films\nTurkish films by genre\nTurkish films"
]
|
[
"Ernie Kovacs",
"TV specials",
"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show (",
"What did he do next?",
"Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character \"Eugene\", the program",
"What happened with the Eugene character?",
"Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956",
"What was going on with the show?",
"Kovacs's special that received the most attention;",
"What resulted from the popular show?",
"Kovacs received his first movie offer,",
"What movie offer did he get?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What did he go on to do next? | 7 | What did Ernie Kovacs go on to do next, after Silent Show? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | had a cover story in Life magazine, | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | true | [
"\"What Did I Do to You?\" is a song recorded by British singer Lisa Stansfield for her 1989 album, Affection. It was written by Stansfield, Ian Devaney and Andy Morris, and produced by Devaney and Morris. The song was released as the fourth European single on 30 April 1990. It included three previously unreleased songs written by Stansfield, Devaney and Morris: \"My Apple Heart,\" \"Lay Me Down\" and \"Something's Happenin'.\" \"What Did I Do to You?\" was remixed by Mark Saunders and by the Grammy Award-winning American house music DJ and producer, David Morales. The single became a top forty hit in the European countries reaching number eighteen in Finland, number twenty in Ireland and number twenty-five in the United Kingdom. \"What Did I Do to You?\" was also released in Japan.\n\nIn 2014, the remixes of \"What Did I Do to You?\" were included on the deluxe 2CD + DVD re-release of Affection and on People Hold On ... The Remix Anthology. They were also featured on The Collection 1989–2003 box set (2014), including previously unreleased Red Zone Mix by David Morales.\n\nCritical reception\nThe song received positive reviews from music critics. Matthew Hocter from Albumism viewed it as a \"upbeat offering\". David Giles from Music Week said it is \"beautifully performed\" by Stansfield. A reviewer from Reading Eagle wrote that \"What Did I Do to You?\" \"would be right at home on the \"Saturday Night Fever\" soundtrack.\"\n\nMusic video\nA music video was produced to promote the single, directed by Philip Richardson, who had previously directed the videos for \"All Around the World\" and \"Live Together\". It features Stansfield with her kiss curls, dressed in a white outfit and performing with her band on a stage in front of a jumping audience. The video was later published on Stansfield's official YouTube channel in November 2009. It has amassed more than 1,6 million views as of October 2021.\n\nTrack listings\n\n European/UK 7\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix Edit) – 4:20\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n European/UK/Japanese CD single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix Edit) – 4:20\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 5:19\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 4:17\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n UK 10\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix) – 5:52\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 5:19\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 4:17\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n European/UK 12\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Morales Mix) – 7:59\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 4:22\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 3:19\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:15\n\n UK 12\" promotional single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Morales Mix) – 7:59\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Anti Poll Tax Dub) – 6:31\n\n Other remixes\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Red Zone Mix) – 7:45\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nLisa Stansfield songs\n1990 singles\nSongs written by Lisa Stansfield\n1989 songs\nArista Records singles\nSongs written by Ian Devaney\nSongs written by Andy Morris (musician)",
"Wait Till Next Year is a 1988 memoir by sportswriter Mike Lupica and screenwriter William Goldman.\n\nThe book is similar to Goldman's earlier effort The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway in that it looks at a year of New York sports teams with Goldman getting press passes to see a huge number of games. The main focus is looking at The Mets following up their championship season while taking in the local Basketball and American Football teams too in a wildly frenetic overview of the coaches, stars, owners, trades and controversies that the season provided.\n\nLupica and Goldman had been friends for thirty years when Lupica suggested to Goldman they collaborate on a book together, from his point of view and Goldman's point of view. Goldman:\nI wanted to be a sports columnist when I was a kid and then I learned more about what they did for a living and I decided I didn't want to do it. You have to go see all that shit. It's fun to go to a ball game occasionally. What was great, the year I did the book with Lupica, was I had press passes so I could go sit with all those people whose columns I read and watch a baseball game or a football game or a basketball game.\nGoldman said they would do alternate chapters. \"I would eventually show him what I had and he would show me what he had but for the most part, we kept away from each other. We'd talk all the time.\"\n\nGoldman said the book \"was a total flop - it didn't work commercially - but it was a wonderful time for me.\"\n\nReferences\n\nEgan, Sean, William Goldman: The Reluctant Storyteller, Bear Manor Media 2014\n\nAmerican memoirs\n1988 non-fiction books\nBooks by William Goldman"
]
|
[
"Ernie Kovacs",
"TV specials",
"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show (",
"What did he do next?",
"Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character \"Eugene\", the program",
"What happened with the Eugene character?",
"Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956",
"What was going on with the show?",
"Kovacs's special that received the most attention;",
"What resulted from the popular show?",
"Kovacs received his first movie offer,",
"What movie offer did he get?",
"I don't know.",
"What did he go on to do next?",
"had a cover story in Life magazine,"
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What else happened to him? | 8 | What else happened to Ernie Kovacs, besides having a cover story in Life magazine? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | received the Sylvania Award | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | true | [
"Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books",
"What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy"
]
|
[
"Ernie Kovacs",
"TV specials",
"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show (",
"What did he do next?",
"Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character \"Eugene\", the program",
"What happened with the Eugene character?",
"Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956",
"What was going on with the show?",
"Kovacs's special that received the most attention;",
"What resulted from the popular show?",
"Kovacs received his first movie offer,",
"What movie offer did he get?",
"I don't know.",
"What did he go on to do next?",
"had a cover story in Life magazine,",
"What else happened to him?",
"received the Sylvania Award"
]
| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | Did he get any other awards at this time? | 9 | Did Ernie Kovacs get any other awards after 1956, other than the Sylvania award? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | true | [
"The Sound Bluntz were a Canadian dance music duo, consisting of producers Cory Bradshaw and Peter Pantzoures. They are most noted as two-time winners of the Juno Award for Dance Recording of the Year, winning at the Juno Awards of 2003 for their cover of Michael Jackson's \"Billie Jean\" and at the Juno Awards of 2004 for \"Something About You\".\n\nThey were also nominated, but did not win, at the Juno Awards of 2007 for \"(Maybe You'll Get) Lucky\".\n\nReferences\n\nJuno Award for Dance Recording of the Year winners\nCanadian dance music groups",
"Rajiv Rao is National Creative Director of Ogilvy & Mather, responsible for the ZooZoo and Pug Advertising Campaigns of Vodafone. He also did many othercreative campaigns. \nHe had won several medals at Cannes, One Show, Clio, Ad fest, CA, Media Spikes and London International Awards for his Creative work. He worked on Vodafone/Orange in India has won ‘Campaign of the year’, 4 times in a row. The World Brand Congress also conferred Mr. Rajiv Rao with the Creative Person of the year award in 2009. He had also been invited to be a part of the jury at the London International Awards and Ad fest Asia Pacific. According to Economic Times India, he has been in the list of top Creative Directors of the country for the last 5 years.\n\nEarly life and education\nHe was not always good at art and drawing at school. He joined Sir J.J.Institute of Applied Arts in Mumbai and he believes that was the right thing he did. He completed Applied Arts which is mainly for advertising but he didn’t have any clear plans at that time. He just thought it would be nice to learn more of art and see what if he can get through his career in it. He had seen a lot of ads and was fascinated to see the world of advertising.\n\nCareer\n\nFinally he joined an advertising agency after he finished studies. He started working in advertising field and figured that it’s a fun job and he would say that working really made him realise that advertising was the right thing for him. After his 6 years journey in advertising industry, he finally landed in Ogilvy India in 1999 as a creative group head.\n\nAwards and honors\n\nReferences\n\nFilm directors from Mumbai\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)"
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"TV specials",
"What tv specials was he on?",
"the famous Silent Show (",
"What did he do next?",
"Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character \"Eugene\", the program",
"What happened with the Eugene character?",
"Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956",
"What was going on with the show?",
"Kovacs's special that received the most attention;",
"What resulted from the popular show?",
"Kovacs received his first movie offer,",
"What movie offer did he get?",
"I don't know.",
"What did he go on to do next?",
"had a cover story in Life magazine,",
"What else happened to him?",
"received the Sylvania Award",
"Did he get any other awards at this time?",
"recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award"
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| C_74a81bb524314d3988a5b03604bcf271_0 | What specials was he in after this? | 10 | What specials was Ernie Kovacs in after being recipient of the Directors Guild of America Award? | Ernie Kovacs | He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961-62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980-1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. CANNOTANSWER | A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during | Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, MST3K, Uncle Floyd, among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.
While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."
Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and his half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.
Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.
During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.
A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.
Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited".
Start in television
Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.
Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.
The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.
During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.
Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.
Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.
He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.
One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.
He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".
Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.
Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.
Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.
Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.
Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.
Kovacs had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was ended.
TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year.
In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.
A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.
The Dutch Masters cigar company became well-known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.
While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly-rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."
Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes, 'The Nairobi Trio'.
In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network.
Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.
Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"--the theme to his shows--as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.
For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.
He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.
In print
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.
While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.
Television guest star
Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).
Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.
Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).
He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.
Personal life
First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.
Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.
Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically-trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"
After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.
Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")
Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.
Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.
Death
In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' bodywith an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched handappeared in newspapers across the United States.
In keeping Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy, and George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."
Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by Edie Adams.
His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs' role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes for the pilot in Griffith Park. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.
Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."
Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.
Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.
Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.
Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.
The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon.
During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.
On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.
In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.
Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.
Partial filmography
Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain
Notes
References
Bibliography
via Project MUSE
Further reading
Adams, Edie (1990). Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. William Morrow;
Barker, David Brian (1982). "Every Moment's a Gift": Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957–1962, a Master's Thesis. Available for viewing at the library at the University of Texas at Austin
Rico, Diana (1990). Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich;
Walley, David (1975). Nothing in Moderation. Drake Publishers; Reprinted as The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, Bolder Books, 1978 and Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1987;
External links
The Official Ernie Kovacs Website
Ernie Kovacs Dot Net: A Tribute To Television's Original Genius
Kovacsland Online! – the Ernie Kovacs website
List of Kovacs' 16 articles for MAD magazine
Watch
The Jack Benny Program with Ernie Kovacs as guest at the Internet Archive
Operation Mad Ball Trailer (1957) at the Internet Archive
John Barbour's documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius at John Barbour's World
Ernie Kovacs Dutch Masters Cigar Commercial
1919 births
1962 deaths
20th-century American male actors
American people of Hungarian descent
American comedy writers
American game show hosts
American male film actors
American male television actors
American humorists
American satirists
American comics writers
American television talk show hosts
Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Emmy Award winners
Mad (magazine) people
Male actors from New Jersey
Actors from Trenton, New Jersey
Road incident deaths in California
Trenton Central High School alumni
Writers from Trenton, New Jersey
American male comedy actors
20th-century American comedians | true | [
"The Beano Summer Special is like The Beano with extra comic strips, which as its name suggests, was released in the summer and are considered more valuable than the standard editions. This special first started in 1963 with a joint Beano-Dandy summer special and then in 1964 the first Beano summer special appeared. These ran continually until 2003 when they were replaced by Beano specials, which was a series of monthly special Beanos including a Summer Special released in the Summer. In 2006, the Beano specials was discontinued in favour of BeanoMAX. However, in 2011 an ultimate summer special exclusive to WHSmith was released and so was The Beano 3-D Summer Annual 2011. Unlike the traditional Beano of the time, this edition of the comic had a more colourful appearance to it. The front cover of these comics often had one picture which had a caption encouraging the reader to turn to the rear cover to see what happens next. As well as Beano Summer Specials there were also Bash Street Kids Summer Specials.\n\nThe Beano\nPublications established in 1963",
"\"A Message to You Rudy\" is a 1967 rocksteady song by Dandy Livingstone. Originally titled \"Rudy a Message to You\", the song later achieved broader success when, in 1979, a cover by The Specials reached number 10 in the UK Singles Chart.\n\nComposition and recording\nLivingstone came up with the idea of the song in about 10 minutes and recorded it a day or two later in about 20 minutes at Maximum Sounds Studio on Old Kent Road with engineer Vic Keary. Livingstone has said that he \"had a very bad cold\" on the day of recording and so it was suggested that he record the song as a guide vocal and then go over the vocals another day. However, everybody liked what Livingstone had done, so he didn't bother going back to sing over it. Whilst recording the song, Livingstone decided he wanted a trombone to feature in the song, so about a week after the recording session, he got trombonist Rico Rodriguez to play the intro melody. At the same time, he got a tenor saxophonist called Pepsi to play the same intro riff and \"alternate the solo differently\".\n\nAfterwards \n\"Rudy a Message to You\" did have some success commercially, selling 30,000 units. It also peaked at number 9 on Record Mirror's Top R&B Singles chart in August 1967, in which it was listed as \"Rudie Take a Message\".\n\nThe lyrics warn a \"rudy\" (rude boy) to think of his future and change his ways, otherwise he will end up in prison. However the reception was not what was intended and it was received as glorifying the rude boy culture.\n\nLivingstone noticed that by 1969, there were three cover versions of \"Rudy a Message to You\", first of which was by The Locomotive. He only found out about The Specials' version after seeing their performance on Top of the Pops, after which he made inquiries about the publishing. He found out Carlin Music was the publisher and they had been trying to find Livingstone's whereabouts. Livingstone was also contacted by Eddy Grant who wanted to be the publisher of the song and gave him £250 in advance. However, Livingstone turned down the offer and signed with Carlin.\n\nAfter the success of The Specials' version, Livingstone's version was re-released in December 1979 on Trojan Records, with the song remixed by Clem Bushay.\n\nThe Specials version\n\nThe Specials' version also featured trombone by Rico Rodriguez and Dick Cuthell played on trumpet. The recording was produced by Elvis Costello.\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\nRocksteady\n1967 singles\n1979 singles\nThe Specials songs\n1967 songs\n2 Tone Records singles"
]
|
[
"Stephen E. Ambrose",
"Plagiarism"
]
| C_e608cccf1c024635807a29e8c150f222_0 | What did Ambrose Plagiarize? | 1 | What did Stephen E. Ambrose plagiarize? | Stephen E. Ambrose | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose. CANNOTANSWER | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. | Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
There have been numerous well documented allegations of plagiarism, inaccuracies, and sloppiness in Ambrose's writings in addition to claims that he has made about his works. However, in a review of To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian for the New York Times, high school teacher William Everdell credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice."
Early life
Ambrose was born January 10, 1936, in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history. While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams. Ambrose then went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.
Career
Academic positions
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989, an honor given only to faculty who attain "national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement". During the 1969–1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted. His opposition to the Vietnam War stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative." Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University (assistant professor of history; 1960–1964) and Johns Hopkins University (associate professor of history; 1964–1969). He held visiting posts at Rutgers University, the University of California, Berkeley, and a number of European schools, including University College Dublin, where he taught as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History.
He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. "The mission of the Eisenhower Center is the study of the causes, conduct, and consequences of American national security policy and the use of force as an instrument of policy in the twentieth century." The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
Writings
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the American Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed. Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center." Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography was considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992). D-Day (1994), built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place." Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, which describes battles fought in northwest Europe from D-Day through the end of the war, utilized, again, extensive oral histories. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic," according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it."
In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage. He, also, reviewed the works of other historians in the Journal of Southern History, Military Affairs, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Foreign Affairs. He served as a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, also.
Television, film, and other activities
Ambrose featured in the 1973-74 ITV television series, The World at War, which detailed the history of World War II.
He served as the historical consultant for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie, said he "pored over D-Day" and Band of Brothers in researching his role. Hanks also credited Ambrose's books with providing extensive detail, particularly regarding D-Day landings.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose served as executive producer for Price for Peace, a documentary concerning the war in the Pacific theater during World War II, and for Moments of Truth, a TV documentary containing interviews with World War II veterans.
In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns. He provided commentary in twenty made-for TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century. He also appeared as a guest on numerous TV programs or stations, including The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span programming, CNN programming, NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Hardball, and various programming on The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. Ambrose's association with National Geographic stemmed, in part, from his designation as an Explorer-in-Residence by the Society.
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II. Also, he served on the board of directors for American Rivers and was a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.
National World War II Museum
Ambrose's work for the Eisenhower Center, specifically his work with D-Day veterans, inspired him to co-found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans with another historian and UNO professor Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller. Ambrose initiated fundraising by donating $500,000. "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory." He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In 2003, Congress designated the museum as "America's National World War II Museum," acknowledging an expanded scope and mission for the museum. "The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives."
Awards
In 1997, Ambrose received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal. In 1998, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. In 1998, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians. In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers. Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
Upon Ambrose's death, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana offered a resolution in the Senate, which received unanimous consent, saluting the "excellence of Stephen Ambrose at capturing the greatness of the American spirit in words."
Personal life, final years, and death
He married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. Judith died in 1965, when Ambrose was 29. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira Buckley (1939–2009), in 1967 and adopted her three children, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh. Moira was an active assistant in his writing and academic projects. After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A longtime smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His health deteriorated rapidly, and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. George McGovern, the primary focus of Ambrose's Wild Blue said, "He probably reached more readers than any other historian in our national history."
Legacy
Ambrose donated $500,000, half the amount needed, to the University of Wisconsin, to endow a chair in the name of William B. Hesseltine, Ambrose's mentor. The chair's position would focus on the teaching of American military history. When the chair became fully endowed, after Ambrose's death, it was renamed the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair.
The Ambrose Professor of History title was established at the University of New Orleans after his death. The position is reserved for a military historian.
Each year the Rutgers University Living History Society awards the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to "an author or artist who has made significant use of oral history." Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
Criticism
Plagiarism
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) pp 88-89</ref> Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book."How the Ambrose Story Developed," History News Network, June 2002.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works—The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Factual errors and disputed characterizations
Pacific Railroad
A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book", listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed "fact-checking" paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column The Reliable Source, that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins, while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."
The Eisenhower controversy
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general Henry Halleck,
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project, as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can." The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life." The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.
Works
Sole author
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (1962)
Upton and the Army, Louisiana State University Press (1964)
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1966)
[https://archive.org/details/supremecommander00ambr The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York: Doubleday (1970)
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, New York: Doubleday (1975)
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, New York: Doubleday (1981)
Eisenhower Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, New York: Simon & Schuster (1983)
Eisenhower Volume 2: The President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1984)
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon & Schuster (1985)
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987)
Eisenhower: Soldier and President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990) (a one-volume condensation of the 1983-84 two-volume Eisenhower biography)
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990)
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster (1991)
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945, New York: Simon & Schuster (1997)
Americans at War, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1997)
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster (1998)
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, New York: Simon & Schuster (2001)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (2002)
This Vast Land, New York: Simon & Schuster, (2003)
With others
with Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983)
with Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, New York: Penguin Books (1997)
with Sam Abell, Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, Washington DC: National Geographic Society, (1998, 2002)
with Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) ; 2010:
with Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002),
Edited works
Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1967)
with James A. Barber, The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings, New York, NY: The Free Press (1972)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1992)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower" A Centenary Assessment, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1995)
American Heritage New History of World War II(original text by C.L. Sulzberger), New York, NY: Viking Press (1997)
References
Further reading
External links
WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
Interview with Stephen Ambrose (1998)
Obituary in The Independent''
Obituary at website of the American Historical Association
Commentary dated December 19, 2000 contributed by G. J. "Chris" Graves, Edson T. Strobridge, and Charles N. Sweet regarding Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869."
Booknotes interview with Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, June 5, 1994.
In Depth interview with Ambrose, November 5, 2000
1936 births
2002 deaths
American Congregationalists
American military historians
American military writers
Deaths from lung cancer
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Historians of the American West
Historians of the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Kansas State University faculty
Louisiana State University faculty
National Humanities Medal recipients
Naval War College faculty
Official biographers to the presidents of the United States
Writers from Decatur, Illinois
People from Moultrie County, Illinois
People from Helena, Montana
Military personnel from Illinois
Writers from New Orleans
People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
University of New Orleans faculty
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
Wisconsin Badgers football players
Writers from Wisconsin
Historians of World War II
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
Historians of the American Civil War
People involved in plagiarism controversies
American male non-fiction writers | true | [
"What Lies Before Us is a comedic play by Morris Panych. It takes place in the Canadian Rocky Mountains in 1884, where a railway survey team, Keating and Ambrose, and their Chinese servant Wing, are stranded after being abandoned by their wilderness guide. The play was a 2007 nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language drama.\n\nKeating and Ambrose argue over what to do - winter approaches and their food supply is dwindling. Ambrose eventually decides to go for help, but an avalanche injures his leg and traps them. Ambrose learns that Keating has contracted rabies from a squirrel, and that he himself has gangrene on his injured leg. While Keating remains optimistic even after becoming paralyzed, Ambrose loses hope. Ultimately, both Keating and Ambrose die, and Wing is left alone to deliver a monologue in Chinese.\n\nThe premiere tour of What Lies Before Us featured:\n Director: Jim Millan\n Keating: Matthew MacFadzean\n Ambrose: David Storch\n Wing: Wayne Sujo\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n \n \n\nPlays by Morris Panych\n2007 plays\nPlays set in Canada\nPeriod pieces\nComedy plays\nFiction set in 1884",
"James R. Ambrose (August 16, 1922 – January 16, 2017) was an American aerospace executive who was United States Under Secretary of the Army from 1981 to 1988.\n\nBiography\nJames R. Ambrose was born in Brewer, Maine. He was educated at the University of Maine, graduating in 1943. He also studied at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, and the University of Maryland, but did not receive degrees from any of those institutions.\n\nDuring World War II, Ambrose worked at the United States Naval Research Laboratory, and stayed on there after the war. While there, he worked on radar, semiconductors, nuclear weapons, and nuclear reactors.\n\nIn late 1955, Ambrose was one of the co-founders of Systems Research Corporation. Systems Research Corporation was subsequently acquired by the Ford Motor Company, laying the foundation for what would become Ford Aerospace. Ambrose worked in management at Ford Aerospace for thirty-six years. He worked mainly on technical aspects of defense systems, space programs, and communications, command, and control systems. From 1968 to 1981, Ambrose held the title of Vice President for Technical Affairs of Ford Aerospace.\n\nOn September 30, 1981, President of the United States Ronald Reagan nominated Ambrose as United States Under Secretary of the Army. After Senate confirmation, Ambrose held this office from October 1981 until February 1988. He died in January 2017 at the age of 94.\n\nReferences\n\n President Reagan's Nomination of Ambrose as Under Secretary of the Army\n Profile at Foothill Communities Association website\n\n1922 births\n2017 deaths\nCatholic University of America alumni\nGeorgetown University alumni\nPeople from Brewer, Maine\nReagan administration personnel\nUnited States Under Secretaries of the Army\nUniversity of Maine alumni\nUnited States Navy personnel of World War II"
]
|
[
"Stephen E. Ambrose",
"Plagiarism",
"What did Ambrose Plagiarize?",
"In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue."
]
| C_e608cccf1c024635807a29e8c150f222_0 | Did he admit to it? | 2 | Did Stephen E. Ambrose admit to plagiarizing? | Stephen E. Ambrose | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose. CANNOTANSWER | I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. | Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
There have been numerous well documented allegations of plagiarism, inaccuracies, and sloppiness in Ambrose's writings in addition to claims that he has made about his works. However, in a review of To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian for the New York Times, high school teacher William Everdell credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice."
Early life
Ambrose was born January 10, 1936, in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history. While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams. Ambrose then went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.
Career
Academic positions
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989, an honor given only to faculty who attain "national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement". During the 1969–1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted. His opposition to the Vietnam War stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative." Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University (assistant professor of history; 1960–1964) and Johns Hopkins University (associate professor of history; 1964–1969). He held visiting posts at Rutgers University, the University of California, Berkeley, and a number of European schools, including University College Dublin, where he taught as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History.
He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. "The mission of the Eisenhower Center is the study of the causes, conduct, and consequences of American national security policy and the use of force as an instrument of policy in the twentieth century." The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
Writings
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the American Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed. Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center." Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography was considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992). D-Day (1994), built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place." Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, which describes battles fought in northwest Europe from D-Day through the end of the war, utilized, again, extensive oral histories. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic," according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it."
In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage. He, also, reviewed the works of other historians in the Journal of Southern History, Military Affairs, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Foreign Affairs. He served as a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, also.
Television, film, and other activities
Ambrose featured in the 1973-74 ITV television series, The World at War, which detailed the history of World War II.
He served as the historical consultant for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie, said he "pored over D-Day" and Band of Brothers in researching his role. Hanks also credited Ambrose's books with providing extensive detail, particularly regarding D-Day landings.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose served as executive producer for Price for Peace, a documentary concerning the war in the Pacific theater during World War II, and for Moments of Truth, a TV documentary containing interviews with World War II veterans.
In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns. He provided commentary in twenty made-for TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century. He also appeared as a guest on numerous TV programs or stations, including The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span programming, CNN programming, NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Hardball, and various programming on The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. Ambrose's association with National Geographic stemmed, in part, from his designation as an Explorer-in-Residence by the Society.
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II. Also, he served on the board of directors for American Rivers and was a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.
National World War II Museum
Ambrose's work for the Eisenhower Center, specifically his work with D-Day veterans, inspired him to co-found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans with another historian and UNO professor Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller. Ambrose initiated fundraising by donating $500,000. "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory." He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In 2003, Congress designated the museum as "America's National World War II Museum," acknowledging an expanded scope and mission for the museum. "The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives."
Awards
In 1997, Ambrose received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal. In 1998, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. In 1998, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians. In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers. Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
Upon Ambrose's death, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana offered a resolution in the Senate, which received unanimous consent, saluting the "excellence of Stephen Ambrose at capturing the greatness of the American spirit in words."
Personal life, final years, and death
He married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. Judith died in 1965, when Ambrose was 29. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira Buckley (1939–2009), in 1967 and adopted her three children, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh. Moira was an active assistant in his writing and academic projects. After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A longtime smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His health deteriorated rapidly, and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. George McGovern, the primary focus of Ambrose's Wild Blue said, "He probably reached more readers than any other historian in our national history."
Legacy
Ambrose donated $500,000, half the amount needed, to the University of Wisconsin, to endow a chair in the name of William B. Hesseltine, Ambrose's mentor. The chair's position would focus on the teaching of American military history. When the chair became fully endowed, after Ambrose's death, it was renamed the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair.
The Ambrose Professor of History title was established at the University of New Orleans after his death. The position is reserved for a military historian.
Each year the Rutgers University Living History Society awards the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to "an author or artist who has made significant use of oral history." Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
Criticism
Plagiarism
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) pp 88-89</ref> Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book."How the Ambrose Story Developed," History News Network, June 2002.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works—The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Factual errors and disputed characterizations
Pacific Railroad
A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book", listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed "fact-checking" paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column The Reliable Source, that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins, while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."
The Eisenhower controversy
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general Henry Halleck,
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project, as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can." The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life." The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.
Works
Sole author
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (1962)
Upton and the Army, Louisiana State University Press (1964)
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1966)
[https://archive.org/details/supremecommander00ambr The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York: Doubleday (1970)
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, New York: Doubleday (1975)
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, New York: Doubleday (1981)
Eisenhower Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, New York: Simon & Schuster (1983)
Eisenhower Volume 2: The President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1984)
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon & Schuster (1985)
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987)
Eisenhower: Soldier and President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990) (a one-volume condensation of the 1983-84 two-volume Eisenhower biography)
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990)
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster (1991)
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945, New York: Simon & Schuster (1997)
Americans at War, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1997)
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster (1998)
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, New York: Simon & Schuster (2001)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (2002)
This Vast Land, New York: Simon & Schuster, (2003)
With others
with Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983)
with Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, New York: Penguin Books (1997)
with Sam Abell, Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, Washington DC: National Geographic Society, (1998, 2002)
with Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) ; 2010:
with Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002),
Edited works
Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1967)
with James A. Barber, The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings, New York, NY: The Free Press (1972)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1992)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower" A Centenary Assessment, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1995)
American Heritage New History of World War II(original text by C.L. Sulzberger), New York, NY: Viking Press (1997)
References
Further reading
External links
WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
Interview with Stephen Ambrose (1998)
Obituary in The Independent''
Obituary at website of the American Historical Association
Commentary dated December 19, 2000 contributed by G. J. "Chris" Graves, Edson T. Strobridge, and Charles N. Sweet regarding Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869."
Booknotes interview with Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, June 5, 1994.
In Depth interview with Ambrose, November 5, 2000
1936 births
2002 deaths
American Congregationalists
American military historians
American military writers
Deaths from lung cancer
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Historians of the American West
Historians of the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Kansas State University faculty
Louisiana State University faculty
National Humanities Medal recipients
Naval War College faculty
Official biographers to the presidents of the United States
Writers from Decatur, Illinois
People from Moultrie County, Illinois
People from Helena, Montana
Military personnel from Illinois
Writers from New Orleans
People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
University of New Orleans faculty
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
Wisconsin Badgers football players
Writers from Wisconsin
Historians of World War II
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
Historians of the American Civil War
People involved in plagiarism controversies
American male non-fiction writers | false | [
"\"I Admit\" is a 19-minute song by American singer R. Kelly. Released on SoundCloud on July 23, 2018, the song addresses the singer's sexual abuse scandals. \"I Admit\" was written by Kelly and Raphael Ramos Oliveira, and produced by Kelly and Noc. The release of \"I Admit\" followed a 2017 BuzzFeed News investigative report that alleged that Kelly operated a \"sex cult\", and a 2018 boycott of Kelly backed by Time's Up. In \"I Admit\", Kelly makes a number of confessions, including that he is dyslexic, that he has been sexually unfaithful, and that he was raped. Kelly does not make any criminal admissions, but instead denies allegations of domestic violence and pedophilia. The lyrics rebuke Jim DeRogatis for his BuzzFeed News report, and disavow the report's allegations that Kelly is in charge of a \"sex cult\".\n\nCritics reviewed \"I Admit\" unfavorably. Some reviewers contrasted the title with the lack of criminal admissions in the lyrics, and described the song as an act of trolling. The song was compared to Kelly's rap opera Trapped in the Closet and O. J. Simpson's book If I Did It. Reviewers noted that Kelly's lyrics more closely resemble a self-defense than an admission or mea culpa. The release of \"I Admit\" led to a response from DeRogatis, who defended his journalism in two interviews. R. Kelly's ex-wife, Andrea Kelly, and brother, Carey Killa Kelly, released songs in response to \"I Admit\" that contain additional allegations against R. Kelly. The song also attracted criticism on social media.\n\nBackground and release \n\n\"I Admit\" is Kelly's first release since his 2016 holiday album, 12 Nights of Christmas.\n\nIn July 2017, Jim DeRogatis contributed an article to BuzzFeed News detailing legal investigations from three families regarding their daughters' alleged kidnappings after they established relationships with Kelly. The article characterized Kelly's operations as a \"cult\", and included interviews with three of Kelly's former associates. However, both Kelly and the daughters refuted the claims.\n\nIn April 2018, the Women of Color branch of the Time's Up movement announced their support for the Mute R. Kelly social media campaign, which advocated for music venues to cancel Kelly's concert dates and for Sony Music to terminate Kelly's recording contract. The organization published a demand on The Root for RCA Records, Ticketmaster, Spotify, Apple Music, and the Greensboro Coliseum Complex to end their business relationships with Kelly. Spotify removed Kelly's music from their playlists after introducing a \"hate content and hateful conduct\" policy in May 2018, but rescinded the policy in June 2018 after people in the music industry, including Kendrick Lamar's representative, accused the company of censorship.\n\n\"I Admit\" was released on the SoundCloud account of Julius Darrington, CEO of the AudioDream record label, on July 23, 2018. RCA Records, Kelly's primary label, did not confirm whether they were associated with the song. Kelly promoted the release with a post, \"Today is the day you've been waiting for\", across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.\n\nAfter the January 2019 broadcast of Surviving R. Kelly, Kelly appeared in a CBS This Morning interview on March 8, 2019, in which Gayle King asked him whether \"I Admit\" was his \"way of confessing\". Kelly responded, \"That question makes no sense, no offense, but what I'm saying is this: 'I Admit' was me expressing my feelings about the things I was going through. If you're listening to it, you can hear exactly what I'm admitting.\"\n\nLyrics \n\nIn \"I Admit\", Kelly admits to various acts, including dropping out of high school and not attending church. Kelly claims to be dyslexic, and asserts that his inability to read his recording contract caused him to forfeit publishing rights to his music, which contributed to Kelly's financial troubles, including his $20million tax debt to the Internal Revenue Service. In the song, Kelly confesses that he was sexually unfaithful and frequented strip clubs. Kelly reveals that he lost his virginity in his childhood when he was raped by an older female family member, elaborating on the disclosures from his 2012 autobiography, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me.\n\nDespite the song's title and Kelly's repetition of the lyric \"I admit it, I did it\" in the chorus, \"I Admit\" does not contain any criminal admissions. Kelly denies accusations of domestic violence, involvement in a \"sex cult\", and pedophilia in his lyrics, dismissing them as matters of opinion. Kelly does not admit guilt regarding the 2008 acquittal of his sex tape allegations, but maintains that he has been \"falsely accused\" and sings that his lawyer advised him to \"don't say noth'\". Although Kelly admits to casual sex with \"both older and young ladies\", he states that all of them were \"over age\". The lyrics denounce DeRogatis for profiting from his reports of Kelly's scandals, and John Legend, Steve Harvey, and Tom Joyner for refusing to publicly defend Kelly from his accusers.\n\nIn response to the Mute R. Kelly campaign, Kelly sings, \"only God can mute me\". Kelly expresses support for a \"women's group\", but also exclaims that \"they tryna lock me up like Bill\", referring to Bill Cosby, who at the time was awaiting incarceration after his April 2018 sexual assault convictions. Kelly finishes the song by telling the audience to \"stay the fuck out of my business\", and inviting his hometown of Chicago to use his image as inspiration for city youth.\n\nCritical reception \n\nSeveral reviewers characterized \"I Admit\" as an act of trolling, since the name of the song overstates the magnitude of the admissions contained within the lyrics. Elyse Wanshel of HuffPost noted similarities between this song and If I Did It, a book by O. J. Simpson that contains a hypothetical description of the alleged murder in Simpson's murder case. Writing for The Daily Beast, Stereo Williams described the song as \"20 minutes of defensive rambling and R. Kelly nailing himself to a cross\". Williams asserted that Kelly \"paints himself as the victim: the victim of the media, of sycophants, of his childhood abuser, of his own illiteracy\" while \"baiting his critics with a number of shockingly brazen lyrical references to his behavior\".\n\nIn a review for The Atlantic, Hannah Giorgis compared the song's structure to Kelly's rap opera Trapped in the Closet, and remarked, \"The specter of harmful actions is softened by the harmonies of the lullaby.\" Giorgis described Kelly's delivery as \"a stomach-churning mix of self-pity and hubris\" and criticized Kelly for refusing to address the alleged victims directly. She noted that \"at no point does he speak to—rather than at or about—the women who have come forward\" and wrote, \"none of the women who have recounted tales of Kelly's abuse is worthy of being the hero in this story. Kelly, and Kelly alone, occupies that mantle.\"\n\nAnn-Derrick Gaillot of The Outline considered \"I Admit\" a \"bad song\" and \"a 20-minute long plea to save his dying career\", and stated that the release of the song demonstrated that Kelly was \"no longer invincible\". In Rolling Stone, Michael Arcenaux lambasted Kelly for attempting to \"invoke his own trauma to excuse the grief he is alleged to have caused in so many women and girls\". Broadlys Leila Ettachfini labeled the song as \"a bizarre attempt to garner some sympathy from the public in hopes that it could somehow absolve Kelly for his alleged crimes against women and girls\", but remarked that \"the song doesn't seem to be achieving Kelly's desired effect\".\n\nResponses \n\nIn interviews with Variety and Billboard, DeRogatis denied that his reporting of Kelly's allegations had been a significant factor in his own career growth. DeRogatis defended his continued coverage of Kelly by disclosing that he still received calls from sources. He said, \"You're not a journalist or a human being if you get those calls and do not do your job.\" Regarding the song's composition, DeRogatis saw \"I Admit\" as a continuation of Kelly's 10-minute remix of \"I Believe I Can Fly\" from his unreleased album Loveland, in which Kelly sings a plea to Saint Peter at the gates of heaven.\n\nAndrea Kelly, R. Kelly's ex-wife, shared lyrics to her remix titled \"Admit It\" on Instagram on July 24, 2018. In her remix, Andrea alleges that R. Kelly physically abused her and neglected their children. In response to a lyric on \"I Admit\" where R. Kelly describes his relationship with his deceased mother, Joanne Kelly, Andrea sings that Joanne would disapprove of his actions. Andrea also accuses R. Kelly of being a \"dead beat dad\" and urges him to obtain \"professional help\".\n\nR. Kelly's brother, Carey Killa Kelly, released a diss track named \"I Confess\" on YouTube on August 3, 2018. Replying to R. Kelly's claim on \"I Admit\" that Carey abandoned him, Carey echoes an April 2018 sexual misconduct allegation in which a woman accused R. Kelly of intentionally giving her a sexually transmitted infection. In \"I Confess\", Carey also implies that R. Kelly had sex with other men.\n\nBlack Twitter responded negatively to \"I Admit\", with many users expressing disgust at the song's lyrical content. The song was poorly received by other artists; Talib Kweli remarked that Kelly's \"lack of self awareness is atrocious\" and Questlove tweeted, \"#IAdmit I want my 19 mins back\". The co-founder of the Mute R. Kelly social media campaign, Oronike Odeleye, called the song a \"19-minute sex trafficking fundraising anthem\" and interpreted its release as an indicator of Mute R. Kelly's success. In an interview with the Associated Press, Odeleye reaffirmed the campaign's efforts to eliminate Kelly's remaining concert dates.\n\nRape, Abuse & Incest National Network spokeswoman Jodi Omear criticized the song's lyrics and stated, \"Laws aren't opinions\". An attorney representing the family of Joycelyn Savage, one of the daughters mentioned in DeRogatis's BuzzFeed News article, rebuked Kelly for trying to \"shift the narrative\" and demanded Savage's release.\n\nKelly was convicted of nine criminal counts, including racketeering (involving sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, and sex trafficking) and violations of the Mann Act, on September 28, 2021. A few fans of Kelly played \"I Admit\" beside the courthouse shortly after the judgment was issued.\n\nSee also \n Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations\n Me Too movement\n\nReferences \n\n2018 songs\nWorks about cults\nObscenity controversies in music\nR. Kelly songs\nSongs about casual sex\nSongs about domestic violence\nSongs about sexual assault\nSongs based on actual events\nSongs written by R. Kelly\nSong recordings produced by R. Kelly",
"Atturnato faciendo vel recipiendo is an old writ which an individual owing suit to a county, hundred, or other court, and desiring to make an attorney appear for him there, whom he doubts the sheriff or steward will not otherwise admit, purchases to command him to receive such attorney, and admit his appearance by him.\n\nReferences\n \n\nWrits"
]
|
[
"Stephen E. Ambrose",
"Plagiarism",
"What did Ambrose Plagiarize?",
"In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.",
"Did he admit to it?",
"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings."
]
| C_e608cccf1c024635807a29e8c150f222_0 | Did he get in trouble for it? | 3 | Did Stephen E. Ambrose get in trouble for plagiarizing? | Stephen E. Ambrose | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
There have been numerous well documented allegations of plagiarism, inaccuracies, and sloppiness in Ambrose's writings in addition to claims that he has made about his works. However, in a review of To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian for the New York Times, high school teacher William Everdell credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice."
Early life
Ambrose was born January 10, 1936, in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history. While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams. Ambrose then went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.
Career
Academic positions
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989, an honor given only to faculty who attain "national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement". During the 1969–1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted. His opposition to the Vietnam War stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative." Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University (assistant professor of history; 1960–1964) and Johns Hopkins University (associate professor of history; 1964–1969). He held visiting posts at Rutgers University, the University of California, Berkeley, and a number of European schools, including University College Dublin, where he taught as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History.
He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. "The mission of the Eisenhower Center is the study of the causes, conduct, and consequences of American national security policy and the use of force as an instrument of policy in the twentieth century." The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
Writings
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the American Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed. Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center." Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography was considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992). D-Day (1994), built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place." Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, which describes battles fought in northwest Europe from D-Day through the end of the war, utilized, again, extensive oral histories. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic," according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it."
In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage. He, also, reviewed the works of other historians in the Journal of Southern History, Military Affairs, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Foreign Affairs. He served as a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, also.
Television, film, and other activities
Ambrose featured in the 1973-74 ITV television series, The World at War, which detailed the history of World War II.
He served as the historical consultant for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie, said he "pored over D-Day" and Band of Brothers in researching his role. Hanks also credited Ambrose's books with providing extensive detail, particularly regarding D-Day landings.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose served as executive producer for Price for Peace, a documentary concerning the war in the Pacific theater during World War II, and for Moments of Truth, a TV documentary containing interviews with World War II veterans.
In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns. He provided commentary in twenty made-for TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century. He also appeared as a guest on numerous TV programs or stations, including The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span programming, CNN programming, NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Hardball, and various programming on The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. Ambrose's association with National Geographic stemmed, in part, from his designation as an Explorer-in-Residence by the Society.
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II. Also, he served on the board of directors for American Rivers and was a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.
National World War II Museum
Ambrose's work for the Eisenhower Center, specifically his work with D-Day veterans, inspired him to co-found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans with another historian and UNO professor Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller. Ambrose initiated fundraising by donating $500,000. "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory." He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In 2003, Congress designated the museum as "America's National World War II Museum," acknowledging an expanded scope and mission for the museum. "The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives."
Awards
In 1997, Ambrose received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal. In 1998, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. In 1998, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians. In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers. Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
Upon Ambrose's death, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana offered a resolution in the Senate, which received unanimous consent, saluting the "excellence of Stephen Ambrose at capturing the greatness of the American spirit in words."
Personal life, final years, and death
He married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. Judith died in 1965, when Ambrose was 29. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira Buckley (1939–2009), in 1967 and adopted her three children, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh. Moira was an active assistant in his writing and academic projects. After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A longtime smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His health deteriorated rapidly, and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. George McGovern, the primary focus of Ambrose's Wild Blue said, "He probably reached more readers than any other historian in our national history."
Legacy
Ambrose donated $500,000, half the amount needed, to the University of Wisconsin, to endow a chair in the name of William B. Hesseltine, Ambrose's mentor. The chair's position would focus on the teaching of American military history. When the chair became fully endowed, after Ambrose's death, it was renamed the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair.
The Ambrose Professor of History title was established at the University of New Orleans after his death. The position is reserved for a military historian.
Each year the Rutgers University Living History Society awards the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to "an author or artist who has made significant use of oral history." Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
Criticism
Plagiarism
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) pp 88-89</ref> Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book."How the Ambrose Story Developed," History News Network, June 2002.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works—The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Factual errors and disputed characterizations
Pacific Railroad
A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book", listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed "fact-checking" paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column The Reliable Source, that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins, while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."
The Eisenhower controversy
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general Henry Halleck,
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project, as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can." The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life." The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.
Works
Sole author
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (1962)
Upton and the Army, Louisiana State University Press (1964)
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1966)
[https://archive.org/details/supremecommander00ambr The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York: Doubleday (1970)
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, New York: Doubleday (1975)
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, New York: Doubleday (1981)
Eisenhower Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, New York: Simon & Schuster (1983)
Eisenhower Volume 2: The President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1984)
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon & Schuster (1985)
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987)
Eisenhower: Soldier and President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990) (a one-volume condensation of the 1983-84 two-volume Eisenhower biography)
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990)
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster (1991)
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945, New York: Simon & Schuster (1997)
Americans at War, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1997)
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster (1998)
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, New York: Simon & Schuster (2001)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (2002)
This Vast Land, New York: Simon & Schuster, (2003)
With others
with Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983)
with Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, New York: Penguin Books (1997)
with Sam Abell, Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, Washington DC: National Geographic Society, (1998, 2002)
with Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) ; 2010:
with Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002),
Edited works
Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1967)
with James A. Barber, The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings, New York, NY: The Free Press (1972)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1992)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower" A Centenary Assessment, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1995)
American Heritage New History of World War II(original text by C.L. Sulzberger), New York, NY: Viking Press (1997)
References
Further reading
External links
WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
Interview with Stephen Ambrose (1998)
Obituary in The Independent''
Obituary at website of the American Historical Association
Commentary dated December 19, 2000 contributed by G. J. "Chris" Graves, Edson T. Strobridge, and Charles N. Sweet regarding Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869."
Booknotes interview with Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, June 5, 1994.
In Depth interview with Ambrose, November 5, 2000
1936 births
2002 deaths
American Congregationalists
American military historians
American military writers
Deaths from lung cancer
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Historians of the American West
Historians of the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Kansas State University faculty
Louisiana State University faculty
National Humanities Medal recipients
Naval War College faculty
Official biographers to the presidents of the United States
Writers from Decatur, Illinois
People from Moultrie County, Illinois
People from Helena, Montana
Military personnel from Illinois
Writers from New Orleans
People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
University of New Orleans faculty
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
Wisconsin Badgers football players
Writers from Wisconsin
Historians of World War II
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
Historians of the American Civil War
People involved in plagiarism controversies
American male non-fiction writers | false | [
"Bubble Trouble is a 1994 action-adventure scrolling shooter video game developed by Lore Design Limited and published by Telegames in North America and Europe exclusively for the Atari Lynx. In the game, the players assume the role of Travis, a scientist whose experiments go wrong as he becomes trapped in a bubble world.\n\nGameplay \n\nBubble Trouble is an action-adventure shooter game.\n\nReception \n\nIGN gave the game a 7/10, writing \"Behind Bubble Trouble'''s screwball premise is a challenging game with a good dose of originality. Though some may find it a bit tough, there's enough appeal to pull most players in for 'one more try'. Complimentary graphics and sound help round out Bubble Trouble into a charming package.\"Ultimate Console Database'' wrote \"The shooter/exploration hybrid gameplay takes a bit of work to get into, but once you learn the controls and figure out exactly what it is you need to do it becomes surprisingly addictive. This is one of those games where each time you strive to get just a little bit farther, although lack of any replay value limits the appeal.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Bubble Trouble at AtariAge\n Bubble Trouble at GameFAQs\n Bubble Trouble at MobyGames\n\n1994 video games\nAtari Lynx games\nAtari Lynx-only games\nLore Design Limited games\nSingle-player video games\nScrolling shooters\nTelegames games\nVideo games developed in the United Kingdom",
"Nema Problema is a 1984 Yugoslav film and the first movie with folk music singer Lepa Brena in the main role. After this movie the film series Hajde da se volimo was begun. The director of the movie is Mića Milošević. It was released on 29 October 1984.\n\nPlot summary\nThe manager of a company (played by Nikola Simić) gets in trouble when he cannot pay his workers. Billions were spent on a football stadium which is now empty, and the bank did not approve requests for credit for the seemingly meaningless investments. Maybe the stadium will get filled during a concert by a popular singer Lepa Brena (played by herself).\n\nExternal links\n \n\nYugoslav films\nFilms set in Belgrade"
]
|
[
"Stephen E. Ambrose",
"Plagiarism",
"What did Ambrose Plagiarize?",
"In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.",
"Did he admit to it?",
"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings.",
"Did he get in trouble for it?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_e608cccf1c024635807a29e8c150f222_0 | Did he plagiarize any other times? | 4 | Did Stephen E. Ambrose plagiarize any other times other than in his book The Wild Blue? | Stephen E. Ambrose | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose. CANNOTANSWER | A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. | Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
There have been numerous well documented allegations of plagiarism, inaccuracies, and sloppiness in Ambrose's writings in addition to claims that he has made about his works. However, in a review of To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian for the New York Times, high school teacher William Everdell credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice."
Early life
Ambrose was born January 10, 1936, in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history. While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams. Ambrose then went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.
Career
Academic positions
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989, an honor given only to faculty who attain "national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement". During the 1969–1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted. His opposition to the Vietnam War stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative." Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University (assistant professor of history; 1960–1964) and Johns Hopkins University (associate professor of history; 1964–1969). He held visiting posts at Rutgers University, the University of California, Berkeley, and a number of European schools, including University College Dublin, where he taught as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History.
He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. "The mission of the Eisenhower Center is the study of the causes, conduct, and consequences of American national security policy and the use of force as an instrument of policy in the twentieth century." The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
Writings
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the American Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed. Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center." Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography was considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992). D-Day (1994), built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place." Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, which describes battles fought in northwest Europe from D-Day through the end of the war, utilized, again, extensive oral histories. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic," according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it."
In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage. He, also, reviewed the works of other historians in the Journal of Southern History, Military Affairs, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Foreign Affairs. He served as a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, also.
Television, film, and other activities
Ambrose featured in the 1973-74 ITV television series, The World at War, which detailed the history of World War II.
He served as the historical consultant for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie, said he "pored over D-Day" and Band of Brothers in researching his role. Hanks also credited Ambrose's books with providing extensive detail, particularly regarding D-Day landings.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose served as executive producer for Price for Peace, a documentary concerning the war in the Pacific theater during World War II, and for Moments of Truth, a TV documentary containing interviews with World War II veterans.
In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns. He provided commentary in twenty made-for TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century. He also appeared as a guest on numerous TV programs or stations, including The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span programming, CNN programming, NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Hardball, and various programming on The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. Ambrose's association with National Geographic stemmed, in part, from his designation as an Explorer-in-Residence by the Society.
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II. Also, he served on the board of directors for American Rivers and was a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.
National World War II Museum
Ambrose's work for the Eisenhower Center, specifically his work with D-Day veterans, inspired him to co-found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans with another historian and UNO professor Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller. Ambrose initiated fundraising by donating $500,000. "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory." He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In 2003, Congress designated the museum as "America's National World War II Museum," acknowledging an expanded scope and mission for the museum. "The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives."
Awards
In 1997, Ambrose received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal. In 1998, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. In 1998, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians. In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers. Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
Upon Ambrose's death, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana offered a resolution in the Senate, which received unanimous consent, saluting the "excellence of Stephen Ambrose at capturing the greatness of the American spirit in words."
Personal life, final years, and death
He married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. Judith died in 1965, when Ambrose was 29. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira Buckley (1939–2009), in 1967 and adopted her three children, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh. Moira was an active assistant in his writing and academic projects. After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A longtime smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His health deteriorated rapidly, and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. George McGovern, the primary focus of Ambrose's Wild Blue said, "He probably reached more readers than any other historian in our national history."
Legacy
Ambrose donated $500,000, half the amount needed, to the University of Wisconsin, to endow a chair in the name of William B. Hesseltine, Ambrose's mentor. The chair's position would focus on the teaching of American military history. When the chair became fully endowed, after Ambrose's death, it was renamed the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair.
The Ambrose Professor of History title was established at the University of New Orleans after his death. The position is reserved for a military historian.
Each year the Rutgers University Living History Society awards the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to "an author or artist who has made significant use of oral history." Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
Criticism
Plagiarism
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) pp 88-89</ref> Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book."How the Ambrose Story Developed," History News Network, June 2002.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works—The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Factual errors and disputed characterizations
Pacific Railroad
A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book", listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed "fact-checking" paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column The Reliable Source, that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins, while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."
The Eisenhower controversy
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general Henry Halleck,
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project, as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can." The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life." The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.
Works
Sole author
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (1962)
Upton and the Army, Louisiana State University Press (1964)
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1966)
[https://archive.org/details/supremecommander00ambr The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York: Doubleday (1970)
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, New York: Doubleday (1975)
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, New York: Doubleday (1981)
Eisenhower Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, New York: Simon & Schuster (1983)
Eisenhower Volume 2: The President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1984)
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon & Schuster (1985)
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987)
Eisenhower: Soldier and President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990) (a one-volume condensation of the 1983-84 two-volume Eisenhower biography)
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990)
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster (1991)
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945, New York: Simon & Schuster (1997)
Americans at War, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1997)
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster (1998)
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, New York: Simon & Schuster (2001)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (2002)
This Vast Land, New York: Simon & Schuster, (2003)
With others
with Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983)
with Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, New York: Penguin Books (1997)
with Sam Abell, Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, Washington DC: National Geographic Society, (1998, 2002)
with Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) ; 2010:
with Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002),
Edited works
Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1967)
with James A. Barber, The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings, New York, NY: The Free Press (1972)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1992)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower" A Centenary Assessment, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1995)
American Heritage New History of World War II(original text by C.L. Sulzberger), New York, NY: Viking Press (1997)
References
Further reading
External links
WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
Interview with Stephen Ambrose (1998)
Obituary in The Independent''
Obituary at website of the American Historical Association
Commentary dated December 19, 2000 contributed by G. J. "Chris" Graves, Edson T. Strobridge, and Charles N. Sweet regarding Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869."
Booknotes interview with Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, June 5, 1994.
In Depth interview with Ambrose, November 5, 2000
1936 births
2002 deaths
American Congregationalists
American military historians
American military writers
Deaths from lung cancer
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Historians of the American West
Historians of the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Kansas State University faculty
Louisiana State University faculty
National Humanities Medal recipients
Naval War College faculty
Official biographers to the presidents of the United States
Writers from Decatur, Illinois
People from Moultrie County, Illinois
People from Helena, Montana
Military personnel from Illinois
Writers from New Orleans
People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
University of New Orleans faculty
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
Wisconsin Badgers football players
Writers from Wisconsin
Historians of World War II
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
Historians of the American Civil War
People involved in plagiarism controversies
American male non-fiction writers | true | [
"The Desperate Preacher's Site is one of the first web sites on the World Wide Web to offer Christian educators and ministers a forum for discussion and exchange of resources. Founded by United Methodist Minister, Rev. Frank Schaefer, the site aims to provide exchanges and resources that are ecumenical and international in nature. Schaefer has been its director and developer from 1996 to the present time.\n\nHistory \nThe Desperate Preacher's Site was founded as a grassroots commentary and discussion web site for religious ministers in 1996 and was placed under the umbrella of JavaCasa Web Resources in 1998. The web site was hailed as an innovative resource for Christian preachers using new media in a November 2000 article by Ecumenical News International (ENI) which was published among other webzines by Christianity Today, entitled: \"Site Hopes to Help Pastors in a Sunday Sermon Crunch.\"\n\nAnother related article from The Tampa Bay Times (formerly The St. Petersburg Times) is called \"Thou shalt not plagiarize,\" by DAVE SCHEIBER. It references DesperatePreacher.com (\"Desperate Preacher's Site\") as well as other similar websites in an article that discusses their use and validity.<ref>The Tampa Bay Times (previously The St. Petersburg Times), \"Thou shalt not plagiarize\"</ref>\n\nSuch websites have come under scrutiny since the widely publicized suspensions and resignations of priests and pastors on account of \"pulpit plagiarism.\" The question has been raised whether such web sites are encouraging religious teachers and leaders to use posted or published sermon manuscripts without giving proper accreditation when presented from the pulpit or lectern. An article detailing these issues is called \"Pulpit polemic: Recycled sermons are on the mount,\" by Suzanne Sataline, which was originally published by The Wall Street Journal and then republished by the Union Tribune of San Diego, California.\n\nReferences\n\n External links \n \n USA Today \"Sermon Sharing-Timesaver Or Sin?\"\n Union-Tribune'' U-T San Diego \"Pulpit polemic: Recycled sermons are on the mount\"\n\nChristian websites\nChristian mass media companies\nInternet properties established in 1996",
"The Group for Political Investigations (Romanian: Grupul de Investigații Politice – GIP) is a Romanian non-governmental organization established in 2005. GIP is a watchdog organization that carries on investigations and analysis related to politicians in Romania. It also monitors the activity of the state institutions and the way these institutions manage public funds. The Group for Political Investigations is headed by Mugur Ciuvică. In October 2016, the Group for Political Investigations accused Laura Codruța Kovesi, Chief Prosecutor of the National Anticorruption Directorate, of alleged plagiarism. GIP’s claims were backed by the Association Group for Reform and University Alternative (GRAUR). In mid-November, the Ethics Committee of Timisoara's West University said 564 lines of Kovesi's doctoral thesis were similar to other sources. Experts said the notification regarding plagiarism in this case is partly justified and grounded. In December, the National Council for the Certification of University Titles, Diplomas and Certificates (CNATDCU) ruled that Laura Codruta Kovesi did not plagiarize her doctoral thesis, the passages that may be labeled as plagiarism representing only 4% of the thesis (20 pages of 444 pages).\n\nReferences\n\nOrganizations established in 2005\nPolitical organizations based in Romania"
]
|
[
"Stephen E. Ambrose",
"Plagiarism",
"What did Ambrose Plagiarize?",
"In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.",
"Did he admit to it?",
"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings.",
"Did he get in trouble for it?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he plagiarize any other times?",
"A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation."
]
| C_e608cccf1c024635807a29e8c150f222_0 | Were there any consequences? | 5 | Were there any consequences the Forbes investigation of Stephen E. Ambrose's work which found cases of plagiarism? | Stephen E. Ambrose | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
There have been numerous well documented allegations of plagiarism, inaccuracies, and sloppiness in Ambrose's writings in addition to claims that he has made about his works. However, in a review of To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian for the New York Times, high school teacher William Everdell credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice."
Early life
Ambrose was born January 10, 1936, in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history. While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams. Ambrose then went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.
Career
Academic positions
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989, an honor given only to faculty who attain "national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement". During the 1969–1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted. His opposition to the Vietnam War stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative." Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University (assistant professor of history; 1960–1964) and Johns Hopkins University (associate professor of history; 1964–1969). He held visiting posts at Rutgers University, the University of California, Berkeley, and a number of European schools, including University College Dublin, where he taught as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History.
He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. "The mission of the Eisenhower Center is the study of the causes, conduct, and consequences of American national security policy and the use of force as an instrument of policy in the twentieth century." The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
Writings
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the American Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed. Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center." Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography was considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992). D-Day (1994), built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place." Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, which describes battles fought in northwest Europe from D-Day through the end of the war, utilized, again, extensive oral histories. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic," according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it."
In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage. He, also, reviewed the works of other historians in the Journal of Southern History, Military Affairs, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Foreign Affairs. He served as a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, also.
Television, film, and other activities
Ambrose featured in the 1973-74 ITV television series, The World at War, which detailed the history of World War II.
He served as the historical consultant for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie, said he "pored over D-Day" and Band of Brothers in researching his role. Hanks also credited Ambrose's books with providing extensive detail, particularly regarding D-Day landings.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose served as executive producer for Price for Peace, a documentary concerning the war in the Pacific theater during World War II, and for Moments of Truth, a TV documentary containing interviews with World War II veterans.
In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns. He provided commentary in twenty made-for TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century. He also appeared as a guest on numerous TV programs or stations, including The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span programming, CNN programming, NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Hardball, and various programming on The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. Ambrose's association with National Geographic stemmed, in part, from his designation as an Explorer-in-Residence by the Society.
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II. Also, he served on the board of directors for American Rivers and was a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.
National World War II Museum
Ambrose's work for the Eisenhower Center, specifically his work with D-Day veterans, inspired him to co-found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans with another historian and UNO professor Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller. Ambrose initiated fundraising by donating $500,000. "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory." He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In 2003, Congress designated the museum as "America's National World War II Museum," acknowledging an expanded scope and mission for the museum. "The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives."
Awards
In 1997, Ambrose received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal. In 1998, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. In 1998, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians. In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers. Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
Upon Ambrose's death, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana offered a resolution in the Senate, which received unanimous consent, saluting the "excellence of Stephen Ambrose at capturing the greatness of the American spirit in words."
Personal life, final years, and death
He married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. Judith died in 1965, when Ambrose was 29. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira Buckley (1939–2009), in 1967 and adopted her three children, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh. Moira was an active assistant in his writing and academic projects. After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A longtime smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His health deteriorated rapidly, and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. George McGovern, the primary focus of Ambrose's Wild Blue said, "He probably reached more readers than any other historian in our national history."
Legacy
Ambrose donated $500,000, half the amount needed, to the University of Wisconsin, to endow a chair in the name of William B. Hesseltine, Ambrose's mentor. The chair's position would focus on the teaching of American military history. When the chair became fully endowed, after Ambrose's death, it was renamed the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair.
The Ambrose Professor of History title was established at the University of New Orleans after his death. The position is reserved for a military historian.
Each year the Rutgers University Living History Society awards the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to "an author or artist who has made significant use of oral history." Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
Criticism
Plagiarism
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) pp 88-89</ref> Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book."How the Ambrose Story Developed," History News Network, June 2002.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works—The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Factual errors and disputed characterizations
Pacific Railroad
A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book", listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed "fact-checking" paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column The Reliable Source, that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins, while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."
The Eisenhower controversy
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general Henry Halleck,
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project, as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can." The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life." The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.
Works
Sole author
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (1962)
Upton and the Army, Louisiana State University Press (1964)
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1966)
[https://archive.org/details/supremecommander00ambr The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York: Doubleday (1970)
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, New York: Doubleday (1975)
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, New York: Doubleday (1981)
Eisenhower Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, New York: Simon & Schuster (1983)
Eisenhower Volume 2: The President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1984)
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon & Schuster (1985)
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987)
Eisenhower: Soldier and President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990) (a one-volume condensation of the 1983-84 two-volume Eisenhower biography)
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990)
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster (1991)
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945, New York: Simon & Schuster (1997)
Americans at War, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1997)
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster (1998)
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, New York: Simon & Schuster (2001)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (2002)
This Vast Land, New York: Simon & Schuster, (2003)
With others
with Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983)
with Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, New York: Penguin Books (1997)
with Sam Abell, Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, Washington DC: National Geographic Society, (1998, 2002)
with Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) ; 2010:
with Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002),
Edited works
Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1967)
with James A. Barber, The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings, New York, NY: The Free Press (1972)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1992)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower" A Centenary Assessment, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1995)
American Heritage New History of World War II(original text by C.L. Sulzberger), New York, NY: Viking Press (1997)
References
Further reading
External links
WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
Interview with Stephen Ambrose (1998)
Obituary in The Independent''
Obituary at website of the American Historical Association
Commentary dated December 19, 2000 contributed by G. J. "Chris" Graves, Edson T. Strobridge, and Charles N. Sweet regarding Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869."
Booknotes interview with Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, June 5, 1994.
In Depth interview with Ambrose, November 5, 2000
1936 births
2002 deaths
American Congregationalists
American military historians
American military writers
Deaths from lung cancer
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Historians of the American West
Historians of the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Kansas State University faculty
Louisiana State University faculty
National Humanities Medal recipients
Naval War College faculty
Official biographers to the presidents of the United States
Writers from Decatur, Illinois
People from Moultrie County, Illinois
People from Helena, Montana
Military personnel from Illinois
Writers from New Orleans
People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
University of New Orleans faculty
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
Wisconsin Badgers football players
Writers from Wisconsin
Historians of World War II
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
Historians of the American Civil War
People involved in plagiarism controversies
American male non-fiction writers | false | [
"Collateral consequences of criminal conviction are the additional civil state penalties, mandated by statute, that attach to a criminal conviction. They are not part of the direct consequences of criminal conviction, such as prison, fines, or probation. They are the further civil actions by the state that are triggered as a consequence of the conviction.\n\nIn some jurisdictions, a judge, finding a defendant guilty of a crime, can order that no conviction be recorded, thereby relieving the person of the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction.\n\nIntroduction\nIf a defendant is found guilty of a crime or pleads guilty, the judge or other sentencing authority imposes a sentence. A sentence can take a number of forms, such as loss of privileges (e.g. driving), house arrest, community service, probation, fines and imprisonment. Collectively, these sentences are referred to as direct consequences – those intended by the judge, and frequently mandated at least in part by an applicable law or statute.\n\nHowever, beyond the terms of the sentence, a defendant can experience additional state actions that are considered by the state to be collateral consequences such as: disenfranchisement (in some countries this may be separately meted out), disentitlement of education loans (for drug charges in the United States), loss of a professional license, or eviction from public housing. These consequences are not imposed directly by the judge, and are beyond the terms of a sentence itself for the actual crime. Instead, they are civil state actions and are referred to as collateral consequences. In most jurisdictions, being charged with a crime can trigger state civil action in the form of an investigation to determine if the charges trigger the civil statutes that attach to the criminal charges. An example would be criminal charges that can trigger deportation, or the revocation of a professional license, such as a medical, nursing, or pharmacist license. Being subject to collateral consequences has been called a form of civil death.\n\nA person accused or convicted of a crime may suffer social consequences of a conviction, such as loss of a job and social stigma. These social consequences, whether or not they lead to convictions, can arise in countries where arrests and legal proceedings are matters of public record, thus disseminating the information about the event to the public to the detriment of the accused.\n\nCollateral consequences in Australia\nIn general, the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction are similar to those in other countries. A non-citizen who fails the character requirements of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection may:\n be denied entry or re-entry into Australia, if outside Australia\n have their visa cancelled, requiring them to leave or to be removed from Australia.\n\nCircumstances under which a non-citizen will fail the character test include one or more terms of imprisonment, totalling 12 or more months, whether the imprisonment took place in Australia or overseas.\n\nIn most jurisdictions, persons who are serving prison terms may be disqualified to vote.\n\nIn some jurisdictions, a judge, finding a person guilty of an offence, can order that no conviction be recorded, thereby relieving the person of the collateral and social consequences of a conviction.\n\nCollateral consequences in Canada\n\nCollateral consequences were defined by Justice Wagner of the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Pham in 2013. Justice Wagner defined collateral consequences broadly, stating that they are \"any consequences for the impact of the sentence on the particular offender.\" He ruled that judges can take collateral consequences into account during the sentencing procedure, so long as the sentence they impose is proportionate and they do not impose \"inappropriate or artificial sentences\" that circumvent \"Parliament's will\". Justice Wagner also stated that, at least in the case of collateral consequences involving immigration, appellate courts can intervene to change a sentence if the trial judge was not aware that such a consequence would arise as a result of his or her sentence.\n\nThe issue arose in Pham because under Canadian federal law, a resident of Canada who is not a citizen can be removed from Canada if the person is convicted of certain types of criminal offences. The removal process is not part of the sentence for the criminal offence, and therefore is a collateral consequence. Once a non-resident person is required to leave Canada because of a criminal conviction, they are not entitled to come back to Canada unless they meet the rehabilitation requirements. A non-resident who is convicted of an offence carrying a life sentence is normally barred from Canada for life, if released from incarceration.\n\nR. v. Pham involved an offender whose sentence would have made him ineligible to appeal his deportation if it were not reduced in length by one day. Neither the sentencing judge nor the offender's lawyers were aware of the potential immigration consequences at the time of sentencing. At the Supreme Court, Justice Wagner concluded that, had the sentencing judge been aware of the collateral consequences, he or she would have imposed a sentence that avoided them. He therefore reduced the length of the offender's sentence by one day.\n\nFollowing the Supreme Court's decision in R. v. Pham, lower courts extended its applicability to other collateral consequences. For example, courts have held that stigma or the loss of employment following a conviction to be collateral consequences that can be taken into account during sentencing. The British Columbia Court of Appeal also ruled that a \"lifetime ban...from income and disability assistance as a result of conviction...\" is a collateral consequence and that a more lenient sentence may be imposed to avoid such a consequence.\n\nCollateral consequences in New Zealand\n\nCollateral consequences are generally, more or less, similar to those in the countries mentioned earlier. Any non-citizen to whom the following applies will generally not be allowed to reside in or visit New Zealand:\n deportation from any country\n a prison sentence, or series of such sentences, adding up to 5 or more years\n in the past 10 years, a sentence of imprisonment of 12 or more months (other than a sentence covered in (2) above).\n\nCollateral consequences in the United Kingdom\n\nSuch consequences can include:\nloss of professional licence (particularly within occupations covered by the Common Law Police Disclosure policy)\ndeportation (if not a citizen)\nloss of ability to obtain a heavy goods vehicle or passenger carrying vehicle licence after a conviction for some serious driving offences, particularly those causing death\nloss of ability to legally possess a firearm\n\nSome limitations are in place in England and Wales due to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, though this includes a number of exceptions.\n\nCollateral consequences in the United States\n\nOutline of collateral consequences\nIn the United States, collateral consequences can include loss or restriction of a professional license, ineligibility for public funds including welfare benefits and student loans, loss of voting rights, ineligibility for jury duty, and deportation for immigrants, including those who, while not American citizens, hold permanent resident status.\n\nIn general, all states impose such consequences. In all jurisdictions throughout the U.S., judges are not obligated to warn of these collateral consequences upon a finding of guilt by trial, or prior to an admission of guilt by plea agreement, except as regards deportation. Deportation has been made an exception by the Supreme Court in Padilla v. Commonwealth of Kentucky.\n\nThere are currently few legal remedies available for these collateral consequences. In recent years, some governmental organizations have, however, discouraged actions that would cause unfairly harsh collateral consequences; for example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) urges human resources managers not to automatically exclude all ex-convicts from employment consideration, particularly if they are members of minorities with disproportionate incarceration rates.\n\nEfforts to include collateral consequences in sentencing in the United States\nIf a defendant is punished beyond the sentence prescribed by law (that is, if collateral consequences do occur), the punishment is then more severe than that intended or warranted. In the worst case, this might violate protections under the United States Constitution, including the Eighth Amendment, which forbids \"cruel and unusual punishments\".\n\nThe Supreme Court of the United States addressed collateral consequences of criminal convictions as early as 1984. In Strickland v. Washington, the Court explored ineffective assistance of counsel with respect to collateral consequences of criminal convictions. In evaluating competence, the Court explained, judges should look at all relevant circumstances and evidence of appropriate measures of professional behavior, such as the ABA Standards for Criminal Justice (\"ABA Standards\"). The ABA Standards require defense lawyers to consider collateral consequences of conviction. Judges, accordingly, should monitor the performance of counsel. States chose to apply this rule in varying ways.\n\nStrickland encouraged but did not mandate consideration of collateral consequences. Some claim that structural incentives exist for lawyers to not elicit information relevant to collateral consequences because doing so may prolong a case; others note that no attorney or judge could predict any and all collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. Since Strickland did not require an analysis of collateral consequences, they generally are not regarded as cause to overturn criminal convictions. However, some argue that the Constitution should require consideration of collateral consequences.\n\nMost states do not accord equal legal effect to the collateral consequences of criminal convictions. For example, in New York the consideration of certain collateral consequences is merely discretionary, while the elucidation of direct consequences is required. For instance, in People v. Peque, New York's highest court overruled the portion of its prior ruling in People v. Ford that \"a court's failure to advise a defendant of potential deportation never affects the validity of the defendant's plea,\" but still held that a trial court had different duties with regard to direct versus collateral consequences of guilty pleas.\n\nLikewise, the Kentucky Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Fuartado, 170 S.W.3d 384 (Ky. 2005) held that the failure of defense counsel to advise a defendant of potential deportation did not give rise to a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel.\n\nRulings regarding deportation were superseded by Padilla v. Kentucky in 2010. \"... counsel must inform her client whether his plea carries a risk of deportation.\" The United States Supreme Court held that the collateral consequence of deportation was a consequence of such great importance that failure by counsel to advise the defendant of deportation is ineffective assistance of counsel which is a constitutional protection under the Sixth Amendment. After Padilla, there has been significant litigation in the lower courts about whether attorneys are required to advise their criminal clients about other consequences of convictions.\n\nIn 2004, the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia assembled a document outlining some collateral consequences. \n\nIn May 2005, Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye of the New York State Court of Appeals organized the Partners in Justice Colloquium to address the issue of collateral consequences. Judge Kaye formed a working group which, in partnership with the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic at the Columbia University Law School, created a site that, for the first time, collects academic works, court opinions, and professionals' resources (by virtue of a message board and database) in one place. The Columbia University Law School in collaboration with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning developed and a Collateral Consequences Calculator for looking up and comparing collateral consequences of criminal charges in New York State.\n\nIn 2009, the American Bar Association created the National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction, a searchable database of the collateral consequences in all U.S. Jurisdictions. The National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction is supported by a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of the Justice. This project was initially supported by Award No.2009-IJ-CX-0102 awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice and by the ABA Criminal Justice Section.\n\nIn Federal law, the federal sentencing guidelines have a model for collateral consequences which is determined by the date of when the offense was committed and by the type of the offense.\n\nSee also\n\nEmployment discrimination against persons with criminal records in the United States\nLoss of rights due to conviction for criminal offense\n\nPadilla v. Commonwealth of Kentucky\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Strickland v. Washington\n People v. Ford\n Commonwealth v. Fuartado, 170 S.W.3d 384 (Ky. 2005)\n The Collateral Consequences Calculator\n ABA Standards for Criminal Justice: Collateral Sanctions and Discretionary Disqualification of Convicted Persons (3d ed. 2004)\n Uniform Law Commission, Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act (2009)\n\nUnited States criminal law\nCriminal justice ethics",
"Truth or Consequences (often abbreviated as T or C) is a city in New Mexico, and the county seat of Sierra County. In 2010, the population was 6,475. It has frequently been noted on lists of unusual place names for having chosen to rename itself in March 1950 after the Truth or Consequences radio show. The name is often hyphenated (Truth-or-Consequences, T-or-C) for clarity, though the formal name contains no punctuation. The town was formerly called Hot Springs, New Mexico.\n\nHistory\nThe area is noted for its hot springs, and the first public bath in the area was built at John Cross Ranch over Geronimo Springs in the late 19th century. The hot springs are part of the Hot Springs Artesian Basin. However, major settlement did not begin until the construction of Elephant Butte Dam and its reservoir in 1912; the dam was completed in 1916. It was a part of the Rio Grande Project, an early large-scale irrigation effort authorized under the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902. In 1916, the town was incorporated as Hot Springs. It became the Sierra County seat in 1937. By the late 1930s, Hot Springs was filled with 40 different natural-hot-spring spas — one per every 75 residents at the time — though primarily catering to visitors.\n\nThe city changed its name from Hot Springs to Truth or Consequences as the result of a radio show contest. In March 1950, Ralph Edwards, the host of the popular NBC Radio quiz show Truth or Consequences, announced that he would air the program on its 10th anniversary from the first town that renamed itself after the show; Hot Springs officially changed its name on March 31, 1950, and the program was broadcast from there the following evening. Edwards visited the town during the first weekend of May for the next 50 years. This event became known as Fiesta and eventually included a beauty contest, a parade, and a stage show. The city still celebrates Fiesta each year during the first weekend of May. The parade generally features local dignitaries, last year's Miss Fiesta pageant queen, and the winner of Hatch Chile Queen pageant. Fiesta also features a dance in Ralph Edwards Park.\n\nHot springs\nSeveral hot springs are located in Truth or Consequences. The combined flow of the hot springs complex in Truth or Consequences is estimated at per second.\n\nBefore World War II, there were about 40 hot springs spas in Truth or Consequences. By 2008, the Hot Springs Association in Truth or Consequences had 10 spa facilities as members. Five of those obtained their water from wells, and La Paloma Hot Springs & Spa (formerly Marshall Hot Springs), Riverbend Hot Springs, Indian Springs Bath House, Artesian Bath house and Hay-Yo-Kay Hot Springs are from free-flowing hot springs.\n\nThe New Mexico Department of Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources created two demonstration projects using geothermal energy in Truth or Consequences in the 1980s. The Carrie Tingley Hospital, for children with physical disabilities, used state funding to create a physical-therapy program in Truth or Consequences, but has since moved to Albuquerque. The local Senior Citizen's Center benefits from a geothermal space heating system.\n\nGeography\nAccording to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and (0.86%) is water.\n\nThe city is located on the Rio Grande, near Elephant Butte Reservoir. The city is served by the Truth or Consequences Municipal Airport, Interstate 25, I-25 Business, New Mexico State Road 51 (NM 51), NM 181 and NM 187.\n\nClimate\nTruth or Consequences has a cool desert climate (Köppen BWk) with three main seasons. The summer season from April to June is very dry and generally hot with large diurnal temperature variation, giving way in July to the monsoon season which remains very hot – and is more uncomfortable due to the hotter nights – but is much more humid as rainfall from thunderstorms is frequent. The winter season from October to March has pleasantly mild and sunny days and cold to very cold nights, with very occasional rainfall from extratropical cyclones.\n\nOn average over the year, 88.6 days top , 12.9 days top , and 91.1 nights fall below . Temperatures have fallen below only twice since 1951, during 1987 and 2011, with the record low being on February 3, 2011. The lowest maximum temperature on record has been on December 25, 1987, but during most years every single day will top freezing and on average only 19.5 days fail to top . The hottest temperature on record is on June 27, 1994, though minimums virtually never stay above due to the low humidity and hot sun, and only eighteen nights remain above during an average year.\n\nPrecipitation is generally scarce apart from monsoonal storms. The wettest month on record has been July 2010 with , but totals above are confined to the monsoon season apart from an anomaly in December 1991 when three major subtropical cyclones brought . 1991 was also the wettest full calendar year with . Snowfall is rare, with a median of zero and mean of ; the heaviest snow recorded in Truth or Consequences is the that fell during the record cold spell of Christmas 1987.\n\nDemographics\n\nAs of the census of 2000, there were 7,289 people, 3,450 households, and 1,859 families residing in the city. The population density was 576.0 people per square mile (222.5/km). There were 4,445 housing units at an average density of 351.3 per square mile (135.7/km). The racial makeup of the city was 85.35% White, 0.63% African American, 1.77% Native American, 0.16% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 9.36% from other races, and 2.68% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 27.4% of the population.\n\nThere were 3,450 households, out of which 20.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 40.5% were married couples living together, 10.3% had a female householder with no husband present, and 46.1% were non-families. 41.2% of all households were made up of individuals, and 22.1% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.04 and the average family size was 2.75.\n\nIn the city, the population was spread out, with 20.2% under the age of 18, 5.7% from 18 to 24, 20.1% from 25 to 44, 24.6% from 45 to 64, and 29.3% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 48 years. For every 100 females, there were 96.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 92.4 males.\n\nThe median income for a household in the city was $20,986, and the median income for a family was $28,750. Males had a median income of $23,214 versus $18,207 for females. The per capita income for the city was $14,415. About 15.6% of families and 23.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 33.3% of those under age 18 and 18.1% of those age 65 or over.\n\nPopular Culture\nThe city serves as the main setting of the Outbreak event in the Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege video game. It returns again as a region in the spinoff game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction.\n\nSee also\n List of municipalities in New Mexico\n Hot Springs Bathhouse and Commercial Historic District in Truth or Consequences\n Mick Foley\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nTorCNM.org, official website of the City of Truth or Consequences\n \n\nCities in New Mexico\nCities in Sierra County, New Mexico\nHot springs of New Mexico\nCounty seats in New Mexico\nBodies of water of Sierra County, New Mexico\nNew Mexico populated places on the Rio Grande"
]
|
[
"Stephen E. Ambrose",
"Plagiarism",
"What did Ambrose Plagiarize?",
"In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.",
"Did he admit to it?",
"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings.",
"Did he get in trouble for it?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he plagiarize any other times?",
"A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation.",
"Were there any consequences?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_e608cccf1c024635807a29e8c150f222_0 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 6 | Are there any other interesting aspects about Stephen E. Ambrose other than the Forbes investigation? | Stephen E. Ambrose | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose. CANNOTANSWER | Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: | Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
There have been numerous well documented allegations of plagiarism, inaccuracies, and sloppiness in Ambrose's writings in addition to claims that he has made about his works. However, in a review of To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian for the New York Times, high school teacher William Everdell credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice."
Early life
Ambrose was born January 10, 1936, in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history. While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams. Ambrose then went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.
Career
Academic positions
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989, an honor given only to faculty who attain "national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement". During the 1969–1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted. His opposition to the Vietnam War stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative." Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University (assistant professor of history; 1960–1964) and Johns Hopkins University (associate professor of history; 1964–1969). He held visiting posts at Rutgers University, the University of California, Berkeley, and a number of European schools, including University College Dublin, where he taught as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History.
He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. "The mission of the Eisenhower Center is the study of the causes, conduct, and consequences of American national security policy and the use of force as an instrument of policy in the twentieth century." The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
Writings
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the American Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed. Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center." Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography was considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992). D-Day (1994), built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place." Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, which describes battles fought in northwest Europe from D-Day through the end of the war, utilized, again, extensive oral histories. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic," according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it."
In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage. He, also, reviewed the works of other historians in the Journal of Southern History, Military Affairs, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Foreign Affairs. He served as a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, also.
Television, film, and other activities
Ambrose featured in the 1973-74 ITV television series, The World at War, which detailed the history of World War II.
He served as the historical consultant for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie, said he "pored over D-Day" and Band of Brothers in researching his role. Hanks also credited Ambrose's books with providing extensive detail, particularly regarding D-Day landings.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose served as executive producer for Price for Peace, a documentary concerning the war in the Pacific theater during World War II, and for Moments of Truth, a TV documentary containing interviews with World War II veterans.
In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns. He provided commentary in twenty made-for TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century. He also appeared as a guest on numerous TV programs or stations, including The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span programming, CNN programming, NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Hardball, and various programming on The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. Ambrose's association with National Geographic stemmed, in part, from his designation as an Explorer-in-Residence by the Society.
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II. Also, he served on the board of directors for American Rivers and was a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.
National World War II Museum
Ambrose's work for the Eisenhower Center, specifically his work with D-Day veterans, inspired him to co-found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans with another historian and UNO professor Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller. Ambrose initiated fundraising by donating $500,000. "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory." He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In 2003, Congress designated the museum as "America's National World War II Museum," acknowledging an expanded scope and mission for the museum. "The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives."
Awards
In 1997, Ambrose received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal. In 1998, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. In 1998, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians. In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers. Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
Upon Ambrose's death, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana offered a resolution in the Senate, which received unanimous consent, saluting the "excellence of Stephen Ambrose at capturing the greatness of the American spirit in words."
Personal life, final years, and death
He married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. Judith died in 1965, when Ambrose was 29. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira Buckley (1939–2009), in 1967 and adopted her three children, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh. Moira was an active assistant in his writing and academic projects. After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A longtime smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His health deteriorated rapidly, and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. George McGovern, the primary focus of Ambrose's Wild Blue said, "He probably reached more readers than any other historian in our national history."
Legacy
Ambrose donated $500,000, half the amount needed, to the University of Wisconsin, to endow a chair in the name of William B. Hesseltine, Ambrose's mentor. The chair's position would focus on the teaching of American military history. When the chair became fully endowed, after Ambrose's death, it was renamed the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair.
The Ambrose Professor of History title was established at the University of New Orleans after his death. The position is reserved for a military historian.
Each year the Rutgers University Living History Society awards the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to "an author or artist who has made significant use of oral history." Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
Criticism
Plagiarism
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) pp 88-89</ref> Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book."How the Ambrose Story Developed," History News Network, June 2002.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works—The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Factual errors and disputed characterizations
Pacific Railroad
A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book", listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed "fact-checking" paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column The Reliable Source, that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins, while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."
The Eisenhower controversy
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general Henry Halleck,
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project, as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can." The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life." The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.
Works
Sole author
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (1962)
Upton and the Army, Louisiana State University Press (1964)
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1966)
[https://archive.org/details/supremecommander00ambr The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York: Doubleday (1970)
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, New York: Doubleday (1975)
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, New York: Doubleday (1981)
Eisenhower Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, New York: Simon & Schuster (1983)
Eisenhower Volume 2: The President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1984)
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon & Schuster (1985)
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987)
Eisenhower: Soldier and President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990) (a one-volume condensation of the 1983-84 two-volume Eisenhower biography)
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990)
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster (1991)
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945, New York: Simon & Schuster (1997)
Americans at War, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1997)
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster (1998)
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, New York: Simon & Schuster (2001)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (2002)
This Vast Land, New York: Simon & Schuster, (2003)
With others
with Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983)
with Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, New York: Penguin Books (1997)
with Sam Abell, Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, Washington DC: National Geographic Society, (1998, 2002)
with Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) ; 2010:
with Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002),
Edited works
Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1967)
with James A. Barber, The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings, New York, NY: The Free Press (1972)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1992)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower" A Centenary Assessment, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1995)
American Heritage New History of World War II(original text by C.L. Sulzberger), New York, NY: Viking Press (1997)
References
Further reading
External links
WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
Interview with Stephen Ambrose (1998)
Obituary in The Independent''
Obituary at website of the American Historical Association
Commentary dated December 19, 2000 contributed by G. J. "Chris" Graves, Edson T. Strobridge, and Charles N. Sweet regarding Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869."
Booknotes interview with Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, June 5, 1994.
In Depth interview with Ambrose, November 5, 2000
1936 births
2002 deaths
American Congregationalists
American military historians
American military writers
Deaths from lung cancer
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Historians of the American West
Historians of the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Kansas State University faculty
Louisiana State University faculty
National Humanities Medal recipients
Naval War College faculty
Official biographers to the presidents of the United States
Writers from Decatur, Illinois
People from Moultrie County, Illinois
People from Helena, Montana
Military personnel from Illinois
Writers from New Orleans
People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
University of New Orleans faculty
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
Wisconsin Badgers football players
Writers from Wisconsin
Historians of World War II
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
Historians of the American Civil War
People involved in plagiarism controversies
American male non-fiction writers | true | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
]
|
[
"Stephen E. Ambrose",
"Plagiarism",
"What did Ambrose Plagiarize?",
"In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.",
"Did he admit to it?",
"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings.",
"Did he get in trouble for it?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he plagiarize any other times?",
"A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation.",
"Were there any consequences?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning:"
]
| C_e608cccf1c024635807a29e8c150f222_0 | Who was Barnes? | 7 | Who was Fred Barnes that reported Stephen E. Ambrose's plagiarism in Wings of Morning? | Stephen E. Ambrose | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose. CANNOTANSWER | Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard | Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
There have been numerous well documented allegations of plagiarism, inaccuracies, and sloppiness in Ambrose's writings in addition to claims that he has made about his works. However, in a review of To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian for the New York Times, high school teacher William Everdell credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice."
Early life
Ambrose was born January 10, 1936, in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history. While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams. Ambrose then went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.
Career
Academic positions
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989, an honor given only to faculty who attain "national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement". During the 1969–1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted. His opposition to the Vietnam War stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative." Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University (assistant professor of history; 1960–1964) and Johns Hopkins University (associate professor of history; 1964–1969). He held visiting posts at Rutgers University, the University of California, Berkeley, and a number of European schools, including University College Dublin, where he taught as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History.
He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. "The mission of the Eisenhower Center is the study of the causes, conduct, and consequences of American national security policy and the use of force as an instrument of policy in the twentieth century." The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
Writings
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the American Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed. Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center." Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography was considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992). D-Day (1994), built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place." Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, which describes battles fought in northwest Europe from D-Day through the end of the war, utilized, again, extensive oral histories. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic," according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it."
In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage. He, also, reviewed the works of other historians in the Journal of Southern History, Military Affairs, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Foreign Affairs. He served as a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, also.
Television, film, and other activities
Ambrose featured in the 1973-74 ITV television series, The World at War, which detailed the history of World War II.
He served as the historical consultant for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie, said he "pored over D-Day" and Band of Brothers in researching his role. Hanks also credited Ambrose's books with providing extensive detail, particularly regarding D-Day landings.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose served as executive producer for Price for Peace, a documentary concerning the war in the Pacific theater during World War II, and for Moments of Truth, a TV documentary containing interviews with World War II veterans.
In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns. He provided commentary in twenty made-for TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century. He also appeared as a guest on numerous TV programs or stations, including The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span programming, CNN programming, NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Hardball, and various programming on The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. Ambrose's association with National Geographic stemmed, in part, from his designation as an Explorer-in-Residence by the Society.
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II. Also, he served on the board of directors for American Rivers and was a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.
National World War II Museum
Ambrose's work for the Eisenhower Center, specifically his work with D-Day veterans, inspired him to co-found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans with another historian and UNO professor Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller. Ambrose initiated fundraising by donating $500,000. "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory." He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In 2003, Congress designated the museum as "America's National World War II Museum," acknowledging an expanded scope and mission for the museum. "The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives."
Awards
In 1997, Ambrose received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal. In 1998, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. In 1998, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians. In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers. Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
Upon Ambrose's death, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana offered a resolution in the Senate, which received unanimous consent, saluting the "excellence of Stephen Ambrose at capturing the greatness of the American spirit in words."
Personal life, final years, and death
He married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. Judith died in 1965, when Ambrose was 29. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira Buckley (1939–2009), in 1967 and adopted her three children, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh. Moira was an active assistant in his writing and academic projects. After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A longtime smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His health deteriorated rapidly, and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. George McGovern, the primary focus of Ambrose's Wild Blue said, "He probably reached more readers than any other historian in our national history."
Legacy
Ambrose donated $500,000, half the amount needed, to the University of Wisconsin, to endow a chair in the name of William B. Hesseltine, Ambrose's mentor. The chair's position would focus on the teaching of American military history. When the chair became fully endowed, after Ambrose's death, it was renamed the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair.
The Ambrose Professor of History title was established at the University of New Orleans after his death. The position is reserved for a military historian.
Each year the Rutgers University Living History Society awards the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to "an author or artist who has made significant use of oral history." Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
Criticism
Plagiarism
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) pp 88-89</ref> Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book."How the Ambrose Story Developed," History News Network, June 2002.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works—The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Factual errors and disputed characterizations
Pacific Railroad
A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book", listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed "fact-checking" paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column The Reliable Source, that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins, while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."
The Eisenhower controversy
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general Henry Halleck,
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project, as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can." The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life." The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.
Works
Sole author
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (1962)
Upton and the Army, Louisiana State University Press (1964)
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1966)
[https://archive.org/details/supremecommander00ambr The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York: Doubleday (1970)
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, New York: Doubleday (1975)
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, New York: Doubleday (1981)
Eisenhower Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, New York: Simon & Schuster (1983)
Eisenhower Volume 2: The President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1984)
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon & Schuster (1985)
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987)
Eisenhower: Soldier and President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990) (a one-volume condensation of the 1983-84 two-volume Eisenhower biography)
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990)
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster (1991)
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945, New York: Simon & Schuster (1997)
Americans at War, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1997)
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster (1998)
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, New York: Simon & Schuster (2001)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (2002)
This Vast Land, New York: Simon & Schuster, (2003)
With others
with Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983)
with Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, New York: Penguin Books (1997)
with Sam Abell, Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, Washington DC: National Geographic Society, (1998, 2002)
with Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) ; 2010:
with Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002),
Edited works
Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1967)
with James A. Barber, The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings, New York, NY: The Free Press (1972)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1992)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower" A Centenary Assessment, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1995)
American Heritage New History of World War II(original text by C.L. Sulzberger), New York, NY: Viking Press (1997)
References
Further reading
External links
WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
Interview with Stephen Ambrose (1998)
Obituary in The Independent''
Obituary at website of the American Historical Association
Commentary dated December 19, 2000 contributed by G. J. "Chris" Graves, Edson T. Strobridge, and Charles N. Sweet regarding Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869."
Booknotes interview with Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, June 5, 1994.
In Depth interview with Ambrose, November 5, 2000
1936 births
2002 deaths
American Congregationalists
American military historians
American military writers
Deaths from lung cancer
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Historians of the American West
Historians of the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Kansas State University faculty
Louisiana State University faculty
National Humanities Medal recipients
Naval War College faculty
Official biographers to the presidents of the United States
Writers from Decatur, Illinois
People from Moultrie County, Illinois
People from Helena, Montana
Military personnel from Illinois
Writers from New Orleans
People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
University of New Orleans faculty
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
Wisconsin Badgers football players
Writers from Wisconsin
Historians of World War II
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
Historians of the American Civil War
People involved in plagiarism controversies
American male non-fiction writers | true | [
"John Francis Barnes also known as Frank Barnes (4 October 1904 – 12 May 1952) was a politician in Queensland, Australia. He was a Member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly.\n\nEarly life \nJohn Francis Barnes was born on 4 October 1904 in Gympie, Queensland, the son of George Daniel (a miner) and his wife Bridget Maria (née Gorey).\n\nPolitics \nBarnes held the Legislative Assembly of Queensland seat for the electoral district of Bundaberg from 1941 to 1950. During this time he stood as an \"Andrew Fisher Labour\" and a \"Frank Barnes Labour\" candidate. His brother Lou Barnes was also a \"Frank Barnes Labor\" member of the Queensland Parliament, representing the seat of Cairns from 1942 to 1947.\n\nFrank Barnes was a colourful identity who supported social credit theories, which had been popular since the Great Depression, and was opposed to the Queensland Labor government.\n\nLater life \nBarnes died in Bundaberg on 12 May 1952 and was buried in the Bundaberg General Cemetery.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1904 births\n1952 deaths\nMembers of the Queensland Legislative Assembly\nAustralian social crediters\n20th-century Australian politicians\nPeople from Gympie",
"George Powell Barnes (20 September 1856 – 9 December 1949), generally referred to by his full name or as \"George P. Barnes\", was a Queensland businessman and politician.\n\nEarly life\nGeorge was a son of Cobb and Co. pioneer Hiram Barnes and a brother of Walter Barnes MLA.\n\nBusiness interests\n\nGeorge Barnes started the company Barnes and Company Limited in 1880 in association with his brother, Walter Henry Barnes and Mr TF Merry. Merry was a storekeeper in Toowoomba, with whom George worked earlier and whose daughter, Mary Cecelia was married to George in 1879. Barnes and Co was formed to control businesses in Warwick, Allora, Yangan and Roma Street and Commonwealth Flour Mills at Warwick and South Brisbane.\n\nHe was a leading figure in the Warwick Methodist Church and the Warwick Ambulance Brigade.\n\nPolitics\nHe was member for Warwick for 27 years, from 1908 to 1935, when he retired.\n\nFamily\nHe married Mary Cecilia Merry (ca.1858 – 3 October 1942) of Bulimba, Queensland in 1879. She was active in the local Methodist Church, Red Cross Society and Benevolent Society; they had a home \"Glen Lyn\" in Warwick.\n\nA son, Franklin George Barnes (ca.1883 – ) was a mining engineer who devised and patented a method for degaussing British ships to counter the threat of magnetic mines in the early days of World War II.\n\nAnother son, Cecil Merry Barnes, lost his life savings when his company, Barnes Ltd. of Fortitude Valley was forced into liquidation. G. P. Barnes felt his son's failure acutely, and personally paid out the company's preference shareholders.\n\nLegacy\nThe former Barnes and Co. Trading Place in Warwick is listed on the Queensland Heritage Register.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences \n\nMembers of the Queensland Legislative Assembly\nAustralian businesspeople\n1856 births\n1949 deaths\nNational Party of Australia members of the Parliament of Queensland"
]
|
[
"Stephen E. Ambrose",
"Plagiarism",
"What did Ambrose Plagiarize?",
"In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.",
"Did he admit to it?",
"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings.",
"Did he get in trouble for it?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he plagiarize any other times?",
"A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation.",
"Were there any consequences?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning:",
"Who was Barnes?",
"Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard"
]
| C_e608cccf1c024635807a29e8c150f222_0 | Anything else interesting? | 8 | Anything else interesting about Stephen E. Ambrose other than what Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard? | Stephen E. Ambrose | In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose. CANNOTANSWER | Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. | Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
There have been numerous well documented allegations of plagiarism, inaccuracies, and sloppiness in Ambrose's writings in addition to claims that he has made about his works. However, in a review of To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian for the New York Times, high school teacher William Everdell credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice."
Early life
Ambrose was born January 10, 1936, in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history. While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams. Ambrose then went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.
Career
Academic positions
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989, an honor given only to faculty who attain "national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement". During the 1969–1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted. His opposition to the Vietnam War stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative." Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University (assistant professor of history; 1960–1964) and Johns Hopkins University (associate professor of history; 1964–1969). He held visiting posts at Rutgers University, the University of California, Berkeley, and a number of European schools, including University College Dublin, where he taught as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History.
He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. "The mission of the Eisenhower Center is the study of the causes, conduct, and consequences of American national security policy and the use of force as an instrument of policy in the twentieth century." The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
Writings
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the American Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed. Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center." Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography was considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992). D-Day (1994), built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place." Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, which describes battles fought in northwest Europe from D-Day through the end of the war, utilized, again, extensive oral histories. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic," according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it."
In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage. He, also, reviewed the works of other historians in the Journal of Southern History, Military Affairs, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Foreign Affairs. He served as a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, also.
Television, film, and other activities
Ambrose featured in the 1973-74 ITV television series, The World at War, which detailed the history of World War II.
He served as the historical consultant for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie, said he "pored over D-Day" and Band of Brothers in researching his role. Hanks also credited Ambrose's books with providing extensive detail, particularly regarding D-Day landings.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose served as executive producer for Price for Peace, a documentary concerning the war in the Pacific theater during World War II, and for Moments of Truth, a TV documentary containing interviews with World War II veterans.
In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns. He provided commentary in twenty made-for TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century. He also appeared as a guest on numerous TV programs or stations, including The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span programming, CNN programming, NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Hardball, and various programming on The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. Ambrose's association with National Geographic stemmed, in part, from his designation as an Explorer-in-Residence by the Society.
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II. Also, he served on the board of directors for American Rivers and was a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.
National World War II Museum
Ambrose's work for the Eisenhower Center, specifically his work with D-Day veterans, inspired him to co-found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans with another historian and UNO professor Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller. Ambrose initiated fundraising by donating $500,000. "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory." He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In 2003, Congress designated the museum as "America's National World War II Museum," acknowledging an expanded scope and mission for the museum. "The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives."
Awards
In 1997, Ambrose received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal. In 1998, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. In 1998, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians. In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers. Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
Upon Ambrose's death, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana offered a resolution in the Senate, which received unanimous consent, saluting the "excellence of Stephen Ambrose at capturing the greatness of the American spirit in words."
Personal life, final years, and death
He married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. Judith died in 1965, when Ambrose was 29. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira Buckley (1939–2009), in 1967 and adopted her three children, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh. Moira was an active assistant in his writing and academic projects. After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A longtime smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His health deteriorated rapidly, and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. George McGovern, the primary focus of Ambrose's Wild Blue said, "He probably reached more readers than any other historian in our national history."
Legacy
Ambrose donated $500,000, half the amount needed, to the University of Wisconsin, to endow a chair in the name of William B. Hesseltine, Ambrose's mentor. The chair's position would focus on the teaching of American military history. When the chair became fully endowed, after Ambrose's death, it was renamed the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair.
The Ambrose Professor of History title was established at the University of New Orleans after his death. The position is reserved for a military historian.
Each year the Rutgers University Living History Society awards the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to "an author or artist who has made significant use of oral history." Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
Criticism
Plagiarism
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) pp 88-89</ref> Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book."How the Ambrose Story Developed," History News Network, June 2002.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works—The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Factual errors and disputed characterizations
Pacific Railroad
A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book", listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed "fact-checking" paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column The Reliable Source, that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins, while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."
The Eisenhower controversy
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general Henry Halleck,
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project, as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can." The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life." The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.
Works
Sole author
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (1962)
Upton and the Army, Louisiana State University Press (1964)
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1966)
[https://archive.org/details/supremecommander00ambr The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York: Doubleday (1970)
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, New York: Doubleday (1975)
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, New York: Doubleday (1981)
Eisenhower Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, New York: Simon & Schuster (1983)
Eisenhower Volume 2: The President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1984)
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon & Schuster (1985)
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987)
Eisenhower: Soldier and President, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990) (a one-volume condensation of the 1983-84 two-volume Eisenhower biography)
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972, New York: Simon & Schuster (1990)
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster (1991)
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945, New York: Simon & Schuster (1997)
Americans at War, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1997)
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster (1998)
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, New York: Simon & Schuster (1999)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, New York: Simon & Schuster (2001)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (2002)
This Vast Land, New York: Simon & Schuster, (2003)
With others
with Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983)
with Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, New York: Penguin Books (1997)
with Sam Abell, Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, Washington DC: National Geographic Society, (1998, 2002)
with Douglas Brinkley, Witness to America (1999) ; 2010:
with Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002),
Edited works
Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (1967)
with James A. Barber, The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings, New York, NY: The Free Press (1972)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1992)
with Gunter Bischoff, Eisenhower" A Centenary Assessment, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1995)
American Heritage New History of World War II(original text by C.L. Sulzberger), New York, NY: Viking Press (1997)
References
Further reading
External links
WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
Interview with Stephen Ambrose (1998)
Obituary in The Independent''
Obituary at website of the American Historical Association
Commentary dated December 19, 2000 contributed by G. J. "Chris" Graves, Edson T. Strobridge, and Charles N. Sweet regarding Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869."
Booknotes interview with Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, June 5, 1994.
In Depth interview with Ambrose, November 5, 2000
1936 births
2002 deaths
American Congregationalists
American military historians
American military writers
Deaths from lung cancer
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Historians of the American West
Historians of the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Kansas State University faculty
Louisiana State University faculty
National Humanities Medal recipients
Naval War College faculty
Official biographers to the presidents of the United States
Writers from Decatur, Illinois
People from Moultrie County, Illinois
People from Helena, Montana
Military personnel from Illinois
Writers from New Orleans
People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
University of New Orleans faculty
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
Wisconsin Badgers football players
Writers from Wisconsin
Historians of World War II
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
Historians of the American Civil War
People involved in plagiarism controversies
American male non-fiction writers | true | [
"\"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" is a 2010 science fiction/magical realism short story by American writer Harlan Ellison. It was first published in Realms of Fantasy.\n\nPlot summary\nA scientist creates a tiny man. The tiny man is initially very popular, but then draws the hatred of the world, and so the tiny man must flee, together with the scientist (who is now likewise hated, for having created the tiny man).\n\nReception\n\"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" won the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, tied with Kij Johnson's \"Ponies\". It was Ellison's final Nebula nomination and win, of his record-setting eight nominations and three wins.\n\nTor.com calls the story \"deceptively simple\", with \"execution (that) is flawless\" and a \"Geppetto-like\" narrator, while Publishers Weekly describes it as \"memorably depict(ing) humanity's smallness of spirit\". The SF Site, however, felt it was \"contrived and less than profound\".\n\nNick Mamatas compared \"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" negatively to Ellison's other Nebula-winning short stories, and stated that the story's two mutually exclusive endings (in one, the tiny man is killed; in the other, he becomes God) are evocative of the process of writing short stories. Ben Peek considered it to be \"more allegory than (...) anything else\", and interpreted it as being about how the media \"give(s) everyone a voice\", and also about how Ellison was treated by science fiction fandom.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAudio version of ''How Interesting: A Tiny Man, at StarShipSofa\nHow Interesting: A Tiny Man, at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database\n\nNebula Award for Best Short Story-winning works\nShort stories by Harlan Ellison",
"Say Anything may refer to:\n\nFilm and television\n Say Anything..., a 1989 American film by Cameron Crowe\n \"Say Anything\" (BoJack Horseman), a television episode\n\nMusic\n Say Anything (band), an American rock band\n Say Anything (album), a 2009 album by the band\n \"Say Anything\", a 2012 song by Say Anything from Anarchy, My Dear\n \"Say Anything\" (Marianas Trench song), 2006\n \"Say Anything\" (X Japan song), 1991\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Aimee Mann from Whatever, 1993\n \"Say Anything\", a song by the Bouncing Souls from The Bouncing Souls, 1997\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Good Charlotte from The Young and the Hopeless, 2002\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Girl in Red, 2018\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Will Young from Lexicon, 2019\n \"Say Anything (Else)\", a song by Cartel from Chroma, 2005\n\nOther uses\n Say Anything (party game), a 2008 board game published by North Star Games\n \"Say Anything\", a column in YM magazine\n\nSee also\n Say Something (disambiguation)"
]
|
[
"Ramzan Kadyrov",
"Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction"
]
| C_c2841d1fd68a4bc6ab19b05947755b9c_0 | What was the chechen recovery? | 1 | What was Ramzan Kadyrov and the chechen recovery? | Ramzan Kadyrov | In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%. In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently". According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit--in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which--while being registered as a charity--has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3-4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions. CANNOTANSWER | In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%. | Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov (; (Q̇adar Aẋmat-khant Ramzan), ; born 5 October 1976) is a Russian and Chechen politician currently serving as the Head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly a member of the Chechen independence movement.
He is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May 2004. In February 2007, Kadyrov replaced Alu Alkhanov as president, shortly after he had turned 30, which is the minimum age for the post. He was engaged in violent power struggles with Chechen commanders Sulim Yamadayev (d. 2009) and Said-Kakiyev for overall military authority, and with Alkhanov for political authority.
Since November 2015, he has been a member of the Advisory Commission of the State Council of the Russian Federation.
Over the years, he has come under criticism from international organisations for a wide array of human rights abuses under his watch, with Human Rights Watch calling the forced disappearances and torture so widespread they constituted crimes against humanity. During his tenure, he has advocated to restrict the public lives of women, and led anti-gay purges in the Republic.
Ramzan Kadyrov has been frequently accused of involvement in the kidnapping, assassination, and torture of human rights activists, critics, and their relatives, within both Chechnya as well as in other regions of the Russian Federation and abroad, through the political use of police and military forces–– accusations that he publicly denies.
Biography
Kadyrov was born in Tsentaroy, Checheno-Ingush ASSR, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. He was the second son in Akhmat and Aimani Kadyrovs' family and their youngest child. He had an elder brother named Zelimkhan (1974 – 31 May 2004), and he has two elder sisters, Zargan (born 1971) and Zulay (born 1972). Kadyrov strove to gain the respect of his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was an imam. He claims that he always emulated his father. Akhmad had supported the call for jihad against Russians during the First Chechen War but switched sides and declared allegiance to Russia in the Second Chechen War. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union dissolved, the Chechens launched a bid for independence.
During the First Chechen War, together with his father, he fought against Russian armed forces. After the war, Ramzan was the personal driver and bodyguard of his father Akhmad, who became the separatist mufti of Chechnya.
The Kadyrovtsy militia was formed during the First Chechen War when Akhmad Kadyrov launched the jihad against Russia.
The Kadyrov family defected to the Moscow side at the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999. Since then, Kadyrov led his militia with support from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) (including service ID cards) becoming the head of the Chechen Presidential Security Service. The militia later became known as the Kadyrovtsy.
Deputy Prime Minister
After his father, the then President, was assassinated on 9 May 2004, Ramzan was appointed as the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic on 10 May 2004.
When his sister was detained by the Dagestan police in January 2005, Kadyrov and some 150 armed men drove to the Khasavyurt City Police (GOVD) building. According to the city mayor, Kadyrov's men surrounded the GOVD, forcing its duty officers against a wall, and assaulted them, after which they left the building with Zulay Kadyrova, "victoriously shooting in the air."
In August 2005, Kadyrov declared that "Europe's largest mosque" would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown. He also claimed that Chechnya is the "most peaceful place in Russia" and in a few years it would also be "the wealthiest and the most peaceful" place in the world. He said that the war was already over with only 150 "bandits" remaining (as opposed to the official figures of 700 to 2,000 rebel fighters), and that thanks to his father, 7,000 separatists had already defected to the Russian side since 1999. When responding to a question on how he is going to "avenge the murder of his father", Kadyrov said:
He remained the First Deputy Prime Minister until November 2005.
Acting Prime Minister
Following a car accident in November 2005, in which Chechnya's prime minister Sergey Abramov was injured, Kadyrov was appointed as the caretaker prime minister on 18 November 2005. He immediately proceeded to implement elements of Sharia law, such as declaring a ban on gambling and alcohol production.
In February 2006, responding to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons, he accused the Danes of "spying" and being "pro-terrorist". He also banned Danish citizens from entering Chechnya, effectively banning activity of the Danish Refugee Council, the largest NGO working in the region. Kadyrov is quoted as saying, "That cartoonist needs to be buried alive." He was eventually pressed to overturn this decision by Moscow, a rare example of federal intervention in Kadyrov's rule in the republic.
Prime Minister
On 1 March 2006, Sergey Abramov resigned from the position of prime minister and told Itar-Tass news agency that he did so "on the condition that Ramzan Kadyrov lead the Chechen government." This was followed by a decree of Kadyrov forcing women to wear headscarves; he also rejected a federal appropriation of the republic's budget, demanding more money, and called for all federal forces but the border guards to be withdrawn.
Kadyrov was appointed as the Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic by Alkhanov on 4 March 2006. Shortly after taking office, Kadyrov approved a project to erect a presidential palace on a plot by the Sunzha River in ruined downtown Grozny. The project, which was also to include a five-star hotel and recreational facilities, was estimated to cost around 1.5 billion rubles ($54 million USD) to build. Later, Kadyrov called for refugee camps scattered across Chechnya to be closed down, calling the refugees "international spies who are interested in stoking conflict between Chechnya and Russia, who are seeking to destabilise the situation in our region". Reuters quoted him as saying that "liquidating the refugee camps will allow us to uncover spies who are working for foreign intelligence services". His cousin Odes Baysultanov was appointed to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister by Alkhanov on 6 March 2006 after being unanimously approved by the Chechen Parliament.
On 5 June 2006, Speaker of the Chechen People's Assembly Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov said at a press conference in Moscow that "there is no alternative" to Kadyrov for the presidency; Kadyrov has "exclusive awards in combat, and has made achievements in improving the peaceful life and in human rights protection. Who could replace him at this stage? Nobody," he said. Later that year, Umar Dzhabrailov, Chechnya's representative in the Federation Council and a close ally of Kadyrov's, urged Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov to initiate a measure calling on Kadyrov to become the republic's president, thereby replacing Alu Alkhanov. The following week, several Russian newspapers reported that a worsening security situation in Chechnya was lessening the likelihood that Kadyrov would replace Alu Alkhanov as the republic's president. Other media, however, reported that Kadyrov continued to strengthen his position at Alkhanov's expense. He was also elected as the Chair of the Chechen Peoples' Assembly in late-October 2006.
On 6 December 2006, Kadyrov said that he would seek the prosecution of the commanders of federal military units responsible for the death or disappearance of civilians in Chechnya (specifically Major General Aleksandr Studenikin). In addition, Kadyrov said the war in Chechnya was unleashed not by the Chechen people but by the Russian leadership. Kadyrov's comments may have represented his government's increasing unhappiness with certain figures in Moscow, who were said to be blocking his elevation to the post of Chechen president. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
On 5 February 2007, Kadyrov said he did not aspire to become the Chechen president; however, he criticised Alkhanov. Kadyrov also claimed the war in Chechnya was ultimately finished, with "all informal armed groups eliminated". Alkhanov, for his part, criticised "the cult of personality and idealisation of one person", a clear reference to Kadyrov, whose enormous portraits are prominently displayed in Grozny.
President of the Chechen Republic
On 15 February 2007, Putin signed a decree removing Alkhanov and installing Kadyrov as Chechen's acting president. On 2 March 2007, following Putin's nomination of Kadyrov as Chechen president, the Chechen parliament approved the nomination. In the following days, serious changes took place in the administrative setup of the republic, affecting both the top- and middle-ranking officials. Former deputy prime minister Odes Baysultanov (a cousin of Kadyrov) was elevated to the vacant post of prime minister. Critics allege that Kadyrov is actively building his own "vertical of power" in the republic, and encouraging nepotism by placing men of his own family(Kadyrov) in all the leading and important positions.
A Russian daily, Gazeta, reported that according to a poll conducted by the independent Levada Center, only 33 percent of Russians believe that Kadyrov can be trusted, while 35 percent believed that he cannot. Asked whether they thought Kadyrov could normalise the situation in Chechnya and end the bloodshed there, 31 percent said yes and 38 percent said no.
On 14 March 2007, Kadyrov said that human rights abuses were "a thing of the past" in his republic, rejecting new charges of torture made by the Council of Europe. Two days later he accused the federal authorities of torturing detainees. On 19 March 2007, Kadyrov vowed to put an end to all remaining guerilla activity in Chechnya within two months. On 5 April 2007, Kadyrov was sworn in as President of Chechnya. He appointed his maternal cousin Odes Baysultanov as the Prime Minister of the republic on 10 April.
After the car-bomb attack on Yunus-bek Yevkurov, president of the neighbouring Republic of Ingushetia on 22 June 2009, Kadyrov claimed that the Kremlin had ordered him to fight insurgents there, and during his subsequent visit to the republic on 24 June pledged ruthless vengeance.
In late December 2009, Kadyrov claimed that remaining rebels were getting financed by "The West"; "I officially declare this: those who destroyed the Soviet Union, those who want to destroy the Russian Federation, they stand behind them". He also suggested that Russia should attack Georgia and Ukraine "It's Russia's private affliction; why should we always suffer if we can eradicate this for good?". In early August 2010, Kadyrov had claimed that there were only 70 Islamist militants left in Chechnya. In the same month, he proposed changing the title of President of the Chechen Republic to Head of the Chechen Republic. On 12 August, he also called upon presidents of all North Caucasus republics to petition the State Duma to change their titles, stating that there should only be one president in Russia. The Chechen parliament unanimously approved this change on 2 September. However, Speaker of the Chechen Parliament Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov stated on 4 September that the title will be retained until the end of Kadyrov's term in April 2011.
In February 2011, he invited the players of Brazil's 2002 FIFA World Cup winning team to play a match against a Chechen football team led by Kadyrov. The Brazilian team was named as Brazil XI. In addition, Ruud Gullit was hired by Kadyrov to train FC Terek Grozny.
Attempts at consolidation of the Chechen nation
As reported by the Caucasian Knot, an independent human rights resource, on 5 February 2009, "in the course of his meeting in Grozny with Ramzan Ampukaev, representative of the Chechen Diaspora in Europe, Ramzan Kadyrov invited former militants, now living in Europe, to come back home":
"Now, the situation in the republic has stabilized, we witness a steady economic growth, and there's no sense for people to leave. And those who are already abroad, can always come back. We'll help them in every possible way," said Mr. Kadyrov. "All sorts of Emirs and former participants of illegal armed formations, who are now in Europe and whose actions were not aggravated by bloody crimes, have two alternatives: either to come back and serve for the welfare of their homeland, or stay there until the end of their days."
Tsentoroy and Chechen Parliament attacks
In 2010, two large scale attacks were carried out by Chechen insurgents, one in Kadyrov's home-village Tsentoroy and the other on Chechen Parliament in Grozny. The assault on Tsentoroy which occurred on 29 August is considered to have "shattered" the image of Kadyrov's unshakeable rule in Chechnya, as it was the first time in six years that his seemingly impregnable village had come under attack. On 2 September, Kadyrov announced a reward of more than $300,000 for information about each of the insurgency leaders involved in the operation, which Chechen commentators interpreted as an indicator of the government's weakness. Kadyrov also tightened his control over information coming from Tsentoroy by not allowing any of the village's 5,000 inhabitants to leave in the days after the attack; the citizenry were also allegedly under the threat of death not to talk about the siege or the damage inflicted by the rebels. The attack on the Chechen parliament was carried out by three Chechen rebels on 19 October 2010. Kadyrov dressed in a parade uniform attended a meeting that was held a few hours after all the buildings of the parliament were declared cleared by the special forces. During the meeting, he apologised to the politicians who escaped unhurt from the attack. Kadyrov vowed to intensify the fight against militants in the republic, calling them "bandits". He also blamed the United Kingdom and Poland saying they were "harbouring criminals. Why do they shield bandits who have shed blood where there is western democracy? Where is the justice? ... Sooner or later Zakayev, Gakayev, Umarov, Vadalov and other criminals will get what they deserve ... I have no doubt that it was the drunk and alcoholic Akhmed Zakayev and his backers in London and other western capitals. I want to say that they will not achieve anything. The Chechen republic is still standing. It is a peaceful and stable region."
Head of the Chechen Republic
Kadyrov was nominated by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on 28 February 2011 and was unanimously elected for a second term by the Chechen Parliament on 5 March 2011. After his election, he stated that he was going to continue the current course of reviving the republic's economy and society.
On 8 March, he captained a Chechen football team which included current players of FC Terek Grozny, former players of Soviet Union national football team and former German midfielder Lothar Matthaeus in a match against the team Brazil XI which included ex-Brazilian footballers like Romario, Dunga, Bebeto and Cafu. Kadyrov scored twice during the match but his team lost 6–4 to the Brazilian side. Kadyrov said that he had organised the match to show that Chechnya had recovered from years of separatist conflict. He also said that the Brazilians weren't paid to appear but came out of goodwill and in return for a donation to flood victims in Brazil.
Kadyrov was sworn in as head of the republic on 5 April 2011. In November 2012, he visited Azerbaijan to sign intergovernmental agreements. In December 2012, he ordered the closure of the newspaper Kadyrov's Path after one of its reporters asked Putin a question about the violence once focused in Chechnya spreading to other republics and followed it up by asking about the fate of a local radio station. Kadyrov had reportedly taken a disliking to the question asked by the reporter to Putin.
Kadyrov termed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's ouster as a "coup d'etat" and a deliberate attempt to exert pressure on Russia through Ukraine, however at the same time placed the blame on Yanukovych for the situation in Ukraine. On 28 February 2014, he affirmed his readiness to dispatch peacekeepers and a consignment of humanitarian aid to Crimea.
After the 2014 Grozny bombing, in which ISIL's hand was suspected, he said that he might block internet in Chechnya as anyone could easily find and listen to a sermon by a jihadist. After Kadyrov went on a tirade against ISIL on Instagram for threatening Russia, ISIL commander Omar al-Shishani put a $5 million bounty on him.
On 26 May 2015, he announced that he was going to star in a Hollywood thriller titled Whoever Doesn't Understand Will Get It which will be directed by a director of famous Hollywood films and also feature global film-stars. Kadyrov in July 2015 denied that ISIL had any territory in Chechnya and claimed that they never will. During an interview in October 2015, he suggested that Putin should send Chechen special forces to Syria claiming they will wipe out ISIL in weeks. On 3 December, he promised revenge against ISIL for beheading of Khasiev. On 8 February 2016, he claimed that Chechen special forces had infiltrated ISIL cells.
Kadyrov announced on 27 February 2016 that he would step down at the end of his second term, which was set to expire on 5 April. However, he later decided to run in the elections that were to be held that September. Putin appointed him as the acting head of Chechnya until the elections in a decree signed on 25 March.
Kadyrov launched his reality show titled The Team with the first episode being aired by Channel One on 30 June. People from across Russia were invited by Kadyrov to register for the contest. The winner of the contest will go on to become head of Chechnya's Agency for Strategic Development.
On 18 September 2016, Kadyrov was re-elected with nearly 98% of the vote. Philip Varychenko, a native of Düsseldorf, was chosen as the winner of Kadyrov's reality show on 22 November and was appointed as a government aide. Kadyrov visited Saudi Arabia on 27 November where he met the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. During the meeting, they discussed Russia–Saudi Arabia relations as well as issues of common interest. He also visited the United Arab Emirates on the same day and met Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. The two discussed friendship, cooperation and strengthening ties. During his visits, he praised King Salman of Saudi Arabia for his "leadership of the Muslim world and efforts to combat extremism".
On 28 November, he stated that veterans of American special forces would not be allowed to train security and intelligence personnel at a "tactical city" in Gudermes because "they weren't as good as Russian special forces and there were sanctions against all official structures from the United States." On 29 November, he claimed in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat that only a few dozen Chechens were fighting with ISIL, adding that most of them grew up in Western Europe. He also stated that measures taken by Chechen authorities had been successful in bringing back many young recruits before they reached Syria.
During an interview aired on 27 November 2017, Kadyrov stated that he was ready to resign as Head of the Chechen Republic, calling it his "dream" as he found the responsibility to be "too heavy". He announced on 5 December that no Chechen athletes will participate under a neutral flag at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
After an attack on the Church of Archangel Michael in Grozny on 19 May 2018, Kadyrov stated that he had personally overseen the operation to eliminate the attackers. On 26 September, he signed an agreement with Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the Head of Ingushetia, resolving the border dispute between the two Russian republics. The agreement seen as grossly unfair to Ingushestia ignited widespread protests eventually leading to resignation of Yevkurov on 24 June 2019.
Kadyrov was given the rank of major general in July 2020, through an executive order of the Russian President. He added on his blog that he had been transferred from Ministry of Internal Affairs to the National Guard of Russia.
COVID-19 pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, Kadyrov initially in March dismissed the spread of the disease as nothing serious. Later, Chechnya imposed strict measures to curb the spread of coronavirus after it first emerged in the republic. In an interview to Caucasian Knot, Kadyrov purportedly stated that infected people violating self-quarantine should be killed. People accused of spreading rumors have also been forced to admit their guilt and apologize on live television broadcasts by Kadyrov, though human rights organizations have claimed they were pressured.
In April 2020, Kadyrov announced imposition of even stricter measures in Chechnya to curb the spread of the coronavirus. In addition to a night curfew, the government also sealed off all transportation to regions outside the republic. Kadyrov meanwhile also denied that force was being used against those who defied the restrictions. After the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin criticized heads of Russian regions for overstepping the extent of their powers with the restrictions they imposed, Kadyrov commented that while he did not know if Mishustin referred to Chechnya, goods as well as entry into the republic was not barred. However, entry of non-Chechens into the republic would be banned to curb the spread of the disease.
On 15 May 2020, Kadyrov in a live broadcast on the state-run Grozny TV stated that medical workers protesting over lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) must be sacked after one such protest occurred in Gudermes, claiming the republic had enough PPE. On 20 May, Kadyrov was reportedly flown to Moscow after developing "flu-like symptoms", suspected to be COVID-19. On 26 May however, Kadyrov attended a televised meeting in Grozny for taking steps against the coronavirus. The next day he stated that he had a right to be sick, without confirming if he had fallen ill. He also dismissed reports of using a catheter, stating he had a right to use it to boost his immunity.
Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction
In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%.
In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently".
According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit—in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which—while being registered as a charity—has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3–4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions.
In 2020 Proekt.media published an in-depth analysis of business operations of Kadyrov and Adam Delimkhanov who are allegedly running multi-million dollar businesses in Moscow through a proxy provided by businessman Pavel Krotov.
2009 assassination attempt
An assassination attempt on Kadyrov and a parliament member Adam Delimkhanov was averted on 23 October 2009, by the police. Chechen Deputy interior minister Roman Edilov said the police shot dead the driver of a speeding car loaded with a 200-litre tank after firing warning shots shortly before Kadyrov was to arrive at a construction site. The driver of the car was later identified as a militant leader (so-called Urus-Martan emir Beslan Bashtayev). Said-Emi Khizriev, who played a role in organising the attack, was killed by Russian police who tried to arrest him in the Michurin village in Grozny. Khizriev planned and took part in explosions at two gas stations in Gudermes in the spring of the previous year, as well as in an armed attack at a sport club in the city.
Accusations of human rights abuses
Kadyrov has been personally implicated in several instances of torture and murder. A number of Chechens opposed to Kadyrov have been assassinated abroad, and several witnesses (including Artur Kurmakaev and Ruslan Khalidov) report the existence of a 300 name "Murder List". Chechens who have been murdered, where Kadyrov's involvement is suspected, include Movladi Baisarov and Ruslan Yamadayev (both Moscow); Sulim Yamadayev (Dubai); Gazhi Edilsutanov, Islam Dzahnibekov, Ali Osaev (Istanbul); and Umar Israilov (Vienna).
Kadyrov stated in December 2009 that he had personally helped many of the murder victims and their families and was not their enemy. "I don't want to kill, who did I fight? I fought terrorists. Who did I protect? I protected the whole of Russia so that people in Moscow or St. Petersburg...could live in peace. They accuse me of killing women and children. It's not true."
A mutinied commander, Movladi Baisarov, said that Kadyrov "acts like a medieval tyrant. If someone tells the truth about what is going on, it's like signing one's own death warrant. Ramzan is a law unto himself. He can do anything he likes. He can take any woman and do whatever he pleases with her. (...) Ramzan acts with total impunity. I know of many people executed on his express orders and I know exactly where they were buried". On 18 November 2006, Baisarov was killed in an ambush by members of Kadyrov's police on Moscow's Leninsky Prospekt, about two kilometres from the Kremlin.
On 13 November 2006, Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper on torture in Chechnya that it had prepared for the 37th session of the United Nations Committee Against Torture. The paper covered torture by personnel of the Second Operational Investigative Bureau (ORB-2), torture by units under the effective command of Kadyrov, torture in secret detentions and the continuing "forced disappearances". According to HRW, torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya". In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not even attempt to conceal their identity. Based on extensive research, HRW concluded in 2005 that forced disappearances in Chechnya are so widespread and systematic that they constitute crimes against humanity.
Anna Politkovskaya, a veteran Russian reporter (murdered in 2006; case unsolved as of ) who reported extensively from Chechnya, claimed that she had received a grainy video footage shot on a mobile phone of a man identical in appearance to Kadyrov, and said that "the clips were the murders of federal servicemen by the Kadyrovites, and also kidnappings directed by Kadyrov. These are very serious things; on the basis of this evidence a criminal case and investigation should follow. This could allow this person to be brought to justice, something he has long richly deserved." She was allegedly working on an article revealing human rights abuses and regular incidents of torture in Chechnya at the time of her murder. Some observers alleged that Kadyrov or his men were possibly behind the assassination.
On 23 October 2006, a criminal case was registered on the basis of the video tape frames published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Anna Politkovskaya's article. Sergey Sokolov, deputy editor-in-chief of the paper, told the Echo Moskvy Radio that it can be clearly seen in the video as to how "Kadyrov's military forces are beating federal soldiers" with participation of "a man looking like Ramzan Kadyrov". On 7 October 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in an elevator in her apartment in Moscow.
German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), which branded Kadyrov a "war criminal", has alleged that up to 75 percent of recent incidents of murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's paramilitary forces.
The Memorial group investigator stated in its report: "Considering the evidence we have gathered, we have no doubt that most of the crimes which are being committed now in Chechnya are the work of Kadyrov's men. There is also no doubt in our minds that Kadyrov has personally taken part in beating and torturing people. What they are doing is pure lawlessness. To make matters worse, they also go after people who are innocent, whose names were given by someone being tortured to death. He and his henchmen spread fear and terror in Chechnya. (...) They travel by night as death squads, kidnapping civilians, who are then locked in a torture chamber, raped and murdered".
According to the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, many illegal places of detention exist in the Chechen Republic; most of them are run by Kadyrovites. In Tsentaroy (Khosi-Yurt), where the Kadyrovite headquarters is located, there are at least two illegal prisons functioning. One consists of concrete bunkers or pillboxes, where kidnapped relatives of armed Chechen fighters are held hostage while the second prison in Tsentaroy is evidently located in the yard—or in immediate vicinity—of the house of Kadyrov.
The Kadyrovites are often accused of working as a death squad against Kadyrov's enemies. Kadyrov is rumoured to own a private prison in his stronghold of Tsentaroy, his home village south-east of Grozny. Fields around Tsentaroy are allegedly mined and all access routes are blocked by checkpoints. On 2 May 2006, representatives of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) alleged that they were prevented from entering the fortress.
A video leaked out in which armed men, loyal to Kadyrov, displayed the severed head of a Chechen guerrilla (who was killed in July 2006) for public display in the village of Kurchaloi, marking the brutality of his forces. They mounted the head on a pipe, together with blood-stained trousers and put a cigarette on him. It was displayed for at least a day as they came back a day later to record it again. On 21 September 2005, a similar incident occurred, as published by Memorial as well as Kavkazky Uzel which described "shocking details" of a special operation conducted by forces loyal to Kadyrov.
On 1 March 2007, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group rights organisation, stated that Kadyrov was "to blame for kidnappings of many innocent people. Their bodies were found later with signs of torture."
Umar Israilov was assassinated in Vienna on 13 January 2009. Israilov was a former Kadyrov bodyguard, who cooperated with The New York Times, extensively detailing abuses committed by Kadyrov and his associates. Israilov had told Austrian authorities in 2008 that he had been threatened by an agent sent by Kadyrov to drop his lawsuit against the Chechen leader at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. On 27 April 2010, the Austrian prosecutor's office announced that they believed Kadyrov had ordered the kidnapping of Israilov and Israilov had been murdered while attempting to escape. According to the investigation, there was evidence that Otto Kaltenbrunner (adopted name of Ramzan Edilov), one of the suspected kidnappers, had been in contact with Kadyrov personally.
On 15 July 2009, Natalia Estemirova, a member of Memorial society, who investigated the alleged abuses by government-backed militias in Chechnya, was abducted and shot to death. Memorial's chairman Oleg Petrovich Orlov accused Kadyrov of being behind the murder, and claimed that Kadyrov had openly threatened her by saying: "Yes, my arms are up to the elbows in blood. And I am not ashamed of that. I have killed and will kill bad people". Kadyrov denied any involvement in the killing and promised to investigate the killing personally. He condemned the killers, and in response to Orlov's accusations, said: "You are not a prosecutor or a judge therefore your claims about my guilt are not ethical, to put it mildly, and are insulting to me. I am sure that you have to think about my rights before declaring for everyone to hear that I am guilty of Estemirova's death." It was later reported that Kadyrov would be suing Memorial for defamation and slander, targeting Orlov personally with his complaint.
Memorial said in a statement on 19 August 2014 that when Kadyrov had lost his mobile phone during a wedding ceremony on 16 August, the police questioned thousands of people who had attended the wedding into early hours of the next morning in an attempt to find it.
A man who criticised local officials and apparently Kadyrov in a YouTube appeal to the Russian President became a target of many threats due to which he had to flee to the neighboring republic of Dagestan. In May 2016, his house was burnt down by a group of masked men and his family was dragged out, put in a car and were thrown under a bridge. His wife also stated that they threatened the other residents with burning down their houses as well if they reported about the matter to anyone. Later, the Chechen police cordoned off his village in order to hunt him down. Kadyrov's spokesman denied these reports were true. The complainant later publicly apologised to Kadyrov and accused the media of distorting his remarks in his video complaint. He again fled to Dagestan in November 2016. According to human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, he had to flee after Chechnya's Deputy Interior Minister Apti Alaudinov personally threatened to kill him.
After Memorial's Chechnya head Oyub Titiev was arrested in January 2018 over drug possession, Oyub's supporters claimed the charges were fake and were made-up by the Chechen authorities to suppress criticism of Kadyrov. Kadyrov called Oyub a "drug addict" while criticising those working with human rights activists and warned them off from working in his region.
On 30 January 2020, Imran Aliev, an anti-Kadyrov blogger, was murdered in a hotel in Lille. French authorities have identified the alleged killer as a hitman having connections with the Chechen leader and who had travelled with Aliev in a train from Belgium to France.
Tumso Abdurakhmanov, a dissident Chechen blogger, was attacked in February 2020, but managed to overpower the assailant, who claimed he had been sent by Moscow. Swedish prosecutors stated that the Chechen government was suspected of being involved in the attack. Dagens Nyheter reported on the trial in November, saying the attacker admitted that he was sent by the Chechen government, but had planned to fail. Another arrested suspect denied her own involvement.
On the evening of 20 January 2022, Zarema Yangulbayeva (), the wife of Saidi Yangulbaev, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Chechnya, was abducted in Nizhny Novgorod and taken to Chechnya for interrogation. A day later, she was charged with assaulting a police officer. Kadyrov said the former judge's family members would either be in prison or underground and asked the Supreme Court of Russia to "kick out" Yangulbaev from the reserve and "erase his name from the history of the judicial body". Yangulbaev lost his position as a judge in 2015, saying he was forced to do so. Yangulbayeva is the mother of a Chechen human rights activist and former lawyer for the Committee for the Prevention of Torture NGO.
Rounding up, torture and execution of gay men
Kadyrov has previously encouraged extrajudicial killings of homosexual men by family members as an alternative to law enforcement – in some cases, gay men in prison have been released early specifically to enable their murder by relatives.
In April 2017, international media reported that gay men in Chechnya were being arrested, detained and tortured as part of a region-wide pogrom. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on 5 May that he would personally ask the Russian Prosecutor General and Interior Ministry to help Kremlin rights ombudswoman Tatyana Moskalkova check the reported abuse. UK Deputy Foreign Secretary Sir Alan Duncan told the UK Parliament he had been informed of alleged plans to eliminate Chechnya's gay community by the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which commenced on 26 May 2017.
Chechnya has denied the reports, with its interior minister calling the allegations an "April Fools' joke". Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov rejected the allegations and described the report in the Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, as "absolute lies and disinformation", basing his denial on the claim that "you cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic. If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn't need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning." Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also said that there had been no evidence found to support the allegations, adding that he had no reason to doubt Kadyrov's claims that no one under his rule has been persecuted for their sexual orientation.
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports aired on 18 July, Kadyrov said, "We don't have those kind of people here. We don't have any gays. If there are any take them to Canada. Praise be to God. Take them far from us so we don't have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them."
Asked about the accusations of systematic torture, Kadyrov said, "They made it up. They are devils. They are for sale. They are subhuman. God damn them for slandering us."
Sanctions
On 20 December 2017, the United States imposed sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on five Russian nationals including Kadyrov, accusing him of personal involvement in repression, torture and murder. U.S. officials accused him of heading "an administration involved in disappearances and extrajudicial killings," and that one or more of his political opponents were killed at his direction. He was added to United States Department of the Treasury's blacklist which also included a Chechen security official Ayub Kataev along with three other Russian individuals for their criminal involvement in a corruption case uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky.
In response, Kadyrov mocked the sanctions on his Instagram account. "A sleepless night is waiting for me." He further stated, "I can be proud that I'm out of favor with the special services of the USA," and added, "In fact, the USA cannot forgive me for dedicating my whole life to the fight against foreign terrorists among which there are bastards of America's special services."
President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the sanctions "illegal" and "unfriendly" stating, "We consider these sanctions illegal, we consider them unfriendly, and we do not agree with them." He also stated that it was highly probable that Russia would retaliate by accusing U.S. officials or citizens of rights violations and banning them from the country.
Further sanctions were added on 20 July 2020, with United States Secretary of State accusing him of increasing abuses on civilians during the COVID-19 pandemic. His immediate family were also sanctioned. The sanctions also ban him, his wife and two of his daughters from traveling to the United States. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova told Sputnik that they will try to impose retaliatory sanctions. Kadyrov meanwhile posted a picture of himself along with firearms, saying, "Pompeo, we accept the fight! What comes next will be more interesting."
Threats to journalists
In 2004, Kadyrov had a conversation with the Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. One of his assistants said to her, "Someone ought to have shot you back in Moscow, right on the street, like they do in your Moscow". Ramzan then repeated after him, "You're an enemy. To be shot...." He is alleged by some observers to be behind her murder.
On 13 April 2020, Kadyrov threatened the journalist Elena Milashina on Instagram for her news article in Novaya Gazeta about Chechnya's coronavirus lockdown, stating it was "defamatory". He also criticized the federal authorities for not taking any action saying, "If you want us to commit a crime and become criminals, just say so! One [of us] will take on this responsibility and serve his time, as required by law." On Telegram, he later labeled her newspaper "anti-Russian" and a "foreign agent", also claiming it stereotyped Chechens.
Milashina had also covered Chechnya's gay purges and had been allegedly attacked on 6 February 2020. She accused the Chechen authorities of orchestrating the attack. Over 100 Russian celebrities and human rights activists, in response to Kadyrov's online threats, called upon the federal government to protect Milashina. Novaya Gazeta was made to delete Milashina's article from its website by the Office of the Prosecutor General of Russia, which claimed it was fake news and created a threat to the lives of citizens. Peskov dismissed Kadyrov's threats as an emotional response, saying everyone was on edge due to the coronavirus pandemic. Human Rights Watch criticized Peskov's reaction, stating it was "like a stark green light to Chechen officials to act on their threats."
On 21 April 2020, the US government funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty stated that it had complained to Russian authorities after Kadyrov had threatened to punish their North Caucasus bureau chief Aslan Doukaev over an article against his government's restrictive coronavirus lockdown measures against farmers in an online video.
The ambassador of United States to Russia, John J. Sullivan, condemned Kadyrov's threats against Milashina and Aslan Doukaev, stating that freedom of press was a pillar of democracy. In a joint statement, French Human Rights Ambassador-at-Large François Croquette and the German Commissioner for Human Rights Policy Bärbel Kofler called Kadyrov's threats against Milashina unacceptable and urged Russia to investigate.
Kadydov had personally warned to punish the Georgian journalist Giorgi Gabunia in June 2020, after he had insulted President Vladimir Putin on-air. The State Security Service of Georgia announced the arrest of a Russian citizen on 15 June for an assassination attempt on Gabunia. Georgian media and Gabunia's boss later claimed the assassin was sent by Kadyrov, who denied the allegations and said that if he had sent someone to kill, they would have succeeded. Kadyrov called Gabunia his enemy and said that he should beg for forgiveness by getting down on his knees, otherwise he would continue to remain one. Georgian authorities have neither confirmed nor denied the allegations against Kadyrov.
Social media
Networks
The number of subscribers to Kadyrov's social networks in 2016 was more than three million people, including three million followers of his Instagram account, according to the Chechen leader's press service. It said that he had 500,000 followers on the Russian VK social network, 760,860 on Facebook, 331,000 on Twitter and 5,447 on LiveJournal. Besides his Instagram postings, it was said that he had also made almost 5,000 on Twitter and 2,300 on VK. The Russian News Agency TASS said that Kadyrov had been "recognized as the most quoted Russian blogger."
In August 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kadyrov had posted nearly 8,000 pictures on Instagram, which made him the online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service's "most prolific political strongman."
The New York Times called Kadyrov's Instagram account "bizarre if strangely compelling", and Newsweek said it was "flashy." In a 2015 article, The New York Times said that Kadyrov was "Instagram-addicted."
The Russian programme director of Human Rights Watch said in an October 2016 article in The Guardian that "even the mildest criticism on social media [is] ruthlessly punished through unlawful, punitive detention, enforced disappearances, cruel and degrading treatment, death threats, threats against family members, and physical abuse of family members." She said that a social worker from a small town in Chechnya made a WhatsApp recording that went viral among Chechen users "imploring" Kadyrov "to look into the plight of ordinary people pushed below the poverty line" by local officials. The article stated that the woman, with her husband, "found herself hauled into the studio of Grozny TV, the state television and radio broadcaster" to face Kadyrov in person, "to apologise publicly for her lies." A "severe and sweeping repression by the local authorities is designed to remind the Chechen public of Kadyrov's total control," the article claimed.
WhatsApp lecture
In May 2015, Kadyrov gave a stern televised lecture to a group of Chechen men and women who were accused of using the WhatsApp messaging service to comment on the impending marriage of local police chief to a teenage girl some three decades younger than him. The wedding had been widely discussed across Russia on reports that the young woman, Kheda Goylabiyeva, was being coerced into marriage with the chief, Nazhud Guchigov.
"Behave like Chechens", Kadyrov was reported as telling the assemblage of about a dozen people standing in the marbled courtyard of a building that seemed to be his government palace. "Honor of the family is the most important thing. Don't write such things any more. You, men, keep your women away from WhatsApp." In its coverage of the incident, The New York Times reported:
"Lock them in, do not let them go out, and they will not post anything", Mr. Kadyrov said in a video to a sheepish group of men and women who kept their arms folded across their chests and their eyes firmly on the ground during the harangue.
In December 2015, a female Chechen social worker criticised Kadyrov in an audio message posted on WhatsApp, after her boss tried to force her to put aside some money as collateral for her next month's payment. Three days after posting the message, she appeared on Grozny TV along with her husband, where she was publicly berated by Kadyrov as well as parliament speaker Daudov, presidential administration head Islam Kadyrov and her boss. The couple apologised on live television for her message.
John Oliver
In May 2016, Kadyrov engaged in a brief Instagram dispute with US television host John Oliver.
He had posted a message on Instagram asking for help in finding his cat, which had gone astray. The posting led Oliver to make a five-minute segment on HBO's Last Week Tonight dealing with the cat's disappearance and, according to The Guardian, Kadyrov's penchant for posting of, for example, "regular videos of his work-outs in the gym," also on Instagram. As well, Oliver teased Kadyrov "for his propensity" to wear T-shirts bearing the image of Russian President Vladimir Putin. After the show, Oliver posted a photo of himself holding a cat, captioned "@RKadyrov Is this your cat?"
Kadyrov responded in English, according to The New York Times along with a doctored photo of Oliver wearing a Putin T-shirt, captioned, in part, "I am tired of jokes. I want to care for cats in Chechnya. By the way, Putin is our leader."
Account suspensions
Kadyrov stated that he found his Russian-language Instagram and Facebook accounts were not working on 23 December 2017, and he never received a response from Instagram after sending a request for service support. His English-language Instagram account remained unaffected however. Kadyrov accused them of bowing to pressure from United States after he was sanctioned.
He wrote on Telegram in response, "Instagram's move, which still wants to pretend it is independent from officials of Washington is weird." He added, "They wanted to stir my indignation, but were wrong, and this is the only thing which pleases me in actions Instagram and their patrons in the White House are undertaking. I have planned already to quit the network. But I thought I could fail my friends and subscribers, as on Instagram and Facebook I have more than 4 million followers."
The Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin stated that the decision by Facebook and Instagram to suspend Kadyrov's accounts violated his rights, stating, "They are afraid of a public conversation and the truth. Such decision cannot be explained in another way… The thing is that to read bloggers in social networks one needs to be their subscribers. By deleting an account, they deprive citizens of their right to know about bloggers’ opinion and to communicate with them."
Russia's telecommunications overseer Roskomnadzor on 26 December asked Facebook to explain why they had suspended his accounts. Facebook issued a statement on 28 December that it did so after he was sanctioned by United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control as these came under trade sanctions.
Other issues
Call to quarantine proceeds of horse race
On 3 November 2009, a horse owned by Kadyrov, Mourilyan, came third in the Melbourne Cup winning about US$380,000 in prize money. The leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, immediately called for the Government of Australia to quarantine the prize money until assurances are received as to how the money will be used. Concerns had been previously raised that the Melbourne Cup could be used to launder money by overseas individuals.
Honor killings
In 2009, Kadyrov stated his approval of honor killings of seven women, based on the belief that they were engaging in adultery. In an interview with David Scott of HBO, he condoned honor killings of homosexuals in July 2017 stating, "If we have [gay] people here, I'm telling you officially their relatives won't let them be because of our faith, our mentality, customs, traditions. Even if it's punishable under the law, we would still condone it."
WikiLeaks
On 28 November 2010, a classified WikiLeaks cable named Kadyrov as a "starring guest" at some of Dagestan's most elaborate weddings, which indicates the political "Caucasus power structure" in these weddings. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
Charlie Hebdo cartoons
In January 2015, Kadyrov said he would organize protests if a Russian newspaper published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, saying "we will not allow anyone to insult the Prophet [Muhammad], even if it will cost us our lives." He also stated that Alexei Venediktov "will be brought to account" after his radio station Ekho Moskvy took a survey of readers on whether to publish the cartoons. Venediktov stated he would ask the authorities to intervene against Kadyrov's threats. During a protest rally against the cartoons attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Chechnya, he accused those backing Charlie Hebdo of using "false slogans about free speech and democracy".
After French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered by a man of Chechen descent for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in his class, Kadyrov criticized the attack, but also told people to not provoke the religious sentiments of Muslims. He also criticized French society for provoking Muslims and stated that the country must have a state institution focusing on inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations. After France's President Emmanuel Macron defended Paty's actions under right to free speech, Kadyrov on Instagram accused him of forcing people to resort to terrorism by doing so.
Support for polygamy
Kadyrov supports polygamy in Muslim-majority republics in Russia, and believes that Muslims who speak out against the practice are not true adherents to their faith. According to Kadyrov, men legally marrying more than one wife would be more honest than having many mistresses, and would resolve Russia's demographic problem. In April 2018, he stated that all Muslim men are permitted by Allah to have four wives but discouraged having the marriages officially registered. He also denied reports that polygamy would be legalised in Chechnya.
Boston Marathon bombing
After the Boston Marathon bombing, Kadyrov expressed sadness for the victims but denied the suspects had any ties to his region in a statement on his Instagram. He suggested that the suspects were products of American upbringing. Kadyrov accused the CIA of framing Dzokhar Tsarnaev on 18 March 2015, after he was handed a death sentence for the Boston Marathon Bombing and said that they could not have conducted the bombing without CIA's knowledge.
Threats to opposition politicians
On 31 January 2016, Kadyrov posted a video of Russian opposition politicians Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza in the crosshairs of a gun on his Instagram blog. In a few days, after multiple complaints, Instagram removed the video prompting Kadyrov to criticize the decision: "This is the much-boasted freedom of speech in America! You can write anything but cannot touch those American dogs, those friends of the Congress and the State Department".
Report by Ilya Yashin
Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin authored a report against Kadyrov released on 23 February 2016 during a press conference which was repeatedly interrupted by police and hecklers. He also claimed that Kadyrov had murdered Boris Nemtsov. The report titled A National Security Threat claimed that Kadyrov poses a threat to Russia. It included allegations of corruption, authoritarian rule, secret prisons, rigging votes in favour of Vladimir Putin, stealing from the country's national budget to enrich himself, enforcing Sharia law over Russian law, his lavish lifestyle, building and maintaining a personal army of about 30,000 fighters, purported ties to organised crime figures, and his involvement in politically motivated murders of journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. The report also contained 20 questions which Yashin had invited Kadyrov to answer but was refused. Kadyrov dismissed the report calling it "nothing but idle chatter" and posted it on his social network accounts before its release. His spokesman filed a request with the Russian Prosecutor General and the Investigative Committee for Yashin to be arrested for the report saying it contained slander and insults against Kadyrov.
Grozny fatwa
A conference of Islamic scholars funded by the Tabah foundation in the United Arab Emirates, was convened by Kadyrov in Grozny in late August 2016. The conference was attended by notable Islamic scholars including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb; Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shawki Allam; ex-Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa, Usama al-Azhari who is the religious adviser to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; Habib Ali al-Jifri and the mufti of Damascus Abdul Fattah al-Bizm. The conference was convened to discuss the alleged abuse of Islamic ideas to propagate extremism and to establish the criteria for determining who are the true followers of the Sunnah. The assembly of scholars issued a fatwa which declared that those who abide by the Kalam, belong to the four madhhabs and follow the path of moral self-perfection espoused by distinguished Islamic teachers, primarily the Sufi sheikhs, were the only true believers. The fatwa called the sect of Salafism as a "dangerous and erroneous contemporary sect", along with the extremist groups like Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Hizb ut-Tahrir . The conference also issued two further documents. In the first one, it appealed to President Vladimir Putin to ban Salafism and term any condemnation of "traditional Islam" as "extremism". It also proposed the fatwa be regarded as the considered opinion of "leading Russian experts" when evaluating the activity of Muslim organizations and the preaching of individual clerics. The second one issued a resolution calling for the establishment of a Council for Islamic Education and also a Council of Ulema, which would rule on who is and is not a true follower of Sunni Islam.
The ruling created a controversy, with both Islamic theologians and secular commentators condemning it, with some seeing it as a bid by Kadyrov to divide Russian Muslims into those who accept the importance he places on teachings of the Sufi brotherhoods as well as probably also what he considers as "traditional Islam" without question, and those who don't with "erroneous" views. Many of the key participants also disavowed the resolutions. Mukkadas Bibarsov, mufti of Saratov Oblast stated that the question of who was a true follower of Sunni Islam was resolved "centuries ago". He also added that the fatwa failed to take into account the crucial differences between Russia's Muslims, specifically that some Muslim communities did not follow Sufism. Liz Fuller writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty commented that the fatwa seemed to be giving permission to Kadyrov to take any action he likes to punish those whose religious views don't match with his own. Yaroslav Trofimov writing for The Wall Street Journal described it as a "new fracture emerging within Islam". Many Saudi clerics and citizens expressed outrage at the fatwa on social media. The Muslim Brotherhood expressed "deep sorrow" over the fatwa, stating that it “ignited fires of discord among Muslims around the world.”
Threats to Russian police officers
In 2015, Kadyrov ordered Chechen security forces to "shoot to kill" if they encountered police officers from other parts of Russia on the territory of the Chechen Republic. Kadyrov said: "I would like to officially state: Open fire if someone from Moscow or Stavropol—it doesn't matter where from—appears on your turf without your knowledge. We have to be reckoned with. … If you are masters of your territory, then you must control it." According to Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, "Some critics claim that Mr. Putin now fears Mr. Kadyrov because he knows any serious attempt to challenge the Chechen leader's position might lead to a third war."
Mixed martial arts tournament involving child fighters
A mixed martial arts tournament involving children was held as an "exhibition fight" on 4 October during the Grand Prix Akhmat 2016 in Grozny and broadcast on Match TV. Three of Kadyrov's sons, all of them aged under 12, fought in the tournament with Kadyrov sitting in the audience and none of the fighters wearing any protective gear. One of the fights ended with a technical knockout. Kadyrov also posted images of the bouts on his Instagram account. The event caused an outcry especially against Kadyrov allowing his children to compete in the tournament. Fedor Emelianenko, the president of Russian MMA Union, criticised the event as "inexcusable", stating that rules stipulate fighters under the age of 21 have to wear protective gear while children under the age of 12 are not allowed to compete. Vadim Finkelstein, the head of MMA promotion M-1 Global also backed Fedor's comments. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for President Putin, stated that the fact that one of the fights between the children finished with a technical knockout was “a reason for the appropriate oversight agencies to inquire about this incident.” Deputy Minister of Sports Pavel Kolobkov stated that participation of children under the age of 12 in MMA competitions was illegal while stating that the incident was being investigated. Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko also stated that the event will be investigated. MMA fighter Jeff Monson however backed the organisers stating that there was nothing wrong with it.
Several Chechen officials responded to Fedor's criticism with insults and accusations including Timur Dugazayev, general director of Akhmat MMA promotion, Member of Parliament Adam Delimkhanov as well as Kadyrov himself. The Ministry of Sports found on 18 October that Kadyrov's promotion had violated regulations. It also found that the event was actually an unlicensed show with no regulatory oversight. The promotion was directed to coordinate with the Ministry of Sports and other regulatory bodies to “prevent such irregularities in conduct” and handed a letter detailing its failure to comply with the legislation.
Comments about gays, Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions with the United States
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel in July 2017, Kadyrov denied that there had been anti-gay purges in Chechnya, while claiming that there were no gay men in Chechnya. He further stated that if there were any, they should be sent to Canada. He also said that gay people were "not human". Kadyrov also commented about Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions between the United States and Russia. He said that "America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia, we have a strong government and are a nuclear state." He also added, "Even if our government was completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed. We will put the whole world on its knees and screw it from behind."
Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar
In September 2017, Kadyrov condemned the persecution of Muslims in Myanmar and organized a rally in Grozny in support of persecuted Rohingya people. Kadyrov had pledged to "oppose Russia’s position" if it "supports" Aung San Suu Kyi's government in Myanmar.
Threats to citizens insulting someone's honor
In June 2019, Kadyrov, in an Instagram video, told residents of Dagestan to not insult Chechnya or Chechens online amidst controversy over a piece of land of the republic being labeled as belonging to Chechnya, threatening to torture whoever insulted the honor of Chechens. He also warned the people to remove any such comments, otherwise they will have to answer to the Chechen law enforcement agencies.
During a government function organized for medium and small-scale businesses in November 2019, Kadryov called for online users insulting someone's honor to be killed, arrested or intimidated per a BBC Russian Service translation. He stated in the same speech that he didn't call for targeting law-abiding citizens, but the others were "crooks, traitors, tattletales and schizophrenics of all stripes."
Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov denied the accuracy of BBC's translation, however Meduza'''s translation found that it painted an accurate picture. The speech was broadcast on a state-owned TV channel. Dmitry Peskov stated that his remarks won't be investigated by the Russian government as it was the job of the police.
Personal life
Kadyrov graduated with a degree in Law from the Makhachkala Institute of Business and Law in 2004. In 2006 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State Technical University to obtain a Candidate of Sciences degree in Economics. In 2015 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State University to obtain a Doctor of Sciences degree in Economics.The New Yorker says that Kadyrov has adopted various personalities over the years: "the merciless warrior in fatigues who leads special operations to kill anti-government rebels; the jolly Caucasus baron who spars with Mike Tyson and shows off his private zoo; the family man and observant Muslim who has banned alcohol, ordered that women wear head scarves in public buildings, and boasts that his six-year-old son has memorized the Koran." He enjoys boxing and once met with former heavyweight-boxing champion Mike Tyson.
In 1996, Kadyrov married Medni Musaevna Kadyrova. The couple are parents of twelve children. His sons Adam and Eli have earned the title of hafiz while his daughters Aishat, Khadizhat and Khutmat have earned the title of hafiza''. Khutmat and another daughter Ashura have performed together with the nasheed singer Mishary Rashid Alafasy. Khadizhat was recognised as the most gifted student in Chechnya in 2016 and qualified for participation in pan-Russian contest "Student of the Year 2016" on 20 February 2016. Medni launched her fashion line called "Firdaws" in March 2012 in Dubai. Aishat too presented her own fashion collection in March 2017 and has also taken over her mother's fashion enterprise Firdaws. She was appointed the First Deputy Culture Minister of Chechnya in September 2020 by her father.
According to a 2021 investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Kadyrov has a second wife named Fatima Khazuyeva. Kadyrov reportedly met Khazuyeva when she was fourteen years old at a 2006 beauty pageant. He reportedly has a third wife, a singer and dancer named Aminat Akhmadova.
Kadyrov is a noted collector of sports cars. He owns a Lamborghini Reventón, one of only 20 sold. He is also known for his extensive collection of Chechen daggers. On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others. When journalist Marianna Maksimovskaya asked him where the money for the live-televised celebration was coming from, he reportedly laughed and said "Allah gives it to us", before adding: "I don't know, it comes from somewhere."
See also
Natalya Estemirova
Politics of Chechnya
Kadyrovtsy
FC Akhmat Grozny
References
External links
Official website
1976 births
Living people
Anti-same-sex-marriage activists
Chechen warlords
Chechen Islamists
Deputy prime ministers of Chechnya
Russian football chairmen and investors
Heroes of the Russian Federation
Recipients of the Order of Courage
People of the Chechen wars
Heads of the Chechen Republic
People from Grozny
People sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act
Russian Muslims
Prime Ministers of Chechnya
Russian military personnel
Russian Sunni Muslims
United Russia politicians
21st-century Russian politicians
Russian Islamists
Russian people of Chechen descent
Racehorse owners and breeders
Honorary Members of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences
Chechen people
FC Akhmat Grozny
Qadiri order
Recipients of the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", 4th class | true | [
"Akhmed Avdorkhanov (1973 – 19 September 2005) was a former head of security for Ichkerian President Aslan Maskhadov. \n\nOfficially the Russian state suggested he was killed by Shamil Basayev in a dispute over money or due to ideology, as he opposed the militant Islam of Basayev and his followers, while the Chechen insurgents claim he was killed by Russian forces. \n\nPresident Vladimir Putin called Avdorkhanov's death \"a turning point\", since according to him Avdorkhanov was the last nationalist leader, and the remaining leaders of the Chechen resistance are radical Islamists who will not receive as much support among the local people.\n\nHis younger brother Zaurbek served as a field commander in the Caucasus Emirate, and most notably was one of the leaders of the August 2010 raid on Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov's home village of Tsentoroy. Zaurbek was killed in what is believed to be an accidental explosion in Galashki, Ingushetia on 31 July 2012.\n\nReferences\n\n1973 births\n2005 deaths\nChechen field commanders\nChechen nationalists\nPeople of the Chechen wars\nChechen warlords\nRussian people of Chechen descent\nChechen people",
"Grozny Airport (, ) is an airport in Chechen Republic, Russia located 7.5 km north of Grozny.\n\nHistory\nFirst Grozny Airport began its work in 1938, when the aircraft P-5 and U-2 started to be the first postal transportation and sanitary flights. After a while, started to be flying and for agriculture. Until 1977, Grozny airport had only a dirt runway, which could only such aircraft as the Li-2, IL-14, AN-24 and AN-10.\n\nIn 1977 was introduced the new airport complex action with artificial runway and basing speed passenger aircraft Tu-134, threw in the Chechen Republic with the regions of the USSR. The new airport was named \"Airport North.\"\n\nBetween the years 1990–2000, the airport name was changed several times:\n\n1990 - Airport Sheikh Mansour \n1995 - Airport North (Severny)\n1996 - Airport Sheikh Mansour \n2000 - Airport North\n\nAll infrastructure and airfield Grozny significantly damaged during combat operations against Chechen fighters who seized the airport September 8, 1991 and held it until 30 September 1994. After the end of the war and the beginning of a relatively peaceful life in the country, a gradual recovery airport. In 2000 was created FSI \"Directorate for Recovery of Grozny Airport\" North \"under the leadership of Adnan Gakayeva Vakhidovich in respect of which 1 December 2005-year investigation department of the FSB for the Chechen Republic was prosecuted for embezzlement of funds in particular large scale\", aimed at restoring the airport.\n\nDuring 1999–2006, in the process of rebuilding the airport, the runway was expanded and extended. The airport complex capable of receiving the Tu-154 and IL-62, was rebuilt. The 6 March 2002 Russian Ministry of Transport Decree number AT-76-P launched a full-scale rebuilding of the airport. In 2005, North Airport was renamed Grozny Airport.\n\nOn 19 February 2007, the order of FATA number AIO-19 issued certificate of state registration to the Grozny Airport (North). The airport was assigned to class B to gain admission to the reception of Tu-134 aircraft and helicopters of all types, day and night, all year round. On November 29, 2007, Grozny airport was authorized to receive the Tu-154.\n\nOn 11 June 2009, the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) issued an international aerodrome certificate, therefore the aerodrome was accepted as suitable for international flights service.\n\nAirlines and destinations\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNonstop to Chechnya: As War Ebbs, Flights Return The New York Times\n\nAirports built in the Soviet Union\nAirports established in 1938\nAirports in Chechnya\nAirport"
]
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[
"Ramzan Kadyrov",
"Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction",
"What was the chechen recovery?",
"In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%."
]
| C_c2841d1fd68a4bc6ab19b05947755b9c_0 | what caused the increase? | 2 | What caused the increase of production in Chechnya's industry in 2006 and 2007? | Ramzan Kadyrov | In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%. In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently". According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit--in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which--while being registered as a charity--has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3-4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions. CANNOTANSWER | According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. | Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov (; (Q̇adar Aẋmat-khant Ramzan), ; born 5 October 1976) is a Russian and Chechen politician currently serving as the Head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly a member of the Chechen independence movement.
He is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May 2004. In February 2007, Kadyrov replaced Alu Alkhanov as president, shortly after he had turned 30, which is the minimum age for the post. He was engaged in violent power struggles with Chechen commanders Sulim Yamadayev (d. 2009) and Said-Kakiyev for overall military authority, and with Alkhanov for political authority.
Since November 2015, he has been a member of the Advisory Commission of the State Council of the Russian Federation.
Over the years, he has come under criticism from international organisations for a wide array of human rights abuses under his watch, with Human Rights Watch calling the forced disappearances and torture so widespread they constituted crimes against humanity. During his tenure, he has advocated to restrict the public lives of women, and led anti-gay purges in the Republic.
Ramzan Kadyrov has been frequently accused of involvement in the kidnapping, assassination, and torture of human rights activists, critics, and their relatives, within both Chechnya as well as in other regions of the Russian Federation and abroad, through the political use of police and military forces–– accusations that he publicly denies.
Biography
Kadyrov was born in Tsentaroy, Checheno-Ingush ASSR, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. He was the second son in Akhmat and Aimani Kadyrovs' family and their youngest child. He had an elder brother named Zelimkhan (1974 – 31 May 2004), and he has two elder sisters, Zargan (born 1971) and Zulay (born 1972). Kadyrov strove to gain the respect of his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was an imam. He claims that he always emulated his father. Akhmad had supported the call for jihad against Russians during the First Chechen War but switched sides and declared allegiance to Russia in the Second Chechen War. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union dissolved, the Chechens launched a bid for independence.
During the First Chechen War, together with his father, he fought against Russian armed forces. After the war, Ramzan was the personal driver and bodyguard of his father Akhmad, who became the separatist mufti of Chechnya.
The Kadyrovtsy militia was formed during the First Chechen War when Akhmad Kadyrov launched the jihad against Russia.
The Kadyrov family defected to the Moscow side at the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999. Since then, Kadyrov led his militia with support from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) (including service ID cards) becoming the head of the Chechen Presidential Security Service. The militia later became known as the Kadyrovtsy.
Deputy Prime Minister
After his father, the then President, was assassinated on 9 May 2004, Ramzan was appointed as the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic on 10 May 2004.
When his sister was detained by the Dagestan police in January 2005, Kadyrov and some 150 armed men drove to the Khasavyurt City Police (GOVD) building. According to the city mayor, Kadyrov's men surrounded the GOVD, forcing its duty officers against a wall, and assaulted them, after which they left the building with Zulay Kadyrova, "victoriously shooting in the air."
In August 2005, Kadyrov declared that "Europe's largest mosque" would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown. He also claimed that Chechnya is the "most peaceful place in Russia" and in a few years it would also be "the wealthiest and the most peaceful" place in the world. He said that the war was already over with only 150 "bandits" remaining (as opposed to the official figures of 700 to 2,000 rebel fighters), and that thanks to his father, 7,000 separatists had already defected to the Russian side since 1999. When responding to a question on how he is going to "avenge the murder of his father", Kadyrov said:
He remained the First Deputy Prime Minister until November 2005.
Acting Prime Minister
Following a car accident in November 2005, in which Chechnya's prime minister Sergey Abramov was injured, Kadyrov was appointed as the caretaker prime minister on 18 November 2005. He immediately proceeded to implement elements of Sharia law, such as declaring a ban on gambling and alcohol production.
In February 2006, responding to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons, he accused the Danes of "spying" and being "pro-terrorist". He also banned Danish citizens from entering Chechnya, effectively banning activity of the Danish Refugee Council, the largest NGO working in the region. Kadyrov is quoted as saying, "That cartoonist needs to be buried alive." He was eventually pressed to overturn this decision by Moscow, a rare example of federal intervention in Kadyrov's rule in the republic.
Prime Minister
On 1 March 2006, Sergey Abramov resigned from the position of prime minister and told Itar-Tass news agency that he did so "on the condition that Ramzan Kadyrov lead the Chechen government." This was followed by a decree of Kadyrov forcing women to wear headscarves; he also rejected a federal appropriation of the republic's budget, demanding more money, and called for all federal forces but the border guards to be withdrawn.
Kadyrov was appointed as the Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic by Alkhanov on 4 March 2006. Shortly after taking office, Kadyrov approved a project to erect a presidential palace on a plot by the Sunzha River in ruined downtown Grozny. The project, which was also to include a five-star hotel and recreational facilities, was estimated to cost around 1.5 billion rubles ($54 million USD) to build. Later, Kadyrov called for refugee camps scattered across Chechnya to be closed down, calling the refugees "international spies who are interested in stoking conflict between Chechnya and Russia, who are seeking to destabilise the situation in our region". Reuters quoted him as saying that "liquidating the refugee camps will allow us to uncover spies who are working for foreign intelligence services". His cousin Odes Baysultanov was appointed to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister by Alkhanov on 6 March 2006 after being unanimously approved by the Chechen Parliament.
On 5 June 2006, Speaker of the Chechen People's Assembly Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov said at a press conference in Moscow that "there is no alternative" to Kadyrov for the presidency; Kadyrov has "exclusive awards in combat, and has made achievements in improving the peaceful life and in human rights protection. Who could replace him at this stage? Nobody," he said. Later that year, Umar Dzhabrailov, Chechnya's representative in the Federation Council and a close ally of Kadyrov's, urged Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov to initiate a measure calling on Kadyrov to become the republic's president, thereby replacing Alu Alkhanov. The following week, several Russian newspapers reported that a worsening security situation in Chechnya was lessening the likelihood that Kadyrov would replace Alu Alkhanov as the republic's president. Other media, however, reported that Kadyrov continued to strengthen his position at Alkhanov's expense. He was also elected as the Chair of the Chechen Peoples' Assembly in late-October 2006.
On 6 December 2006, Kadyrov said that he would seek the prosecution of the commanders of federal military units responsible for the death or disappearance of civilians in Chechnya (specifically Major General Aleksandr Studenikin). In addition, Kadyrov said the war in Chechnya was unleashed not by the Chechen people but by the Russian leadership. Kadyrov's comments may have represented his government's increasing unhappiness with certain figures in Moscow, who were said to be blocking his elevation to the post of Chechen president. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
On 5 February 2007, Kadyrov said he did not aspire to become the Chechen president; however, he criticised Alkhanov. Kadyrov also claimed the war in Chechnya was ultimately finished, with "all informal armed groups eliminated". Alkhanov, for his part, criticised "the cult of personality and idealisation of one person", a clear reference to Kadyrov, whose enormous portraits are prominently displayed in Grozny.
President of the Chechen Republic
On 15 February 2007, Putin signed a decree removing Alkhanov and installing Kadyrov as Chechen's acting president. On 2 March 2007, following Putin's nomination of Kadyrov as Chechen president, the Chechen parliament approved the nomination. In the following days, serious changes took place in the administrative setup of the republic, affecting both the top- and middle-ranking officials. Former deputy prime minister Odes Baysultanov (a cousin of Kadyrov) was elevated to the vacant post of prime minister. Critics allege that Kadyrov is actively building his own "vertical of power" in the republic, and encouraging nepotism by placing men of his own family(Kadyrov) in all the leading and important positions.
A Russian daily, Gazeta, reported that according to a poll conducted by the independent Levada Center, only 33 percent of Russians believe that Kadyrov can be trusted, while 35 percent believed that he cannot. Asked whether they thought Kadyrov could normalise the situation in Chechnya and end the bloodshed there, 31 percent said yes and 38 percent said no.
On 14 March 2007, Kadyrov said that human rights abuses were "a thing of the past" in his republic, rejecting new charges of torture made by the Council of Europe. Two days later he accused the federal authorities of torturing detainees. On 19 March 2007, Kadyrov vowed to put an end to all remaining guerilla activity in Chechnya within two months. On 5 April 2007, Kadyrov was sworn in as President of Chechnya. He appointed his maternal cousin Odes Baysultanov as the Prime Minister of the republic on 10 April.
After the car-bomb attack on Yunus-bek Yevkurov, president of the neighbouring Republic of Ingushetia on 22 June 2009, Kadyrov claimed that the Kremlin had ordered him to fight insurgents there, and during his subsequent visit to the republic on 24 June pledged ruthless vengeance.
In late December 2009, Kadyrov claimed that remaining rebels were getting financed by "The West"; "I officially declare this: those who destroyed the Soviet Union, those who want to destroy the Russian Federation, they stand behind them". He also suggested that Russia should attack Georgia and Ukraine "It's Russia's private affliction; why should we always suffer if we can eradicate this for good?". In early August 2010, Kadyrov had claimed that there were only 70 Islamist militants left in Chechnya. In the same month, he proposed changing the title of President of the Chechen Republic to Head of the Chechen Republic. On 12 August, he also called upon presidents of all North Caucasus republics to petition the State Duma to change their titles, stating that there should only be one president in Russia. The Chechen parliament unanimously approved this change on 2 September. However, Speaker of the Chechen Parliament Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov stated on 4 September that the title will be retained until the end of Kadyrov's term in April 2011.
In February 2011, he invited the players of Brazil's 2002 FIFA World Cup winning team to play a match against a Chechen football team led by Kadyrov. The Brazilian team was named as Brazil XI. In addition, Ruud Gullit was hired by Kadyrov to train FC Terek Grozny.
Attempts at consolidation of the Chechen nation
As reported by the Caucasian Knot, an independent human rights resource, on 5 February 2009, "in the course of his meeting in Grozny with Ramzan Ampukaev, representative of the Chechen Diaspora in Europe, Ramzan Kadyrov invited former militants, now living in Europe, to come back home":
"Now, the situation in the republic has stabilized, we witness a steady economic growth, and there's no sense for people to leave. And those who are already abroad, can always come back. We'll help them in every possible way," said Mr. Kadyrov. "All sorts of Emirs and former participants of illegal armed formations, who are now in Europe and whose actions were not aggravated by bloody crimes, have two alternatives: either to come back and serve for the welfare of their homeland, or stay there until the end of their days."
Tsentoroy and Chechen Parliament attacks
In 2010, two large scale attacks were carried out by Chechen insurgents, one in Kadyrov's home-village Tsentoroy and the other on Chechen Parliament in Grozny. The assault on Tsentoroy which occurred on 29 August is considered to have "shattered" the image of Kadyrov's unshakeable rule in Chechnya, as it was the first time in six years that his seemingly impregnable village had come under attack. On 2 September, Kadyrov announced a reward of more than $300,000 for information about each of the insurgency leaders involved in the operation, which Chechen commentators interpreted as an indicator of the government's weakness. Kadyrov also tightened his control over information coming from Tsentoroy by not allowing any of the village's 5,000 inhabitants to leave in the days after the attack; the citizenry were also allegedly under the threat of death not to talk about the siege or the damage inflicted by the rebels. The attack on the Chechen parliament was carried out by three Chechen rebels on 19 October 2010. Kadyrov dressed in a parade uniform attended a meeting that was held a few hours after all the buildings of the parliament were declared cleared by the special forces. During the meeting, he apologised to the politicians who escaped unhurt from the attack. Kadyrov vowed to intensify the fight against militants in the republic, calling them "bandits". He also blamed the United Kingdom and Poland saying they were "harbouring criminals. Why do they shield bandits who have shed blood where there is western democracy? Where is the justice? ... Sooner or later Zakayev, Gakayev, Umarov, Vadalov and other criminals will get what they deserve ... I have no doubt that it was the drunk and alcoholic Akhmed Zakayev and his backers in London and other western capitals. I want to say that they will not achieve anything. The Chechen republic is still standing. It is a peaceful and stable region."
Head of the Chechen Republic
Kadyrov was nominated by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on 28 February 2011 and was unanimously elected for a second term by the Chechen Parliament on 5 March 2011. After his election, he stated that he was going to continue the current course of reviving the republic's economy and society.
On 8 March, he captained a Chechen football team which included current players of FC Terek Grozny, former players of Soviet Union national football team and former German midfielder Lothar Matthaeus in a match against the team Brazil XI which included ex-Brazilian footballers like Romario, Dunga, Bebeto and Cafu. Kadyrov scored twice during the match but his team lost 6–4 to the Brazilian side. Kadyrov said that he had organised the match to show that Chechnya had recovered from years of separatist conflict. He also said that the Brazilians weren't paid to appear but came out of goodwill and in return for a donation to flood victims in Brazil.
Kadyrov was sworn in as head of the republic on 5 April 2011. In November 2012, he visited Azerbaijan to sign intergovernmental agreements. In December 2012, he ordered the closure of the newspaper Kadyrov's Path after one of its reporters asked Putin a question about the violence once focused in Chechnya spreading to other republics and followed it up by asking about the fate of a local radio station. Kadyrov had reportedly taken a disliking to the question asked by the reporter to Putin.
Kadyrov termed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's ouster as a "coup d'etat" and a deliberate attempt to exert pressure on Russia through Ukraine, however at the same time placed the blame on Yanukovych for the situation in Ukraine. On 28 February 2014, he affirmed his readiness to dispatch peacekeepers and a consignment of humanitarian aid to Crimea.
After the 2014 Grozny bombing, in which ISIL's hand was suspected, he said that he might block internet in Chechnya as anyone could easily find and listen to a sermon by a jihadist. After Kadyrov went on a tirade against ISIL on Instagram for threatening Russia, ISIL commander Omar al-Shishani put a $5 million bounty on him.
On 26 May 2015, he announced that he was going to star in a Hollywood thriller titled Whoever Doesn't Understand Will Get It which will be directed by a director of famous Hollywood films and also feature global film-stars. Kadyrov in July 2015 denied that ISIL had any territory in Chechnya and claimed that they never will. During an interview in October 2015, he suggested that Putin should send Chechen special forces to Syria claiming they will wipe out ISIL in weeks. On 3 December, he promised revenge against ISIL for beheading of Khasiev. On 8 February 2016, he claimed that Chechen special forces had infiltrated ISIL cells.
Kadyrov announced on 27 February 2016 that he would step down at the end of his second term, which was set to expire on 5 April. However, he later decided to run in the elections that were to be held that September. Putin appointed him as the acting head of Chechnya until the elections in a decree signed on 25 March.
Kadyrov launched his reality show titled The Team with the first episode being aired by Channel One on 30 June. People from across Russia were invited by Kadyrov to register for the contest. The winner of the contest will go on to become head of Chechnya's Agency for Strategic Development.
On 18 September 2016, Kadyrov was re-elected with nearly 98% of the vote. Philip Varychenko, a native of Düsseldorf, was chosen as the winner of Kadyrov's reality show on 22 November and was appointed as a government aide. Kadyrov visited Saudi Arabia on 27 November where he met the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. During the meeting, they discussed Russia–Saudi Arabia relations as well as issues of common interest. He also visited the United Arab Emirates on the same day and met Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. The two discussed friendship, cooperation and strengthening ties. During his visits, he praised King Salman of Saudi Arabia for his "leadership of the Muslim world and efforts to combat extremism".
On 28 November, he stated that veterans of American special forces would not be allowed to train security and intelligence personnel at a "tactical city" in Gudermes because "they weren't as good as Russian special forces and there were sanctions against all official structures from the United States." On 29 November, he claimed in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat that only a few dozen Chechens were fighting with ISIL, adding that most of them grew up in Western Europe. He also stated that measures taken by Chechen authorities had been successful in bringing back many young recruits before they reached Syria.
During an interview aired on 27 November 2017, Kadyrov stated that he was ready to resign as Head of the Chechen Republic, calling it his "dream" as he found the responsibility to be "too heavy". He announced on 5 December that no Chechen athletes will participate under a neutral flag at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
After an attack on the Church of Archangel Michael in Grozny on 19 May 2018, Kadyrov stated that he had personally overseen the operation to eliminate the attackers. On 26 September, he signed an agreement with Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the Head of Ingushetia, resolving the border dispute between the two Russian republics. The agreement seen as grossly unfair to Ingushestia ignited widespread protests eventually leading to resignation of Yevkurov on 24 June 2019.
Kadyrov was given the rank of major general in July 2020, through an executive order of the Russian President. He added on his blog that he had been transferred from Ministry of Internal Affairs to the National Guard of Russia.
COVID-19 pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, Kadyrov initially in March dismissed the spread of the disease as nothing serious. Later, Chechnya imposed strict measures to curb the spread of coronavirus after it first emerged in the republic. In an interview to Caucasian Knot, Kadyrov purportedly stated that infected people violating self-quarantine should be killed. People accused of spreading rumors have also been forced to admit their guilt and apologize on live television broadcasts by Kadyrov, though human rights organizations have claimed they were pressured.
In April 2020, Kadyrov announced imposition of even stricter measures in Chechnya to curb the spread of the coronavirus. In addition to a night curfew, the government also sealed off all transportation to regions outside the republic. Kadyrov meanwhile also denied that force was being used against those who defied the restrictions. After the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin criticized heads of Russian regions for overstepping the extent of their powers with the restrictions they imposed, Kadyrov commented that while he did not know if Mishustin referred to Chechnya, goods as well as entry into the republic was not barred. However, entry of non-Chechens into the republic would be banned to curb the spread of the disease.
On 15 May 2020, Kadyrov in a live broadcast on the state-run Grozny TV stated that medical workers protesting over lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) must be sacked after one such protest occurred in Gudermes, claiming the republic had enough PPE. On 20 May, Kadyrov was reportedly flown to Moscow after developing "flu-like symptoms", suspected to be COVID-19. On 26 May however, Kadyrov attended a televised meeting in Grozny for taking steps against the coronavirus. The next day he stated that he had a right to be sick, without confirming if he had fallen ill. He also dismissed reports of using a catheter, stating he had a right to use it to boost his immunity.
Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction
In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%.
In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently".
According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit—in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which—while being registered as a charity—has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3–4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions.
In 2020 Proekt.media published an in-depth analysis of business operations of Kadyrov and Adam Delimkhanov who are allegedly running multi-million dollar businesses in Moscow through a proxy provided by businessman Pavel Krotov.
2009 assassination attempt
An assassination attempt on Kadyrov and a parliament member Adam Delimkhanov was averted on 23 October 2009, by the police. Chechen Deputy interior minister Roman Edilov said the police shot dead the driver of a speeding car loaded with a 200-litre tank after firing warning shots shortly before Kadyrov was to arrive at a construction site. The driver of the car was later identified as a militant leader (so-called Urus-Martan emir Beslan Bashtayev). Said-Emi Khizriev, who played a role in organising the attack, was killed by Russian police who tried to arrest him in the Michurin village in Grozny. Khizriev planned and took part in explosions at two gas stations in Gudermes in the spring of the previous year, as well as in an armed attack at a sport club in the city.
Accusations of human rights abuses
Kadyrov has been personally implicated in several instances of torture and murder. A number of Chechens opposed to Kadyrov have been assassinated abroad, and several witnesses (including Artur Kurmakaev and Ruslan Khalidov) report the existence of a 300 name "Murder List". Chechens who have been murdered, where Kadyrov's involvement is suspected, include Movladi Baisarov and Ruslan Yamadayev (both Moscow); Sulim Yamadayev (Dubai); Gazhi Edilsutanov, Islam Dzahnibekov, Ali Osaev (Istanbul); and Umar Israilov (Vienna).
Kadyrov stated in December 2009 that he had personally helped many of the murder victims and their families and was not their enemy. "I don't want to kill, who did I fight? I fought terrorists. Who did I protect? I protected the whole of Russia so that people in Moscow or St. Petersburg...could live in peace. They accuse me of killing women and children. It's not true."
A mutinied commander, Movladi Baisarov, said that Kadyrov "acts like a medieval tyrant. If someone tells the truth about what is going on, it's like signing one's own death warrant. Ramzan is a law unto himself. He can do anything he likes. He can take any woman and do whatever he pleases with her. (...) Ramzan acts with total impunity. I know of many people executed on his express orders and I know exactly where they were buried". On 18 November 2006, Baisarov was killed in an ambush by members of Kadyrov's police on Moscow's Leninsky Prospekt, about two kilometres from the Kremlin.
On 13 November 2006, Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper on torture in Chechnya that it had prepared for the 37th session of the United Nations Committee Against Torture. The paper covered torture by personnel of the Second Operational Investigative Bureau (ORB-2), torture by units under the effective command of Kadyrov, torture in secret detentions and the continuing "forced disappearances". According to HRW, torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya". In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not even attempt to conceal their identity. Based on extensive research, HRW concluded in 2005 that forced disappearances in Chechnya are so widespread and systematic that they constitute crimes against humanity.
Anna Politkovskaya, a veteran Russian reporter (murdered in 2006; case unsolved as of ) who reported extensively from Chechnya, claimed that she had received a grainy video footage shot on a mobile phone of a man identical in appearance to Kadyrov, and said that "the clips were the murders of federal servicemen by the Kadyrovites, and also kidnappings directed by Kadyrov. These are very serious things; on the basis of this evidence a criminal case and investigation should follow. This could allow this person to be brought to justice, something he has long richly deserved." She was allegedly working on an article revealing human rights abuses and regular incidents of torture in Chechnya at the time of her murder. Some observers alleged that Kadyrov or his men were possibly behind the assassination.
On 23 October 2006, a criminal case was registered on the basis of the video tape frames published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Anna Politkovskaya's article. Sergey Sokolov, deputy editor-in-chief of the paper, told the Echo Moskvy Radio that it can be clearly seen in the video as to how "Kadyrov's military forces are beating federal soldiers" with participation of "a man looking like Ramzan Kadyrov". On 7 October 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in an elevator in her apartment in Moscow.
German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), which branded Kadyrov a "war criminal", has alleged that up to 75 percent of recent incidents of murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's paramilitary forces.
The Memorial group investigator stated in its report: "Considering the evidence we have gathered, we have no doubt that most of the crimes which are being committed now in Chechnya are the work of Kadyrov's men. There is also no doubt in our minds that Kadyrov has personally taken part in beating and torturing people. What they are doing is pure lawlessness. To make matters worse, they also go after people who are innocent, whose names were given by someone being tortured to death. He and his henchmen spread fear and terror in Chechnya. (...) They travel by night as death squads, kidnapping civilians, who are then locked in a torture chamber, raped and murdered".
According to the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, many illegal places of detention exist in the Chechen Republic; most of them are run by Kadyrovites. In Tsentaroy (Khosi-Yurt), where the Kadyrovite headquarters is located, there are at least two illegal prisons functioning. One consists of concrete bunkers or pillboxes, where kidnapped relatives of armed Chechen fighters are held hostage while the second prison in Tsentaroy is evidently located in the yard—or in immediate vicinity—of the house of Kadyrov.
The Kadyrovites are often accused of working as a death squad against Kadyrov's enemies. Kadyrov is rumoured to own a private prison in his stronghold of Tsentaroy, his home village south-east of Grozny. Fields around Tsentaroy are allegedly mined and all access routes are blocked by checkpoints. On 2 May 2006, representatives of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) alleged that they were prevented from entering the fortress.
A video leaked out in which armed men, loyal to Kadyrov, displayed the severed head of a Chechen guerrilla (who was killed in July 2006) for public display in the village of Kurchaloi, marking the brutality of his forces. They mounted the head on a pipe, together with blood-stained trousers and put a cigarette on him. It was displayed for at least a day as they came back a day later to record it again. On 21 September 2005, a similar incident occurred, as published by Memorial as well as Kavkazky Uzel which described "shocking details" of a special operation conducted by forces loyal to Kadyrov.
On 1 March 2007, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group rights organisation, stated that Kadyrov was "to blame for kidnappings of many innocent people. Their bodies were found later with signs of torture."
Umar Israilov was assassinated in Vienna on 13 January 2009. Israilov was a former Kadyrov bodyguard, who cooperated with The New York Times, extensively detailing abuses committed by Kadyrov and his associates. Israilov had told Austrian authorities in 2008 that he had been threatened by an agent sent by Kadyrov to drop his lawsuit against the Chechen leader at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. On 27 April 2010, the Austrian prosecutor's office announced that they believed Kadyrov had ordered the kidnapping of Israilov and Israilov had been murdered while attempting to escape. According to the investigation, there was evidence that Otto Kaltenbrunner (adopted name of Ramzan Edilov), one of the suspected kidnappers, had been in contact with Kadyrov personally.
On 15 July 2009, Natalia Estemirova, a member of Memorial society, who investigated the alleged abuses by government-backed militias in Chechnya, was abducted and shot to death. Memorial's chairman Oleg Petrovich Orlov accused Kadyrov of being behind the murder, and claimed that Kadyrov had openly threatened her by saying: "Yes, my arms are up to the elbows in blood. And I am not ashamed of that. I have killed and will kill bad people". Kadyrov denied any involvement in the killing and promised to investigate the killing personally. He condemned the killers, and in response to Orlov's accusations, said: "You are not a prosecutor or a judge therefore your claims about my guilt are not ethical, to put it mildly, and are insulting to me. I am sure that you have to think about my rights before declaring for everyone to hear that I am guilty of Estemirova's death." It was later reported that Kadyrov would be suing Memorial for defamation and slander, targeting Orlov personally with his complaint.
Memorial said in a statement on 19 August 2014 that when Kadyrov had lost his mobile phone during a wedding ceremony on 16 August, the police questioned thousands of people who had attended the wedding into early hours of the next morning in an attempt to find it.
A man who criticised local officials and apparently Kadyrov in a YouTube appeal to the Russian President became a target of many threats due to which he had to flee to the neighboring republic of Dagestan. In May 2016, his house was burnt down by a group of masked men and his family was dragged out, put in a car and were thrown under a bridge. His wife also stated that they threatened the other residents with burning down their houses as well if they reported about the matter to anyone. Later, the Chechen police cordoned off his village in order to hunt him down. Kadyrov's spokesman denied these reports were true. The complainant later publicly apologised to Kadyrov and accused the media of distorting his remarks in his video complaint. He again fled to Dagestan in November 2016. According to human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, he had to flee after Chechnya's Deputy Interior Minister Apti Alaudinov personally threatened to kill him.
After Memorial's Chechnya head Oyub Titiev was arrested in January 2018 over drug possession, Oyub's supporters claimed the charges were fake and were made-up by the Chechen authorities to suppress criticism of Kadyrov. Kadyrov called Oyub a "drug addict" while criticising those working with human rights activists and warned them off from working in his region.
On 30 January 2020, Imran Aliev, an anti-Kadyrov blogger, was murdered in a hotel in Lille. French authorities have identified the alleged killer as a hitman having connections with the Chechen leader and who had travelled with Aliev in a train from Belgium to France.
Tumso Abdurakhmanov, a dissident Chechen blogger, was attacked in February 2020, but managed to overpower the assailant, who claimed he had been sent by Moscow. Swedish prosecutors stated that the Chechen government was suspected of being involved in the attack. Dagens Nyheter reported on the trial in November, saying the attacker admitted that he was sent by the Chechen government, but had planned to fail. Another arrested suspect denied her own involvement.
On the evening of 20 January 2022, Zarema Yangulbayeva (), the wife of Saidi Yangulbaev, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Chechnya, was abducted in Nizhny Novgorod and taken to Chechnya for interrogation. A day later, she was charged with assaulting a police officer. Kadyrov said the former judge's family members would either be in prison or underground and asked the Supreme Court of Russia to "kick out" Yangulbaev from the reserve and "erase his name from the history of the judicial body". Yangulbaev lost his position as a judge in 2015, saying he was forced to do so. Yangulbayeva is the mother of a Chechen human rights activist and former lawyer for the Committee for the Prevention of Torture NGO.
Rounding up, torture and execution of gay men
Kadyrov has previously encouraged extrajudicial killings of homosexual men by family members as an alternative to law enforcement – in some cases, gay men in prison have been released early specifically to enable their murder by relatives.
In April 2017, international media reported that gay men in Chechnya were being arrested, detained and tortured as part of a region-wide pogrom. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on 5 May that he would personally ask the Russian Prosecutor General and Interior Ministry to help Kremlin rights ombudswoman Tatyana Moskalkova check the reported abuse. UK Deputy Foreign Secretary Sir Alan Duncan told the UK Parliament he had been informed of alleged plans to eliminate Chechnya's gay community by the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which commenced on 26 May 2017.
Chechnya has denied the reports, with its interior minister calling the allegations an "April Fools' joke". Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov rejected the allegations and described the report in the Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, as "absolute lies and disinformation", basing his denial on the claim that "you cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic. If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn't need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning." Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also said that there had been no evidence found to support the allegations, adding that he had no reason to doubt Kadyrov's claims that no one under his rule has been persecuted for their sexual orientation.
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports aired on 18 July, Kadyrov said, "We don't have those kind of people here. We don't have any gays. If there are any take them to Canada. Praise be to God. Take them far from us so we don't have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them."
Asked about the accusations of systematic torture, Kadyrov said, "They made it up. They are devils. They are for sale. They are subhuman. God damn them for slandering us."
Sanctions
On 20 December 2017, the United States imposed sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on five Russian nationals including Kadyrov, accusing him of personal involvement in repression, torture and murder. U.S. officials accused him of heading "an administration involved in disappearances and extrajudicial killings," and that one or more of his political opponents were killed at his direction. He was added to United States Department of the Treasury's blacklist which also included a Chechen security official Ayub Kataev along with three other Russian individuals for their criminal involvement in a corruption case uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky.
In response, Kadyrov mocked the sanctions on his Instagram account. "A sleepless night is waiting for me." He further stated, "I can be proud that I'm out of favor with the special services of the USA," and added, "In fact, the USA cannot forgive me for dedicating my whole life to the fight against foreign terrorists among which there are bastards of America's special services."
President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the sanctions "illegal" and "unfriendly" stating, "We consider these sanctions illegal, we consider them unfriendly, and we do not agree with them." He also stated that it was highly probable that Russia would retaliate by accusing U.S. officials or citizens of rights violations and banning them from the country.
Further sanctions were added on 20 July 2020, with United States Secretary of State accusing him of increasing abuses on civilians during the COVID-19 pandemic. His immediate family were also sanctioned. The sanctions also ban him, his wife and two of his daughters from traveling to the United States. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova told Sputnik that they will try to impose retaliatory sanctions. Kadyrov meanwhile posted a picture of himself along with firearms, saying, "Pompeo, we accept the fight! What comes next will be more interesting."
Threats to journalists
In 2004, Kadyrov had a conversation with the Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. One of his assistants said to her, "Someone ought to have shot you back in Moscow, right on the street, like they do in your Moscow". Ramzan then repeated after him, "You're an enemy. To be shot...." He is alleged by some observers to be behind her murder.
On 13 April 2020, Kadyrov threatened the journalist Elena Milashina on Instagram for her news article in Novaya Gazeta about Chechnya's coronavirus lockdown, stating it was "defamatory". He also criticized the federal authorities for not taking any action saying, "If you want us to commit a crime and become criminals, just say so! One [of us] will take on this responsibility and serve his time, as required by law." On Telegram, he later labeled her newspaper "anti-Russian" and a "foreign agent", also claiming it stereotyped Chechens.
Milashina had also covered Chechnya's gay purges and had been allegedly attacked on 6 February 2020. She accused the Chechen authorities of orchestrating the attack. Over 100 Russian celebrities and human rights activists, in response to Kadyrov's online threats, called upon the federal government to protect Milashina. Novaya Gazeta was made to delete Milashina's article from its website by the Office of the Prosecutor General of Russia, which claimed it was fake news and created a threat to the lives of citizens. Peskov dismissed Kadyrov's threats as an emotional response, saying everyone was on edge due to the coronavirus pandemic. Human Rights Watch criticized Peskov's reaction, stating it was "like a stark green light to Chechen officials to act on their threats."
On 21 April 2020, the US government funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty stated that it had complained to Russian authorities after Kadyrov had threatened to punish their North Caucasus bureau chief Aslan Doukaev over an article against his government's restrictive coronavirus lockdown measures against farmers in an online video.
The ambassador of United States to Russia, John J. Sullivan, condemned Kadyrov's threats against Milashina and Aslan Doukaev, stating that freedom of press was a pillar of democracy. In a joint statement, French Human Rights Ambassador-at-Large François Croquette and the German Commissioner for Human Rights Policy Bärbel Kofler called Kadyrov's threats against Milashina unacceptable and urged Russia to investigate.
Kadydov had personally warned to punish the Georgian journalist Giorgi Gabunia in June 2020, after he had insulted President Vladimir Putin on-air. The State Security Service of Georgia announced the arrest of a Russian citizen on 15 June for an assassination attempt on Gabunia. Georgian media and Gabunia's boss later claimed the assassin was sent by Kadyrov, who denied the allegations and said that if he had sent someone to kill, they would have succeeded. Kadyrov called Gabunia his enemy and said that he should beg for forgiveness by getting down on his knees, otherwise he would continue to remain one. Georgian authorities have neither confirmed nor denied the allegations against Kadyrov.
Social media
Networks
The number of subscribers to Kadyrov's social networks in 2016 was more than three million people, including three million followers of his Instagram account, according to the Chechen leader's press service. It said that he had 500,000 followers on the Russian VK social network, 760,860 on Facebook, 331,000 on Twitter and 5,447 on LiveJournal. Besides his Instagram postings, it was said that he had also made almost 5,000 on Twitter and 2,300 on VK. The Russian News Agency TASS said that Kadyrov had been "recognized as the most quoted Russian blogger."
In August 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kadyrov had posted nearly 8,000 pictures on Instagram, which made him the online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service's "most prolific political strongman."
The New York Times called Kadyrov's Instagram account "bizarre if strangely compelling", and Newsweek said it was "flashy." In a 2015 article, The New York Times said that Kadyrov was "Instagram-addicted."
The Russian programme director of Human Rights Watch said in an October 2016 article in The Guardian that "even the mildest criticism on social media [is] ruthlessly punished through unlawful, punitive detention, enforced disappearances, cruel and degrading treatment, death threats, threats against family members, and physical abuse of family members." She said that a social worker from a small town in Chechnya made a WhatsApp recording that went viral among Chechen users "imploring" Kadyrov "to look into the plight of ordinary people pushed below the poverty line" by local officials. The article stated that the woman, with her husband, "found herself hauled into the studio of Grozny TV, the state television and radio broadcaster" to face Kadyrov in person, "to apologise publicly for her lies." A "severe and sweeping repression by the local authorities is designed to remind the Chechen public of Kadyrov's total control," the article claimed.
WhatsApp lecture
In May 2015, Kadyrov gave a stern televised lecture to a group of Chechen men and women who were accused of using the WhatsApp messaging service to comment on the impending marriage of local police chief to a teenage girl some three decades younger than him. The wedding had been widely discussed across Russia on reports that the young woman, Kheda Goylabiyeva, was being coerced into marriage with the chief, Nazhud Guchigov.
"Behave like Chechens", Kadyrov was reported as telling the assemblage of about a dozen people standing in the marbled courtyard of a building that seemed to be his government palace. "Honor of the family is the most important thing. Don't write such things any more. You, men, keep your women away from WhatsApp." In its coverage of the incident, The New York Times reported:
"Lock them in, do not let them go out, and they will not post anything", Mr. Kadyrov said in a video to a sheepish group of men and women who kept their arms folded across their chests and their eyes firmly on the ground during the harangue.
In December 2015, a female Chechen social worker criticised Kadyrov in an audio message posted on WhatsApp, after her boss tried to force her to put aside some money as collateral for her next month's payment. Three days after posting the message, she appeared on Grozny TV along with her husband, where she was publicly berated by Kadyrov as well as parliament speaker Daudov, presidential administration head Islam Kadyrov and her boss. The couple apologised on live television for her message.
John Oliver
In May 2016, Kadyrov engaged in a brief Instagram dispute with US television host John Oliver.
He had posted a message on Instagram asking for help in finding his cat, which had gone astray. The posting led Oliver to make a five-minute segment on HBO's Last Week Tonight dealing with the cat's disappearance and, according to The Guardian, Kadyrov's penchant for posting of, for example, "regular videos of his work-outs in the gym," also on Instagram. As well, Oliver teased Kadyrov "for his propensity" to wear T-shirts bearing the image of Russian President Vladimir Putin. After the show, Oliver posted a photo of himself holding a cat, captioned "@RKadyrov Is this your cat?"
Kadyrov responded in English, according to The New York Times along with a doctored photo of Oliver wearing a Putin T-shirt, captioned, in part, "I am tired of jokes. I want to care for cats in Chechnya. By the way, Putin is our leader."
Account suspensions
Kadyrov stated that he found his Russian-language Instagram and Facebook accounts were not working on 23 December 2017, and he never received a response from Instagram after sending a request for service support. His English-language Instagram account remained unaffected however. Kadyrov accused them of bowing to pressure from United States after he was sanctioned.
He wrote on Telegram in response, "Instagram's move, which still wants to pretend it is independent from officials of Washington is weird." He added, "They wanted to stir my indignation, but were wrong, and this is the only thing which pleases me in actions Instagram and their patrons in the White House are undertaking. I have planned already to quit the network. But I thought I could fail my friends and subscribers, as on Instagram and Facebook I have more than 4 million followers."
The Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin stated that the decision by Facebook and Instagram to suspend Kadyrov's accounts violated his rights, stating, "They are afraid of a public conversation and the truth. Such decision cannot be explained in another way… The thing is that to read bloggers in social networks one needs to be their subscribers. By deleting an account, they deprive citizens of their right to know about bloggers’ opinion and to communicate with them."
Russia's telecommunications overseer Roskomnadzor on 26 December asked Facebook to explain why they had suspended his accounts. Facebook issued a statement on 28 December that it did so after he was sanctioned by United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control as these came under trade sanctions.
Other issues
Call to quarantine proceeds of horse race
On 3 November 2009, a horse owned by Kadyrov, Mourilyan, came third in the Melbourne Cup winning about US$380,000 in prize money. The leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, immediately called for the Government of Australia to quarantine the prize money until assurances are received as to how the money will be used. Concerns had been previously raised that the Melbourne Cup could be used to launder money by overseas individuals.
Honor killings
In 2009, Kadyrov stated his approval of honor killings of seven women, based on the belief that they were engaging in adultery. In an interview with David Scott of HBO, he condoned honor killings of homosexuals in July 2017 stating, "If we have [gay] people here, I'm telling you officially their relatives won't let them be because of our faith, our mentality, customs, traditions. Even if it's punishable under the law, we would still condone it."
WikiLeaks
On 28 November 2010, a classified WikiLeaks cable named Kadyrov as a "starring guest" at some of Dagestan's most elaborate weddings, which indicates the political "Caucasus power structure" in these weddings. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
Charlie Hebdo cartoons
In January 2015, Kadyrov said he would organize protests if a Russian newspaper published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, saying "we will not allow anyone to insult the Prophet [Muhammad], even if it will cost us our lives." He also stated that Alexei Venediktov "will be brought to account" after his radio station Ekho Moskvy took a survey of readers on whether to publish the cartoons. Venediktov stated he would ask the authorities to intervene against Kadyrov's threats. During a protest rally against the cartoons attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Chechnya, he accused those backing Charlie Hebdo of using "false slogans about free speech and democracy".
After French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered by a man of Chechen descent for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in his class, Kadyrov criticized the attack, but also told people to not provoke the religious sentiments of Muslims. He also criticized French society for provoking Muslims and stated that the country must have a state institution focusing on inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations. After France's President Emmanuel Macron defended Paty's actions under right to free speech, Kadyrov on Instagram accused him of forcing people to resort to terrorism by doing so.
Support for polygamy
Kadyrov supports polygamy in Muslim-majority republics in Russia, and believes that Muslims who speak out against the practice are not true adherents to their faith. According to Kadyrov, men legally marrying more than one wife would be more honest than having many mistresses, and would resolve Russia's demographic problem. In April 2018, he stated that all Muslim men are permitted by Allah to have four wives but discouraged having the marriages officially registered. He also denied reports that polygamy would be legalised in Chechnya.
Boston Marathon bombing
After the Boston Marathon bombing, Kadyrov expressed sadness for the victims but denied the suspects had any ties to his region in a statement on his Instagram. He suggested that the suspects were products of American upbringing. Kadyrov accused the CIA of framing Dzokhar Tsarnaev on 18 March 2015, after he was handed a death sentence for the Boston Marathon Bombing and said that they could not have conducted the bombing without CIA's knowledge.
Threats to opposition politicians
On 31 January 2016, Kadyrov posted a video of Russian opposition politicians Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza in the crosshairs of a gun on his Instagram blog. In a few days, after multiple complaints, Instagram removed the video prompting Kadyrov to criticize the decision: "This is the much-boasted freedom of speech in America! You can write anything but cannot touch those American dogs, those friends of the Congress and the State Department".
Report by Ilya Yashin
Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin authored a report against Kadyrov released on 23 February 2016 during a press conference which was repeatedly interrupted by police and hecklers. He also claimed that Kadyrov had murdered Boris Nemtsov. The report titled A National Security Threat claimed that Kadyrov poses a threat to Russia. It included allegations of corruption, authoritarian rule, secret prisons, rigging votes in favour of Vladimir Putin, stealing from the country's national budget to enrich himself, enforcing Sharia law over Russian law, his lavish lifestyle, building and maintaining a personal army of about 30,000 fighters, purported ties to organised crime figures, and his involvement in politically motivated murders of journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. The report also contained 20 questions which Yashin had invited Kadyrov to answer but was refused. Kadyrov dismissed the report calling it "nothing but idle chatter" and posted it on his social network accounts before its release. His spokesman filed a request with the Russian Prosecutor General and the Investigative Committee for Yashin to be arrested for the report saying it contained slander and insults against Kadyrov.
Grozny fatwa
A conference of Islamic scholars funded by the Tabah foundation in the United Arab Emirates, was convened by Kadyrov in Grozny in late August 2016. The conference was attended by notable Islamic scholars including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb; Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shawki Allam; ex-Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa, Usama al-Azhari who is the religious adviser to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; Habib Ali al-Jifri and the mufti of Damascus Abdul Fattah al-Bizm. The conference was convened to discuss the alleged abuse of Islamic ideas to propagate extremism and to establish the criteria for determining who are the true followers of the Sunnah. The assembly of scholars issued a fatwa which declared that those who abide by the Kalam, belong to the four madhhabs and follow the path of moral self-perfection espoused by distinguished Islamic teachers, primarily the Sufi sheikhs, were the only true believers. The fatwa called the sect of Salafism as a "dangerous and erroneous contemporary sect", along with the extremist groups like Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Hizb ut-Tahrir . The conference also issued two further documents. In the first one, it appealed to President Vladimir Putin to ban Salafism and term any condemnation of "traditional Islam" as "extremism". It also proposed the fatwa be regarded as the considered opinion of "leading Russian experts" when evaluating the activity of Muslim organizations and the preaching of individual clerics. The second one issued a resolution calling for the establishment of a Council for Islamic Education and also a Council of Ulema, which would rule on who is and is not a true follower of Sunni Islam.
The ruling created a controversy, with both Islamic theologians and secular commentators condemning it, with some seeing it as a bid by Kadyrov to divide Russian Muslims into those who accept the importance he places on teachings of the Sufi brotherhoods as well as probably also what he considers as "traditional Islam" without question, and those who don't with "erroneous" views. Many of the key participants also disavowed the resolutions. Mukkadas Bibarsov, mufti of Saratov Oblast stated that the question of who was a true follower of Sunni Islam was resolved "centuries ago". He also added that the fatwa failed to take into account the crucial differences between Russia's Muslims, specifically that some Muslim communities did not follow Sufism. Liz Fuller writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty commented that the fatwa seemed to be giving permission to Kadyrov to take any action he likes to punish those whose religious views don't match with his own. Yaroslav Trofimov writing for The Wall Street Journal described it as a "new fracture emerging within Islam". Many Saudi clerics and citizens expressed outrage at the fatwa on social media. The Muslim Brotherhood expressed "deep sorrow" over the fatwa, stating that it “ignited fires of discord among Muslims around the world.”
Threats to Russian police officers
In 2015, Kadyrov ordered Chechen security forces to "shoot to kill" if they encountered police officers from other parts of Russia on the territory of the Chechen Republic. Kadyrov said: "I would like to officially state: Open fire if someone from Moscow or Stavropol—it doesn't matter where from—appears on your turf without your knowledge. We have to be reckoned with. … If you are masters of your territory, then you must control it." According to Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, "Some critics claim that Mr. Putin now fears Mr. Kadyrov because he knows any serious attempt to challenge the Chechen leader's position might lead to a third war."
Mixed martial arts tournament involving child fighters
A mixed martial arts tournament involving children was held as an "exhibition fight" on 4 October during the Grand Prix Akhmat 2016 in Grozny and broadcast on Match TV. Three of Kadyrov's sons, all of them aged under 12, fought in the tournament with Kadyrov sitting in the audience and none of the fighters wearing any protective gear. One of the fights ended with a technical knockout. Kadyrov also posted images of the bouts on his Instagram account. The event caused an outcry especially against Kadyrov allowing his children to compete in the tournament. Fedor Emelianenko, the president of Russian MMA Union, criticised the event as "inexcusable", stating that rules stipulate fighters under the age of 21 have to wear protective gear while children under the age of 12 are not allowed to compete. Vadim Finkelstein, the head of MMA promotion M-1 Global also backed Fedor's comments. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for President Putin, stated that the fact that one of the fights between the children finished with a technical knockout was “a reason for the appropriate oversight agencies to inquire about this incident.” Deputy Minister of Sports Pavel Kolobkov stated that participation of children under the age of 12 in MMA competitions was illegal while stating that the incident was being investigated. Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko also stated that the event will be investigated. MMA fighter Jeff Monson however backed the organisers stating that there was nothing wrong with it.
Several Chechen officials responded to Fedor's criticism with insults and accusations including Timur Dugazayev, general director of Akhmat MMA promotion, Member of Parliament Adam Delimkhanov as well as Kadyrov himself. The Ministry of Sports found on 18 October that Kadyrov's promotion had violated regulations. It also found that the event was actually an unlicensed show with no regulatory oversight. The promotion was directed to coordinate with the Ministry of Sports and other regulatory bodies to “prevent such irregularities in conduct” and handed a letter detailing its failure to comply with the legislation.
Comments about gays, Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions with the United States
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel in July 2017, Kadyrov denied that there had been anti-gay purges in Chechnya, while claiming that there were no gay men in Chechnya. He further stated that if there were any, they should be sent to Canada. He also said that gay people were "not human". Kadyrov also commented about Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions between the United States and Russia. He said that "America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia, we have a strong government and are a nuclear state." He also added, "Even if our government was completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed. We will put the whole world on its knees and screw it from behind."
Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar
In September 2017, Kadyrov condemned the persecution of Muslims in Myanmar and organized a rally in Grozny in support of persecuted Rohingya people. Kadyrov had pledged to "oppose Russia’s position" if it "supports" Aung San Suu Kyi's government in Myanmar.
Threats to citizens insulting someone's honor
In June 2019, Kadyrov, in an Instagram video, told residents of Dagestan to not insult Chechnya or Chechens online amidst controversy over a piece of land of the republic being labeled as belonging to Chechnya, threatening to torture whoever insulted the honor of Chechens. He also warned the people to remove any such comments, otherwise they will have to answer to the Chechen law enforcement agencies.
During a government function organized for medium and small-scale businesses in November 2019, Kadryov called for online users insulting someone's honor to be killed, arrested or intimidated per a BBC Russian Service translation. He stated in the same speech that he didn't call for targeting law-abiding citizens, but the others were "crooks, traitors, tattletales and schizophrenics of all stripes."
Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov denied the accuracy of BBC's translation, however Meduza'''s translation found that it painted an accurate picture. The speech was broadcast on a state-owned TV channel. Dmitry Peskov stated that his remarks won't be investigated by the Russian government as it was the job of the police.
Personal life
Kadyrov graduated with a degree in Law from the Makhachkala Institute of Business and Law in 2004. In 2006 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State Technical University to obtain a Candidate of Sciences degree in Economics. In 2015 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State University to obtain a Doctor of Sciences degree in Economics.The New Yorker says that Kadyrov has adopted various personalities over the years: "the merciless warrior in fatigues who leads special operations to kill anti-government rebels; the jolly Caucasus baron who spars with Mike Tyson and shows off his private zoo; the family man and observant Muslim who has banned alcohol, ordered that women wear head scarves in public buildings, and boasts that his six-year-old son has memorized the Koran." He enjoys boxing and once met with former heavyweight-boxing champion Mike Tyson.
In 1996, Kadyrov married Medni Musaevna Kadyrova. The couple are parents of twelve children. His sons Adam and Eli have earned the title of hafiz while his daughters Aishat, Khadizhat and Khutmat have earned the title of hafiza''. Khutmat and another daughter Ashura have performed together with the nasheed singer Mishary Rashid Alafasy. Khadizhat was recognised as the most gifted student in Chechnya in 2016 and qualified for participation in pan-Russian contest "Student of the Year 2016" on 20 February 2016. Medni launched her fashion line called "Firdaws" in March 2012 in Dubai. Aishat too presented her own fashion collection in March 2017 and has also taken over her mother's fashion enterprise Firdaws. She was appointed the First Deputy Culture Minister of Chechnya in September 2020 by her father.
According to a 2021 investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Kadyrov has a second wife named Fatima Khazuyeva. Kadyrov reportedly met Khazuyeva when she was fourteen years old at a 2006 beauty pageant. He reportedly has a third wife, a singer and dancer named Aminat Akhmadova.
Kadyrov is a noted collector of sports cars. He owns a Lamborghini Reventón, one of only 20 sold. He is also known for his extensive collection of Chechen daggers. On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others. When journalist Marianna Maksimovskaya asked him where the money for the live-televised celebration was coming from, he reportedly laughed and said "Allah gives it to us", before adding: "I don't know, it comes from somewhere."
See also
Natalya Estemirova
Politics of Chechnya
Kadyrovtsy
FC Akhmat Grozny
References
External links
Official website
1976 births
Living people
Anti-same-sex-marriage activists
Chechen warlords
Chechen Islamists
Deputy prime ministers of Chechnya
Russian football chairmen and investors
Heroes of the Russian Federation
Recipients of the Order of Courage
People of the Chechen wars
Heads of the Chechen Republic
People from Grozny
People sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act
Russian Muslims
Prime Ministers of Chechnya
Russian military personnel
Russian Sunni Muslims
United Russia politicians
21st-century Russian politicians
Russian Islamists
Russian people of Chechen descent
Racehorse owners and breeders
Honorary Members of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences
Chechen people
FC Akhmat Grozny
Qadiri order
Recipients of the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", 4th class | true | [
"Frost damage is caused by moisture freezing in the construction. Frost damage can occur as cracks, stone splinters and swelling of the material.\n\nWhen water freezes, the volume of water increases by 9 %. When the volumetric moisture content exceeds 91 %, then the volume increase of water in the pores of the material caused by freezing cannot be absorbed by sufficient empty pores. This causes an increase in the internal pressure. If this pressure exceeds the tensile strength of the material, then micro-cracks occur. Visible frost damage develops after an accumulation of micro-cracks as a result of several freeze-thaw cycles.\n\nFrost damage can be prevented by the use of frost-proof materials, i.e., a material which has sufficient closed pores, by which the volume increase caused by the freezing of water in capillary pores can be absorbed by the ice-free closed pores.\n\nConcrete\n\nFrost damage of early-age concrete is particularly harmful for the concrete mechanical resistance because the ice volume expansion causes micro-cracks in the concrete structures, and as a consequence it lowers the compressive strength of concrete. Therefore, when concreting at cold temperature cannot be avoided, it is essential to have a minimum curing time at a temperature sufficiently above the freezing point of the concrete pore water, so that the early strength of concrete is high enough to resist the inner tensile stress caused by water freezing.\n\nSee also\n Frost weathering\n Ice thermal expansion\n\nSources\nReferences\n\nBibliography\n Goesten A.J.P.M. (2016). Hygrothermal simulation model: Damage as a result of insulating historical buildings. Eindhoven University of Technology.\n ter Bekke T. (2001). Vochttransport in monumentaal metselwerk. Eindhoven University of Technology.\n\nThis article is a translation of the corresponding article on the Dutch Wikipedia.\n\nConstruction\nConcrete\nWater ice\nWeathering",
"The Mesozoic–Cenozoic Radiation is the third major extended increase of biodiversity in the Phanerozoic, after the Cambrian Explosion and the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, which appeared to exceeded the equilibrium reached after the Ordovician radiation. Made known by its identification in marine invertebrates, this evolutionary radiation began in the Mesozoic, after the Permian extinctions, and continues to this date. This spectacular radiation affected both terrestrial and marine flora and fauna, during which the “modern” fauna came to replace much of the Paleozoic fauna. Notably, this radiation event was marked by the rise of angiosperms during the mid-Cretaceous, and the K-Pg extinction, which initiated the rapid increase in mammalian biodiversity.\n\nCauses and significance\nThe exact causes of this extended increase in biodiversity are still being debated, however, the Mesozoic-Cenozoic radiation has often been related to large-scale paleogeographical changes. The fragmentation of the supercontinent Pangaea has been related to an increase in both marine and terrestrial biodiversity. The link between the fragmentation of supercontinents and biodiversity was first proposed by Valentine and Moores in 1972. They hypothesized that the isolation of terrestrial environments and the partitioning of oceanic water masses, as a result of the breaking up of Pangaea, resulted in an increase in allopatric speciation, which led to an increased biodiversity. These smaller landmasses, while individually being less diverse than a supercontinent, contain a high degree of endemic species, resulting in an overall higher biodiversity than a single landmass of equivalent size. It is therefore argued that, similarly to the Ordovician bio-diversification, the differentiation of biotas along environmental gradients caused by the fragmentation of a supercontinent, was a driving force behind the Mesozoic-Cenozoic radiation. \n\nPart of the dramatic increase in biodiversity during this time was caused by the evolutionary radiation of flowering plants, or angiosperms, during the mid-Cretaceous. Characteristics of this clade associated with reproduction have served as a key innovation for an entire clade, and led to a burst of evolution after the origin of the flower. These later diversified further and co-radiated with pollinating insects, increasing biodiversity.\n\nA third factor which played a role in the Mesozoic-Cenozoic radiation was the K-Pg extinction, which marked the end of the dinosaurs and, surprisingly, resulted in a massive increase in biodiversity of terrestrial tetrapods, which can almost entirely be attributed to the radiation of mammals. There are multiple things which could have caused this deviation from the equilibrium, one of which is that the before the K-Pg extinction an equilibrium was reached which limited biodiversity. The extinction event reorganized the fundamental ecology, on which diversity is built and maintained. After these reorganized ecosystems stabilized a new, higher, equilibrium was reached, which was maintained during the Cenozoic.\n\nPull of the recent\nOne effect which has to be taken into account when estimating past biodiversity levels is the pull of the recent, which describes a phenomenon in the fossil record which causes biodiversity estimates to be skewed towards modern taxa. This bias towards recent taxa is caused by a better availability of more recent fossil records. In mammals it has also been argued that the complexity of teeth, allowing for precise taxonomic identification of fragmentary fossils, increases their perceived diversity when compared to other clades at the time. The contribution of this effect to the apparent increase in biodiversity is still unclear and heavily debated.\n\nReferences\n\nEvolutionary biology\nMesozoic events\nCenozoic events\nBiogeography"
]
|
[
"Ramzan Kadyrov",
"Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction",
"What was the chechen recovery?",
"In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%.",
"what caused the increase?",
"According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya."
]
| C_c2841d1fd68a4bc6ab19b05947755b9c_0 | was anyone ever arrested ? | 3 | Was anyone ever arrested in relation to Ramzan Kadyrov's accusation of collecting wealth through theft of federal subsidies? | Ramzan Kadyrov | In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%. In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently". According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit--in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which--while being registered as a charity--has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3-4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions. CANNOTANSWER | These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. | Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov (; (Q̇adar Aẋmat-khant Ramzan), ; born 5 October 1976) is a Russian and Chechen politician currently serving as the Head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly a member of the Chechen independence movement.
He is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May 2004. In February 2007, Kadyrov replaced Alu Alkhanov as president, shortly after he had turned 30, which is the minimum age for the post. He was engaged in violent power struggles with Chechen commanders Sulim Yamadayev (d. 2009) and Said-Kakiyev for overall military authority, and with Alkhanov for political authority.
Since November 2015, he has been a member of the Advisory Commission of the State Council of the Russian Federation.
Over the years, he has come under criticism from international organisations for a wide array of human rights abuses under his watch, with Human Rights Watch calling the forced disappearances and torture so widespread they constituted crimes against humanity. During his tenure, he has advocated to restrict the public lives of women, and led anti-gay purges in the Republic.
Ramzan Kadyrov has been frequently accused of involvement in the kidnapping, assassination, and torture of human rights activists, critics, and their relatives, within both Chechnya as well as in other regions of the Russian Federation and abroad, through the political use of police and military forces–– accusations that he publicly denies.
Biography
Kadyrov was born in Tsentaroy, Checheno-Ingush ASSR, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. He was the second son in Akhmat and Aimani Kadyrovs' family and their youngest child. He had an elder brother named Zelimkhan (1974 – 31 May 2004), and he has two elder sisters, Zargan (born 1971) and Zulay (born 1972). Kadyrov strove to gain the respect of his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was an imam. He claims that he always emulated his father. Akhmad had supported the call for jihad against Russians during the First Chechen War but switched sides and declared allegiance to Russia in the Second Chechen War. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union dissolved, the Chechens launched a bid for independence.
During the First Chechen War, together with his father, he fought against Russian armed forces. After the war, Ramzan was the personal driver and bodyguard of his father Akhmad, who became the separatist mufti of Chechnya.
The Kadyrovtsy militia was formed during the First Chechen War when Akhmad Kadyrov launched the jihad against Russia.
The Kadyrov family defected to the Moscow side at the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999. Since then, Kadyrov led his militia with support from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) (including service ID cards) becoming the head of the Chechen Presidential Security Service. The militia later became known as the Kadyrovtsy.
Deputy Prime Minister
After his father, the then President, was assassinated on 9 May 2004, Ramzan was appointed as the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic on 10 May 2004.
When his sister was detained by the Dagestan police in January 2005, Kadyrov and some 150 armed men drove to the Khasavyurt City Police (GOVD) building. According to the city mayor, Kadyrov's men surrounded the GOVD, forcing its duty officers against a wall, and assaulted them, after which they left the building with Zulay Kadyrova, "victoriously shooting in the air."
In August 2005, Kadyrov declared that "Europe's largest mosque" would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown. He also claimed that Chechnya is the "most peaceful place in Russia" and in a few years it would also be "the wealthiest and the most peaceful" place in the world. He said that the war was already over with only 150 "bandits" remaining (as opposed to the official figures of 700 to 2,000 rebel fighters), and that thanks to his father, 7,000 separatists had already defected to the Russian side since 1999. When responding to a question on how he is going to "avenge the murder of his father", Kadyrov said:
He remained the First Deputy Prime Minister until November 2005.
Acting Prime Minister
Following a car accident in November 2005, in which Chechnya's prime minister Sergey Abramov was injured, Kadyrov was appointed as the caretaker prime minister on 18 November 2005. He immediately proceeded to implement elements of Sharia law, such as declaring a ban on gambling and alcohol production.
In February 2006, responding to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons, he accused the Danes of "spying" and being "pro-terrorist". He also banned Danish citizens from entering Chechnya, effectively banning activity of the Danish Refugee Council, the largest NGO working in the region. Kadyrov is quoted as saying, "That cartoonist needs to be buried alive." He was eventually pressed to overturn this decision by Moscow, a rare example of federal intervention in Kadyrov's rule in the republic.
Prime Minister
On 1 March 2006, Sergey Abramov resigned from the position of prime minister and told Itar-Tass news agency that he did so "on the condition that Ramzan Kadyrov lead the Chechen government." This was followed by a decree of Kadyrov forcing women to wear headscarves; he also rejected a federal appropriation of the republic's budget, demanding more money, and called for all federal forces but the border guards to be withdrawn.
Kadyrov was appointed as the Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic by Alkhanov on 4 March 2006. Shortly after taking office, Kadyrov approved a project to erect a presidential palace on a plot by the Sunzha River in ruined downtown Grozny. The project, which was also to include a five-star hotel and recreational facilities, was estimated to cost around 1.5 billion rubles ($54 million USD) to build. Later, Kadyrov called for refugee camps scattered across Chechnya to be closed down, calling the refugees "international spies who are interested in stoking conflict between Chechnya and Russia, who are seeking to destabilise the situation in our region". Reuters quoted him as saying that "liquidating the refugee camps will allow us to uncover spies who are working for foreign intelligence services". His cousin Odes Baysultanov was appointed to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister by Alkhanov on 6 March 2006 after being unanimously approved by the Chechen Parliament.
On 5 June 2006, Speaker of the Chechen People's Assembly Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov said at a press conference in Moscow that "there is no alternative" to Kadyrov for the presidency; Kadyrov has "exclusive awards in combat, and has made achievements in improving the peaceful life and in human rights protection. Who could replace him at this stage? Nobody," he said. Later that year, Umar Dzhabrailov, Chechnya's representative in the Federation Council and a close ally of Kadyrov's, urged Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov to initiate a measure calling on Kadyrov to become the republic's president, thereby replacing Alu Alkhanov. The following week, several Russian newspapers reported that a worsening security situation in Chechnya was lessening the likelihood that Kadyrov would replace Alu Alkhanov as the republic's president. Other media, however, reported that Kadyrov continued to strengthen his position at Alkhanov's expense. He was also elected as the Chair of the Chechen Peoples' Assembly in late-October 2006.
On 6 December 2006, Kadyrov said that he would seek the prosecution of the commanders of federal military units responsible for the death or disappearance of civilians in Chechnya (specifically Major General Aleksandr Studenikin). In addition, Kadyrov said the war in Chechnya was unleashed not by the Chechen people but by the Russian leadership. Kadyrov's comments may have represented his government's increasing unhappiness with certain figures in Moscow, who were said to be blocking his elevation to the post of Chechen president. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
On 5 February 2007, Kadyrov said he did not aspire to become the Chechen president; however, he criticised Alkhanov. Kadyrov also claimed the war in Chechnya was ultimately finished, with "all informal armed groups eliminated". Alkhanov, for his part, criticised "the cult of personality and idealisation of one person", a clear reference to Kadyrov, whose enormous portraits are prominently displayed in Grozny.
President of the Chechen Republic
On 15 February 2007, Putin signed a decree removing Alkhanov and installing Kadyrov as Chechen's acting president. On 2 March 2007, following Putin's nomination of Kadyrov as Chechen president, the Chechen parliament approved the nomination. In the following days, serious changes took place in the administrative setup of the republic, affecting both the top- and middle-ranking officials. Former deputy prime minister Odes Baysultanov (a cousin of Kadyrov) was elevated to the vacant post of prime minister. Critics allege that Kadyrov is actively building his own "vertical of power" in the republic, and encouraging nepotism by placing men of his own family(Kadyrov) in all the leading and important positions.
A Russian daily, Gazeta, reported that according to a poll conducted by the independent Levada Center, only 33 percent of Russians believe that Kadyrov can be trusted, while 35 percent believed that he cannot. Asked whether they thought Kadyrov could normalise the situation in Chechnya and end the bloodshed there, 31 percent said yes and 38 percent said no.
On 14 March 2007, Kadyrov said that human rights abuses were "a thing of the past" in his republic, rejecting new charges of torture made by the Council of Europe. Two days later he accused the federal authorities of torturing detainees. On 19 March 2007, Kadyrov vowed to put an end to all remaining guerilla activity in Chechnya within two months. On 5 April 2007, Kadyrov was sworn in as President of Chechnya. He appointed his maternal cousin Odes Baysultanov as the Prime Minister of the republic on 10 April.
After the car-bomb attack on Yunus-bek Yevkurov, president of the neighbouring Republic of Ingushetia on 22 June 2009, Kadyrov claimed that the Kremlin had ordered him to fight insurgents there, and during his subsequent visit to the republic on 24 June pledged ruthless vengeance.
In late December 2009, Kadyrov claimed that remaining rebels were getting financed by "The West"; "I officially declare this: those who destroyed the Soviet Union, those who want to destroy the Russian Federation, they stand behind them". He also suggested that Russia should attack Georgia and Ukraine "It's Russia's private affliction; why should we always suffer if we can eradicate this for good?". In early August 2010, Kadyrov had claimed that there were only 70 Islamist militants left in Chechnya. In the same month, he proposed changing the title of President of the Chechen Republic to Head of the Chechen Republic. On 12 August, he also called upon presidents of all North Caucasus republics to petition the State Duma to change their titles, stating that there should only be one president in Russia. The Chechen parliament unanimously approved this change on 2 September. However, Speaker of the Chechen Parliament Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov stated on 4 September that the title will be retained until the end of Kadyrov's term in April 2011.
In February 2011, he invited the players of Brazil's 2002 FIFA World Cup winning team to play a match against a Chechen football team led by Kadyrov. The Brazilian team was named as Brazil XI. In addition, Ruud Gullit was hired by Kadyrov to train FC Terek Grozny.
Attempts at consolidation of the Chechen nation
As reported by the Caucasian Knot, an independent human rights resource, on 5 February 2009, "in the course of his meeting in Grozny with Ramzan Ampukaev, representative of the Chechen Diaspora in Europe, Ramzan Kadyrov invited former militants, now living in Europe, to come back home":
"Now, the situation in the republic has stabilized, we witness a steady economic growth, and there's no sense for people to leave. And those who are already abroad, can always come back. We'll help them in every possible way," said Mr. Kadyrov. "All sorts of Emirs and former participants of illegal armed formations, who are now in Europe and whose actions were not aggravated by bloody crimes, have two alternatives: either to come back and serve for the welfare of their homeland, or stay there until the end of their days."
Tsentoroy and Chechen Parliament attacks
In 2010, two large scale attacks were carried out by Chechen insurgents, one in Kadyrov's home-village Tsentoroy and the other on Chechen Parliament in Grozny. The assault on Tsentoroy which occurred on 29 August is considered to have "shattered" the image of Kadyrov's unshakeable rule in Chechnya, as it was the first time in six years that his seemingly impregnable village had come under attack. On 2 September, Kadyrov announced a reward of more than $300,000 for information about each of the insurgency leaders involved in the operation, which Chechen commentators interpreted as an indicator of the government's weakness. Kadyrov also tightened his control over information coming from Tsentoroy by not allowing any of the village's 5,000 inhabitants to leave in the days after the attack; the citizenry were also allegedly under the threat of death not to talk about the siege or the damage inflicted by the rebels. The attack on the Chechen parliament was carried out by three Chechen rebels on 19 October 2010. Kadyrov dressed in a parade uniform attended a meeting that was held a few hours after all the buildings of the parliament were declared cleared by the special forces. During the meeting, he apologised to the politicians who escaped unhurt from the attack. Kadyrov vowed to intensify the fight against militants in the republic, calling them "bandits". He also blamed the United Kingdom and Poland saying they were "harbouring criminals. Why do they shield bandits who have shed blood where there is western democracy? Where is the justice? ... Sooner or later Zakayev, Gakayev, Umarov, Vadalov and other criminals will get what they deserve ... I have no doubt that it was the drunk and alcoholic Akhmed Zakayev and his backers in London and other western capitals. I want to say that they will not achieve anything. The Chechen republic is still standing. It is a peaceful and stable region."
Head of the Chechen Republic
Kadyrov was nominated by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on 28 February 2011 and was unanimously elected for a second term by the Chechen Parliament on 5 March 2011. After his election, he stated that he was going to continue the current course of reviving the republic's economy and society.
On 8 March, he captained a Chechen football team which included current players of FC Terek Grozny, former players of Soviet Union national football team and former German midfielder Lothar Matthaeus in a match against the team Brazil XI which included ex-Brazilian footballers like Romario, Dunga, Bebeto and Cafu. Kadyrov scored twice during the match but his team lost 6–4 to the Brazilian side. Kadyrov said that he had organised the match to show that Chechnya had recovered from years of separatist conflict. He also said that the Brazilians weren't paid to appear but came out of goodwill and in return for a donation to flood victims in Brazil.
Kadyrov was sworn in as head of the republic on 5 April 2011. In November 2012, he visited Azerbaijan to sign intergovernmental agreements. In December 2012, he ordered the closure of the newspaper Kadyrov's Path after one of its reporters asked Putin a question about the violence once focused in Chechnya spreading to other republics and followed it up by asking about the fate of a local radio station. Kadyrov had reportedly taken a disliking to the question asked by the reporter to Putin.
Kadyrov termed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's ouster as a "coup d'etat" and a deliberate attempt to exert pressure on Russia through Ukraine, however at the same time placed the blame on Yanukovych for the situation in Ukraine. On 28 February 2014, he affirmed his readiness to dispatch peacekeepers and a consignment of humanitarian aid to Crimea.
After the 2014 Grozny bombing, in which ISIL's hand was suspected, he said that he might block internet in Chechnya as anyone could easily find and listen to a sermon by a jihadist. After Kadyrov went on a tirade against ISIL on Instagram for threatening Russia, ISIL commander Omar al-Shishani put a $5 million bounty on him.
On 26 May 2015, he announced that he was going to star in a Hollywood thriller titled Whoever Doesn't Understand Will Get It which will be directed by a director of famous Hollywood films and also feature global film-stars. Kadyrov in July 2015 denied that ISIL had any territory in Chechnya and claimed that they never will. During an interview in October 2015, he suggested that Putin should send Chechen special forces to Syria claiming they will wipe out ISIL in weeks. On 3 December, he promised revenge against ISIL for beheading of Khasiev. On 8 February 2016, he claimed that Chechen special forces had infiltrated ISIL cells.
Kadyrov announced on 27 February 2016 that he would step down at the end of his second term, which was set to expire on 5 April. However, he later decided to run in the elections that were to be held that September. Putin appointed him as the acting head of Chechnya until the elections in a decree signed on 25 March.
Kadyrov launched his reality show titled The Team with the first episode being aired by Channel One on 30 June. People from across Russia were invited by Kadyrov to register for the contest. The winner of the contest will go on to become head of Chechnya's Agency for Strategic Development.
On 18 September 2016, Kadyrov was re-elected with nearly 98% of the vote. Philip Varychenko, a native of Düsseldorf, was chosen as the winner of Kadyrov's reality show on 22 November and was appointed as a government aide. Kadyrov visited Saudi Arabia on 27 November where he met the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. During the meeting, they discussed Russia–Saudi Arabia relations as well as issues of common interest. He also visited the United Arab Emirates on the same day and met Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. The two discussed friendship, cooperation and strengthening ties. During his visits, he praised King Salman of Saudi Arabia for his "leadership of the Muslim world and efforts to combat extremism".
On 28 November, he stated that veterans of American special forces would not be allowed to train security and intelligence personnel at a "tactical city" in Gudermes because "they weren't as good as Russian special forces and there were sanctions against all official structures from the United States." On 29 November, he claimed in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat that only a few dozen Chechens were fighting with ISIL, adding that most of them grew up in Western Europe. He also stated that measures taken by Chechen authorities had been successful in bringing back many young recruits before they reached Syria.
During an interview aired on 27 November 2017, Kadyrov stated that he was ready to resign as Head of the Chechen Republic, calling it his "dream" as he found the responsibility to be "too heavy". He announced on 5 December that no Chechen athletes will participate under a neutral flag at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
After an attack on the Church of Archangel Michael in Grozny on 19 May 2018, Kadyrov stated that he had personally overseen the operation to eliminate the attackers. On 26 September, he signed an agreement with Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the Head of Ingushetia, resolving the border dispute between the two Russian republics. The agreement seen as grossly unfair to Ingushestia ignited widespread protests eventually leading to resignation of Yevkurov on 24 June 2019.
Kadyrov was given the rank of major general in July 2020, through an executive order of the Russian President. He added on his blog that he had been transferred from Ministry of Internal Affairs to the National Guard of Russia.
COVID-19 pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, Kadyrov initially in March dismissed the spread of the disease as nothing serious. Later, Chechnya imposed strict measures to curb the spread of coronavirus after it first emerged in the republic. In an interview to Caucasian Knot, Kadyrov purportedly stated that infected people violating self-quarantine should be killed. People accused of spreading rumors have also been forced to admit their guilt and apologize on live television broadcasts by Kadyrov, though human rights organizations have claimed they were pressured.
In April 2020, Kadyrov announced imposition of even stricter measures in Chechnya to curb the spread of the coronavirus. In addition to a night curfew, the government also sealed off all transportation to regions outside the republic. Kadyrov meanwhile also denied that force was being used against those who defied the restrictions. After the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin criticized heads of Russian regions for overstepping the extent of their powers with the restrictions they imposed, Kadyrov commented that while he did not know if Mishustin referred to Chechnya, goods as well as entry into the republic was not barred. However, entry of non-Chechens into the republic would be banned to curb the spread of the disease.
On 15 May 2020, Kadyrov in a live broadcast on the state-run Grozny TV stated that medical workers protesting over lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) must be sacked after one such protest occurred in Gudermes, claiming the republic had enough PPE. On 20 May, Kadyrov was reportedly flown to Moscow after developing "flu-like symptoms", suspected to be COVID-19. On 26 May however, Kadyrov attended a televised meeting in Grozny for taking steps against the coronavirus. The next day he stated that he had a right to be sick, without confirming if he had fallen ill. He also dismissed reports of using a catheter, stating he had a right to use it to boost his immunity.
Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction
In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%.
In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently".
According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit—in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which—while being registered as a charity—has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3–4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions.
In 2020 Proekt.media published an in-depth analysis of business operations of Kadyrov and Adam Delimkhanov who are allegedly running multi-million dollar businesses in Moscow through a proxy provided by businessman Pavel Krotov.
2009 assassination attempt
An assassination attempt on Kadyrov and a parliament member Adam Delimkhanov was averted on 23 October 2009, by the police. Chechen Deputy interior minister Roman Edilov said the police shot dead the driver of a speeding car loaded with a 200-litre tank after firing warning shots shortly before Kadyrov was to arrive at a construction site. The driver of the car was later identified as a militant leader (so-called Urus-Martan emir Beslan Bashtayev). Said-Emi Khizriev, who played a role in organising the attack, was killed by Russian police who tried to arrest him in the Michurin village in Grozny. Khizriev planned and took part in explosions at two gas stations in Gudermes in the spring of the previous year, as well as in an armed attack at a sport club in the city.
Accusations of human rights abuses
Kadyrov has been personally implicated in several instances of torture and murder. A number of Chechens opposed to Kadyrov have been assassinated abroad, and several witnesses (including Artur Kurmakaev and Ruslan Khalidov) report the existence of a 300 name "Murder List". Chechens who have been murdered, where Kadyrov's involvement is suspected, include Movladi Baisarov and Ruslan Yamadayev (both Moscow); Sulim Yamadayev (Dubai); Gazhi Edilsutanov, Islam Dzahnibekov, Ali Osaev (Istanbul); and Umar Israilov (Vienna).
Kadyrov stated in December 2009 that he had personally helped many of the murder victims and their families and was not their enemy. "I don't want to kill, who did I fight? I fought terrorists. Who did I protect? I protected the whole of Russia so that people in Moscow or St. Petersburg...could live in peace. They accuse me of killing women and children. It's not true."
A mutinied commander, Movladi Baisarov, said that Kadyrov "acts like a medieval tyrant. If someone tells the truth about what is going on, it's like signing one's own death warrant. Ramzan is a law unto himself. He can do anything he likes. He can take any woman and do whatever he pleases with her. (...) Ramzan acts with total impunity. I know of many people executed on his express orders and I know exactly where they were buried". On 18 November 2006, Baisarov was killed in an ambush by members of Kadyrov's police on Moscow's Leninsky Prospekt, about two kilometres from the Kremlin.
On 13 November 2006, Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper on torture in Chechnya that it had prepared for the 37th session of the United Nations Committee Against Torture. The paper covered torture by personnel of the Second Operational Investigative Bureau (ORB-2), torture by units under the effective command of Kadyrov, torture in secret detentions and the continuing "forced disappearances". According to HRW, torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya". In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not even attempt to conceal their identity. Based on extensive research, HRW concluded in 2005 that forced disappearances in Chechnya are so widespread and systematic that they constitute crimes against humanity.
Anna Politkovskaya, a veteran Russian reporter (murdered in 2006; case unsolved as of ) who reported extensively from Chechnya, claimed that she had received a grainy video footage shot on a mobile phone of a man identical in appearance to Kadyrov, and said that "the clips were the murders of federal servicemen by the Kadyrovites, and also kidnappings directed by Kadyrov. These are very serious things; on the basis of this evidence a criminal case and investigation should follow. This could allow this person to be brought to justice, something he has long richly deserved." She was allegedly working on an article revealing human rights abuses and regular incidents of torture in Chechnya at the time of her murder. Some observers alleged that Kadyrov or his men were possibly behind the assassination.
On 23 October 2006, a criminal case was registered on the basis of the video tape frames published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Anna Politkovskaya's article. Sergey Sokolov, deputy editor-in-chief of the paper, told the Echo Moskvy Radio that it can be clearly seen in the video as to how "Kadyrov's military forces are beating federal soldiers" with participation of "a man looking like Ramzan Kadyrov". On 7 October 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in an elevator in her apartment in Moscow.
German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), which branded Kadyrov a "war criminal", has alleged that up to 75 percent of recent incidents of murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's paramilitary forces.
The Memorial group investigator stated in its report: "Considering the evidence we have gathered, we have no doubt that most of the crimes which are being committed now in Chechnya are the work of Kadyrov's men. There is also no doubt in our minds that Kadyrov has personally taken part in beating and torturing people. What they are doing is pure lawlessness. To make matters worse, they also go after people who are innocent, whose names were given by someone being tortured to death. He and his henchmen spread fear and terror in Chechnya. (...) They travel by night as death squads, kidnapping civilians, who are then locked in a torture chamber, raped and murdered".
According to the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, many illegal places of detention exist in the Chechen Republic; most of them are run by Kadyrovites. In Tsentaroy (Khosi-Yurt), where the Kadyrovite headquarters is located, there are at least two illegal prisons functioning. One consists of concrete bunkers or pillboxes, where kidnapped relatives of armed Chechen fighters are held hostage while the second prison in Tsentaroy is evidently located in the yard—or in immediate vicinity—of the house of Kadyrov.
The Kadyrovites are often accused of working as a death squad against Kadyrov's enemies. Kadyrov is rumoured to own a private prison in his stronghold of Tsentaroy, his home village south-east of Grozny. Fields around Tsentaroy are allegedly mined and all access routes are blocked by checkpoints. On 2 May 2006, representatives of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) alleged that they were prevented from entering the fortress.
A video leaked out in which armed men, loyal to Kadyrov, displayed the severed head of a Chechen guerrilla (who was killed in July 2006) for public display in the village of Kurchaloi, marking the brutality of his forces. They mounted the head on a pipe, together with blood-stained trousers and put a cigarette on him. It was displayed for at least a day as they came back a day later to record it again. On 21 September 2005, a similar incident occurred, as published by Memorial as well as Kavkazky Uzel which described "shocking details" of a special operation conducted by forces loyal to Kadyrov.
On 1 March 2007, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group rights organisation, stated that Kadyrov was "to blame for kidnappings of many innocent people. Their bodies were found later with signs of torture."
Umar Israilov was assassinated in Vienna on 13 January 2009. Israilov was a former Kadyrov bodyguard, who cooperated with The New York Times, extensively detailing abuses committed by Kadyrov and his associates. Israilov had told Austrian authorities in 2008 that he had been threatened by an agent sent by Kadyrov to drop his lawsuit against the Chechen leader at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. On 27 April 2010, the Austrian prosecutor's office announced that they believed Kadyrov had ordered the kidnapping of Israilov and Israilov had been murdered while attempting to escape. According to the investigation, there was evidence that Otto Kaltenbrunner (adopted name of Ramzan Edilov), one of the suspected kidnappers, had been in contact with Kadyrov personally.
On 15 July 2009, Natalia Estemirova, a member of Memorial society, who investigated the alleged abuses by government-backed militias in Chechnya, was abducted and shot to death. Memorial's chairman Oleg Petrovich Orlov accused Kadyrov of being behind the murder, and claimed that Kadyrov had openly threatened her by saying: "Yes, my arms are up to the elbows in blood. And I am not ashamed of that. I have killed and will kill bad people". Kadyrov denied any involvement in the killing and promised to investigate the killing personally. He condemned the killers, and in response to Orlov's accusations, said: "You are not a prosecutor or a judge therefore your claims about my guilt are not ethical, to put it mildly, and are insulting to me. I am sure that you have to think about my rights before declaring for everyone to hear that I am guilty of Estemirova's death." It was later reported that Kadyrov would be suing Memorial for defamation and slander, targeting Orlov personally with his complaint.
Memorial said in a statement on 19 August 2014 that when Kadyrov had lost his mobile phone during a wedding ceremony on 16 August, the police questioned thousands of people who had attended the wedding into early hours of the next morning in an attempt to find it.
A man who criticised local officials and apparently Kadyrov in a YouTube appeal to the Russian President became a target of many threats due to which he had to flee to the neighboring republic of Dagestan. In May 2016, his house was burnt down by a group of masked men and his family was dragged out, put in a car and were thrown under a bridge. His wife also stated that they threatened the other residents with burning down their houses as well if they reported about the matter to anyone. Later, the Chechen police cordoned off his village in order to hunt him down. Kadyrov's spokesman denied these reports were true. The complainant later publicly apologised to Kadyrov and accused the media of distorting his remarks in his video complaint. He again fled to Dagestan in November 2016. According to human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, he had to flee after Chechnya's Deputy Interior Minister Apti Alaudinov personally threatened to kill him.
After Memorial's Chechnya head Oyub Titiev was arrested in January 2018 over drug possession, Oyub's supporters claimed the charges were fake and were made-up by the Chechen authorities to suppress criticism of Kadyrov. Kadyrov called Oyub a "drug addict" while criticising those working with human rights activists and warned them off from working in his region.
On 30 January 2020, Imran Aliev, an anti-Kadyrov blogger, was murdered in a hotel in Lille. French authorities have identified the alleged killer as a hitman having connections with the Chechen leader and who had travelled with Aliev in a train from Belgium to France.
Tumso Abdurakhmanov, a dissident Chechen blogger, was attacked in February 2020, but managed to overpower the assailant, who claimed he had been sent by Moscow. Swedish prosecutors stated that the Chechen government was suspected of being involved in the attack. Dagens Nyheter reported on the trial in November, saying the attacker admitted that he was sent by the Chechen government, but had planned to fail. Another arrested suspect denied her own involvement.
On the evening of 20 January 2022, Zarema Yangulbayeva (), the wife of Saidi Yangulbaev, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Chechnya, was abducted in Nizhny Novgorod and taken to Chechnya for interrogation. A day later, she was charged with assaulting a police officer. Kadyrov said the former judge's family members would either be in prison or underground and asked the Supreme Court of Russia to "kick out" Yangulbaev from the reserve and "erase his name from the history of the judicial body". Yangulbaev lost his position as a judge in 2015, saying he was forced to do so. Yangulbayeva is the mother of a Chechen human rights activist and former lawyer for the Committee for the Prevention of Torture NGO.
Rounding up, torture and execution of gay men
Kadyrov has previously encouraged extrajudicial killings of homosexual men by family members as an alternative to law enforcement – in some cases, gay men in prison have been released early specifically to enable their murder by relatives.
In April 2017, international media reported that gay men in Chechnya were being arrested, detained and tortured as part of a region-wide pogrom. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on 5 May that he would personally ask the Russian Prosecutor General and Interior Ministry to help Kremlin rights ombudswoman Tatyana Moskalkova check the reported abuse. UK Deputy Foreign Secretary Sir Alan Duncan told the UK Parliament he had been informed of alleged plans to eliminate Chechnya's gay community by the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which commenced on 26 May 2017.
Chechnya has denied the reports, with its interior minister calling the allegations an "April Fools' joke". Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov rejected the allegations and described the report in the Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, as "absolute lies and disinformation", basing his denial on the claim that "you cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic. If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn't need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning." Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also said that there had been no evidence found to support the allegations, adding that he had no reason to doubt Kadyrov's claims that no one under his rule has been persecuted for their sexual orientation.
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports aired on 18 July, Kadyrov said, "We don't have those kind of people here. We don't have any gays. If there are any take them to Canada. Praise be to God. Take them far from us so we don't have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them."
Asked about the accusations of systematic torture, Kadyrov said, "They made it up. They are devils. They are for sale. They are subhuman. God damn them for slandering us."
Sanctions
On 20 December 2017, the United States imposed sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on five Russian nationals including Kadyrov, accusing him of personal involvement in repression, torture and murder. U.S. officials accused him of heading "an administration involved in disappearances and extrajudicial killings," and that one or more of his political opponents were killed at his direction. He was added to United States Department of the Treasury's blacklist which also included a Chechen security official Ayub Kataev along with three other Russian individuals for their criminal involvement in a corruption case uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky.
In response, Kadyrov mocked the sanctions on his Instagram account. "A sleepless night is waiting for me." He further stated, "I can be proud that I'm out of favor with the special services of the USA," and added, "In fact, the USA cannot forgive me for dedicating my whole life to the fight against foreign terrorists among which there are bastards of America's special services."
President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the sanctions "illegal" and "unfriendly" stating, "We consider these sanctions illegal, we consider them unfriendly, and we do not agree with them." He also stated that it was highly probable that Russia would retaliate by accusing U.S. officials or citizens of rights violations and banning them from the country.
Further sanctions were added on 20 July 2020, with United States Secretary of State accusing him of increasing abuses on civilians during the COVID-19 pandemic. His immediate family were also sanctioned. The sanctions also ban him, his wife and two of his daughters from traveling to the United States. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova told Sputnik that they will try to impose retaliatory sanctions. Kadyrov meanwhile posted a picture of himself along with firearms, saying, "Pompeo, we accept the fight! What comes next will be more interesting."
Threats to journalists
In 2004, Kadyrov had a conversation with the Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. One of his assistants said to her, "Someone ought to have shot you back in Moscow, right on the street, like they do in your Moscow". Ramzan then repeated after him, "You're an enemy. To be shot...." He is alleged by some observers to be behind her murder.
On 13 April 2020, Kadyrov threatened the journalist Elena Milashina on Instagram for her news article in Novaya Gazeta about Chechnya's coronavirus lockdown, stating it was "defamatory". He also criticized the federal authorities for not taking any action saying, "If you want us to commit a crime and become criminals, just say so! One [of us] will take on this responsibility and serve his time, as required by law." On Telegram, he later labeled her newspaper "anti-Russian" and a "foreign agent", also claiming it stereotyped Chechens.
Milashina had also covered Chechnya's gay purges and had been allegedly attacked on 6 February 2020. She accused the Chechen authorities of orchestrating the attack. Over 100 Russian celebrities and human rights activists, in response to Kadyrov's online threats, called upon the federal government to protect Milashina. Novaya Gazeta was made to delete Milashina's article from its website by the Office of the Prosecutor General of Russia, which claimed it was fake news and created a threat to the lives of citizens. Peskov dismissed Kadyrov's threats as an emotional response, saying everyone was on edge due to the coronavirus pandemic. Human Rights Watch criticized Peskov's reaction, stating it was "like a stark green light to Chechen officials to act on their threats."
On 21 April 2020, the US government funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty stated that it had complained to Russian authorities after Kadyrov had threatened to punish their North Caucasus bureau chief Aslan Doukaev over an article against his government's restrictive coronavirus lockdown measures against farmers in an online video.
The ambassador of United States to Russia, John J. Sullivan, condemned Kadyrov's threats against Milashina and Aslan Doukaev, stating that freedom of press was a pillar of democracy. In a joint statement, French Human Rights Ambassador-at-Large François Croquette and the German Commissioner for Human Rights Policy Bärbel Kofler called Kadyrov's threats against Milashina unacceptable and urged Russia to investigate.
Kadydov had personally warned to punish the Georgian journalist Giorgi Gabunia in June 2020, after he had insulted President Vladimir Putin on-air. The State Security Service of Georgia announced the arrest of a Russian citizen on 15 June for an assassination attempt on Gabunia. Georgian media and Gabunia's boss later claimed the assassin was sent by Kadyrov, who denied the allegations and said that if he had sent someone to kill, they would have succeeded. Kadyrov called Gabunia his enemy and said that he should beg for forgiveness by getting down on his knees, otherwise he would continue to remain one. Georgian authorities have neither confirmed nor denied the allegations against Kadyrov.
Social media
Networks
The number of subscribers to Kadyrov's social networks in 2016 was more than three million people, including three million followers of his Instagram account, according to the Chechen leader's press service. It said that he had 500,000 followers on the Russian VK social network, 760,860 on Facebook, 331,000 on Twitter and 5,447 on LiveJournal. Besides his Instagram postings, it was said that he had also made almost 5,000 on Twitter and 2,300 on VK. The Russian News Agency TASS said that Kadyrov had been "recognized as the most quoted Russian blogger."
In August 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kadyrov had posted nearly 8,000 pictures on Instagram, which made him the online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service's "most prolific political strongman."
The New York Times called Kadyrov's Instagram account "bizarre if strangely compelling", and Newsweek said it was "flashy." In a 2015 article, The New York Times said that Kadyrov was "Instagram-addicted."
The Russian programme director of Human Rights Watch said in an October 2016 article in The Guardian that "even the mildest criticism on social media [is] ruthlessly punished through unlawful, punitive detention, enforced disappearances, cruel and degrading treatment, death threats, threats against family members, and physical abuse of family members." She said that a social worker from a small town in Chechnya made a WhatsApp recording that went viral among Chechen users "imploring" Kadyrov "to look into the plight of ordinary people pushed below the poverty line" by local officials. The article stated that the woman, with her husband, "found herself hauled into the studio of Grozny TV, the state television and radio broadcaster" to face Kadyrov in person, "to apologise publicly for her lies." A "severe and sweeping repression by the local authorities is designed to remind the Chechen public of Kadyrov's total control," the article claimed.
WhatsApp lecture
In May 2015, Kadyrov gave a stern televised lecture to a group of Chechen men and women who were accused of using the WhatsApp messaging service to comment on the impending marriage of local police chief to a teenage girl some three decades younger than him. The wedding had been widely discussed across Russia on reports that the young woman, Kheda Goylabiyeva, was being coerced into marriage with the chief, Nazhud Guchigov.
"Behave like Chechens", Kadyrov was reported as telling the assemblage of about a dozen people standing in the marbled courtyard of a building that seemed to be his government palace. "Honor of the family is the most important thing. Don't write such things any more. You, men, keep your women away from WhatsApp." In its coverage of the incident, The New York Times reported:
"Lock them in, do not let them go out, and they will not post anything", Mr. Kadyrov said in a video to a sheepish group of men and women who kept their arms folded across their chests and their eyes firmly on the ground during the harangue.
In December 2015, a female Chechen social worker criticised Kadyrov in an audio message posted on WhatsApp, after her boss tried to force her to put aside some money as collateral for her next month's payment. Three days after posting the message, she appeared on Grozny TV along with her husband, where she was publicly berated by Kadyrov as well as parliament speaker Daudov, presidential administration head Islam Kadyrov and her boss. The couple apologised on live television for her message.
John Oliver
In May 2016, Kadyrov engaged in a brief Instagram dispute with US television host John Oliver.
He had posted a message on Instagram asking for help in finding his cat, which had gone astray. The posting led Oliver to make a five-minute segment on HBO's Last Week Tonight dealing with the cat's disappearance and, according to The Guardian, Kadyrov's penchant for posting of, for example, "regular videos of his work-outs in the gym," also on Instagram. As well, Oliver teased Kadyrov "for his propensity" to wear T-shirts bearing the image of Russian President Vladimir Putin. After the show, Oliver posted a photo of himself holding a cat, captioned "@RKadyrov Is this your cat?"
Kadyrov responded in English, according to The New York Times along with a doctored photo of Oliver wearing a Putin T-shirt, captioned, in part, "I am tired of jokes. I want to care for cats in Chechnya. By the way, Putin is our leader."
Account suspensions
Kadyrov stated that he found his Russian-language Instagram and Facebook accounts were not working on 23 December 2017, and he never received a response from Instagram after sending a request for service support. His English-language Instagram account remained unaffected however. Kadyrov accused them of bowing to pressure from United States after he was sanctioned.
He wrote on Telegram in response, "Instagram's move, which still wants to pretend it is independent from officials of Washington is weird." He added, "They wanted to stir my indignation, but were wrong, and this is the only thing which pleases me in actions Instagram and their patrons in the White House are undertaking. I have planned already to quit the network. But I thought I could fail my friends and subscribers, as on Instagram and Facebook I have more than 4 million followers."
The Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin stated that the decision by Facebook and Instagram to suspend Kadyrov's accounts violated his rights, stating, "They are afraid of a public conversation and the truth. Such decision cannot be explained in another way… The thing is that to read bloggers in social networks one needs to be their subscribers. By deleting an account, they deprive citizens of their right to know about bloggers’ opinion and to communicate with them."
Russia's telecommunications overseer Roskomnadzor on 26 December asked Facebook to explain why they had suspended his accounts. Facebook issued a statement on 28 December that it did so after he was sanctioned by United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control as these came under trade sanctions.
Other issues
Call to quarantine proceeds of horse race
On 3 November 2009, a horse owned by Kadyrov, Mourilyan, came third in the Melbourne Cup winning about US$380,000 in prize money. The leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, immediately called for the Government of Australia to quarantine the prize money until assurances are received as to how the money will be used. Concerns had been previously raised that the Melbourne Cup could be used to launder money by overseas individuals.
Honor killings
In 2009, Kadyrov stated his approval of honor killings of seven women, based on the belief that they were engaging in adultery. In an interview with David Scott of HBO, he condoned honor killings of homosexuals in July 2017 stating, "If we have [gay] people here, I'm telling you officially their relatives won't let them be because of our faith, our mentality, customs, traditions. Even if it's punishable under the law, we would still condone it."
WikiLeaks
On 28 November 2010, a classified WikiLeaks cable named Kadyrov as a "starring guest" at some of Dagestan's most elaborate weddings, which indicates the political "Caucasus power structure" in these weddings. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
Charlie Hebdo cartoons
In January 2015, Kadyrov said he would organize protests if a Russian newspaper published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, saying "we will not allow anyone to insult the Prophet [Muhammad], even if it will cost us our lives." He also stated that Alexei Venediktov "will be brought to account" after his radio station Ekho Moskvy took a survey of readers on whether to publish the cartoons. Venediktov stated he would ask the authorities to intervene against Kadyrov's threats. During a protest rally against the cartoons attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Chechnya, he accused those backing Charlie Hebdo of using "false slogans about free speech and democracy".
After French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered by a man of Chechen descent for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in his class, Kadyrov criticized the attack, but also told people to not provoke the religious sentiments of Muslims. He also criticized French society for provoking Muslims and stated that the country must have a state institution focusing on inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations. After France's President Emmanuel Macron defended Paty's actions under right to free speech, Kadyrov on Instagram accused him of forcing people to resort to terrorism by doing so.
Support for polygamy
Kadyrov supports polygamy in Muslim-majority republics in Russia, and believes that Muslims who speak out against the practice are not true adherents to their faith. According to Kadyrov, men legally marrying more than one wife would be more honest than having many mistresses, and would resolve Russia's demographic problem. In April 2018, he stated that all Muslim men are permitted by Allah to have four wives but discouraged having the marriages officially registered. He also denied reports that polygamy would be legalised in Chechnya.
Boston Marathon bombing
After the Boston Marathon bombing, Kadyrov expressed sadness for the victims but denied the suspects had any ties to his region in a statement on his Instagram. He suggested that the suspects were products of American upbringing. Kadyrov accused the CIA of framing Dzokhar Tsarnaev on 18 March 2015, after he was handed a death sentence for the Boston Marathon Bombing and said that they could not have conducted the bombing without CIA's knowledge.
Threats to opposition politicians
On 31 January 2016, Kadyrov posted a video of Russian opposition politicians Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza in the crosshairs of a gun on his Instagram blog. In a few days, after multiple complaints, Instagram removed the video prompting Kadyrov to criticize the decision: "This is the much-boasted freedom of speech in America! You can write anything but cannot touch those American dogs, those friends of the Congress and the State Department".
Report by Ilya Yashin
Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin authored a report against Kadyrov released on 23 February 2016 during a press conference which was repeatedly interrupted by police and hecklers. He also claimed that Kadyrov had murdered Boris Nemtsov. The report titled A National Security Threat claimed that Kadyrov poses a threat to Russia. It included allegations of corruption, authoritarian rule, secret prisons, rigging votes in favour of Vladimir Putin, stealing from the country's national budget to enrich himself, enforcing Sharia law over Russian law, his lavish lifestyle, building and maintaining a personal army of about 30,000 fighters, purported ties to organised crime figures, and his involvement in politically motivated murders of journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. The report also contained 20 questions which Yashin had invited Kadyrov to answer but was refused. Kadyrov dismissed the report calling it "nothing but idle chatter" and posted it on his social network accounts before its release. His spokesman filed a request with the Russian Prosecutor General and the Investigative Committee for Yashin to be arrested for the report saying it contained slander and insults against Kadyrov.
Grozny fatwa
A conference of Islamic scholars funded by the Tabah foundation in the United Arab Emirates, was convened by Kadyrov in Grozny in late August 2016. The conference was attended by notable Islamic scholars including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb; Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shawki Allam; ex-Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa, Usama al-Azhari who is the religious adviser to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; Habib Ali al-Jifri and the mufti of Damascus Abdul Fattah al-Bizm. The conference was convened to discuss the alleged abuse of Islamic ideas to propagate extremism and to establish the criteria for determining who are the true followers of the Sunnah. The assembly of scholars issued a fatwa which declared that those who abide by the Kalam, belong to the four madhhabs and follow the path of moral self-perfection espoused by distinguished Islamic teachers, primarily the Sufi sheikhs, were the only true believers. The fatwa called the sect of Salafism as a "dangerous and erroneous contemporary sect", along with the extremist groups like Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Hizb ut-Tahrir . The conference also issued two further documents. In the first one, it appealed to President Vladimir Putin to ban Salafism and term any condemnation of "traditional Islam" as "extremism". It also proposed the fatwa be regarded as the considered opinion of "leading Russian experts" when evaluating the activity of Muslim organizations and the preaching of individual clerics. The second one issued a resolution calling for the establishment of a Council for Islamic Education and also a Council of Ulema, which would rule on who is and is not a true follower of Sunni Islam.
The ruling created a controversy, with both Islamic theologians and secular commentators condemning it, with some seeing it as a bid by Kadyrov to divide Russian Muslims into those who accept the importance he places on teachings of the Sufi brotherhoods as well as probably also what he considers as "traditional Islam" without question, and those who don't with "erroneous" views. Many of the key participants also disavowed the resolutions. Mukkadas Bibarsov, mufti of Saratov Oblast stated that the question of who was a true follower of Sunni Islam was resolved "centuries ago". He also added that the fatwa failed to take into account the crucial differences between Russia's Muslims, specifically that some Muslim communities did not follow Sufism. Liz Fuller writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty commented that the fatwa seemed to be giving permission to Kadyrov to take any action he likes to punish those whose religious views don't match with his own. Yaroslav Trofimov writing for The Wall Street Journal described it as a "new fracture emerging within Islam". Many Saudi clerics and citizens expressed outrage at the fatwa on social media. The Muslim Brotherhood expressed "deep sorrow" over the fatwa, stating that it “ignited fires of discord among Muslims around the world.”
Threats to Russian police officers
In 2015, Kadyrov ordered Chechen security forces to "shoot to kill" if they encountered police officers from other parts of Russia on the territory of the Chechen Republic. Kadyrov said: "I would like to officially state: Open fire if someone from Moscow or Stavropol—it doesn't matter where from—appears on your turf without your knowledge. We have to be reckoned with. … If you are masters of your territory, then you must control it." According to Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, "Some critics claim that Mr. Putin now fears Mr. Kadyrov because he knows any serious attempt to challenge the Chechen leader's position might lead to a third war."
Mixed martial arts tournament involving child fighters
A mixed martial arts tournament involving children was held as an "exhibition fight" on 4 October during the Grand Prix Akhmat 2016 in Grozny and broadcast on Match TV. Three of Kadyrov's sons, all of them aged under 12, fought in the tournament with Kadyrov sitting in the audience and none of the fighters wearing any protective gear. One of the fights ended with a technical knockout. Kadyrov also posted images of the bouts on his Instagram account. The event caused an outcry especially against Kadyrov allowing his children to compete in the tournament. Fedor Emelianenko, the president of Russian MMA Union, criticised the event as "inexcusable", stating that rules stipulate fighters under the age of 21 have to wear protective gear while children under the age of 12 are not allowed to compete. Vadim Finkelstein, the head of MMA promotion M-1 Global also backed Fedor's comments. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for President Putin, stated that the fact that one of the fights between the children finished with a technical knockout was “a reason for the appropriate oversight agencies to inquire about this incident.” Deputy Minister of Sports Pavel Kolobkov stated that participation of children under the age of 12 in MMA competitions was illegal while stating that the incident was being investigated. Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko also stated that the event will be investigated. MMA fighter Jeff Monson however backed the organisers stating that there was nothing wrong with it.
Several Chechen officials responded to Fedor's criticism with insults and accusations including Timur Dugazayev, general director of Akhmat MMA promotion, Member of Parliament Adam Delimkhanov as well as Kadyrov himself. The Ministry of Sports found on 18 October that Kadyrov's promotion had violated regulations. It also found that the event was actually an unlicensed show with no regulatory oversight. The promotion was directed to coordinate with the Ministry of Sports and other regulatory bodies to “prevent such irregularities in conduct” and handed a letter detailing its failure to comply with the legislation.
Comments about gays, Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions with the United States
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel in July 2017, Kadyrov denied that there had been anti-gay purges in Chechnya, while claiming that there were no gay men in Chechnya. He further stated that if there were any, they should be sent to Canada. He also said that gay people were "not human". Kadyrov also commented about Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions between the United States and Russia. He said that "America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia, we have a strong government and are a nuclear state." He also added, "Even if our government was completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed. We will put the whole world on its knees and screw it from behind."
Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar
In September 2017, Kadyrov condemned the persecution of Muslims in Myanmar and organized a rally in Grozny in support of persecuted Rohingya people. Kadyrov had pledged to "oppose Russia’s position" if it "supports" Aung San Suu Kyi's government in Myanmar.
Threats to citizens insulting someone's honor
In June 2019, Kadyrov, in an Instagram video, told residents of Dagestan to not insult Chechnya or Chechens online amidst controversy over a piece of land of the republic being labeled as belonging to Chechnya, threatening to torture whoever insulted the honor of Chechens. He also warned the people to remove any such comments, otherwise they will have to answer to the Chechen law enforcement agencies.
During a government function organized for medium and small-scale businesses in November 2019, Kadryov called for online users insulting someone's honor to be killed, arrested or intimidated per a BBC Russian Service translation. He stated in the same speech that he didn't call for targeting law-abiding citizens, but the others were "crooks, traitors, tattletales and schizophrenics of all stripes."
Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov denied the accuracy of BBC's translation, however Meduza'''s translation found that it painted an accurate picture. The speech was broadcast on a state-owned TV channel. Dmitry Peskov stated that his remarks won't be investigated by the Russian government as it was the job of the police.
Personal life
Kadyrov graduated with a degree in Law from the Makhachkala Institute of Business and Law in 2004. In 2006 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State Technical University to obtain a Candidate of Sciences degree in Economics. In 2015 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State University to obtain a Doctor of Sciences degree in Economics.The New Yorker says that Kadyrov has adopted various personalities over the years: "the merciless warrior in fatigues who leads special operations to kill anti-government rebels; the jolly Caucasus baron who spars with Mike Tyson and shows off his private zoo; the family man and observant Muslim who has banned alcohol, ordered that women wear head scarves in public buildings, and boasts that his six-year-old son has memorized the Koran." He enjoys boxing and once met with former heavyweight-boxing champion Mike Tyson.
In 1996, Kadyrov married Medni Musaevna Kadyrova. The couple are parents of twelve children. His sons Adam and Eli have earned the title of hafiz while his daughters Aishat, Khadizhat and Khutmat have earned the title of hafiza''. Khutmat and another daughter Ashura have performed together with the nasheed singer Mishary Rashid Alafasy. Khadizhat was recognised as the most gifted student in Chechnya in 2016 and qualified for participation in pan-Russian contest "Student of the Year 2016" on 20 February 2016. Medni launched her fashion line called "Firdaws" in March 2012 in Dubai. Aishat too presented her own fashion collection in March 2017 and has also taken over her mother's fashion enterprise Firdaws. She was appointed the First Deputy Culture Minister of Chechnya in September 2020 by her father.
According to a 2021 investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Kadyrov has a second wife named Fatima Khazuyeva. Kadyrov reportedly met Khazuyeva when she was fourteen years old at a 2006 beauty pageant. He reportedly has a third wife, a singer and dancer named Aminat Akhmadova.
Kadyrov is a noted collector of sports cars. He owns a Lamborghini Reventón, one of only 20 sold. He is also known for his extensive collection of Chechen daggers. On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others. When journalist Marianna Maksimovskaya asked him where the money for the live-televised celebration was coming from, he reportedly laughed and said "Allah gives it to us", before adding: "I don't know, it comes from somewhere."
See also
Natalya Estemirova
Politics of Chechnya
Kadyrovtsy
FC Akhmat Grozny
References
External links
Official website
1976 births
Living people
Anti-same-sex-marriage activists
Chechen warlords
Chechen Islamists
Deputy prime ministers of Chechnya
Russian football chairmen and investors
Heroes of the Russian Federation
Recipients of the Order of Courage
People of the Chechen wars
Heads of the Chechen Republic
People from Grozny
People sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act
Russian Muslims
Prime Ministers of Chechnya
Russian military personnel
Russian Sunni Muslims
United Russia politicians
21st-century Russian politicians
Russian Islamists
Russian people of Chechen descent
Racehorse owners and breeders
Honorary Members of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences
Chechen people
FC Akhmat Grozny
Qadiri order
Recipients of the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", 4th class | true | [
"Pregnant with Success is the debut studio album by American rapper Junglepussy. It was released on November 17, 2015. It is a follow-up to her 2014 mixtape, Satisfaction Guaranteed. The production was handled by Shy Guy, Cousin Gabriel, Matt Parad, and Dubbel Dutch.\n\nJunglepussy described it as \"an ode to my mother, to all mothers, to anyone who's ever planted a seed, to anyone who's ever created something, to anyone who's ever waited patiently for something to come into fruition.\"\n\nCritical reception\n\nAnupa Mistry of Pitchfork gave the album a 7.5 out of 10, calling it \"another reminder of how humor can bring the audience closer and form an emotional connection.\"\n\nThe album was placed at number 31 on Facts \"50 Best Albums of 2015\" list, number 12 on Spins \"50 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2015\" list, and number 37 on Rolling Stones \"40 Best Rap Albums of 2015\" list. It was also included on Respect.s \"Best Hip Hop Projects of 2015\" list and Imposes \"Best Albums of 2015\" list.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n2015 albums\nHip hop albums by American artists",
"\"Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?\" is a song written by Stevie Nicks and Keith Olsen off the 1985 album Rock a Little. The song was also released as a single in 1986, peaking at No. 60 for two weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. \n\nDuring the VH1 Storytellers series, Nicks explained that \"Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?\" was written about the death of Joe Walsh's eldest daughter, Emma Kristen, and his subsequent penning of \"Song for Emma\" for the album So What.\n\n\"Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?\" appears on the 1991 compilation album Timespace: The Best of Stevie Nicks.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReception\nMike DeGagne of AllMusic retrospectively applauded Nicks for her \"wholehearted approach\" on \"Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?\".\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n\nExternal links\n\n1986 singles\n1985 songs\nStevie Nicks songs\nSongs written by Stevie Nicks\nAtlantic Records singles\nSong recordings produced by Keith Olsen\nSongs written by Keith Olsen\nSongs in memory of deceased persons\nSongs inspired by deaths\nModern Records (1980) singles"
]
|
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"Ramzan Kadyrov",
"Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction",
"What was the chechen recovery?",
"In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%.",
"what caused the increase?",
"According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya.",
"was anyone ever arrested ?",
"These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities."
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| C_c2841d1fd68a4bc6ab19b05947755b9c_0 | what was the reconstruction? | 4 | What was the reconstruction of Chechnya? | Ramzan Kadyrov | In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%. In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently". According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit--in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which--while being registered as a charity--has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3-4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions. CANNOTANSWER | Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget | Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov (; (Q̇adar Aẋmat-khant Ramzan), ; born 5 October 1976) is a Russian and Chechen politician currently serving as the Head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly a member of the Chechen independence movement.
He is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May 2004. In February 2007, Kadyrov replaced Alu Alkhanov as president, shortly after he had turned 30, which is the minimum age for the post. He was engaged in violent power struggles with Chechen commanders Sulim Yamadayev (d. 2009) and Said-Kakiyev for overall military authority, and with Alkhanov for political authority.
Since November 2015, he has been a member of the Advisory Commission of the State Council of the Russian Federation.
Over the years, he has come under criticism from international organisations for a wide array of human rights abuses under his watch, with Human Rights Watch calling the forced disappearances and torture so widespread they constituted crimes against humanity. During his tenure, he has advocated to restrict the public lives of women, and led anti-gay purges in the Republic.
Ramzan Kadyrov has been frequently accused of involvement in the kidnapping, assassination, and torture of human rights activists, critics, and their relatives, within both Chechnya as well as in other regions of the Russian Federation and abroad, through the political use of police and military forces–– accusations that he publicly denies.
Biography
Kadyrov was born in Tsentaroy, Checheno-Ingush ASSR, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. He was the second son in Akhmat and Aimani Kadyrovs' family and their youngest child. He had an elder brother named Zelimkhan (1974 – 31 May 2004), and he has two elder sisters, Zargan (born 1971) and Zulay (born 1972). Kadyrov strove to gain the respect of his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was an imam. He claims that he always emulated his father. Akhmad had supported the call for jihad against Russians during the First Chechen War but switched sides and declared allegiance to Russia in the Second Chechen War. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union dissolved, the Chechens launched a bid for independence.
During the First Chechen War, together with his father, he fought against Russian armed forces. After the war, Ramzan was the personal driver and bodyguard of his father Akhmad, who became the separatist mufti of Chechnya.
The Kadyrovtsy militia was formed during the First Chechen War when Akhmad Kadyrov launched the jihad against Russia.
The Kadyrov family defected to the Moscow side at the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999. Since then, Kadyrov led his militia with support from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) (including service ID cards) becoming the head of the Chechen Presidential Security Service. The militia later became known as the Kadyrovtsy.
Deputy Prime Minister
After his father, the then President, was assassinated on 9 May 2004, Ramzan was appointed as the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic on 10 May 2004.
When his sister was detained by the Dagestan police in January 2005, Kadyrov and some 150 armed men drove to the Khasavyurt City Police (GOVD) building. According to the city mayor, Kadyrov's men surrounded the GOVD, forcing its duty officers against a wall, and assaulted them, after which they left the building with Zulay Kadyrova, "victoriously shooting in the air."
In August 2005, Kadyrov declared that "Europe's largest mosque" would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown. He also claimed that Chechnya is the "most peaceful place in Russia" and in a few years it would also be "the wealthiest and the most peaceful" place in the world. He said that the war was already over with only 150 "bandits" remaining (as opposed to the official figures of 700 to 2,000 rebel fighters), and that thanks to his father, 7,000 separatists had already defected to the Russian side since 1999. When responding to a question on how he is going to "avenge the murder of his father", Kadyrov said:
He remained the First Deputy Prime Minister until November 2005.
Acting Prime Minister
Following a car accident in November 2005, in which Chechnya's prime minister Sergey Abramov was injured, Kadyrov was appointed as the caretaker prime minister on 18 November 2005. He immediately proceeded to implement elements of Sharia law, such as declaring a ban on gambling and alcohol production.
In February 2006, responding to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons, he accused the Danes of "spying" and being "pro-terrorist". He also banned Danish citizens from entering Chechnya, effectively banning activity of the Danish Refugee Council, the largest NGO working in the region. Kadyrov is quoted as saying, "That cartoonist needs to be buried alive." He was eventually pressed to overturn this decision by Moscow, a rare example of federal intervention in Kadyrov's rule in the republic.
Prime Minister
On 1 March 2006, Sergey Abramov resigned from the position of prime minister and told Itar-Tass news agency that he did so "on the condition that Ramzan Kadyrov lead the Chechen government." This was followed by a decree of Kadyrov forcing women to wear headscarves; he also rejected a federal appropriation of the republic's budget, demanding more money, and called for all federal forces but the border guards to be withdrawn.
Kadyrov was appointed as the Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic by Alkhanov on 4 March 2006. Shortly after taking office, Kadyrov approved a project to erect a presidential palace on a plot by the Sunzha River in ruined downtown Grozny. The project, which was also to include a five-star hotel and recreational facilities, was estimated to cost around 1.5 billion rubles ($54 million USD) to build. Later, Kadyrov called for refugee camps scattered across Chechnya to be closed down, calling the refugees "international spies who are interested in stoking conflict between Chechnya and Russia, who are seeking to destabilise the situation in our region". Reuters quoted him as saying that "liquidating the refugee camps will allow us to uncover spies who are working for foreign intelligence services". His cousin Odes Baysultanov was appointed to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister by Alkhanov on 6 March 2006 after being unanimously approved by the Chechen Parliament.
On 5 June 2006, Speaker of the Chechen People's Assembly Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov said at a press conference in Moscow that "there is no alternative" to Kadyrov for the presidency; Kadyrov has "exclusive awards in combat, and has made achievements in improving the peaceful life and in human rights protection. Who could replace him at this stage? Nobody," he said. Later that year, Umar Dzhabrailov, Chechnya's representative in the Federation Council and a close ally of Kadyrov's, urged Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov to initiate a measure calling on Kadyrov to become the republic's president, thereby replacing Alu Alkhanov. The following week, several Russian newspapers reported that a worsening security situation in Chechnya was lessening the likelihood that Kadyrov would replace Alu Alkhanov as the republic's president. Other media, however, reported that Kadyrov continued to strengthen his position at Alkhanov's expense. He was also elected as the Chair of the Chechen Peoples' Assembly in late-October 2006.
On 6 December 2006, Kadyrov said that he would seek the prosecution of the commanders of federal military units responsible for the death or disappearance of civilians in Chechnya (specifically Major General Aleksandr Studenikin). In addition, Kadyrov said the war in Chechnya was unleashed not by the Chechen people but by the Russian leadership. Kadyrov's comments may have represented his government's increasing unhappiness with certain figures in Moscow, who were said to be blocking his elevation to the post of Chechen president. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
On 5 February 2007, Kadyrov said he did not aspire to become the Chechen president; however, he criticised Alkhanov. Kadyrov also claimed the war in Chechnya was ultimately finished, with "all informal armed groups eliminated". Alkhanov, for his part, criticised "the cult of personality and idealisation of one person", a clear reference to Kadyrov, whose enormous portraits are prominently displayed in Grozny.
President of the Chechen Republic
On 15 February 2007, Putin signed a decree removing Alkhanov and installing Kadyrov as Chechen's acting president. On 2 March 2007, following Putin's nomination of Kadyrov as Chechen president, the Chechen parliament approved the nomination. In the following days, serious changes took place in the administrative setup of the republic, affecting both the top- and middle-ranking officials. Former deputy prime minister Odes Baysultanov (a cousin of Kadyrov) was elevated to the vacant post of prime minister. Critics allege that Kadyrov is actively building his own "vertical of power" in the republic, and encouraging nepotism by placing men of his own family(Kadyrov) in all the leading and important positions.
A Russian daily, Gazeta, reported that according to a poll conducted by the independent Levada Center, only 33 percent of Russians believe that Kadyrov can be trusted, while 35 percent believed that he cannot. Asked whether they thought Kadyrov could normalise the situation in Chechnya and end the bloodshed there, 31 percent said yes and 38 percent said no.
On 14 March 2007, Kadyrov said that human rights abuses were "a thing of the past" in his republic, rejecting new charges of torture made by the Council of Europe. Two days later he accused the federal authorities of torturing detainees. On 19 March 2007, Kadyrov vowed to put an end to all remaining guerilla activity in Chechnya within two months. On 5 April 2007, Kadyrov was sworn in as President of Chechnya. He appointed his maternal cousin Odes Baysultanov as the Prime Minister of the republic on 10 April.
After the car-bomb attack on Yunus-bek Yevkurov, president of the neighbouring Republic of Ingushetia on 22 June 2009, Kadyrov claimed that the Kremlin had ordered him to fight insurgents there, and during his subsequent visit to the republic on 24 June pledged ruthless vengeance.
In late December 2009, Kadyrov claimed that remaining rebels were getting financed by "The West"; "I officially declare this: those who destroyed the Soviet Union, those who want to destroy the Russian Federation, they stand behind them". He also suggested that Russia should attack Georgia and Ukraine "It's Russia's private affliction; why should we always suffer if we can eradicate this for good?". In early August 2010, Kadyrov had claimed that there were only 70 Islamist militants left in Chechnya. In the same month, he proposed changing the title of President of the Chechen Republic to Head of the Chechen Republic. On 12 August, he also called upon presidents of all North Caucasus republics to petition the State Duma to change their titles, stating that there should only be one president in Russia. The Chechen parliament unanimously approved this change on 2 September. However, Speaker of the Chechen Parliament Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov stated on 4 September that the title will be retained until the end of Kadyrov's term in April 2011.
In February 2011, he invited the players of Brazil's 2002 FIFA World Cup winning team to play a match against a Chechen football team led by Kadyrov. The Brazilian team was named as Brazil XI. In addition, Ruud Gullit was hired by Kadyrov to train FC Terek Grozny.
Attempts at consolidation of the Chechen nation
As reported by the Caucasian Knot, an independent human rights resource, on 5 February 2009, "in the course of his meeting in Grozny with Ramzan Ampukaev, representative of the Chechen Diaspora in Europe, Ramzan Kadyrov invited former militants, now living in Europe, to come back home":
"Now, the situation in the republic has stabilized, we witness a steady economic growth, and there's no sense for people to leave. And those who are already abroad, can always come back. We'll help them in every possible way," said Mr. Kadyrov. "All sorts of Emirs and former participants of illegal armed formations, who are now in Europe and whose actions were not aggravated by bloody crimes, have two alternatives: either to come back and serve for the welfare of their homeland, or stay there until the end of their days."
Tsentoroy and Chechen Parliament attacks
In 2010, two large scale attacks were carried out by Chechen insurgents, one in Kadyrov's home-village Tsentoroy and the other on Chechen Parliament in Grozny. The assault on Tsentoroy which occurred on 29 August is considered to have "shattered" the image of Kadyrov's unshakeable rule in Chechnya, as it was the first time in six years that his seemingly impregnable village had come under attack. On 2 September, Kadyrov announced a reward of more than $300,000 for information about each of the insurgency leaders involved in the operation, which Chechen commentators interpreted as an indicator of the government's weakness. Kadyrov also tightened his control over information coming from Tsentoroy by not allowing any of the village's 5,000 inhabitants to leave in the days after the attack; the citizenry were also allegedly under the threat of death not to talk about the siege or the damage inflicted by the rebels. The attack on the Chechen parliament was carried out by three Chechen rebels on 19 October 2010. Kadyrov dressed in a parade uniform attended a meeting that was held a few hours after all the buildings of the parliament were declared cleared by the special forces. During the meeting, he apologised to the politicians who escaped unhurt from the attack. Kadyrov vowed to intensify the fight against militants in the republic, calling them "bandits". He also blamed the United Kingdom and Poland saying they were "harbouring criminals. Why do they shield bandits who have shed blood where there is western democracy? Where is the justice? ... Sooner or later Zakayev, Gakayev, Umarov, Vadalov and other criminals will get what they deserve ... I have no doubt that it was the drunk and alcoholic Akhmed Zakayev and his backers in London and other western capitals. I want to say that they will not achieve anything. The Chechen republic is still standing. It is a peaceful and stable region."
Head of the Chechen Republic
Kadyrov was nominated by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on 28 February 2011 and was unanimously elected for a second term by the Chechen Parliament on 5 March 2011. After his election, he stated that he was going to continue the current course of reviving the republic's economy and society.
On 8 March, he captained a Chechen football team which included current players of FC Terek Grozny, former players of Soviet Union national football team and former German midfielder Lothar Matthaeus in a match against the team Brazil XI which included ex-Brazilian footballers like Romario, Dunga, Bebeto and Cafu. Kadyrov scored twice during the match but his team lost 6–4 to the Brazilian side. Kadyrov said that he had organised the match to show that Chechnya had recovered from years of separatist conflict. He also said that the Brazilians weren't paid to appear but came out of goodwill and in return for a donation to flood victims in Brazil.
Kadyrov was sworn in as head of the republic on 5 April 2011. In November 2012, he visited Azerbaijan to sign intergovernmental agreements. In December 2012, he ordered the closure of the newspaper Kadyrov's Path after one of its reporters asked Putin a question about the violence once focused in Chechnya spreading to other republics and followed it up by asking about the fate of a local radio station. Kadyrov had reportedly taken a disliking to the question asked by the reporter to Putin.
Kadyrov termed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's ouster as a "coup d'etat" and a deliberate attempt to exert pressure on Russia through Ukraine, however at the same time placed the blame on Yanukovych for the situation in Ukraine. On 28 February 2014, he affirmed his readiness to dispatch peacekeepers and a consignment of humanitarian aid to Crimea.
After the 2014 Grozny bombing, in which ISIL's hand was suspected, he said that he might block internet in Chechnya as anyone could easily find and listen to a sermon by a jihadist. After Kadyrov went on a tirade against ISIL on Instagram for threatening Russia, ISIL commander Omar al-Shishani put a $5 million bounty on him.
On 26 May 2015, he announced that he was going to star in a Hollywood thriller titled Whoever Doesn't Understand Will Get It which will be directed by a director of famous Hollywood films and also feature global film-stars. Kadyrov in July 2015 denied that ISIL had any territory in Chechnya and claimed that they never will. During an interview in October 2015, he suggested that Putin should send Chechen special forces to Syria claiming they will wipe out ISIL in weeks. On 3 December, he promised revenge against ISIL for beheading of Khasiev. On 8 February 2016, he claimed that Chechen special forces had infiltrated ISIL cells.
Kadyrov announced on 27 February 2016 that he would step down at the end of his second term, which was set to expire on 5 April. However, he later decided to run in the elections that were to be held that September. Putin appointed him as the acting head of Chechnya until the elections in a decree signed on 25 March.
Kadyrov launched his reality show titled The Team with the first episode being aired by Channel One on 30 June. People from across Russia were invited by Kadyrov to register for the contest. The winner of the contest will go on to become head of Chechnya's Agency for Strategic Development.
On 18 September 2016, Kadyrov was re-elected with nearly 98% of the vote. Philip Varychenko, a native of Düsseldorf, was chosen as the winner of Kadyrov's reality show on 22 November and was appointed as a government aide. Kadyrov visited Saudi Arabia on 27 November where he met the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. During the meeting, they discussed Russia–Saudi Arabia relations as well as issues of common interest. He also visited the United Arab Emirates on the same day and met Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. The two discussed friendship, cooperation and strengthening ties. During his visits, he praised King Salman of Saudi Arabia for his "leadership of the Muslim world and efforts to combat extremism".
On 28 November, he stated that veterans of American special forces would not be allowed to train security and intelligence personnel at a "tactical city" in Gudermes because "they weren't as good as Russian special forces and there were sanctions against all official structures from the United States." On 29 November, he claimed in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat that only a few dozen Chechens were fighting with ISIL, adding that most of them grew up in Western Europe. He also stated that measures taken by Chechen authorities had been successful in bringing back many young recruits before they reached Syria.
During an interview aired on 27 November 2017, Kadyrov stated that he was ready to resign as Head of the Chechen Republic, calling it his "dream" as he found the responsibility to be "too heavy". He announced on 5 December that no Chechen athletes will participate under a neutral flag at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
After an attack on the Church of Archangel Michael in Grozny on 19 May 2018, Kadyrov stated that he had personally overseen the operation to eliminate the attackers. On 26 September, he signed an agreement with Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the Head of Ingushetia, resolving the border dispute between the two Russian republics. The agreement seen as grossly unfair to Ingushestia ignited widespread protests eventually leading to resignation of Yevkurov on 24 June 2019.
Kadyrov was given the rank of major general in July 2020, through an executive order of the Russian President. He added on his blog that he had been transferred from Ministry of Internal Affairs to the National Guard of Russia.
COVID-19 pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, Kadyrov initially in March dismissed the spread of the disease as nothing serious. Later, Chechnya imposed strict measures to curb the spread of coronavirus after it first emerged in the republic. In an interview to Caucasian Knot, Kadyrov purportedly stated that infected people violating self-quarantine should be killed. People accused of spreading rumors have also been forced to admit their guilt and apologize on live television broadcasts by Kadyrov, though human rights organizations have claimed they were pressured.
In April 2020, Kadyrov announced imposition of even stricter measures in Chechnya to curb the spread of the coronavirus. In addition to a night curfew, the government also sealed off all transportation to regions outside the republic. Kadyrov meanwhile also denied that force was being used against those who defied the restrictions. After the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin criticized heads of Russian regions for overstepping the extent of their powers with the restrictions they imposed, Kadyrov commented that while he did not know if Mishustin referred to Chechnya, goods as well as entry into the republic was not barred. However, entry of non-Chechens into the republic would be banned to curb the spread of the disease.
On 15 May 2020, Kadyrov in a live broadcast on the state-run Grozny TV stated that medical workers protesting over lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) must be sacked after one such protest occurred in Gudermes, claiming the republic had enough PPE. On 20 May, Kadyrov was reportedly flown to Moscow after developing "flu-like symptoms", suspected to be COVID-19. On 26 May however, Kadyrov attended a televised meeting in Grozny for taking steps against the coronavirus. The next day he stated that he had a right to be sick, without confirming if he had fallen ill. He also dismissed reports of using a catheter, stating he had a right to use it to boost his immunity.
Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction
In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%.
In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently".
According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit—in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which—while being registered as a charity—has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3–4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions.
In 2020 Proekt.media published an in-depth analysis of business operations of Kadyrov and Adam Delimkhanov who are allegedly running multi-million dollar businesses in Moscow through a proxy provided by businessman Pavel Krotov.
2009 assassination attempt
An assassination attempt on Kadyrov and a parliament member Adam Delimkhanov was averted on 23 October 2009, by the police. Chechen Deputy interior minister Roman Edilov said the police shot dead the driver of a speeding car loaded with a 200-litre tank after firing warning shots shortly before Kadyrov was to arrive at a construction site. The driver of the car was later identified as a militant leader (so-called Urus-Martan emir Beslan Bashtayev). Said-Emi Khizriev, who played a role in organising the attack, was killed by Russian police who tried to arrest him in the Michurin village in Grozny. Khizriev planned and took part in explosions at two gas stations in Gudermes in the spring of the previous year, as well as in an armed attack at a sport club in the city.
Accusations of human rights abuses
Kadyrov has been personally implicated in several instances of torture and murder. A number of Chechens opposed to Kadyrov have been assassinated abroad, and several witnesses (including Artur Kurmakaev and Ruslan Khalidov) report the existence of a 300 name "Murder List". Chechens who have been murdered, where Kadyrov's involvement is suspected, include Movladi Baisarov and Ruslan Yamadayev (both Moscow); Sulim Yamadayev (Dubai); Gazhi Edilsutanov, Islam Dzahnibekov, Ali Osaev (Istanbul); and Umar Israilov (Vienna).
Kadyrov stated in December 2009 that he had personally helped many of the murder victims and their families and was not their enemy. "I don't want to kill, who did I fight? I fought terrorists. Who did I protect? I protected the whole of Russia so that people in Moscow or St. Petersburg...could live in peace. They accuse me of killing women and children. It's not true."
A mutinied commander, Movladi Baisarov, said that Kadyrov "acts like a medieval tyrant. If someone tells the truth about what is going on, it's like signing one's own death warrant. Ramzan is a law unto himself. He can do anything he likes. He can take any woman and do whatever he pleases with her. (...) Ramzan acts with total impunity. I know of many people executed on his express orders and I know exactly where they were buried". On 18 November 2006, Baisarov was killed in an ambush by members of Kadyrov's police on Moscow's Leninsky Prospekt, about two kilometres from the Kremlin.
On 13 November 2006, Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper on torture in Chechnya that it had prepared for the 37th session of the United Nations Committee Against Torture. The paper covered torture by personnel of the Second Operational Investigative Bureau (ORB-2), torture by units under the effective command of Kadyrov, torture in secret detentions and the continuing "forced disappearances". According to HRW, torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya". In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not even attempt to conceal their identity. Based on extensive research, HRW concluded in 2005 that forced disappearances in Chechnya are so widespread and systematic that they constitute crimes against humanity.
Anna Politkovskaya, a veteran Russian reporter (murdered in 2006; case unsolved as of ) who reported extensively from Chechnya, claimed that she had received a grainy video footage shot on a mobile phone of a man identical in appearance to Kadyrov, and said that "the clips were the murders of federal servicemen by the Kadyrovites, and also kidnappings directed by Kadyrov. These are very serious things; on the basis of this evidence a criminal case and investigation should follow. This could allow this person to be brought to justice, something he has long richly deserved." She was allegedly working on an article revealing human rights abuses and regular incidents of torture in Chechnya at the time of her murder. Some observers alleged that Kadyrov or his men were possibly behind the assassination.
On 23 October 2006, a criminal case was registered on the basis of the video tape frames published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Anna Politkovskaya's article. Sergey Sokolov, deputy editor-in-chief of the paper, told the Echo Moskvy Radio that it can be clearly seen in the video as to how "Kadyrov's military forces are beating federal soldiers" with participation of "a man looking like Ramzan Kadyrov". On 7 October 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in an elevator in her apartment in Moscow.
German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), which branded Kadyrov a "war criminal", has alleged that up to 75 percent of recent incidents of murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's paramilitary forces.
The Memorial group investigator stated in its report: "Considering the evidence we have gathered, we have no doubt that most of the crimes which are being committed now in Chechnya are the work of Kadyrov's men. There is also no doubt in our minds that Kadyrov has personally taken part in beating and torturing people. What they are doing is pure lawlessness. To make matters worse, they also go after people who are innocent, whose names were given by someone being tortured to death. He and his henchmen spread fear and terror in Chechnya. (...) They travel by night as death squads, kidnapping civilians, who are then locked in a torture chamber, raped and murdered".
According to the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, many illegal places of detention exist in the Chechen Republic; most of them are run by Kadyrovites. In Tsentaroy (Khosi-Yurt), where the Kadyrovite headquarters is located, there are at least two illegal prisons functioning. One consists of concrete bunkers or pillboxes, where kidnapped relatives of armed Chechen fighters are held hostage while the second prison in Tsentaroy is evidently located in the yard—or in immediate vicinity—of the house of Kadyrov.
The Kadyrovites are often accused of working as a death squad against Kadyrov's enemies. Kadyrov is rumoured to own a private prison in his stronghold of Tsentaroy, his home village south-east of Grozny. Fields around Tsentaroy are allegedly mined and all access routes are blocked by checkpoints. On 2 May 2006, representatives of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) alleged that they were prevented from entering the fortress.
A video leaked out in which armed men, loyal to Kadyrov, displayed the severed head of a Chechen guerrilla (who was killed in July 2006) for public display in the village of Kurchaloi, marking the brutality of his forces. They mounted the head on a pipe, together with blood-stained trousers and put a cigarette on him. It was displayed for at least a day as they came back a day later to record it again. On 21 September 2005, a similar incident occurred, as published by Memorial as well as Kavkazky Uzel which described "shocking details" of a special operation conducted by forces loyal to Kadyrov.
On 1 March 2007, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group rights organisation, stated that Kadyrov was "to blame for kidnappings of many innocent people. Their bodies were found later with signs of torture."
Umar Israilov was assassinated in Vienna on 13 January 2009. Israilov was a former Kadyrov bodyguard, who cooperated with The New York Times, extensively detailing abuses committed by Kadyrov and his associates. Israilov had told Austrian authorities in 2008 that he had been threatened by an agent sent by Kadyrov to drop his lawsuit against the Chechen leader at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. On 27 April 2010, the Austrian prosecutor's office announced that they believed Kadyrov had ordered the kidnapping of Israilov and Israilov had been murdered while attempting to escape. According to the investigation, there was evidence that Otto Kaltenbrunner (adopted name of Ramzan Edilov), one of the suspected kidnappers, had been in contact with Kadyrov personally.
On 15 July 2009, Natalia Estemirova, a member of Memorial society, who investigated the alleged abuses by government-backed militias in Chechnya, was abducted and shot to death. Memorial's chairman Oleg Petrovich Orlov accused Kadyrov of being behind the murder, and claimed that Kadyrov had openly threatened her by saying: "Yes, my arms are up to the elbows in blood. And I am not ashamed of that. I have killed and will kill bad people". Kadyrov denied any involvement in the killing and promised to investigate the killing personally. He condemned the killers, and in response to Orlov's accusations, said: "You are not a prosecutor or a judge therefore your claims about my guilt are not ethical, to put it mildly, and are insulting to me. I am sure that you have to think about my rights before declaring for everyone to hear that I am guilty of Estemirova's death." It was later reported that Kadyrov would be suing Memorial for defamation and slander, targeting Orlov personally with his complaint.
Memorial said in a statement on 19 August 2014 that when Kadyrov had lost his mobile phone during a wedding ceremony on 16 August, the police questioned thousands of people who had attended the wedding into early hours of the next morning in an attempt to find it.
A man who criticised local officials and apparently Kadyrov in a YouTube appeal to the Russian President became a target of many threats due to which he had to flee to the neighboring republic of Dagestan. In May 2016, his house was burnt down by a group of masked men and his family was dragged out, put in a car and were thrown under a bridge. His wife also stated that they threatened the other residents with burning down their houses as well if they reported about the matter to anyone. Later, the Chechen police cordoned off his village in order to hunt him down. Kadyrov's spokesman denied these reports were true. The complainant later publicly apologised to Kadyrov and accused the media of distorting his remarks in his video complaint. He again fled to Dagestan in November 2016. According to human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, he had to flee after Chechnya's Deputy Interior Minister Apti Alaudinov personally threatened to kill him.
After Memorial's Chechnya head Oyub Titiev was arrested in January 2018 over drug possession, Oyub's supporters claimed the charges were fake and were made-up by the Chechen authorities to suppress criticism of Kadyrov. Kadyrov called Oyub a "drug addict" while criticising those working with human rights activists and warned them off from working in his region.
On 30 January 2020, Imran Aliev, an anti-Kadyrov blogger, was murdered in a hotel in Lille. French authorities have identified the alleged killer as a hitman having connections with the Chechen leader and who had travelled with Aliev in a train from Belgium to France.
Tumso Abdurakhmanov, a dissident Chechen blogger, was attacked in February 2020, but managed to overpower the assailant, who claimed he had been sent by Moscow. Swedish prosecutors stated that the Chechen government was suspected of being involved in the attack. Dagens Nyheter reported on the trial in November, saying the attacker admitted that he was sent by the Chechen government, but had planned to fail. Another arrested suspect denied her own involvement.
On the evening of 20 January 2022, Zarema Yangulbayeva (), the wife of Saidi Yangulbaev, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Chechnya, was abducted in Nizhny Novgorod and taken to Chechnya for interrogation. A day later, she was charged with assaulting a police officer. Kadyrov said the former judge's family members would either be in prison or underground and asked the Supreme Court of Russia to "kick out" Yangulbaev from the reserve and "erase his name from the history of the judicial body". Yangulbaev lost his position as a judge in 2015, saying he was forced to do so. Yangulbayeva is the mother of a Chechen human rights activist and former lawyer for the Committee for the Prevention of Torture NGO.
Rounding up, torture and execution of gay men
Kadyrov has previously encouraged extrajudicial killings of homosexual men by family members as an alternative to law enforcement – in some cases, gay men in prison have been released early specifically to enable their murder by relatives.
In April 2017, international media reported that gay men in Chechnya were being arrested, detained and tortured as part of a region-wide pogrom. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on 5 May that he would personally ask the Russian Prosecutor General and Interior Ministry to help Kremlin rights ombudswoman Tatyana Moskalkova check the reported abuse. UK Deputy Foreign Secretary Sir Alan Duncan told the UK Parliament he had been informed of alleged plans to eliminate Chechnya's gay community by the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which commenced on 26 May 2017.
Chechnya has denied the reports, with its interior minister calling the allegations an "April Fools' joke". Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov rejected the allegations and described the report in the Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, as "absolute lies and disinformation", basing his denial on the claim that "you cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic. If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn't need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning." Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also said that there had been no evidence found to support the allegations, adding that he had no reason to doubt Kadyrov's claims that no one under his rule has been persecuted for their sexual orientation.
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports aired on 18 July, Kadyrov said, "We don't have those kind of people here. We don't have any gays. If there are any take them to Canada. Praise be to God. Take them far from us so we don't have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them."
Asked about the accusations of systematic torture, Kadyrov said, "They made it up. They are devils. They are for sale. They are subhuman. God damn them for slandering us."
Sanctions
On 20 December 2017, the United States imposed sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on five Russian nationals including Kadyrov, accusing him of personal involvement in repression, torture and murder. U.S. officials accused him of heading "an administration involved in disappearances and extrajudicial killings," and that one or more of his political opponents were killed at his direction. He was added to United States Department of the Treasury's blacklist which also included a Chechen security official Ayub Kataev along with three other Russian individuals for their criminal involvement in a corruption case uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky.
In response, Kadyrov mocked the sanctions on his Instagram account. "A sleepless night is waiting for me." He further stated, "I can be proud that I'm out of favor with the special services of the USA," and added, "In fact, the USA cannot forgive me for dedicating my whole life to the fight against foreign terrorists among which there are bastards of America's special services."
President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the sanctions "illegal" and "unfriendly" stating, "We consider these sanctions illegal, we consider them unfriendly, and we do not agree with them." He also stated that it was highly probable that Russia would retaliate by accusing U.S. officials or citizens of rights violations and banning them from the country.
Further sanctions were added on 20 July 2020, with United States Secretary of State accusing him of increasing abuses on civilians during the COVID-19 pandemic. His immediate family were also sanctioned. The sanctions also ban him, his wife and two of his daughters from traveling to the United States. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova told Sputnik that they will try to impose retaliatory sanctions. Kadyrov meanwhile posted a picture of himself along with firearms, saying, "Pompeo, we accept the fight! What comes next will be more interesting."
Threats to journalists
In 2004, Kadyrov had a conversation with the Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. One of his assistants said to her, "Someone ought to have shot you back in Moscow, right on the street, like they do in your Moscow". Ramzan then repeated after him, "You're an enemy. To be shot...." He is alleged by some observers to be behind her murder.
On 13 April 2020, Kadyrov threatened the journalist Elena Milashina on Instagram for her news article in Novaya Gazeta about Chechnya's coronavirus lockdown, stating it was "defamatory". He also criticized the federal authorities for not taking any action saying, "If you want us to commit a crime and become criminals, just say so! One [of us] will take on this responsibility and serve his time, as required by law." On Telegram, he later labeled her newspaper "anti-Russian" and a "foreign agent", also claiming it stereotyped Chechens.
Milashina had also covered Chechnya's gay purges and had been allegedly attacked on 6 February 2020. She accused the Chechen authorities of orchestrating the attack. Over 100 Russian celebrities and human rights activists, in response to Kadyrov's online threats, called upon the federal government to protect Milashina. Novaya Gazeta was made to delete Milashina's article from its website by the Office of the Prosecutor General of Russia, which claimed it was fake news and created a threat to the lives of citizens. Peskov dismissed Kadyrov's threats as an emotional response, saying everyone was on edge due to the coronavirus pandemic. Human Rights Watch criticized Peskov's reaction, stating it was "like a stark green light to Chechen officials to act on their threats."
On 21 April 2020, the US government funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty stated that it had complained to Russian authorities after Kadyrov had threatened to punish their North Caucasus bureau chief Aslan Doukaev over an article against his government's restrictive coronavirus lockdown measures against farmers in an online video.
The ambassador of United States to Russia, John J. Sullivan, condemned Kadyrov's threats against Milashina and Aslan Doukaev, stating that freedom of press was a pillar of democracy. In a joint statement, French Human Rights Ambassador-at-Large François Croquette and the German Commissioner for Human Rights Policy Bärbel Kofler called Kadyrov's threats against Milashina unacceptable and urged Russia to investigate.
Kadydov had personally warned to punish the Georgian journalist Giorgi Gabunia in June 2020, after he had insulted President Vladimir Putin on-air. The State Security Service of Georgia announced the arrest of a Russian citizen on 15 June for an assassination attempt on Gabunia. Georgian media and Gabunia's boss later claimed the assassin was sent by Kadyrov, who denied the allegations and said that if he had sent someone to kill, they would have succeeded. Kadyrov called Gabunia his enemy and said that he should beg for forgiveness by getting down on his knees, otherwise he would continue to remain one. Georgian authorities have neither confirmed nor denied the allegations against Kadyrov.
Social media
Networks
The number of subscribers to Kadyrov's social networks in 2016 was more than three million people, including three million followers of his Instagram account, according to the Chechen leader's press service. It said that he had 500,000 followers on the Russian VK social network, 760,860 on Facebook, 331,000 on Twitter and 5,447 on LiveJournal. Besides his Instagram postings, it was said that he had also made almost 5,000 on Twitter and 2,300 on VK. The Russian News Agency TASS said that Kadyrov had been "recognized as the most quoted Russian blogger."
In August 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kadyrov had posted nearly 8,000 pictures on Instagram, which made him the online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service's "most prolific political strongman."
The New York Times called Kadyrov's Instagram account "bizarre if strangely compelling", and Newsweek said it was "flashy." In a 2015 article, The New York Times said that Kadyrov was "Instagram-addicted."
The Russian programme director of Human Rights Watch said in an October 2016 article in The Guardian that "even the mildest criticism on social media [is] ruthlessly punished through unlawful, punitive detention, enforced disappearances, cruel and degrading treatment, death threats, threats against family members, and physical abuse of family members." She said that a social worker from a small town in Chechnya made a WhatsApp recording that went viral among Chechen users "imploring" Kadyrov "to look into the plight of ordinary people pushed below the poverty line" by local officials. The article stated that the woman, with her husband, "found herself hauled into the studio of Grozny TV, the state television and radio broadcaster" to face Kadyrov in person, "to apologise publicly for her lies." A "severe and sweeping repression by the local authorities is designed to remind the Chechen public of Kadyrov's total control," the article claimed.
WhatsApp lecture
In May 2015, Kadyrov gave a stern televised lecture to a group of Chechen men and women who were accused of using the WhatsApp messaging service to comment on the impending marriage of local police chief to a teenage girl some three decades younger than him. The wedding had been widely discussed across Russia on reports that the young woman, Kheda Goylabiyeva, was being coerced into marriage with the chief, Nazhud Guchigov.
"Behave like Chechens", Kadyrov was reported as telling the assemblage of about a dozen people standing in the marbled courtyard of a building that seemed to be his government palace. "Honor of the family is the most important thing. Don't write such things any more. You, men, keep your women away from WhatsApp." In its coverage of the incident, The New York Times reported:
"Lock them in, do not let them go out, and they will not post anything", Mr. Kadyrov said in a video to a sheepish group of men and women who kept their arms folded across their chests and their eyes firmly on the ground during the harangue.
In December 2015, a female Chechen social worker criticised Kadyrov in an audio message posted on WhatsApp, after her boss tried to force her to put aside some money as collateral for her next month's payment. Three days after posting the message, she appeared on Grozny TV along with her husband, where she was publicly berated by Kadyrov as well as parliament speaker Daudov, presidential administration head Islam Kadyrov and her boss. The couple apologised on live television for her message.
John Oliver
In May 2016, Kadyrov engaged in a brief Instagram dispute with US television host John Oliver.
He had posted a message on Instagram asking for help in finding his cat, which had gone astray. The posting led Oliver to make a five-minute segment on HBO's Last Week Tonight dealing with the cat's disappearance and, according to The Guardian, Kadyrov's penchant for posting of, for example, "regular videos of his work-outs in the gym," also on Instagram. As well, Oliver teased Kadyrov "for his propensity" to wear T-shirts bearing the image of Russian President Vladimir Putin. After the show, Oliver posted a photo of himself holding a cat, captioned "@RKadyrov Is this your cat?"
Kadyrov responded in English, according to The New York Times along with a doctored photo of Oliver wearing a Putin T-shirt, captioned, in part, "I am tired of jokes. I want to care for cats in Chechnya. By the way, Putin is our leader."
Account suspensions
Kadyrov stated that he found his Russian-language Instagram and Facebook accounts were not working on 23 December 2017, and he never received a response from Instagram after sending a request for service support. His English-language Instagram account remained unaffected however. Kadyrov accused them of bowing to pressure from United States after he was sanctioned.
He wrote on Telegram in response, "Instagram's move, which still wants to pretend it is independent from officials of Washington is weird." He added, "They wanted to stir my indignation, but were wrong, and this is the only thing which pleases me in actions Instagram and their patrons in the White House are undertaking. I have planned already to quit the network. But I thought I could fail my friends and subscribers, as on Instagram and Facebook I have more than 4 million followers."
The Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin stated that the decision by Facebook and Instagram to suspend Kadyrov's accounts violated his rights, stating, "They are afraid of a public conversation and the truth. Such decision cannot be explained in another way… The thing is that to read bloggers in social networks one needs to be their subscribers. By deleting an account, they deprive citizens of their right to know about bloggers’ opinion and to communicate with them."
Russia's telecommunications overseer Roskomnadzor on 26 December asked Facebook to explain why they had suspended his accounts. Facebook issued a statement on 28 December that it did so after he was sanctioned by United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control as these came under trade sanctions.
Other issues
Call to quarantine proceeds of horse race
On 3 November 2009, a horse owned by Kadyrov, Mourilyan, came third in the Melbourne Cup winning about US$380,000 in prize money. The leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, immediately called for the Government of Australia to quarantine the prize money until assurances are received as to how the money will be used. Concerns had been previously raised that the Melbourne Cup could be used to launder money by overseas individuals.
Honor killings
In 2009, Kadyrov stated his approval of honor killings of seven women, based on the belief that they were engaging in adultery. In an interview with David Scott of HBO, he condoned honor killings of homosexuals in July 2017 stating, "If we have [gay] people here, I'm telling you officially their relatives won't let them be because of our faith, our mentality, customs, traditions. Even if it's punishable under the law, we would still condone it."
WikiLeaks
On 28 November 2010, a classified WikiLeaks cable named Kadyrov as a "starring guest" at some of Dagestan's most elaborate weddings, which indicates the political "Caucasus power structure" in these weddings. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
Charlie Hebdo cartoons
In January 2015, Kadyrov said he would organize protests if a Russian newspaper published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, saying "we will not allow anyone to insult the Prophet [Muhammad], even if it will cost us our lives." He also stated that Alexei Venediktov "will be brought to account" after his radio station Ekho Moskvy took a survey of readers on whether to publish the cartoons. Venediktov stated he would ask the authorities to intervene against Kadyrov's threats. During a protest rally against the cartoons attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Chechnya, he accused those backing Charlie Hebdo of using "false slogans about free speech and democracy".
After French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered by a man of Chechen descent for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in his class, Kadyrov criticized the attack, but also told people to not provoke the religious sentiments of Muslims. He also criticized French society for provoking Muslims and stated that the country must have a state institution focusing on inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations. After France's President Emmanuel Macron defended Paty's actions under right to free speech, Kadyrov on Instagram accused him of forcing people to resort to terrorism by doing so.
Support for polygamy
Kadyrov supports polygamy in Muslim-majority republics in Russia, and believes that Muslims who speak out against the practice are not true adherents to their faith. According to Kadyrov, men legally marrying more than one wife would be more honest than having many mistresses, and would resolve Russia's demographic problem. In April 2018, he stated that all Muslim men are permitted by Allah to have four wives but discouraged having the marriages officially registered. He also denied reports that polygamy would be legalised in Chechnya.
Boston Marathon bombing
After the Boston Marathon bombing, Kadyrov expressed sadness for the victims but denied the suspects had any ties to his region in a statement on his Instagram. He suggested that the suspects were products of American upbringing. Kadyrov accused the CIA of framing Dzokhar Tsarnaev on 18 March 2015, after he was handed a death sentence for the Boston Marathon Bombing and said that they could not have conducted the bombing without CIA's knowledge.
Threats to opposition politicians
On 31 January 2016, Kadyrov posted a video of Russian opposition politicians Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza in the crosshairs of a gun on his Instagram blog. In a few days, after multiple complaints, Instagram removed the video prompting Kadyrov to criticize the decision: "This is the much-boasted freedom of speech in America! You can write anything but cannot touch those American dogs, those friends of the Congress and the State Department".
Report by Ilya Yashin
Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin authored a report against Kadyrov released on 23 February 2016 during a press conference which was repeatedly interrupted by police and hecklers. He also claimed that Kadyrov had murdered Boris Nemtsov. The report titled A National Security Threat claimed that Kadyrov poses a threat to Russia. It included allegations of corruption, authoritarian rule, secret prisons, rigging votes in favour of Vladimir Putin, stealing from the country's national budget to enrich himself, enforcing Sharia law over Russian law, his lavish lifestyle, building and maintaining a personal army of about 30,000 fighters, purported ties to organised crime figures, and his involvement in politically motivated murders of journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. The report also contained 20 questions which Yashin had invited Kadyrov to answer but was refused. Kadyrov dismissed the report calling it "nothing but idle chatter" and posted it on his social network accounts before its release. His spokesman filed a request with the Russian Prosecutor General and the Investigative Committee for Yashin to be arrested for the report saying it contained slander and insults against Kadyrov.
Grozny fatwa
A conference of Islamic scholars funded by the Tabah foundation in the United Arab Emirates, was convened by Kadyrov in Grozny in late August 2016. The conference was attended by notable Islamic scholars including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb; Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shawki Allam; ex-Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa, Usama al-Azhari who is the religious adviser to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; Habib Ali al-Jifri and the mufti of Damascus Abdul Fattah al-Bizm. The conference was convened to discuss the alleged abuse of Islamic ideas to propagate extremism and to establish the criteria for determining who are the true followers of the Sunnah. The assembly of scholars issued a fatwa which declared that those who abide by the Kalam, belong to the four madhhabs and follow the path of moral self-perfection espoused by distinguished Islamic teachers, primarily the Sufi sheikhs, were the only true believers. The fatwa called the sect of Salafism as a "dangerous and erroneous contemporary sect", along with the extremist groups like Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Hizb ut-Tahrir . The conference also issued two further documents. In the first one, it appealed to President Vladimir Putin to ban Salafism and term any condemnation of "traditional Islam" as "extremism". It also proposed the fatwa be regarded as the considered opinion of "leading Russian experts" when evaluating the activity of Muslim organizations and the preaching of individual clerics. The second one issued a resolution calling for the establishment of a Council for Islamic Education and also a Council of Ulema, which would rule on who is and is not a true follower of Sunni Islam.
The ruling created a controversy, with both Islamic theologians and secular commentators condemning it, with some seeing it as a bid by Kadyrov to divide Russian Muslims into those who accept the importance he places on teachings of the Sufi brotherhoods as well as probably also what he considers as "traditional Islam" without question, and those who don't with "erroneous" views. Many of the key participants also disavowed the resolutions. Mukkadas Bibarsov, mufti of Saratov Oblast stated that the question of who was a true follower of Sunni Islam was resolved "centuries ago". He also added that the fatwa failed to take into account the crucial differences between Russia's Muslims, specifically that some Muslim communities did not follow Sufism. Liz Fuller writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty commented that the fatwa seemed to be giving permission to Kadyrov to take any action he likes to punish those whose religious views don't match with his own. Yaroslav Trofimov writing for The Wall Street Journal described it as a "new fracture emerging within Islam". Many Saudi clerics and citizens expressed outrage at the fatwa on social media. The Muslim Brotherhood expressed "deep sorrow" over the fatwa, stating that it “ignited fires of discord among Muslims around the world.”
Threats to Russian police officers
In 2015, Kadyrov ordered Chechen security forces to "shoot to kill" if they encountered police officers from other parts of Russia on the territory of the Chechen Republic. Kadyrov said: "I would like to officially state: Open fire if someone from Moscow or Stavropol—it doesn't matter where from—appears on your turf without your knowledge. We have to be reckoned with. … If you are masters of your territory, then you must control it." According to Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, "Some critics claim that Mr. Putin now fears Mr. Kadyrov because he knows any serious attempt to challenge the Chechen leader's position might lead to a third war."
Mixed martial arts tournament involving child fighters
A mixed martial arts tournament involving children was held as an "exhibition fight" on 4 October during the Grand Prix Akhmat 2016 in Grozny and broadcast on Match TV. Three of Kadyrov's sons, all of them aged under 12, fought in the tournament with Kadyrov sitting in the audience and none of the fighters wearing any protective gear. One of the fights ended with a technical knockout. Kadyrov also posted images of the bouts on his Instagram account. The event caused an outcry especially against Kadyrov allowing his children to compete in the tournament. Fedor Emelianenko, the president of Russian MMA Union, criticised the event as "inexcusable", stating that rules stipulate fighters under the age of 21 have to wear protective gear while children under the age of 12 are not allowed to compete. Vadim Finkelstein, the head of MMA promotion M-1 Global also backed Fedor's comments. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for President Putin, stated that the fact that one of the fights between the children finished with a technical knockout was “a reason for the appropriate oversight agencies to inquire about this incident.” Deputy Minister of Sports Pavel Kolobkov stated that participation of children under the age of 12 in MMA competitions was illegal while stating that the incident was being investigated. Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko also stated that the event will be investigated. MMA fighter Jeff Monson however backed the organisers stating that there was nothing wrong with it.
Several Chechen officials responded to Fedor's criticism with insults and accusations including Timur Dugazayev, general director of Akhmat MMA promotion, Member of Parliament Adam Delimkhanov as well as Kadyrov himself. The Ministry of Sports found on 18 October that Kadyrov's promotion had violated regulations. It also found that the event was actually an unlicensed show with no regulatory oversight. The promotion was directed to coordinate with the Ministry of Sports and other regulatory bodies to “prevent such irregularities in conduct” and handed a letter detailing its failure to comply with the legislation.
Comments about gays, Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions with the United States
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel in July 2017, Kadyrov denied that there had been anti-gay purges in Chechnya, while claiming that there were no gay men in Chechnya. He further stated that if there were any, they should be sent to Canada. He also said that gay people were "not human". Kadyrov also commented about Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions between the United States and Russia. He said that "America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia, we have a strong government and are a nuclear state." He also added, "Even if our government was completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed. We will put the whole world on its knees and screw it from behind."
Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar
In September 2017, Kadyrov condemned the persecution of Muslims in Myanmar and organized a rally in Grozny in support of persecuted Rohingya people. Kadyrov had pledged to "oppose Russia’s position" if it "supports" Aung San Suu Kyi's government in Myanmar.
Threats to citizens insulting someone's honor
In June 2019, Kadyrov, in an Instagram video, told residents of Dagestan to not insult Chechnya or Chechens online amidst controversy over a piece of land of the republic being labeled as belonging to Chechnya, threatening to torture whoever insulted the honor of Chechens. He also warned the people to remove any such comments, otherwise they will have to answer to the Chechen law enforcement agencies.
During a government function organized for medium and small-scale businesses in November 2019, Kadryov called for online users insulting someone's honor to be killed, arrested or intimidated per a BBC Russian Service translation. He stated in the same speech that he didn't call for targeting law-abiding citizens, but the others were "crooks, traitors, tattletales and schizophrenics of all stripes."
Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov denied the accuracy of BBC's translation, however Meduza'''s translation found that it painted an accurate picture. The speech was broadcast on a state-owned TV channel. Dmitry Peskov stated that his remarks won't be investigated by the Russian government as it was the job of the police.
Personal life
Kadyrov graduated with a degree in Law from the Makhachkala Institute of Business and Law in 2004. In 2006 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State Technical University to obtain a Candidate of Sciences degree in Economics. In 2015 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State University to obtain a Doctor of Sciences degree in Economics.The New Yorker says that Kadyrov has adopted various personalities over the years: "the merciless warrior in fatigues who leads special operations to kill anti-government rebels; the jolly Caucasus baron who spars with Mike Tyson and shows off his private zoo; the family man and observant Muslim who has banned alcohol, ordered that women wear head scarves in public buildings, and boasts that his six-year-old son has memorized the Koran." He enjoys boxing and once met with former heavyweight-boxing champion Mike Tyson.
In 1996, Kadyrov married Medni Musaevna Kadyrova. The couple are parents of twelve children. His sons Adam and Eli have earned the title of hafiz while his daughters Aishat, Khadizhat and Khutmat have earned the title of hafiza''. Khutmat and another daughter Ashura have performed together with the nasheed singer Mishary Rashid Alafasy. Khadizhat was recognised as the most gifted student in Chechnya in 2016 and qualified for participation in pan-Russian contest "Student of the Year 2016" on 20 February 2016. Medni launched her fashion line called "Firdaws" in March 2012 in Dubai. Aishat too presented her own fashion collection in March 2017 and has also taken over her mother's fashion enterprise Firdaws. She was appointed the First Deputy Culture Minister of Chechnya in September 2020 by her father.
According to a 2021 investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Kadyrov has a second wife named Fatima Khazuyeva. Kadyrov reportedly met Khazuyeva when she was fourteen years old at a 2006 beauty pageant. He reportedly has a third wife, a singer and dancer named Aminat Akhmadova.
Kadyrov is a noted collector of sports cars. He owns a Lamborghini Reventón, one of only 20 sold. He is also known for his extensive collection of Chechen daggers. On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others. When journalist Marianna Maksimovskaya asked him where the money for the live-televised celebration was coming from, he reportedly laughed and said "Allah gives it to us", before adding: "I don't know, it comes from somewhere."
See also
Natalya Estemirova
Politics of Chechnya
Kadyrovtsy
FC Akhmat Grozny
References
External links
Official website
1976 births
Living people
Anti-same-sex-marriage activists
Chechen warlords
Chechen Islamists
Deputy prime ministers of Chechnya
Russian football chairmen and investors
Heroes of the Russian Federation
Recipients of the Order of Courage
People of the Chechen wars
Heads of the Chechen Republic
People from Grozny
People sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act
Russian Muslims
Prime Ministers of Chechnya
Russian military personnel
Russian Sunni Muslims
United Russia politicians
21st-century Russian politicians
Russian Islamists
Russian people of Chechen descent
Racehorse owners and breeders
Honorary Members of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences
Chechen people
FC Akhmat Grozny
Qadiri order
Recipients of the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", 4th class | true | [
"The Ministry of Reconstruction was a department of the United Kingdom government which existed after both World War I and World War II in order to provide for the needs of the population in the post war years.\n\nWorld War I \n\nThe Ministry of Reconstruction was originally established by the Lloyd George government of 1917 and covered a wide range of political and social areas, including:\n administrative reform\n the role of women in society\n employment\n industrial relations\n housing\nIt was led by Christopher Addison and was \"charged with overseeing the task of rebuilding 'the national life on a better and more durable foundation' once the Great War was over.\n\nFrom 1918 the Advisory Council to the Ministry of Reconstruction was chaired by Sir Henry Birchenough.\n\nThe Ministry addressed the issues of prolonged strike action by workers, many of whom were demobilised troops. 2.4 million British workers were involved in strike action in 1919, in what the government perceived as a threat to the development of the economy.\n\nWorld War II \n\nThe second Ministry of Reconstruction was established in November 1943 and abolished in July 1945 and for its duration was under the political leadership of Lord Woolton. Its permanent secretary was Norman Brook. It replaced the Reconstruction Secretariat which had been the political responsibility of Arthur Greenwood, minister without portfolio in the War Cabinet. Between 1940 and 1942 the Secretariat was headed by Sir George Chrystal, formerly permanent secretary at the Ministry of Health, and subsequently by Alfred Hurst, formerly undersecretary at the Ministry of Mines.\n\nSee also\nMinister of Reconstruction\n\nReferences\n\nReconstruction\nUnited Kingdom, Reconstruction\n1917 establishments in the United Kingdom\nUnited Kingdom, Reconstruction\n1943 establishments in the United Kingdom\n1945 disestablishments in the United Kingdom\nUnited Kingdom in World War I\nUnited Kingdom home front during World War II\nThe National Archives (United Kingdom)",
"Zanaetchiski Dom () is a building in Kumanovo, North Macedonia.\n\nReconstruction\nLast reconstruction was in 1983.\n\nInterior reconstruction of the Main Hall was completed on 30 December 2016. The cost was 18 Million MKD and it was provided by Centre for Development of the Northeast Region and Kumanovo Municipality. Previously the Main Hall was the \"Cinema Napredok\" that stopped working in the mid 1990s The Hall was out of function until 2016 reconstruction.\n\nSee also\n Buildings in Kumanovo\n\nExternal links\n Gallery of the Interior\n\nReferences\n\nBuildings and structures in Kumanovo"
]
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"Ramzan Kadyrov",
"Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction",
"What was the chechen recovery?",
"In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%.",
"what caused the increase?",
"According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya.",
"was anyone ever arrested ?",
"These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities.",
"what was the reconstruction?",
"Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget"
]
| C_c2841d1fd68a4bc6ab19b05947755b9c_0 | how long did the reconstruction take? | 5 | How long did the reconstruction take in Chechnya? | Ramzan Kadyrov | In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%. In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently". According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit--in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which--while being registered as a charity--has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3-4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov (; (Q̇adar Aẋmat-khant Ramzan), ; born 5 October 1976) is a Russian and Chechen politician currently serving as the Head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly a member of the Chechen independence movement.
He is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May 2004. In February 2007, Kadyrov replaced Alu Alkhanov as president, shortly after he had turned 30, which is the minimum age for the post. He was engaged in violent power struggles with Chechen commanders Sulim Yamadayev (d. 2009) and Said-Kakiyev for overall military authority, and with Alkhanov for political authority.
Since November 2015, he has been a member of the Advisory Commission of the State Council of the Russian Federation.
Over the years, he has come under criticism from international organisations for a wide array of human rights abuses under his watch, with Human Rights Watch calling the forced disappearances and torture so widespread they constituted crimes against humanity. During his tenure, he has advocated to restrict the public lives of women, and led anti-gay purges in the Republic.
Ramzan Kadyrov has been frequently accused of involvement in the kidnapping, assassination, and torture of human rights activists, critics, and their relatives, within both Chechnya as well as in other regions of the Russian Federation and abroad, through the political use of police and military forces–– accusations that he publicly denies.
Biography
Kadyrov was born in Tsentaroy, Checheno-Ingush ASSR, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. He was the second son in Akhmat and Aimani Kadyrovs' family and their youngest child. He had an elder brother named Zelimkhan (1974 – 31 May 2004), and he has two elder sisters, Zargan (born 1971) and Zulay (born 1972). Kadyrov strove to gain the respect of his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was an imam. He claims that he always emulated his father. Akhmad had supported the call for jihad against Russians during the First Chechen War but switched sides and declared allegiance to Russia in the Second Chechen War. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union dissolved, the Chechens launched a bid for independence.
During the First Chechen War, together with his father, he fought against Russian armed forces. After the war, Ramzan was the personal driver and bodyguard of his father Akhmad, who became the separatist mufti of Chechnya.
The Kadyrovtsy militia was formed during the First Chechen War when Akhmad Kadyrov launched the jihad against Russia.
The Kadyrov family defected to the Moscow side at the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999. Since then, Kadyrov led his militia with support from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) (including service ID cards) becoming the head of the Chechen Presidential Security Service. The militia later became known as the Kadyrovtsy.
Deputy Prime Minister
After his father, the then President, was assassinated on 9 May 2004, Ramzan was appointed as the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic on 10 May 2004.
When his sister was detained by the Dagestan police in January 2005, Kadyrov and some 150 armed men drove to the Khasavyurt City Police (GOVD) building. According to the city mayor, Kadyrov's men surrounded the GOVD, forcing its duty officers against a wall, and assaulted them, after which they left the building with Zulay Kadyrova, "victoriously shooting in the air."
In August 2005, Kadyrov declared that "Europe's largest mosque" would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown. He also claimed that Chechnya is the "most peaceful place in Russia" and in a few years it would also be "the wealthiest and the most peaceful" place in the world. He said that the war was already over with only 150 "bandits" remaining (as opposed to the official figures of 700 to 2,000 rebel fighters), and that thanks to his father, 7,000 separatists had already defected to the Russian side since 1999. When responding to a question on how he is going to "avenge the murder of his father", Kadyrov said:
He remained the First Deputy Prime Minister until November 2005.
Acting Prime Minister
Following a car accident in November 2005, in which Chechnya's prime minister Sergey Abramov was injured, Kadyrov was appointed as the caretaker prime minister on 18 November 2005. He immediately proceeded to implement elements of Sharia law, such as declaring a ban on gambling and alcohol production.
In February 2006, responding to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons, he accused the Danes of "spying" and being "pro-terrorist". He also banned Danish citizens from entering Chechnya, effectively banning activity of the Danish Refugee Council, the largest NGO working in the region. Kadyrov is quoted as saying, "That cartoonist needs to be buried alive." He was eventually pressed to overturn this decision by Moscow, a rare example of federal intervention in Kadyrov's rule in the republic.
Prime Minister
On 1 March 2006, Sergey Abramov resigned from the position of prime minister and told Itar-Tass news agency that he did so "on the condition that Ramzan Kadyrov lead the Chechen government." This was followed by a decree of Kadyrov forcing women to wear headscarves; he also rejected a federal appropriation of the republic's budget, demanding more money, and called for all federal forces but the border guards to be withdrawn.
Kadyrov was appointed as the Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic by Alkhanov on 4 March 2006. Shortly after taking office, Kadyrov approved a project to erect a presidential palace on a plot by the Sunzha River in ruined downtown Grozny. The project, which was also to include a five-star hotel and recreational facilities, was estimated to cost around 1.5 billion rubles ($54 million USD) to build. Later, Kadyrov called for refugee camps scattered across Chechnya to be closed down, calling the refugees "international spies who are interested in stoking conflict between Chechnya and Russia, who are seeking to destabilise the situation in our region". Reuters quoted him as saying that "liquidating the refugee camps will allow us to uncover spies who are working for foreign intelligence services". His cousin Odes Baysultanov was appointed to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister by Alkhanov on 6 March 2006 after being unanimously approved by the Chechen Parliament.
On 5 June 2006, Speaker of the Chechen People's Assembly Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov said at a press conference in Moscow that "there is no alternative" to Kadyrov for the presidency; Kadyrov has "exclusive awards in combat, and has made achievements in improving the peaceful life and in human rights protection. Who could replace him at this stage? Nobody," he said. Later that year, Umar Dzhabrailov, Chechnya's representative in the Federation Council and a close ally of Kadyrov's, urged Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov to initiate a measure calling on Kadyrov to become the republic's president, thereby replacing Alu Alkhanov. The following week, several Russian newspapers reported that a worsening security situation in Chechnya was lessening the likelihood that Kadyrov would replace Alu Alkhanov as the republic's president. Other media, however, reported that Kadyrov continued to strengthen his position at Alkhanov's expense. He was also elected as the Chair of the Chechen Peoples' Assembly in late-October 2006.
On 6 December 2006, Kadyrov said that he would seek the prosecution of the commanders of federal military units responsible for the death or disappearance of civilians in Chechnya (specifically Major General Aleksandr Studenikin). In addition, Kadyrov said the war in Chechnya was unleashed not by the Chechen people but by the Russian leadership. Kadyrov's comments may have represented his government's increasing unhappiness with certain figures in Moscow, who were said to be blocking his elevation to the post of Chechen president. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
On 5 February 2007, Kadyrov said he did not aspire to become the Chechen president; however, he criticised Alkhanov. Kadyrov also claimed the war in Chechnya was ultimately finished, with "all informal armed groups eliminated". Alkhanov, for his part, criticised "the cult of personality and idealisation of one person", a clear reference to Kadyrov, whose enormous portraits are prominently displayed in Grozny.
President of the Chechen Republic
On 15 February 2007, Putin signed a decree removing Alkhanov and installing Kadyrov as Chechen's acting president. On 2 March 2007, following Putin's nomination of Kadyrov as Chechen president, the Chechen parliament approved the nomination. In the following days, serious changes took place in the administrative setup of the republic, affecting both the top- and middle-ranking officials. Former deputy prime minister Odes Baysultanov (a cousin of Kadyrov) was elevated to the vacant post of prime minister. Critics allege that Kadyrov is actively building his own "vertical of power" in the republic, and encouraging nepotism by placing men of his own family(Kadyrov) in all the leading and important positions.
A Russian daily, Gazeta, reported that according to a poll conducted by the independent Levada Center, only 33 percent of Russians believe that Kadyrov can be trusted, while 35 percent believed that he cannot. Asked whether they thought Kadyrov could normalise the situation in Chechnya and end the bloodshed there, 31 percent said yes and 38 percent said no.
On 14 March 2007, Kadyrov said that human rights abuses were "a thing of the past" in his republic, rejecting new charges of torture made by the Council of Europe. Two days later he accused the federal authorities of torturing detainees. On 19 March 2007, Kadyrov vowed to put an end to all remaining guerilla activity in Chechnya within two months. On 5 April 2007, Kadyrov was sworn in as President of Chechnya. He appointed his maternal cousin Odes Baysultanov as the Prime Minister of the republic on 10 April.
After the car-bomb attack on Yunus-bek Yevkurov, president of the neighbouring Republic of Ingushetia on 22 June 2009, Kadyrov claimed that the Kremlin had ordered him to fight insurgents there, and during his subsequent visit to the republic on 24 June pledged ruthless vengeance.
In late December 2009, Kadyrov claimed that remaining rebels were getting financed by "The West"; "I officially declare this: those who destroyed the Soviet Union, those who want to destroy the Russian Federation, they stand behind them". He also suggested that Russia should attack Georgia and Ukraine "It's Russia's private affliction; why should we always suffer if we can eradicate this for good?". In early August 2010, Kadyrov had claimed that there were only 70 Islamist militants left in Chechnya. In the same month, he proposed changing the title of President of the Chechen Republic to Head of the Chechen Republic. On 12 August, he also called upon presidents of all North Caucasus republics to petition the State Duma to change their titles, stating that there should only be one president in Russia. The Chechen parliament unanimously approved this change on 2 September. However, Speaker of the Chechen Parliament Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov stated on 4 September that the title will be retained until the end of Kadyrov's term in April 2011.
In February 2011, he invited the players of Brazil's 2002 FIFA World Cup winning team to play a match against a Chechen football team led by Kadyrov. The Brazilian team was named as Brazil XI. In addition, Ruud Gullit was hired by Kadyrov to train FC Terek Grozny.
Attempts at consolidation of the Chechen nation
As reported by the Caucasian Knot, an independent human rights resource, on 5 February 2009, "in the course of his meeting in Grozny with Ramzan Ampukaev, representative of the Chechen Diaspora in Europe, Ramzan Kadyrov invited former militants, now living in Europe, to come back home":
"Now, the situation in the republic has stabilized, we witness a steady economic growth, and there's no sense for people to leave. And those who are already abroad, can always come back. We'll help them in every possible way," said Mr. Kadyrov. "All sorts of Emirs and former participants of illegal armed formations, who are now in Europe and whose actions were not aggravated by bloody crimes, have two alternatives: either to come back and serve for the welfare of their homeland, or stay there until the end of their days."
Tsentoroy and Chechen Parliament attacks
In 2010, two large scale attacks were carried out by Chechen insurgents, one in Kadyrov's home-village Tsentoroy and the other on Chechen Parliament in Grozny. The assault on Tsentoroy which occurred on 29 August is considered to have "shattered" the image of Kadyrov's unshakeable rule in Chechnya, as it was the first time in six years that his seemingly impregnable village had come under attack. On 2 September, Kadyrov announced a reward of more than $300,000 for information about each of the insurgency leaders involved in the operation, which Chechen commentators interpreted as an indicator of the government's weakness. Kadyrov also tightened his control over information coming from Tsentoroy by not allowing any of the village's 5,000 inhabitants to leave in the days after the attack; the citizenry were also allegedly under the threat of death not to talk about the siege or the damage inflicted by the rebels. The attack on the Chechen parliament was carried out by three Chechen rebels on 19 October 2010. Kadyrov dressed in a parade uniform attended a meeting that was held a few hours after all the buildings of the parliament were declared cleared by the special forces. During the meeting, he apologised to the politicians who escaped unhurt from the attack. Kadyrov vowed to intensify the fight against militants in the republic, calling them "bandits". He also blamed the United Kingdom and Poland saying they were "harbouring criminals. Why do they shield bandits who have shed blood where there is western democracy? Where is the justice? ... Sooner or later Zakayev, Gakayev, Umarov, Vadalov and other criminals will get what they deserve ... I have no doubt that it was the drunk and alcoholic Akhmed Zakayev and his backers in London and other western capitals. I want to say that they will not achieve anything. The Chechen republic is still standing. It is a peaceful and stable region."
Head of the Chechen Republic
Kadyrov was nominated by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on 28 February 2011 and was unanimously elected for a second term by the Chechen Parliament on 5 March 2011. After his election, he stated that he was going to continue the current course of reviving the republic's economy and society.
On 8 March, he captained a Chechen football team which included current players of FC Terek Grozny, former players of Soviet Union national football team and former German midfielder Lothar Matthaeus in a match against the team Brazil XI which included ex-Brazilian footballers like Romario, Dunga, Bebeto and Cafu. Kadyrov scored twice during the match but his team lost 6–4 to the Brazilian side. Kadyrov said that he had organised the match to show that Chechnya had recovered from years of separatist conflict. He also said that the Brazilians weren't paid to appear but came out of goodwill and in return for a donation to flood victims in Brazil.
Kadyrov was sworn in as head of the republic on 5 April 2011. In November 2012, he visited Azerbaijan to sign intergovernmental agreements. In December 2012, he ordered the closure of the newspaper Kadyrov's Path after one of its reporters asked Putin a question about the violence once focused in Chechnya spreading to other republics and followed it up by asking about the fate of a local radio station. Kadyrov had reportedly taken a disliking to the question asked by the reporter to Putin.
Kadyrov termed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's ouster as a "coup d'etat" and a deliberate attempt to exert pressure on Russia through Ukraine, however at the same time placed the blame on Yanukovych for the situation in Ukraine. On 28 February 2014, he affirmed his readiness to dispatch peacekeepers and a consignment of humanitarian aid to Crimea.
After the 2014 Grozny bombing, in which ISIL's hand was suspected, he said that he might block internet in Chechnya as anyone could easily find and listen to a sermon by a jihadist. After Kadyrov went on a tirade against ISIL on Instagram for threatening Russia, ISIL commander Omar al-Shishani put a $5 million bounty on him.
On 26 May 2015, he announced that he was going to star in a Hollywood thriller titled Whoever Doesn't Understand Will Get It which will be directed by a director of famous Hollywood films and also feature global film-stars. Kadyrov in July 2015 denied that ISIL had any territory in Chechnya and claimed that they never will. During an interview in October 2015, he suggested that Putin should send Chechen special forces to Syria claiming they will wipe out ISIL in weeks. On 3 December, he promised revenge against ISIL for beheading of Khasiev. On 8 February 2016, he claimed that Chechen special forces had infiltrated ISIL cells.
Kadyrov announced on 27 February 2016 that he would step down at the end of his second term, which was set to expire on 5 April. However, he later decided to run in the elections that were to be held that September. Putin appointed him as the acting head of Chechnya until the elections in a decree signed on 25 March.
Kadyrov launched his reality show titled The Team with the first episode being aired by Channel One on 30 June. People from across Russia were invited by Kadyrov to register for the contest. The winner of the contest will go on to become head of Chechnya's Agency for Strategic Development.
On 18 September 2016, Kadyrov was re-elected with nearly 98% of the vote. Philip Varychenko, a native of Düsseldorf, was chosen as the winner of Kadyrov's reality show on 22 November and was appointed as a government aide. Kadyrov visited Saudi Arabia on 27 November where he met the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. During the meeting, they discussed Russia–Saudi Arabia relations as well as issues of common interest. He also visited the United Arab Emirates on the same day and met Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. The two discussed friendship, cooperation and strengthening ties. During his visits, he praised King Salman of Saudi Arabia for his "leadership of the Muslim world and efforts to combat extremism".
On 28 November, he stated that veterans of American special forces would not be allowed to train security and intelligence personnel at a "tactical city" in Gudermes because "they weren't as good as Russian special forces and there were sanctions against all official structures from the United States." On 29 November, he claimed in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat that only a few dozen Chechens were fighting with ISIL, adding that most of them grew up in Western Europe. He also stated that measures taken by Chechen authorities had been successful in bringing back many young recruits before they reached Syria.
During an interview aired on 27 November 2017, Kadyrov stated that he was ready to resign as Head of the Chechen Republic, calling it his "dream" as he found the responsibility to be "too heavy". He announced on 5 December that no Chechen athletes will participate under a neutral flag at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
After an attack on the Church of Archangel Michael in Grozny on 19 May 2018, Kadyrov stated that he had personally overseen the operation to eliminate the attackers. On 26 September, he signed an agreement with Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the Head of Ingushetia, resolving the border dispute between the two Russian republics. The agreement seen as grossly unfair to Ingushestia ignited widespread protests eventually leading to resignation of Yevkurov on 24 June 2019.
Kadyrov was given the rank of major general in July 2020, through an executive order of the Russian President. He added on his blog that he had been transferred from Ministry of Internal Affairs to the National Guard of Russia.
COVID-19 pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, Kadyrov initially in March dismissed the spread of the disease as nothing serious. Later, Chechnya imposed strict measures to curb the spread of coronavirus after it first emerged in the republic. In an interview to Caucasian Knot, Kadyrov purportedly stated that infected people violating self-quarantine should be killed. People accused of spreading rumors have also been forced to admit their guilt and apologize on live television broadcasts by Kadyrov, though human rights organizations have claimed they were pressured.
In April 2020, Kadyrov announced imposition of even stricter measures in Chechnya to curb the spread of the coronavirus. In addition to a night curfew, the government also sealed off all transportation to regions outside the republic. Kadyrov meanwhile also denied that force was being used against those who defied the restrictions. After the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin criticized heads of Russian regions for overstepping the extent of their powers with the restrictions they imposed, Kadyrov commented that while he did not know if Mishustin referred to Chechnya, goods as well as entry into the republic was not barred. However, entry of non-Chechens into the republic would be banned to curb the spread of the disease.
On 15 May 2020, Kadyrov in a live broadcast on the state-run Grozny TV stated that medical workers protesting over lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) must be sacked after one such protest occurred in Gudermes, claiming the republic had enough PPE. On 20 May, Kadyrov was reportedly flown to Moscow after developing "flu-like symptoms", suspected to be COVID-19. On 26 May however, Kadyrov attended a televised meeting in Grozny for taking steps against the coronavirus. The next day he stated that he had a right to be sick, without confirming if he had fallen ill. He also dismissed reports of using a catheter, stating he had a right to use it to boost his immunity.
Chechen economic recovery and reconstruction
In 2006, the production of Chechnya's industry increased by 11.9%. In 2007, the rate of growth was 26.4%.
In February 2010, head of the British delegation of the Human Rights Group Lord Judd, formerly "bitterly critical of the Russian authorities for the situation in Chechnya", pointed out a striking change for the better in the Russian North Caucasus republic. Judd said that changes which occurred since his visit as a member of PACE delegation in 2000 were "so overwhelming that sometimes you forget about what happened here until quite recently".
According to a 2016 report by Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, Kadyrov collected enormous wealth, primarily through theft of federal subsidies for Chechnya. Between 2001 and 2014 Chechnya has received over 464 billion roubles in subsidies, grants and donations with federal subsidies accounting for 80% of the republic's budget (and this does not include funds allocated for infrastructure managed at federal level such as roads). However, the administration of Chechnya is being criticized for spending public funds for their personal benefit—in 2010 Dmitry Medvedev noted that "federal funds often do not reach people; we know where they disappear; it is obvious-they are being stolen". For example, the fleet of official vehicles in Chechnya accounts for half of all official vehicles in all Northern Caucasus republics. Public funds are being funnelled through Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, which—while being registered as a charity—has never produced or published any financial reports as required by Russian law. These violations are ignored by Russian Ministry of Justice, which in many cases has enforced them very strictly against other charities. The foundation operates a building company that services most of the publicly procured infrastructure projects in the republic and also collects a fee from all working citizens of Chechnya, ranging from 10 to 30% of their earnings, raising 3–4 billion roubles per year this way. Kadyrov himself declares annual income of 4.84 million roubles (2015), which is inconsistent with his lavish life-style, luxury vehicles, watches, race horses and mansions.
In 2020 Proekt.media published an in-depth analysis of business operations of Kadyrov and Adam Delimkhanov who are allegedly running multi-million dollar businesses in Moscow through a proxy provided by businessman Pavel Krotov.
2009 assassination attempt
An assassination attempt on Kadyrov and a parliament member Adam Delimkhanov was averted on 23 October 2009, by the police. Chechen Deputy interior minister Roman Edilov said the police shot dead the driver of a speeding car loaded with a 200-litre tank after firing warning shots shortly before Kadyrov was to arrive at a construction site. The driver of the car was later identified as a militant leader (so-called Urus-Martan emir Beslan Bashtayev). Said-Emi Khizriev, who played a role in organising the attack, was killed by Russian police who tried to arrest him in the Michurin village in Grozny. Khizriev planned and took part in explosions at two gas stations in Gudermes in the spring of the previous year, as well as in an armed attack at a sport club in the city.
Accusations of human rights abuses
Kadyrov has been personally implicated in several instances of torture and murder. A number of Chechens opposed to Kadyrov have been assassinated abroad, and several witnesses (including Artur Kurmakaev and Ruslan Khalidov) report the existence of a 300 name "Murder List". Chechens who have been murdered, where Kadyrov's involvement is suspected, include Movladi Baisarov and Ruslan Yamadayev (both Moscow); Sulim Yamadayev (Dubai); Gazhi Edilsutanov, Islam Dzahnibekov, Ali Osaev (Istanbul); and Umar Israilov (Vienna).
Kadyrov stated in December 2009 that he had personally helped many of the murder victims and their families and was not their enemy. "I don't want to kill, who did I fight? I fought terrorists. Who did I protect? I protected the whole of Russia so that people in Moscow or St. Petersburg...could live in peace. They accuse me of killing women and children. It's not true."
A mutinied commander, Movladi Baisarov, said that Kadyrov "acts like a medieval tyrant. If someone tells the truth about what is going on, it's like signing one's own death warrant. Ramzan is a law unto himself. He can do anything he likes. He can take any woman and do whatever he pleases with her. (...) Ramzan acts with total impunity. I know of many people executed on his express orders and I know exactly where they were buried". On 18 November 2006, Baisarov was killed in an ambush by members of Kadyrov's police on Moscow's Leninsky Prospekt, about two kilometres from the Kremlin.
On 13 November 2006, Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper on torture in Chechnya that it had prepared for the 37th session of the United Nations Committee Against Torture. The paper covered torture by personnel of the Second Operational Investigative Bureau (ORB-2), torture by units under the effective command of Kadyrov, torture in secret detentions and the continuing "forced disappearances". According to HRW, torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya". In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not even attempt to conceal their identity. Based on extensive research, HRW concluded in 2005 that forced disappearances in Chechnya are so widespread and systematic that they constitute crimes against humanity.
Anna Politkovskaya, a veteran Russian reporter (murdered in 2006; case unsolved as of ) who reported extensively from Chechnya, claimed that she had received a grainy video footage shot on a mobile phone of a man identical in appearance to Kadyrov, and said that "the clips were the murders of federal servicemen by the Kadyrovites, and also kidnappings directed by Kadyrov. These are very serious things; on the basis of this evidence a criminal case and investigation should follow. This could allow this person to be brought to justice, something he has long richly deserved." She was allegedly working on an article revealing human rights abuses and regular incidents of torture in Chechnya at the time of her murder. Some observers alleged that Kadyrov or his men were possibly behind the assassination.
On 23 October 2006, a criminal case was registered on the basis of the video tape frames published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Anna Politkovskaya's article. Sergey Sokolov, deputy editor-in-chief of the paper, told the Echo Moskvy Radio that it can be clearly seen in the video as to how "Kadyrov's military forces are beating federal soldiers" with participation of "a man looking like Ramzan Kadyrov". On 7 October 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in an elevator in her apartment in Moscow.
German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), which branded Kadyrov a "war criminal", has alleged that up to 75 percent of recent incidents of murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's paramilitary forces.
The Memorial group investigator stated in its report: "Considering the evidence we have gathered, we have no doubt that most of the crimes which are being committed now in Chechnya are the work of Kadyrov's men. There is also no doubt in our minds that Kadyrov has personally taken part in beating and torturing people. What they are doing is pure lawlessness. To make matters worse, they also go after people who are innocent, whose names were given by someone being tortured to death. He and his henchmen spread fear and terror in Chechnya. (...) They travel by night as death squads, kidnapping civilians, who are then locked in a torture chamber, raped and murdered".
According to the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, many illegal places of detention exist in the Chechen Republic; most of them are run by Kadyrovites. In Tsentaroy (Khosi-Yurt), where the Kadyrovite headquarters is located, there are at least two illegal prisons functioning. One consists of concrete bunkers or pillboxes, where kidnapped relatives of armed Chechen fighters are held hostage while the second prison in Tsentaroy is evidently located in the yard—or in immediate vicinity—of the house of Kadyrov.
The Kadyrovites are often accused of working as a death squad against Kadyrov's enemies. Kadyrov is rumoured to own a private prison in his stronghold of Tsentaroy, his home village south-east of Grozny. Fields around Tsentaroy are allegedly mined and all access routes are blocked by checkpoints. On 2 May 2006, representatives of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) alleged that they were prevented from entering the fortress.
A video leaked out in which armed men, loyal to Kadyrov, displayed the severed head of a Chechen guerrilla (who was killed in July 2006) for public display in the village of Kurchaloi, marking the brutality of his forces. They mounted the head on a pipe, together with blood-stained trousers and put a cigarette on him. It was displayed for at least a day as they came back a day later to record it again. On 21 September 2005, a similar incident occurred, as published by Memorial as well as Kavkazky Uzel which described "shocking details" of a special operation conducted by forces loyal to Kadyrov.
On 1 March 2007, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group rights organisation, stated that Kadyrov was "to blame for kidnappings of many innocent people. Their bodies were found later with signs of torture."
Umar Israilov was assassinated in Vienna on 13 January 2009. Israilov was a former Kadyrov bodyguard, who cooperated with The New York Times, extensively detailing abuses committed by Kadyrov and his associates. Israilov had told Austrian authorities in 2008 that he had been threatened by an agent sent by Kadyrov to drop his lawsuit against the Chechen leader at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. On 27 April 2010, the Austrian prosecutor's office announced that they believed Kadyrov had ordered the kidnapping of Israilov and Israilov had been murdered while attempting to escape. According to the investigation, there was evidence that Otto Kaltenbrunner (adopted name of Ramzan Edilov), one of the suspected kidnappers, had been in contact with Kadyrov personally.
On 15 July 2009, Natalia Estemirova, a member of Memorial society, who investigated the alleged abuses by government-backed militias in Chechnya, was abducted and shot to death. Memorial's chairman Oleg Petrovich Orlov accused Kadyrov of being behind the murder, and claimed that Kadyrov had openly threatened her by saying: "Yes, my arms are up to the elbows in blood. And I am not ashamed of that. I have killed and will kill bad people". Kadyrov denied any involvement in the killing and promised to investigate the killing personally. He condemned the killers, and in response to Orlov's accusations, said: "You are not a prosecutor or a judge therefore your claims about my guilt are not ethical, to put it mildly, and are insulting to me. I am sure that you have to think about my rights before declaring for everyone to hear that I am guilty of Estemirova's death." It was later reported that Kadyrov would be suing Memorial for defamation and slander, targeting Orlov personally with his complaint.
Memorial said in a statement on 19 August 2014 that when Kadyrov had lost his mobile phone during a wedding ceremony on 16 August, the police questioned thousands of people who had attended the wedding into early hours of the next morning in an attempt to find it.
A man who criticised local officials and apparently Kadyrov in a YouTube appeal to the Russian President became a target of many threats due to which he had to flee to the neighboring republic of Dagestan. In May 2016, his house was burnt down by a group of masked men and his family was dragged out, put in a car and were thrown under a bridge. His wife also stated that they threatened the other residents with burning down their houses as well if they reported about the matter to anyone. Later, the Chechen police cordoned off his village in order to hunt him down. Kadyrov's spokesman denied these reports were true. The complainant later publicly apologised to Kadyrov and accused the media of distorting his remarks in his video complaint. He again fled to Dagestan in November 2016. According to human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, he had to flee after Chechnya's Deputy Interior Minister Apti Alaudinov personally threatened to kill him.
After Memorial's Chechnya head Oyub Titiev was arrested in January 2018 over drug possession, Oyub's supporters claimed the charges were fake and were made-up by the Chechen authorities to suppress criticism of Kadyrov. Kadyrov called Oyub a "drug addict" while criticising those working with human rights activists and warned them off from working in his region.
On 30 January 2020, Imran Aliev, an anti-Kadyrov blogger, was murdered in a hotel in Lille. French authorities have identified the alleged killer as a hitman having connections with the Chechen leader and who had travelled with Aliev in a train from Belgium to France.
Tumso Abdurakhmanov, a dissident Chechen blogger, was attacked in February 2020, but managed to overpower the assailant, who claimed he had been sent by Moscow. Swedish prosecutors stated that the Chechen government was suspected of being involved in the attack. Dagens Nyheter reported on the trial in November, saying the attacker admitted that he was sent by the Chechen government, but had planned to fail. Another arrested suspect denied her own involvement.
On the evening of 20 January 2022, Zarema Yangulbayeva (), the wife of Saidi Yangulbaev, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Chechnya, was abducted in Nizhny Novgorod and taken to Chechnya for interrogation. A day later, she was charged with assaulting a police officer. Kadyrov said the former judge's family members would either be in prison or underground and asked the Supreme Court of Russia to "kick out" Yangulbaev from the reserve and "erase his name from the history of the judicial body". Yangulbaev lost his position as a judge in 2015, saying he was forced to do so. Yangulbayeva is the mother of a Chechen human rights activist and former lawyer for the Committee for the Prevention of Torture NGO.
Rounding up, torture and execution of gay men
Kadyrov has previously encouraged extrajudicial killings of homosexual men by family members as an alternative to law enforcement – in some cases, gay men in prison have been released early specifically to enable their murder by relatives.
In April 2017, international media reported that gay men in Chechnya were being arrested, detained and tortured as part of a region-wide pogrom. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on 5 May that he would personally ask the Russian Prosecutor General and Interior Ministry to help Kremlin rights ombudswoman Tatyana Moskalkova check the reported abuse. UK Deputy Foreign Secretary Sir Alan Duncan told the UK Parliament he had been informed of alleged plans to eliminate Chechnya's gay community by the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which commenced on 26 May 2017.
Chechnya has denied the reports, with its interior minister calling the allegations an "April Fools' joke". Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov rejected the allegations and described the report in the Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, as "absolute lies and disinformation", basing his denial on the claim that "you cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic. If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn't need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning." Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also said that there had been no evidence found to support the allegations, adding that he had no reason to doubt Kadyrov's claims that no one under his rule has been persecuted for their sexual orientation.
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports aired on 18 July, Kadyrov said, "We don't have those kind of people here. We don't have any gays. If there are any take them to Canada. Praise be to God. Take them far from us so we don't have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them."
Asked about the accusations of systematic torture, Kadyrov said, "They made it up. They are devils. They are for sale. They are subhuman. God damn them for slandering us."
Sanctions
On 20 December 2017, the United States imposed sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on five Russian nationals including Kadyrov, accusing him of personal involvement in repression, torture and murder. U.S. officials accused him of heading "an administration involved in disappearances and extrajudicial killings," and that one or more of his political opponents were killed at his direction. He was added to United States Department of the Treasury's blacklist which also included a Chechen security official Ayub Kataev along with three other Russian individuals for their criminal involvement in a corruption case uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky.
In response, Kadyrov mocked the sanctions on his Instagram account. "A sleepless night is waiting for me." He further stated, "I can be proud that I'm out of favor with the special services of the USA," and added, "In fact, the USA cannot forgive me for dedicating my whole life to the fight against foreign terrorists among which there are bastards of America's special services."
President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the sanctions "illegal" and "unfriendly" stating, "We consider these sanctions illegal, we consider them unfriendly, and we do not agree with them." He also stated that it was highly probable that Russia would retaliate by accusing U.S. officials or citizens of rights violations and banning them from the country.
Further sanctions were added on 20 July 2020, with United States Secretary of State accusing him of increasing abuses on civilians during the COVID-19 pandemic. His immediate family were also sanctioned. The sanctions also ban him, his wife and two of his daughters from traveling to the United States. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova told Sputnik that they will try to impose retaliatory sanctions. Kadyrov meanwhile posted a picture of himself along with firearms, saying, "Pompeo, we accept the fight! What comes next will be more interesting."
Threats to journalists
In 2004, Kadyrov had a conversation with the Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. One of his assistants said to her, "Someone ought to have shot you back in Moscow, right on the street, like they do in your Moscow". Ramzan then repeated after him, "You're an enemy. To be shot...." He is alleged by some observers to be behind her murder.
On 13 April 2020, Kadyrov threatened the journalist Elena Milashina on Instagram for her news article in Novaya Gazeta about Chechnya's coronavirus lockdown, stating it was "defamatory". He also criticized the federal authorities for not taking any action saying, "If you want us to commit a crime and become criminals, just say so! One [of us] will take on this responsibility and serve his time, as required by law." On Telegram, he later labeled her newspaper "anti-Russian" and a "foreign agent", also claiming it stereotyped Chechens.
Milashina had also covered Chechnya's gay purges and had been allegedly attacked on 6 February 2020. She accused the Chechen authorities of orchestrating the attack. Over 100 Russian celebrities and human rights activists, in response to Kadyrov's online threats, called upon the federal government to protect Milashina. Novaya Gazeta was made to delete Milashina's article from its website by the Office of the Prosecutor General of Russia, which claimed it was fake news and created a threat to the lives of citizens. Peskov dismissed Kadyrov's threats as an emotional response, saying everyone was on edge due to the coronavirus pandemic. Human Rights Watch criticized Peskov's reaction, stating it was "like a stark green light to Chechen officials to act on their threats."
On 21 April 2020, the US government funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty stated that it had complained to Russian authorities after Kadyrov had threatened to punish their North Caucasus bureau chief Aslan Doukaev over an article against his government's restrictive coronavirus lockdown measures against farmers in an online video.
The ambassador of United States to Russia, John J. Sullivan, condemned Kadyrov's threats against Milashina and Aslan Doukaev, stating that freedom of press was a pillar of democracy. In a joint statement, French Human Rights Ambassador-at-Large François Croquette and the German Commissioner for Human Rights Policy Bärbel Kofler called Kadyrov's threats against Milashina unacceptable and urged Russia to investigate.
Kadydov had personally warned to punish the Georgian journalist Giorgi Gabunia in June 2020, after he had insulted President Vladimir Putin on-air. The State Security Service of Georgia announced the arrest of a Russian citizen on 15 June for an assassination attempt on Gabunia. Georgian media and Gabunia's boss later claimed the assassin was sent by Kadyrov, who denied the allegations and said that if he had sent someone to kill, they would have succeeded. Kadyrov called Gabunia his enemy and said that he should beg for forgiveness by getting down on his knees, otherwise he would continue to remain one. Georgian authorities have neither confirmed nor denied the allegations against Kadyrov.
Social media
Networks
The number of subscribers to Kadyrov's social networks in 2016 was more than three million people, including three million followers of his Instagram account, according to the Chechen leader's press service. It said that he had 500,000 followers on the Russian VK social network, 760,860 on Facebook, 331,000 on Twitter and 5,447 on LiveJournal. Besides his Instagram postings, it was said that he had also made almost 5,000 on Twitter and 2,300 on VK. The Russian News Agency TASS said that Kadyrov had been "recognized as the most quoted Russian blogger."
In August 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kadyrov had posted nearly 8,000 pictures on Instagram, which made him the online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service's "most prolific political strongman."
The New York Times called Kadyrov's Instagram account "bizarre if strangely compelling", and Newsweek said it was "flashy." In a 2015 article, The New York Times said that Kadyrov was "Instagram-addicted."
The Russian programme director of Human Rights Watch said in an October 2016 article in The Guardian that "even the mildest criticism on social media [is] ruthlessly punished through unlawful, punitive detention, enforced disappearances, cruel and degrading treatment, death threats, threats against family members, and physical abuse of family members." She said that a social worker from a small town in Chechnya made a WhatsApp recording that went viral among Chechen users "imploring" Kadyrov "to look into the plight of ordinary people pushed below the poverty line" by local officials. The article stated that the woman, with her husband, "found herself hauled into the studio of Grozny TV, the state television and radio broadcaster" to face Kadyrov in person, "to apologise publicly for her lies." A "severe and sweeping repression by the local authorities is designed to remind the Chechen public of Kadyrov's total control," the article claimed.
WhatsApp lecture
In May 2015, Kadyrov gave a stern televised lecture to a group of Chechen men and women who were accused of using the WhatsApp messaging service to comment on the impending marriage of local police chief to a teenage girl some three decades younger than him. The wedding had been widely discussed across Russia on reports that the young woman, Kheda Goylabiyeva, was being coerced into marriage with the chief, Nazhud Guchigov.
"Behave like Chechens", Kadyrov was reported as telling the assemblage of about a dozen people standing in the marbled courtyard of a building that seemed to be his government palace. "Honor of the family is the most important thing. Don't write such things any more. You, men, keep your women away from WhatsApp." In its coverage of the incident, The New York Times reported:
"Lock them in, do not let them go out, and they will not post anything", Mr. Kadyrov said in a video to a sheepish group of men and women who kept their arms folded across their chests and their eyes firmly on the ground during the harangue.
In December 2015, a female Chechen social worker criticised Kadyrov in an audio message posted on WhatsApp, after her boss tried to force her to put aside some money as collateral for her next month's payment. Three days after posting the message, she appeared on Grozny TV along with her husband, where she was publicly berated by Kadyrov as well as parliament speaker Daudov, presidential administration head Islam Kadyrov and her boss. The couple apologised on live television for her message.
John Oliver
In May 2016, Kadyrov engaged in a brief Instagram dispute with US television host John Oliver.
He had posted a message on Instagram asking for help in finding his cat, which had gone astray. The posting led Oliver to make a five-minute segment on HBO's Last Week Tonight dealing with the cat's disappearance and, according to The Guardian, Kadyrov's penchant for posting of, for example, "regular videos of his work-outs in the gym," also on Instagram. As well, Oliver teased Kadyrov "for his propensity" to wear T-shirts bearing the image of Russian President Vladimir Putin. After the show, Oliver posted a photo of himself holding a cat, captioned "@RKadyrov Is this your cat?"
Kadyrov responded in English, according to The New York Times along with a doctored photo of Oliver wearing a Putin T-shirt, captioned, in part, "I am tired of jokes. I want to care for cats in Chechnya. By the way, Putin is our leader."
Account suspensions
Kadyrov stated that he found his Russian-language Instagram and Facebook accounts were not working on 23 December 2017, and he never received a response from Instagram after sending a request for service support. His English-language Instagram account remained unaffected however. Kadyrov accused them of bowing to pressure from United States after he was sanctioned.
He wrote on Telegram in response, "Instagram's move, which still wants to pretend it is independent from officials of Washington is weird." He added, "They wanted to stir my indignation, but were wrong, and this is the only thing which pleases me in actions Instagram and their patrons in the White House are undertaking. I have planned already to quit the network. But I thought I could fail my friends and subscribers, as on Instagram and Facebook I have more than 4 million followers."
The Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin stated that the decision by Facebook and Instagram to suspend Kadyrov's accounts violated his rights, stating, "They are afraid of a public conversation and the truth. Such decision cannot be explained in another way… The thing is that to read bloggers in social networks one needs to be their subscribers. By deleting an account, they deprive citizens of their right to know about bloggers’ opinion and to communicate with them."
Russia's telecommunications overseer Roskomnadzor on 26 December asked Facebook to explain why they had suspended his accounts. Facebook issued a statement on 28 December that it did so after he was sanctioned by United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control as these came under trade sanctions.
Other issues
Call to quarantine proceeds of horse race
On 3 November 2009, a horse owned by Kadyrov, Mourilyan, came third in the Melbourne Cup winning about US$380,000 in prize money. The leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, immediately called for the Government of Australia to quarantine the prize money until assurances are received as to how the money will be used. Concerns had been previously raised that the Melbourne Cup could be used to launder money by overseas individuals.
Honor killings
In 2009, Kadyrov stated his approval of honor killings of seven women, based on the belief that they were engaging in adultery. In an interview with David Scott of HBO, he condoned honor killings of homosexuals in July 2017 stating, "If we have [gay] people here, I'm telling you officially their relatives won't let them be because of our faith, our mentality, customs, traditions. Even if it's punishable under the law, we would still condone it."
WikiLeaks
On 28 November 2010, a classified WikiLeaks cable named Kadyrov as a "starring guest" at some of Dagestan's most elaborate weddings, which indicates the political "Caucasus power structure" in these weddings. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".
Charlie Hebdo cartoons
In January 2015, Kadyrov said he would organize protests if a Russian newspaper published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, saying "we will not allow anyone to insult the Prophet [Muhammad], even if it will cost us our lives." He also stated that Alexei Venediktov "will be brought to account" after his radio station Ekho Moskvy took a survey of readers on whether to publish the cartoons. Venediktov stated he would ask the authorities to intervene against Kadyrov's threats. During a protest rally against the cartoons attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Chechnya, he accused those backing Charlie Hebdo of using "false slogans about free speech and democracy".
After French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered by a man of Chechen descent for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in his class, Kadyrov criticized the attack, but also told people to not provoke the religious sentiments of Muslims. He also criticized French society for provoking Muslims and stated that the country must have a state institution focusing on inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations. After France's President Emmanuel Macron defended Paty's actions under right to free speech, Kadyrov on Instagram accused him of forcing people to resort to terrorism by doing so.
Support for polygamy
Kadyrov supports polygamy in Muslim-majority republics in Russia, and believes that Muslims who speak out against the practice are not true adherents to their faith. According to Kadyrov, men legally marrying more than one wife would be more honest than having many mistresses, and would resolve Russia's demographic problem. In April 2018, he stated that all Muslim men are permitted by Allah to have four wives but discouraged having the marriages officially registered. He also denied reports that polygamy would be legalised in Chechnya.
Boston Marathon bombing
After the Boston Marathon bombing, Kadyrov expressed sadness for the victims but denied the suspects had any ties to his region in a statement on his Instagram. He suggested that the suspects were products of American upbringing. Kadyrov accused the CIA of framing Dzokhar Tsarnaev on 18 March 2015, after he was handed a death sentence for the Boston Marathon Bombing and said that they could not have conducted the bombing without CIA's knowledge.
Threats to opposition politicians
On 31 January 2016, Kadyrov posted a video of Russian opposition politicians Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza in the crosshairs of a gun on his Instagram blog. In a few days, after multiple complaints, Instagram removed the video prompting Kadyrov to criticize the decision: "This is the much-boasted freedom of speech in America! You can write anything but cannot touch those American dogs, those friends of the Congress and the State Department".
Report by Ilya Yashin
Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin authored a report against Kadyrov released on 23 February 2016 during a press conference which was repeatedly interrupted by police and hecklers. He also claimed that Kadyrov had murdered Boris Nemtsov. The report titled A National Security Threat claimed that Kadyrov poses a threat to Russia. It included allegations of corruption, authoritarian rule, secret prisons, rigging votes in favour of Vladimir Putin, stealing from the country's national budget to enrich himself, enforcing Sharia law over Russian law, his lavish lifestyle, building and maintaining a personal army of about 30,000 fighters, purported ties to organised crime figures, and his involvement in politically motivated murders of journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. The report also contained 20 questions which Yashin had invited Kadyrov to answer but was refused. Kadyrov dismissed the report calling it "nothing but idle chatter" and posted it on his social network accounts before its release. His spokesman filed a request with the Russian Prosecutor General and the Investigative Committee for Yashin to be arrested for the report saying it contained slander and insults against Kadyrov.
Grozny fatwa
A conference of Islamic scholars funded by the Tabah foundation in the United Arab Emirates, was convened by Kadyrov in Grozny in late August 2016. The conference was attended by notable Islamic scholars including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb; Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shawki Allam; ex-Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa, Usama al-Azhari who is the religious adviser to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; Habib Ali al-Jifri and the mufti of Damascus Abdul Fattah al-Bizm. The conference was convened to discuss the alleged abuse of Islamic ideas to propagate extremism and to establish the criteria for determining who are the true followers of the Sunnah. The assembly of scholars issued a fatwa which declared that those who abide by the Kalam, belong to the four madhhabs and follow the path of moral self-perfection espoused by distinguished Islamic teachers, primarily the Sufi sheikhs, were the only true believers. The fatwa called the sect of Salafism as a "dangerous and erroneous contemporary sect", along with the extremist groups like Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Hizb ut-Tahrir . The conference also issued two further documents. In the first one, it appealed to President Vladimir Putin to ban Salafism and term any condemnation of "traditional Islam" as "extremism". It also proposed the fatwa be regarded as the considered opinion of "leading Russian experts" when evaluating the activity of Muslim organizations and the preaching of individual clerics. The second one issued a resolution calling for the establishment of a Council for Islamic Education and also a Council of Ulema, which would rule on who is and is not a true follower of Sunni Islam.
The ruling created a controversy, with both Islamic theologians and secular commentators condemning it, with some seeing it as a bid by Kadyrov to divide Russian Muslims into those who accept the importance he places on teachings of the Sufi brotherhoods as well as probably also what he considers as "traditional Islam" without question, and those who don't with "erroneous" views. Many of the key participants also disavowed the resolutions. Mukkadas Bibarsov, mufti of Saratov Oblast stated that the question of who was a true follower of Sunni Islam was resolved "centuries ago". He also added that the fatwa failed to take into account the crucial differences between Russia's Muslims, specifically that some Muslim communities did not follow Sufism. Liz Fuller writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty commented that the fatwa seemed to be giving permission to Kadyrov to take any action he likes to punish those whose religious views don't match with his own. Yaroslav Trofimov writing for The Wall Street Journal described it as a "new fracture emerging within Islam". Many Saudi clerics and citizens expressed outrage at the fatwa on social media. The Muslim Brotherhood expressed "deep sorrow" over the fatwa, stating that it “ignited fires of discord among Muslims around the world.”
Threats to Russian police officers
In 2015, Kadyrov ordered Chechen security forces to "shoot to kill" if they encountered police officers from other parts of Russia on the territory of the Chechen Republic. Kadyrov said: "I would like to officially state: Open fire if someone from Moscow or Stavropol—it doesn't matter where from—appears on your turf without your knowledge. We have to be reckoned with. … If you are masters of your territory, then you must control it." According to Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, "Some critics claim that Mr. Putin now fears Mr. Kadyrov because he knows any serious attempt to challenge the Chechen leader's position might lead to a third war."
Mixed martial arts tournament involving child fighters
A mixed martial arts tournament involving children was held as an "exhibition fight" on 4 October during the Grand Prix Akhmat 2016 in Grozny and broadcast on Match TV. Three of Kadyrov's sons, all of them aged under 12, fought in the tournament with Kadyrov sitting in the audience and none of the fighters wearing any protective gear. One of the fights ended with a technical knockout. Kadyrov also posted images of the bouts on his Instagram account. The event caused an outcry especially against Kadyrov allowing his children to compete in the tournament. Fedor Emelianenko, the president of Russian MMA Union, criticised the event as "inexcusable", stating that rules stipulate fighters under the age of 21 have to wear protective gear while children under the age of 12 are not allowed to compete. Vadim Finkelstein, the head of MMA promotion M-1 Global also backed Fedor's comments. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for President Putin, stated that the fact that one of the fights between the children finished with a technical knockout was “a reason for the appropriate oversight agencies to inquire about this incident.” Deputy Minister of Sports Pavel Kolobkov stated that participation of children under the age of 12 in MMA competitions was illegal while stating that the incident was being investigated. Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko also stated that the event will be investigated. MMA fighter Jeff Monson however backed the organisers stating that there was nothing wrong with it.
Several Chechen officials responded to Fedor's criticism with insults and accusations including Timur Dugazayev, general director of Akhmat MMA promotion, Member of Parliament Adam Delimkhanov as well as Kadyrov himself. The Ministry of Sports found on 18 October that Kadyrov's promotion had violated regulations. It also found that the event was actually an unlicensed show with no regulatory oversight. The promotion was directed to coordinate with the Ministry of Sports and other regulatory bodies to “prevent such irregularities in conduct” and handed a letter detailing its failure to comply with the legislation.
Comments about gays, Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions with the United States
In an interview with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel in July 2017, Kadyrov denied that there had been anti-gay purges in Chechnya, while claiming that there were no gay men in Chechnya. He further stated that if there were any, they should be sent to Canada. He also said that gay people were "not human". Kadyrov also commented about Russia's nuclear arsenal and tensions between the United States and Russia. He said that "America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia, we have a strong government and are a nuclear state." He also added, "Even if our government was completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed. We will put the whole world on its knees and screw it from behind."
Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar
In September 2017, Kadyrov condemned the persecution of Muslims in Myanmar and organized a rally in Grozny in support of persecuted Rohingya people. Kadyrov had pledged to "oppose Russia’s position" if it "supports" Aung San Suu Kyi's government in Myanmar.
Threats to citizens insulting someone's honor
In June 2019, Kadyrov, in an Instagram video, told residents of Dagestan to not insult Chechnya or Chechens online amidst controversy over a piece of land of the republic being labeled as belonging to Chechnya, threatening to torture whoever insulted the honor of Chechens. He also warned the people to remove any such comments, otherwise they will have to answer to the Chechen law enforcement agencies.
During a government function organized for medium and small-scale businesses in November 2019, Kadryov called for online users insulting someone's honor to be killed, arrested or intimidated per a BBC Russian Service translation. He stated in the same speech that he didn't call for targeting law-abiding citizens, but the others were "crooks, traitors, tattletales and schizophrenics of all stripes."
Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov denied the accuracy of BBC's translation, however Meduza'''s translation found that it painted an accurate picture. The speech was broadcast on a state-owned TV channel. Dmitry Peskov stated that his remarks won't be investigated by the Russian government as it was the job of the police.
Personal life
Kadyrov graduated with a degree in Law from the Makhachkala Institute of Business and Law in 2004. In 2006 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State Technical University to obtain a Candidate of Sciences degree in Economics. In 2015 he defended his thesis at Dagestan State University to obtain a Doctor of Sciences degree in Economics.The New Yorker says that Kadyrov has adopted various personalities over the years: "the merciless warrior in fatigues who leads special operations to kill anti-government rebels; the jolly Caucasus baron who spars with Mike Tyson and shows off his private zoo; the family man and observant Muslim who has banned alcohol, ordered that women wear head scarves in public buildings, and boasts that his six-year-old son has memorized the Koran." He enjoys boxing and once met with former heavyweight-boxing champion Mike Tyson.
In 1996, Kadyrov married Medni Musaevna Kadyrova. The couple are parents of twelve children. His sons Adam and Eli have earned the title of hafiz while his daughters Aishat, Khadizhat and Khutmat have earned the title of hafiza''. Khutmat and another daughter Ashura have performed together with the nasheed singer Mishary Rashid Alafasy. Khadizhat was recognised as the most gifted student in Chechnya in 2016 and qualified for participation in pan-Russian contest "Student of the Year 2016" on 20 February 2016. Medni launched her fashion line called "Firdaws" in March 2012 in Dubai. Aishat too presented her own fashion collection in March 2017 and has also taken over her mother's fashion enterprise Firdaws. She was appointed the First Deputy Culture Minister of Chechnya in September 2020 by her father.
According to a 2021 investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Kadyrov has a second wife named Fatima Khazuyeva. Kadyrov reportedly met Khazuyeva when she was fourteen years old at a 2006 beauty pageant. He reportedly has a third wife, a singer and dancer named Aminat Akhmadova.
Kadyrov is a noted collector of sports cars. He owns a Lamborghini Reventón, one of only 20 sold. He is also known for his extensive collection of Chechen daggers. On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others. When journalist Marianna Maksimovskaya asked him where the money for the live-televised celebration was coming from, he reportedly laughed and said "Allah gives it to us", before adding: "I don't know, it comes from somewhere."
See also
Natalya Estemirova
Politics of Chechnya
Kadyrovtsy
FC Akhmat Grozny
References
External links
Official website
1976 births
Living people
Anti-same-sex-marriage activists
Chechen warlords
Chechen Islamists
Deputy prime ministers of Chechnya
Russian football chairmen and investors
Heroes of the Russian Federation
Recipients of the Order of Courage
People of the Chechen wars
Heads of the Chechen Republic
People from Grozny
People sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act
Russian Muslims
Prime Ministers of Chechnya
Russian military personnel
Russian Sunni Muslims
United Russia politicians
21st-century Russian politicians
Russian Islamists
Russian people of Chechen descent
Racehorse owners and breeders
Honorary Members of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences
Chechen people
FC Akhmat Grozny
Qadiri order
Recipients of the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", 4th class | false | [
"\"Take Away the Colour\" is a 1993 song by British born, Italy based Eurodance artist ICE MC. It was his first single from his album Ice'n'Green on which it appears as third track, and his ninth single overall. It was written and produced by Robyx, while the female vocals were performed by Simone Jay. The song was reissued a year later, in 1995, in a new version entitled \"Take Away the Colour ('95 Reconstruction)\", however, this version is performed by Alexia. The first version was more successful, reaching the top 20 in Belgium (Wallonia and Flanders), Austria and Sweden. The B-side featuring on the various formats of the 1995 release is a megamix composed by ICE MC's hit single \"Think about the Way\", \"It's a Rainy Day\" and \"Take Away the Colour\". This megamix was the next single in France and was only released in this country.\n\nTrack listings\nThese are the formats and track listings of major single releases of \"Take Away the Colour\".\n\n1994 release\n CD maxi - Europe\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (radio mix) — 3:29\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (HF mix) — 6:45\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (VCF mix) — 5:08\n\n CD maxi - Australia\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (radio mix) — 3:25\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (HF mix) — 6:41\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (to be sampled) — 3:27\n\n CD single\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (radio mix) — 3:28\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (HF mix) — 6:44\n\n 12\" maxi - Europe\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (HF mix) — 6:41\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (VCF mix) — 5:06\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (radio mix) — 3:25\n\n CD maxi - Remixes - Germany\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (uannanatu remix) — 7:10\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (trance dub) — 6:23\n\n CD maxi - Remixes - Italy\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (radio 7\" version) — 3:25\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (FOS vocal dub) — 7:17\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (uannanatu remix) — 7:10\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (trance dub) — 6:33\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (VCF mix) — 5:06\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (to be sampled) — 3:27\n\n 12\" maxi - Remixes\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (FOS vocal dub) — 7:18\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (uannanatu remix) — 7:10\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (trance dub) — 6:33\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (to be sampled) — 3:27\n\n1995 release\n CD maxi - Sweden\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction short radio edit) — 3:59\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction) — 5:27\n \"Megamix (extended version) — 8:44\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (original LP version) — 3:25\n \"Megamix (short radio version) — 4:14\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n\n CD maxi - Belgium\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (original LP version) — 3:25\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction short) — 3:59\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction long) — 5:27\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n \"Megamix Short\" — 4:14\n \"Megamix Long\" — 8:44\n\n CD maxi - Germany\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction) — 3:59\n \"Megamix\" (short version) — 4:14\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction) — 5:27\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n\n CD single - France, Belgium\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (original LP version) — 3:25 (Belgium only)\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction short) — 3:59\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction long version) — 5:27 (France only)\n\n 12\" maxi - Belgium\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction short) — 3:59\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (original LP version) — 3:25\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction long) — 5:27\n \"Megamix Short\" — 4:14\n\n 12\" maxi - Germany, Spain, Italy\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction) — 5:27\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction short) — 3:59\n \"Megamix\" (extended version) — 8:44\n \"Megamix\" (short version) — 4:14\n\n 12\" maxi - France\n \"Take Away the Colour\" ('95 Reconstruction) — 5:27\n \"Take Away the Colour\" (Rob X remix) — 6:14\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n1994 version\n\n1995 version\n\nYear-end charts\n1995 version\n\nReferences\n\n1993 singles\n1994 singles\nSongs written by Roberto Zanetti\nIan Campbell (rapper) songs\nIce MC songs\n1993 songs\nDance Pool singles\nPolydor Records singles",
"\"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" is a single by British pop rock group the Beautiful South from their sixth album, Quench (1998). It was written by Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray. The lyrics, which take the form of a conversation between two reconciling lovers, are noted for a reference to the TARDIS from Doctor Who. According to the book Last Orders at the Liars Bar: the Official Story of the Beautiful South, \"How Long's a Tear Take To Dry?\" was originally to be called \"She Bangs the Buns\" due to its chord structure reminiscent of Manchester's the Stone Roses. The song reached number 12 on the UK Singles Chart, becoming the band's twelfth and final top-twenty hit.\n\nSingle release\n\"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" reached number 12 in the UK Singles Chart in March 1999. Although not released on vinyl, it was given a dual-CD release in the UK. B-sides included a remix of \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" as well as acoustic versions of three other songs: \"Perfect 10\", \"Big Coin\", and \"Rotterdam\". On 18 March 1999, the band performed \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" live on the BBC music programme Top of the Pops.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video, available on The Beautiful South's compilation DVD Munch, is a humorous account of The Beautiful South on a world tour in order to pay for drinks at the local bar. The band is portrayed by cartoon versions of themselves, in a style reminiscent of 1960s-era Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and Scooby-Doo in particular. In the commentary track on the Munch DVD, Paul Heaton explains that the video was actually produced by Hanna-Barbera.\n\nTrack listings\n\nUK CD1\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\"\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" (remix)\n \"Perfect 10\" (acoustic)\n\nUK CD2\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\"\n \"Big Coin\" (acoustic)\n \"Rotterdam\" (acoustic)\n\nUK cassette single\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\"\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" (remix)\n\nEuropean CD single\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" (radio edit)\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" (remix)\n \"Perfect 10\" (acoustic)\n \"Rotterdam\" (acoustic)\n\nGerman CD single\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\"\n \"Dumb\"\n \"I Sold My Heart to the Junkman\"\n \"Suck Harder\"\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n Pattenden, Mike - Last Orders at the Liars Bar: the Official Story of the Beautiful South ()\n\n1999 singles\n1998 songs\nThe Beautiful South songs\nGo! Discs singles\nHanna-Barbera\nMercury Records singles\nSongs written by David Rotheray\nSongs written by Paul Heaton"
]
|
[
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe",
"Educator"
]
| C_b455de4bbfad4424aa200fd1ac95172f_0 | What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while as an educator? | 1 | What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while an educator? | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today. Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death. CANNOTANSWER | architecture | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. Mies strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".
Early career
Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and using the Dutch "van der", because the German form "von" was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes.
Personal life
In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914–2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915–2003), and Waltraut (1917–1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900–1989) was his primary companion. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from the 15th of October until the 8th of November 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.
Traditionalism to Modernism
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles.
The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He constructed his first modernist house with the Villa Wolf in 1926 in Guben (today Gubin, Poland) for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. This was shortly followed by Haus Lange and Haus Esters in 1928.
He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, completed in 1930.
He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G, which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. He served as its last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the day, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance of the traditional design styles. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had proposed that art and crafts should be entirely independent of architecture, that the architect should no longer control those cultural elements as the Beaux Arts principles had dictated. Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
The bold work of leading American architects was admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that encompass their outdoor surroundings, as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the Wright's American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction, and American skyscrapers were greatly admired.
Emigration to the United States
Commission opportunities dwindled with the Great Depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.
Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School, which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe.
Career in the United States
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.
In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass.
His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herbert Greenwald, presented to Americans a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
American work
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860–880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects. He also built homes for wealthy clients.
Chicago Federal Complex
Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the high-rise John C. Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post Office building. The complex's plot area extends over two blocks; a one-block site, bounded by Jackson, Clark, Adams, and Dearborn streets, contains the Kluczynski Federal Building and U.S. Post Office Loop Station, while a parcel on an adjacent block to the east contains the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The structural framing of the buildings is formed of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs. The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat black graphite paint. The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules. This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground-floor lobbies of the two tower buildings with the grid lines continuing vertically up the buildings and integrating each component of the complex. Associated architects that have played a role in the complex's long history from 1959 to 1974 include Schmidt, Garden & Erickson; C.F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein & Sons.
Farnsworth House
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-paneled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.
The Farnsworth House and its wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.
The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are configured to express their own individual character.
The Promontory – Lake Shore Drive
The Promontory Apartments is a 22-story skyscraper in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, that overlooks Promontory Point in Burnham Park and its Lake Michigan beaches. It is the first residential skyscraper Mies designed and the first of his buildings to feature concepts such as an exposed skeleton. An active community cooperative, the building which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, has 122 units. Its building was initiated by developer Herbert Greenwald for wealthier occupants. Mies employed a Double T design with the horizontal cross-bars joined; the stems of the T's form wings to the rear. Each T is its own building with separate addresses, elevators, and interior stairways. This tripartite design would feature prominently in future Mies designs. Starting with the third story, each floor of each T has three apartments that share an elevator lobby. A solarium and party room on the roof provides excellent views of the park and beaches to the east, and the University of Chicago to the west.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby.
The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other.
Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.
Seagram Building
Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
During 1951–1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass, and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one-story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum. He also built a residence for John M. van Beuren on a family estate near Morristown, New Jersey.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Wiess Law Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in the world.
Two buildings in Baltimore, MD
The One Charles Center, built in 1962, is a 23-story aluminum and glass building that heralded the beginning of Baltimore's downtown modern buildings. The Highfield House, just to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, was built in 1964 as a rental apartment building. The 15-story concrete tower became a residential condominium building in 1979. Both buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Gallery, Berlin
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. Art installations by Ulrich Rückriem (1998) or Jenny Holzer, as much as exhibitions on the work of Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas have demonstrated the exceptional possibilities of this space.
The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for temporary exhibits. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the museum's total built area with conventional white-walled art gallery spaces and support functions. A large window running along all the West facade opens these spaces up to the large sculpture garden which is part of the podium building.
Mies Building at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
In 1952, a fraternity commissioned Mies to design a building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The plan was not realized during his lifetime, but the design was rediscovered in 2013, and in 2019 the university's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design announced they would be constructing it with blessing of his grandchildren. The building is scheduled to open in September 2021.
Furniture
Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Educator
Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance.
Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision.
In 1961, a program at Columbia University's School of Architecture celebrated the four great founders of contemporary architecture: Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. It included addresses by Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as an interview with Mies van der Rohe. Discussion focused upon philosophies of design, aspects of their various architectural projects, and the juncture of architecture and city planning.
Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death.
Later years and death
Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfill himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969, from esophageal cancer caused by his smoking habit. After cremation, his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by an intentionally unadorned, clean-line black slab of polished granite and a large honey locust tree.
Archives
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, was established in 1968 by the museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the museum. The archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929–1969 (bulk 1948–1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
Other archives are held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (personal book collection), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (drawings and photos) in Montreal, the Newberry Library in Chicago (personal correspondence), and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (professional correspondence).
Gallery
List of works
Early career in Europe (1907–1938)
1908 Riehl House – Residential home, Potsdam, Germany
1911 Perls House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1913 Werner House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1917 Urbig House – Residential home, Potsdam
1922 Kempner House – Residential home, Charlottenburg
1922 Eichstaedt House – Residential home, Wannsee
1922 Feldmann House – Residential home, Wilmersdorf
1923 Ryder House – Residential home, Wiesbaden
1925 Villa Wolf – Residential home, Guben
1926 Mosler House – Residential home, Babelsberg
1926 – Monument dedicated to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
1927 Afrikanische Straße Apartments – Multi-Family Residential, Berlin, Germany
1927 Weissenhof Estate – Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart
1928 Haus Lange and Haus Esters – Residential home and an art museum, Krefeld
1929 Barcelona Pavilion – World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain
1930 Villa Tugendhat – Residential home, Brno, Czechia, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001
1930 Verseidag Factory – Dyeing and HE Silk Mill building Krefeld, Germany
1932 Lemke House – Residential home, Weissensee
Buildings after emigration to the United States (1939–1960)
1939–1958 – Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, academic campus & buildings, Chicago, Illinois
1949 The Promontory Apartments – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Sheridan-Oakdale Apartments (2933 N Sheridan Rd ) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments – Residential apartment towers, Chicago
1951 Algonquin Apartments – Residential apartments, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Farnsworth House – Vacation home, Plano, Illinois
1952 Arts Club of Chicago Interior Renovation – Art gallery, demolished in 1997, Chicago, Illinois
1952 Robert H. McCormick House – Residential home, relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1954 Cullinan Hall – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1956 Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture – Academic building, Chicago, Illinois
1956 900-910 North Lake Shore (Esplanade Apartments) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1957 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (330–330 W Diversey Parkway) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago (1957)
1958 Seagram Building – Office tower, New York City, New York
1958 Caroline Wiess Law Building, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1959 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Building – Office building, Des Moines, Iowa
1959 Lafayette Park – Residential development, Detroit, Michigan.
1960 Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments– Residential complex, Newark, New Jersey
Late career Worldwide (1961–69)
1961 Bacardi Office Building – Office Building, Mexico City
1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive – Residential apartment complex of three towers, Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1962 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Des Moines Building – Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa
1962 One Charles Center – Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland
1963 2400 North Lakeview Apartments – Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1963 Morris Greenwald House – Vacation Home, Weston, Connecticut
1964 Chicago Federal Center – Civic Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1960–1964 Dirksen Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
Kluczynski Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
United States Post Office Loop Station – General Post Office, Chicago
1964 Highfield House, 4000 North Charles – Originally Rental Apartments, and now Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland
1965 University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration – Academic Building Chicago, Illinois
1965 Richard King Mellon Hall – Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
1965 Meredith Hall – School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
1967 Westmount Square – Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount, Island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1968 Neue Nationalgalerie – Modern Art Museum, Berlin, Germany
1965–1968 Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1967–1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre – Office Tower Complex, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1969 Filling station – Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (closed)
1970 One Illinois Center – Office Tower, Chicago, Illinois (completed post-mortem)
1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library – District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. (completed post-mortem)
1973 American Life Building – Louisville, Kentucky (completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)
1973 IBM Plaza – Office Tower, Chicago (completed post-mortem)
Buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus (1939–1958)
1943 Minerals & Metals Research Building – Research
1945 Engineering Research Building – Research
1946 Alumni Memorial Hall – Classroom
1946 Wishnick Hall – Classroom
1946 Perlstein Hall – Classroom
1950 I.I.T. Boiler Plant – Academic
1950 Institute of Gas Technology Building – Research
1950 American Association of Railroads Administration Building (now the College of Music Building) – Administration
1952 Mechanical Engineering Research Building I – Research
1952 Carr Memorial Chapel – Religious
1953 American Association of Railroads Mechanical Engineering Building – Research
1953 Carman Hall at IIT – Dormitory
1955 Cunningham Hall – Dormitory
1955 Bailey Hall – Dormitory
1955 I.I.T. Commons Building
1956 Crown Hall – Academic, College of Architecture
1957 Physics & Electrical Engineering Research Building – Research
1957 Siegel Hall – Classroom
1953 American Association of Railroads Laboratory Building – Research
1958 Metals Technology Building Extension – Research
See also
Online Architecture – lets the construction purpose of building online
International style (architecture)
References
Further reading
Lamster, Mark (2018). "The man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century" (hardcover,528 pages) Little, Brown & Co. English; ;
Rovira, Josep M; Casais, Lluis (2002). Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: Reflections,71 pages. Publisher:Triangle Postal.
External links
Mies van der Rohe Society
Mies van der Rohe Foundation
Mies in Berlin-Mies in America
Great Buildings Architects
Mies van der Rohe Spotlight – ArchDaily
Elmhurst Art Museum, featuring McCormick House
Richard King Mellon Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Mies, IIT, and the Second Chicago School
Mies in America exhibition
Travel guide to Mies Buildings
Construction underway to transform famed Nuns’ Island gas station
Mies' Lafayette Park in Detroit
Mies in IR
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural and furniture drawings, 1946–1961, held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Finding aid for the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students collection , Canadian Centre for Architecture
Functionalist architects
1886 births
1969 deaths
19th-century Prussian people
20th-century American architects
Bauhaus teachers
Burials at Graceland Cemetery (Chicago)
20th-century German architects
German emigrants to the United States
German furniture designers
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
Architecture educators
International style architects
Modernist architects from Germany
People from Aachen
Artists from Chicago
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal | true | [
"Wolf Tegethoff (born 1953) is a German art historian, an expert on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and currently, with Ulrich Pfisterer, director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.\n\nTegethoff studied art history, urban design, economic history and social history at the University of Bonn and Columbia University, New York. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1981. From 1981-87 he was assistant professor at the Kunsthistorisches Institut of the University of Kiel. From 1987 to 1991 he was second director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, and since 1991 he is director of this institute. He has been visiting professor at the universities of Bonn, Haifa and Venice. In 2000 he was appointed professor of art history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.\n\nTegethoff is married to art historian Marion Ackermann (born 1965), who was director of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and is currently director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. They have two children. Two further children are from a previous relationship.\n\nReferences\n\nSelect publications\nMies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses. New York, Cambridge, Mass. 1985.\n\"From Obscurity to Maturity: Mies van der Rohe's Breakthrough to Modernism\". In Franz Schulze, ed., Mies van der Rohe. New York 1989, pp. 28–94.\nIm Brennpunkt der Moderne: Mies van der Rohe und das Haus Tugendhat in Brünn. Munich 1998.\nLudwig Mies van der Rohe: the Tugendhat House. Vienna, New York 2000. \n'Catching the spirit: Mies's early work and the impact of the \"Prussian style\" '. In Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, eds., Mies in Berlin, New York 2001, pp. 134–151.\nNation, Style, Modernism. Cracow, Munich 2006.\nCarlo Scarpa: struttura e forme. Venice 2007.\nRalf Kaspers: Fotografie. Düsseldorf 2009.\nAllgemeines Künsterlexikon. Associate Editor, Berlin/Boston 2018.\n\nExternal links\nZentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte: Wolf Tegethoff\nLudwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich: Prof. Dr. Wolf Tegethoff.\n\nLiving people\n1953 births\nGerman art historians\nGerman male non-fiction writers",
"Georgia van der Rohe (born Dorothea Mies; March 2, 1914 – December 10, 2008) was a German dancer, actress, and director.\n\nLife\nGeorgia van der Rohe, daughter of the renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his wife Ada, grew up in the company of Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Wassily Kandinsky.\n\nVan der Rohe had two children.\n\nReferences\n\n1914 births\n2008 deaths\nGerman female dancers"
]
|
[
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe",
"Educator",
"What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while as an educator?",
"architecture"
]
| C_b455de4bbfad4424aa200fd1ac95172f_0 | At which school did Rohe teach at? | 2 | At which school did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach? | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today. Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death. CANNOTANSWER | Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. Mies strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".
Early career
Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and using the Dutch "van der", because the German form "von" was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes.
Personal life
In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914–2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915–2003), and Waltraut (1917–1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900–1989) was his primary companion. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from the 15th of October until the 8th of November 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.
Traditionalism to Modernism
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles.
The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He constructed his first modernist house with the Villa Wolf in 1926 in Guben (today Gubin, Poland) for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. This was shortly followed by Haus Lange and Haus Esters in 1928.
He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, completed in 1930.
He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G, which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. He served as its last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the day, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance of the traditional design styles. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had proposed that art and crafts should be entirely independent of architecture, that the architect should no longer control those cultural elements as the Beaux Arts principles had dictated. Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
The bold work of leading American architects was admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that encompass their outdoor surroundings, as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the Wright's American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction, and American skyscrapers were greatly admired.
Emigration to the United States
Commission opportunities dwindled with the Great Depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.
Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School, which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe.
Career in the United States
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.
In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass.
His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herbert Greenwald, presented to Americans a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
American work
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860–880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects. He also built homes for wealthy clients.
Chicago Federal Complex
Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the high-rise John C. Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post Office building. The complex's plot area extends over two blocks; a one-block site, bounded by Jackson, Clark, Adams, and Dearborn streets, contains the Kluczynski Federal Building and U.S. Post Office Loop Station, while a parcel on an adjacent block to the east contains the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The structural framing of the buildings is formed of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs. The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat black graphite paint. The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules. This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground-floor lobbies of the two tower buildings with the grid lines continuing vertically up the buildings and integrating each component of the complex. Associated architects that have played a role in the complex's long history from 1959 to 1974 include Schmidt, Garden & Erickson; C.F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein & Sons.
Farnsworth House
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-paneled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.
The Farnsworth House and its wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.
The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are configured to express their own individual character.
The Promontory – Lake Shore Drive
The Promontory Apartments is a 22-story skyscraper in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, that overlooks Promontory Point in Burnham Park and its Lake Michigan beaches. It is the first residential skyscraper Mies designed and the first of his buildings to feature concepts such as an exposed skeleton. An active community cooperative, the building which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, has 122 units. Its building was initiated by developer Herbert Greenwald for wealthier occupants. Mies employed a Double T design with the horizontal cross-bars joined; the stems of the T's form wings to the rear. Each T is its own building with separate addresses, elevators, and interior stairways. This tripartite design would feature prominently in future Mies designs. Starting with the third story, each floor of each T has three apartments that share an elevator lobby. A solarium and party room on the roof provides excellent views of the park and beaches to the east, and the University of Chicago to the west.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby.
The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other.
Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.
Seagram Building
Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
During 1951–1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass, and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one-story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum. He also built a residence for John M. van Beuren on a family estate near Morristown, New Jersey.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Wiess Law Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in the world.
Two buildings in Baltimore, MD
The One Charles Center, built in 1962, is a 23-story aluminum and glass building that heralded the beginning of Baltimore's downtown modern buildings. The Highfield House, just to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, was built in 1964 as a rental apartment building. The 15-story concrete tower became a residential condominium building in 1979. Both buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Gallery, Berlin
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. Art installations by Ulrich Rückriem (1998) or Jenny Holzer, as much as exhibitions on the work of Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas have demonstrated the exceptional possibilities of this space.
The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for temporary exhibits. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the museum's total built area with conventional white-walled art gallery spaces and support functions. A large window running along all the West facade opens these spaces up to the large sculpture garden which is part of the podium building.
Mies Building at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
In 1952, a fraternity commissioned Mies to design a building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The plan was not realized during his lifetime, but the design was rediscovered in 2013, and in 2019 the university's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design announced they would be constructing it with blessing of his grandchildren. The building is scheduled to open in September 2021.
Furniture
Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Educator
Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance.
Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision.
In 1961, a program at Columbia University's School of Architecture celebrated the four great founders of contemporary architecture: Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. It included addresses by Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as an interview with Mies van der Rohe. Discussion focused upon philosophies of design, aspects of their various architectural projects, and the juncture of architecture and city planning.
Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death.
Later years and death
Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfill himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969, from esophageal cancer caused by his smoking habit. After cremation, his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by an intentionally unadorned, clean-line black slab of polished granite and a large honey locust tree.
Archives
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, was established in 1968 by the museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the museum. The archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929–1969 (bulk 1948–1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
Other archives are held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (personal book collection), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (drawings and photos) in Montreal, the Newberry Library in Chicago (personal correspondence), and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (professional correspondence).
Gallery
List of works
Early career in Europe (1907–1938)
1908 Riehl House – Residential home, Potsdam, Germany
1911 Perls House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1913 Werner House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1917 Urbig House – Residential home, Potsdam
1922 Kempner House – Residential home, Charlottenburg
1922 Eichstaedt House – Residential home, Wannsee
1922 Feldmann House – Residential home, Wilmersdorf
1923 Ryder House – Residential home, Wiesbaden
1925 Villa Wolf – Residential home, Guben
1926 Mosler House – Residential home, Babelsberg
1926 – Monument dedicated to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
1927 Afrikanische Straße Apartments – Multi-Family Residential, Berlin, Germany
1927 Weissenhof Estate – Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart
1928 Haus Lange and Haus Esters – Residential home and an art museum, Krefeld
1929 Barcelona Pavilion – World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain
1930 Villa Tugendhat – Residential home, Brno, Czechia, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001
1930 Verseidag Factory – Dyeing and HE Silk Mill building Krefeld, Germany
1932 Lemke House – Residential home, Weissensee
Buildings after emigration to the United States (1939–1960)
1939–1958 – Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, academic campus & buildings, Chicago, Illinois
1949 The Promontory Apartments – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Sheridan-Oakdale Apartments (2933 N Sheridan Rd ) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments – Residential apartment towers, Chicago
1951 Algonquin Apartments – Residential apartments, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Farnsworth House – Vacation home, Plano, Illinois
1952 Arts Club of Chicago Interior Renovation – Art gallery, demolished in 1997, Chicago, Illinois
1952 Robert H. McCormick House – Residential home, relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1954 Cullinan Hall – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1956 Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture – Academic building, Chicago, Illinois
1956 900-910 North Lake Shore (Esplanade Apartments) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1957 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (330–330 W Diversey Parkway) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago (1957)
1958 Seagram Building – Office tower, New York City, New York
1958 Caroline Wiess Law Building, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1959 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Building – Office building, Des Moines, Iowa
1959 Lafayette Park – Residential development, Detroit, Michigan.
1960 Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments– Residential complex, Newark, New Jersey
Late career Worldwide (1961–69)
1961 Bacardi Office Building – Office Building, Mexico City
1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive – Residential apartment complex of three towers, Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1962 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Des Moines Building – Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa
1962 One Charles Center – Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland
1963 2400 North Lakeview Apartments – Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1963 Morris Greenwald House – Vacation Home, Weston, Connecticut
1964 Chicago Federal Center – Civic Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1960–1964 Dirksen Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
Kluczynski Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
United States Post Office Loop Station – General Post Office, Chicago
1964 Highfield House, 4000 North Charles – Originally Rental Apartments, and now Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland
1965 University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration – Academic Building Chicago, Illinois
1965 Richard King Mellon Hall – Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
1965 Meredith Hall – School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
1967 Westmount Square – Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount, Island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1968 Neue Nationalgalerie – Modern Art Museum, Berlin, Germany
1965–1968 Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1967–1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre – Office Tower Complex, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1969 Filling station – Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (closed)
1970 One Illinois Center – Office Tower, Chicago, Illinois (completed post-mortem)
1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library – District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. (completed post-mortem)
1973 American Life Building – Louisville, Kentucky (completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)
1973 IBM Plaza – Office Tower, Chicago (completed post-mortem)
Buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus (1939–1958)
1943 Minerals & Metals Research Building – Research
1945 Engineering Research Building – Research
1946 Alumni Memorial Hall – Classroom
1946 Wishnick Hall – Classroom
1946 Perlstein Hall – Classroom
1950 I.I.T. Boiler Plant – Academic
1950 Institute of Gas Technology Building – Research
1950 American Association of Railroads Administration Building (now the College of Music Building) – Administration
1952 Mechanical Engineering Research Building I – Research
1952 Carr Memorial Chapel – Religious
1953 American Association of Railroads Mechanical Engineering Building – Research
1953 Carman Hall at IIT – Dormitory
1955 Cunningham Hall – Dormitory
1955 Bailey Hall – Dormitory
1955 I.I.T. Commons Building
1956 Crown Hall – Academic, College of Architecture
1957 Physics & Electrical Engineering Research Building – Research
1957 Siegel Hall – Classroom
1953 American Association of Railroads Laboratory Building – Research
1958 Metals Technology Building Extension – Research
See also
Online Architecture – lets the construction purpose of building online
International style (architecture)
References
Further reading
Lamster, Mark (2018). "The man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century" (hardcover,528 pages) Little, Brown & Co. English; ;
Rovira, Josep M; Casais, Lluis (2002). Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: Reflections,71 pages. Publisher:Triangle Postal.
External links
Mies van der Rohe Society
Mies van der Rohe Foundation
Mies in Berlin-Mies in America
Great Buildings Architects
Mies van der Rohe Spotlight – ArchDaily
Elmhurst Art Museum, featuring McCormick House
Richard King Mellon Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Mies, IIT, and the Second Chicago School
Mies in America exhibition
Travel guide to Mies Buildings
Construction underway to transform famed Nuns’ Island gas station
Mies' Lafayette Park in Detroit
Mies in IR
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural and furniture drawings, 1946–1961, held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Finding aid for the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students collection , Canadian Centre for Architecture
Functionalist architects
1886 births
1969 deaths
19th-century Prussian people
20th-century American architects
Bauhaus teachers
Burials at Graceland Cemetery (Chicago)
20th-century German architects
German emigrants to the United States
German furniture designers
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
Architecture educators
International style architects
Modernist architects from Germany
People from Aachen
Artists from Chicago
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal | false | [
"Alice Rohe (January 15, 1876 – April 7, 1957) was an American author and journalist. She became a newspaper writer in the 1890s and after joined Theta Sigma Phi, the first American journalism association for women in communications. During World War I, Rohe works as the first female overseas bureau chief for a major American press service in Rome.\n\nEarly life\nAlice Rohe was born January 15, 1876, in Lawrence, Kansas, United States. She was the daughter of Adam and Alice Park Rohe and the elder of the two surviving Rohe children. Her sister was named Margaret, and her father was a sketch artist during the Civil War.\n\nFrom 1892 to 1896, Rohe attended the University of Kansas. June 1895, she served as a founding editor of the school's weekly newspaper. She also became a member of the women's fraternity Pi Beta Phi.\n\nDuring the first World War she reported from Italy for the United Press. She wrote about the principality of \"San Marino\" who served as one of America's smallest ally. She was arrested for spying twice but each time she was released. A later comment by George Creel described her as a \"volunteer\" which implies that she may have been serving as a spy.\n\nLater life\nIn 1935, Rohe returned to the United States. Until her death she was living with her sister's family in New York when she died on April 7, 1957. She bequeathed her collected Etruscan objects to the University of Kansas.\n\nBibliography\nOur Littlest Ally (1918)\n\nSelected Written Resources\nThere are some selected written resources written by Alice Rohe. \n Abdul Ba-ha Patriarchal Head of Bahaists in Denver With Message of Love and Justice to All and for All, The Daily News, September 25, 1912 \n Mackay Presents Woman As Leader In Human Progress. The Baltimore Sun, April 8, 1914\n Come, Die With Me' Begs Youth To a Stranger at Busy Corner, Colonel Adam Rohe, Visitor From Kansas Who Served in War Escapes From Would-Be-Suicide and Quickly Boards a Car. Denver Daily News, before 1915\n Hitch in Vatican Plan: Peace Program Believed to Have Encountered Difficulty..., The Washington Post, November 26, 1915\n Wait Action By Pope: Rome Diplomats See German Appeal to Vatican..., Washington Post, December 2, 1915\n Peace Offer to Pope. Kaiser Said to Have Made Proposal Through the Vatican., Washington Post, December 5, 1915\n Women Weep in Rome's Poverty-Stricken San Lorenzo District For Their Men Who Are at Front. Washington Post, January 30, 1916\n American Newspapers Help Provide Hot Rations for Italians at Front. Washington Post, February 27, 1916\n Our Littlest Ally. National Geographic Magazine 34 (August, 1918):138-63\n Queen Santa Claus. Good Housekeeping 69 (December 1919):15-16, 121-125\n Snaps of Macedonia. Travel 35 (May 1920):11-15\n The Story of Susan Glaspell., The Morning Telegraph, December 18, 1921, Sec. 2\n Mussolini, Hope of Youth, Italy's 'Man of Tomorrow.''' The New York Times, November 5, 1922\n New Italian Renascence. The Bookman 56 (June 1923): 653-55\n At Last Native American Plays., The Independent, April 12, 1924\n Only in a Crowd Could I Do It., Collier's 73 (Jan. 26, 1924):15\n American Repertoire Theatre?, The Independent 112 (June 7, 1924): 317-18\n Pirandella's Warning. The Forum 71 (June 1924):791\n Only in America., The Independent 114 (April 11, 1925):405\n I Was Dying—I Made It My Job to Get Well., Hearst's International combined with Cosmopolitan 78 (May 1925): 34\n Why I Fled Italy.'', Reader's Digest, 28 (April 1936):47-50. \"Mussolini, Lady Killer.\", The Literary Digest 124 (July 31, 1937): 27.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n Alice Rohe at Library of Congress\n\n1876 births\n1957 deaths\n19th-century American writers\nWriters from Kansas\nAmerican women journalists\nJournalists from Kansas\nKansas State University alumni\n19th-century American women writers\n20th-century American women writers\n20th-century American non-fiction writers",
"Wolf Tegethoff (born 1953) is a German art historian, an expert on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and currently, with Ulrich Pfisterer, director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.\n\nTegethoff studied art history, urban design, economic history and social history at the University of Bonn and Columbia University, New York. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1981. From 1981-87 he was assistant professor at the Kunsthistorisches Institut of the University of Kiel. From 1987 to 1991 he was second director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, and since 1991 he is director of this institute. He has been visiting professor at the universities of Bonn, Haifa and Venice. In 2000 he was appointed professor of art history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.\n\nTegethoff is married to art historian Marion Ackermann (born 1965), who was director of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and is currently director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. They have two children. Two further children are from a previous relationship.\n\nReferences\n\nSelect publications\nMies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses. New York, Cambridge, Mass. 1985.\n\"From Obscurity to Maturity: Mies van der Rohe's Breakthrough to Modernism\". In Franz Schulze, ed., Mies van der Rohe. New York 1989, pp. 28–94.\nIm Brennpunkt der Moderne: Mies van der Rohe und das Haus Tugendhat in Brünn. Munich 1998.\nLudwig Mies van der Rohe: the Tugendhat House. Vienna, New York 2000. \n'Catching the spirit: Mies's early work and the impact of the \"Prussian style\" '. In Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, eds., Mies in Berlin, New York 2001, pp. 134–151.\nNation, Style, Modernism. Cracow, Munich 2006.\nCarlo Scarpa: struttura e forme. Venice 2007.\nRalf Kaspers: Fotografie. Düsseldorf 2009.\nAllgemeines Künsterlexikon. Associate Editor, Berlin/Boston 2018.\n\nExternal links\nZentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte: Wolf Tegethoff\nLudwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich: Prof. Dr. Wolf Tegethoff.\n\nLiving people\n1953 births\nGerman art historians\nGerman male non-fiction writers"
]
|
[
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe",
"Educator",
"What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while as an educator?",
"architecture",
"At which school did Rohe teach at?",
"Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago,"
]
| C_b455de4bbfad4424aa200fd1ac95172f_0 | What year did he begin teaching at the Illinois Instite of Technology? | 3 | What year did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe begin teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology? | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today. Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. Mies strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".
Early career
Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and using the Dutch "van der", because the German form "von" was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes.
Personal life
In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914–2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915–2003), and Waltraut (1917–1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900–1989) was his primary companion. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from the 15th of October until the 8th of November 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.
Traditionalism to Modernism
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles.
The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He constructed his first modernist house with the Villa Wolf in 1926 in Guben (today Gubin, Poland) for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. This was shortly followed by Haus Lange and Haus Esters in 1928.
He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, completed in 1930.
He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G, which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. He served as its last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the day, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance of the traditional design styles. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had proposed that art and crafts should be entirely independent of architecture, that the architect should no longer control those cultural elements as the Beaux Arts principles had dictated. Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
The bold work of leading American architects was admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that encompass their outdoor surroundings, as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the Wright's American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction, and American skyscrapers were greatly admired.
Emigration to the United States
Commission opportunities dwindled with the Great Depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.
Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School, which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe.
Career in the United States
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.
In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass.
His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herbert Greenwald, presented to Americans a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
American work
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860–880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects. He also built homes for wealthy clients.
Chicago Federal Complex
Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the high-rise John C. Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post Office building. The complex's plot area extends over two blocks; a one-block site, bounded by Jackson, Clark, Adams, and Dearborn streets, contains the Kluczynski Federal Building and U.S. Post Office Loop Station, while a parcel on an adjacent block to the east contains the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The structural framing of the buildings is formed of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs. The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat black graphite paint. The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules. This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground-floor lobbies of the two tower buildings with the grid lines continuing vertically up the buildings and integrating each component of the complex. Associated architects that have played a role in the complex's long history from 1959 to 1974 include Schmidt, Garden & Erickson; C.F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein & Sons.
Farnsworth House
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-paneled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.
The Farnsworth House and its wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.
The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are configured to express their own individual character.
The Promontory – Lake Shore Drive
The Promontory Apartments is a 22-story skyscraper in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, that overlooks Promontory Point in Burnham Park and its Lake Michigan beaches. It is the first residential skyscraper Mies designed and the first of his buildings to feature concepts such as an exposed skeleton. An active community cooperative, the building which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, has 122 units. Its building was initiated by developer Herbert Greenwald for wealthier occupants. Mies employed a Double T design with the horizontal cross-bars joined; the stems of the T's form wings to the rear. Each T is its own building with separate addresses, elevators, and interior stairways. This tripartite design would feature prominently in future Mies designs. Starting with the third story, each floor of each T has three apartments that share an elevator lobby. A solarium and party room on the roof provides excellent views of the park and beaches to the east, and the University of Chicago to the west.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby.
The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other.
Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.
Seagram Building
Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
During 1951–1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass, and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one-story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum. He also built a residence for John M. van Beuren on a family estate near Morristown, New Jersey.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Wiess Law Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in the world.
Two buildings in Baltimore, MD
The One Charles Center, built in 1962, is a 23-story aluminum and glass building that heralded the beginning of Baltimore's downtown modern buildings. The Highfield House, just to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, was built in 1964 as a rental apartment building. The 15-story concrete tower became a residential condominium building in 1979. Both buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Gallery, Berlin
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. Art installations by Ulrich Rückriem (1998) or Jenny Holzer, as much as exhibitions on the work of Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas have demonstrated the exceptional possibilities of this space.
The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for temporary exhibits. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the museum's total built area with conventional white-walled art gallery spaces and support functions. A large window running along all the West facade opens these spaces up to the large sculpture garden which is part of the podium building.
Mies Building at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
In 1952, a fraternity commissioned Mies to design a building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The plan was not realized during his lifetime, but the design was rediscovered in 2013, and in 2019 the university's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design announced they would be constructing it with blessing of his grandchildren. The building is scheduled to open in September 2021.
Furniture
Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Educator
Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance.
Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision.
In 1961, a program at Columbia University's School of Architecture celebrated the four great founders of contemporary architecture: Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. It included addresses by Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as an interview with Mies van der Rohe. Discussion focused upon philosophies of design, aspects of their various architectural projects, and the juncture of architecture and city planning.
Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death.
Later years and death
Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfill himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969, from esophageal cancer caused by his smoking habit. After cremation, his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by an intentionally unadorned, clean-line black slab of polished granite and a large honey locust tree.
Archives
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, was established in 1968 by the museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the museum. The archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929–1969 (bulk 1948–1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
Other archives are held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (personal book collection), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (drawings and photos) in Montreal, the Newberry Library in Chicago (personal correspondence), and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (professional correspondence).
Gallery
List of works
Early career in Europe (1907–1938)
1908 Riehl House – Residential home, Potsdam, Germany
1911 Perls House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1913 Werner House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1917 Urbig House – Residential home, Potsdam
1922 Kempner House – Residential home, Charlottenburg
1922 Eichstaedt House – Residential home, Wannsee
1922 Feldmann House – Residential home, Wilmersdorf
1923 Ryder House – Residential home, Wiesbaden
1925 Villa Wolf – Residential home, Guben
1926 Mosler House – Residential home, Babelsberg
1926 – Monument dedicated to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
1927 Afrikanische Straße Apartments – Multi-Family Residential, Berlin, Germany
1927 Weissenhof Estate – Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart
1928 Haus Lange and Haus Esters – Residential home and an art museum, Krefeld
1929 Barcelona Pavilion – World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain
1930 Villa Tugendhat – Residential home, Brno, Czechia, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001
1930 Verseidag Factory – Dyeing and HE Silk Mill building Krefeld, Germany
1932 Lemke House – Residential home, Weissensee
Buildings after emigration to the United States (1939–1960)
1939–1958 – Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, academic campus & buildings, Chicago, Illinois
1949 The Promontory Apartments – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Sheridan-Oakdale Apartments (2933 N Sheridan Rd ) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments – Residential apartment towers, Chicago
1951 Algonquin Apartments – Residential apartments, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Farnsworth House – Vacation home, Plano, Illinois
1952 Arts Club of Chicago Interior Renovation – Art gallery, demolished in 1997, Chicago, Illinois
1952 Robert H. McCormick House – Residential home, relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1954 Cullinan Hall – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1956 Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture – Academic building, Chicago, Illinois
1956 900-910 North Lake Shore (Esplanade Apartments) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1957 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (330–330 W Diversey Parkway) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago (1957)
1958 Seagram Building – Office tower, New York City, New York
1958 Caroline Wiess Law Building, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1959 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Building – Office building, Des Moines, Iowa
1959 Lafayette Park – Residential development, Detroit, Michigan.
1960 Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments– Residential complex, Newark, New Jersey
Late career Worldwide (1961–69)
1961 Bacardi Office Building – Office Building, Mexico City
1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive – Residential apartment complex of three towers, Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1962 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Des Moines Building – Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa
1962 One Charles Center – Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland
1963 2400 North Lakeview Apartments – Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1963 Morris Greenwald House – Vacation Home, Weston, Connecticut
1964 Chicago Federal Center – Civic Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1960–1964 Dirksen Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
Kluczynski Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
United States Post Office Loop Station – General Post Office, Chicago
1964 Highfield House, 4000 North Charles – Originally Rental Apartments, and now Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland
1965 University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration – Academic Building Chicago, Illinois
1965 Richard King Mellon Hall – Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
1965 Meredith Hall – School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
1967 Westmount Square – Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount, Island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1968 Neue Nationalgalerie – Modern Art Museum, Berlin, Germany
1965–1968 Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1967–1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre – Office Tower Complex, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1969 Filling station – Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (closed)
1970 One Illinois Center – Office Tower, Chicago, Illinois (completed post-mortem)
1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library – District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. (completed post-mortem)
1973 American Life Building – Louisville, Kentucky (completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)
1973 IBM Plaza – Office Tower, Chicago (completed post-mortem)
Buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus (1939–1958)
1943 Minerals & Metals Research Building – Research
1945 Engineering Research Building – Research
1946 Alumni Memorial Hall – Classroom
1946 Wishnick Hall – Classroom
1946 Perlstein Hall – Classroom
1950 I.I.T. Boiler Plant – Academic
1950 Institute of Gas Technology Building – Research
1950 American Association of Railroads Administration Building (now the College of Music Building) – Administration
1952 Mechanical Engineering Research Building I – Research
1952 Carr Memorial Chapel – Religious
1953 American Association of Railroads Mechanical Engineering Building – Research
1953 Carman Hall at IIT – Dormitory
1955 Cunningham Hall – Dormitory
1955 Bailey Hall – Dormitory
1955 I.I.T. Commons Building
1956 Crown Hall – Academic, College of Architecture
1957 Physics & Electrical Engineering Research Building – Research
1957 Siegel Hall – Classroom
1953 American Association of Railroads Laboratory Building – Research
1958 Metals Technology Building Extension – Research
See also
Online Architecture – lets the construction purpose of building online
International style (architecture)
References
Further reading
Lamster, Mark (2018). "The man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century" (hardcover,528 pages) Little, Brown & Co. English; ;
Rovira, Josep M; Casais, Lluis (2002). Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: Reflections,71 pages. Publisher:Triangle Postal.
External links
Mies van der Rohe Society
Mies van der Rohe Foundation
Mies in Berlin-Mies in America
Great Buildings Architects
Mies van der Rohe Spotlight – ArchDaily
Elmhurst Art Museum, featuring McCormick House
Richard King Mellon Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Mies, IIT, and the Second Chicago School
Mies in America exhibition
Travel guide to Mies Buildings
Construction underway to transform famed Nuns’ Island gas station
Mies' Lafayette Park in Detroit
Mies in IR
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural and furniture drawings, 1946–1961, held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Finding aid for the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students collection , Canadian Centre for Architecture
Functionalist architects
1886 births
1969 deaths
19th-century Prussian people
20th-century American architects
Bauhaus teachers
Burials at Graceland Cemetery (Chicago)
20th-century German architects
German emigrants to the United States
German furniture designers
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
Architecture educators
International style architects
Modernist architects from Germany
People from Aachen
Artists from Chicago
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal | false | [
"Carol Ann Chapelle (born August 18, 1955) is an American linguist and Angela B. Pavitt Professor in English at Iowa State University.\n\nChapelle earned a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and began teaching at Iowa State University in 1985. She was editor of the TESOL Quarterly from 1999 to 2004. In 2010, Chappelle was named a distinguished professor. She was appointed Angela B. Pavitt Professor in English in March 2015.\n\nPublications\n Argument-based validation in testing and assessment, 2021\n Computer applications in second language acquisition : foundations for teaching, testing and research, 1982\n English language learning and technology : lectures on applied linguistics in the age of information and communication technology, 2003\n Assessing language through computer technology, 2006\n Building a validity argument for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, 2007\n Tips for teaching with CALL : practical approaches to computer-assisted language learning, 2008\n The handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning, 2017\n Teaching culture in introductory foreign language textbooks, 2016\n\nReferences\n\n1955 births\nLiving people\nLinguists from the United States\nWomen linguists\nIowa State University faculty\nUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign alumni\nAcademic journal editors\n20th-century linguists\n21st-century linguists",
"Muhammad S. Eissa is an author and lecturer of Arabic at the University of Chicago, and prior to that was the Mellon Lecturer at the University of Michigan.\n\nEissa holds a bachelors, masters and a Ph.D. all from Al-Azhar University in Egypt. He also holds a C.Phil. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. Eissa has been a professor of Arabic at American University in Cairo, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and Brigham Young University. He is the consulting editor for the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. Eissa is a Muslim. He serves as an educational advisor to the Islamic Schools League of America.\n\nEissa wrote along with James A. Toronto the article on textbooks in Egypt in Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East.\n\nEissa is currently a visiting professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY.\n\nSources\nMiddle Eastern Texts Initiative staff bios\nReview of ''Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East\nCampus Watch article on Eissa\n\nAl-Azhar University alumni\nEgyptian emigrants to the United States\nAmerican Muslims\nUniversity of California, Los Angeles alumni\nThe American University in Cairo faculty\nNorthwestern University faculty\nIllinois Institute of Technology faculty\nBrigham Young University faculty\nUniversity of Michigan faculty\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)"
]
|
[
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe",
"Educator",
"What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while as an educator?",
"architecture",
"At which school did Rohe teach at?",
"Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago,",
"What year did he begin teaching at the Illinois Instite of Technology?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_b455de4bbfad4424aa200fd1ac95172f_0 | Did he contribute any acclaimed ideas while he was teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology? | 4 | Did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe contribute any acclaimed ideas while he was teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology? | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today. Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death. CANNOTANSWER | Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. Mies strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".
Early career
Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and using the Dutch "van der", because the German form "von" was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes.
Personal life
In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914–2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915–2003), and Waltraut (1917–1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900–1989) was his primary companion. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from the 15th of October until the 8th of November 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.
Traditionalism to Modernism
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles.
The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He constructed his first modernist house with the Villa Wolf in 1926 in Guben (today Gubin, Poland) for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. This was shortly followed by Haus Lange and Haus Esters in 1928.
He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, completed in 1930.
He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G, which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. He served as its last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the day, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance of the traditional design styles. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had proposed that art and crafts should be entirely independent of architecture, that the architect should no longer control those cultural elements as the Beaux Arts principles had dictated. Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
The bold work of leading American architects was admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that encompass their outdoor surroundings, as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the Wright's American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction, and American skyscrapers were greatly admired.
Emigration to the United States
Commission opportunities dwindled with the Great Depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.
Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School, which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe.
Career in the United States
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.
In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass.
His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herbert Greenwald, presented to Americans a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
American work
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860–880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects. He also built homes for wealthy clients.
Chicago Federal Complex
Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the high-rise John C. Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post Office building. The complex's plot area extends over two blocks; a one-block site, bounded by Jackson, Clark, Adams, and Dearborn streets, contains the Kluczynski Federal Building and U.S. Post Office Loop Station, while a parcel on an adjacent block to the east contains the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The structural framing of the buildings is formed of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs. The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat black graphite paint. The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules. This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground-floor lobbies of the two tower buildings with the grid lines continuing vertically up the buildings and integrating each component of the complex. Associated architects that have played a role in the complex's long history from 1959 to 1974 include Schmidt, Garden & Erickson; C.F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein & Sons.
Farnsworth House
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-paneled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.
The Farnsworth House and its wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.
The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are configured to express their own individual character.
The Promontory – Lake Shore Drive
The Promontory Apartments is a 22-story skyscraper in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, that overlooks Promontory Point in Burnham Park and its Lake Michigan beaches. It is the first residential skyscraper Mies designed and the first of his buildings to feature concepts such as an exposed skeleton. An active community cooperative, the building which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, has 122 units. Its building was initiated by developer Herbert Greenwald for wealthier occupants. Mies employed a Double T design with the horizontal cross-bars joined; the stems of the T's form wings to the rear. Each T is its own building with separate addresses, elevators, and interior stairways. This tripartite design would feature prominently in future Mies designs. Starting with the third story, each floor of each T has three apartments that share an elevator lobby. A solarium and party room on the roof provides excellent views of the park and beaches to the east, and the University of Chicago to the west.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby.
The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other.
Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.
Seagram Building
Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
During 1951–1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass, and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one-story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum. He also built a residence for John M. van Beuren on a family estate near Morristown, New Jersey.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Wiess Law Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in the world.
Two buildings in Baltimore, MD
The One Charles Center, built in 1962, is a 23-story aluminum and glass building that heralded the beginning of Baltimore's downtown modern buildings. The Highfield House, just to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, was built in 1964 as a rental apartment building. The 15-story concrete tower became a residential condominium building in 1979. Both buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Gallery, Berlin
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. Art installations by Ulrich Rückriem (1998) or Jenny Holzer, as much as exhibitions on the work of Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas have demonstrated the exceptional possibilities of this space.
The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for temporary exhibits. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the museum's total built area with conventional white-walled art gallery spaces and support functions. A large window running along all the West facade opens these spaces up to the large sculpture garden which is part of the podium building.
Mies Building at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
In 1952, a fraternity commissioned Mies to design a building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The plan was not realized during his lifetime, but the design was rediscovered in 2013, and in 2019 the university's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design announced they would be constructing it with blessing of his grandchildren. The building is scheduled to open in September 2021.
Furniture
Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Educator
Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance.
Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision.
In 1961, a program at Columbia University's School of Architecture celebrated the four great founders of contemporary architecture: Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. It included addresses by Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as an interview with Mies van der Rohe. Discussion focused upon philosophies of design, aspects of their various architectural projects, and the juncture of architecture and city planning.
Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death.
Later years and death
Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfill himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969, from esophageal cancer caused by his smoking habit. After cremation, his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by an intentionally unadorned, clean-line black slab of polished granite and a large honey locust tree.
Archives
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, was established in 1968 by the museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the museum. The archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929–1969 (bulk 1948–1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
Other archives are held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (personal book collection), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (drawings and photos) in Montreal, the Newberry Library in Chicago (personal correspondence), and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (professional correspondence).
Gallery
List of works
Early career in Europe (1907–1938)
1908 Riehl House – Residential home, Potsdam, Germany
1911 Perls House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1913 Werner House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1917 Urbig House – Residential home, Potsdam
1922 Kempner House – Residential home, Charlottenburg
1922 Eichstaedt House – Residential home, Wannsee
1922 Feldmann House – Residential home, Wilmersdorf
1923 Ryder House – Residential home, Wiesbaden
1925 Villa Wolf – Residential home, Guben
1926 Mosler House – Residential home, Babelsberg
1926 – Monument dedicated to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
1927 Afrikanische Straße Apartments – Multi-Family Residential, Berlin, Germany
1927 Weissenhof Estate – Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart
1928 Haus Lange and Haus Esters – Residential home and an art museum, Krefeld
1929 Barcelona Pavilion – World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain
1930 Villa Tugendhat – Residential home, Brno, Czechia, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001
1930 Verseidag Factory – Dyeing and HE Silk Mill building Krefeld, Germany
1932 Lemke House – Residential home, Weissensee
Buildings after emigration to the United States (1939–1960)
1939–1958 – Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, academic campus & buildings, Chicago, Illinois
1949 The Promontory Apartments – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Sheridan-Oakdale Apartments (2933 N Sheridan Rd ) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments – Residential apartment towers, Chicago
1951 Algonquin Apartments – Residential apartments, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Farnsworth House – Vacation home, Plano, Illinois
1952 Arts Club of Chicago Interior Renovation – Art gallery, demolished in 1997, Chicago, Illinois
1952 Robert H. McCormick House – Residential home, relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1954 Cullinan Hall – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1956 Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture – Academic building, Chicago, Illinois
1956 900-910 North Lake Shore (Esplanade Apartments) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1957 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (330–330 W Diversey Parkway) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago (1957)
1958 Seagram Building – Office tower, New York City, New York
1958 Caroline Wiess Law Building, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1959 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Building – Office building, Des Moines, Iowa
1959 Lafayette Park – Residential development, Detroit, Michigan.
1960 Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments– Residential complex, Newark, New Jersey
Late career Worldwide (1961–69)
1961 Bacardi Office Building – Office Building, Mexico City
1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive – Residential apartment complex of three towers, Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1962 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Des Moines Building – Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa
1962 One Charles Center – Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland
1963 2400 North Lakeview Apartments – Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1963 Morris Greenwald House – Vacation Home, Weston, Connecticut
1964 Chicago Federal Center – Civic Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1960–1964 Dirksen Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
Kluczynski Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
United States Post Office Loop Station – General Post Office, Chicago
1964 Highfield House, 4000 North Charles – Originally Rental Apartments, and now Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland
1965 University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration – Academic Building Chicago, Illinois
1965 Richard King Mellon Hall – Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
1965 Meredith Hall – School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
1967 Westmount Square – Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount, Island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1968 Neue Nationalgalerie – Modern Art Museum, Berlin, Germany
1965–1968 Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1967–1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre – Office Tower Complex, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1969 Filling station – Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (closed)
1970 One Illinois Center – Office Tower, Chicago, Illinois (completed post-mortem)
1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library – District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. (completed post-mortem)
1973 American Life Building – Louisville, Kentucky (completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)
1973 IBM Plaza – Office Tower, Chicago (completed post-mortem)
Buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus (1939–1958)
1943 Minerals & Metals Research Building – Research
1945 Engineering Research Building – Research
1946 Alumni Memorial Hall – Classroom
1946 Wishnick Hall – Classroom
1946 Perlstein Hall – Classroom
1950 I.I.T. Boiler Plant – Academic
1950 Institute of Gas Technology Building – Research
1950 American Association of Railroads Administration Building (now the College of Music Building) – Administration
1952 Mechanical Engineering Research Building I – Research
1952 Carr Memorial Chapel – Religious
1953 American Association of Railroads Mechanical Engineering Building – Research
1953 Carman Hall at IIT – Dormitory
1955 Cunningham Hall – Dormitory
1955 Bailey Hall – Dormitory
1955 I.I.T. Commons Building
1956 Crown Hall – Academic, College of Architecture
1957 Physics & Electrical Engineering Research Building – Research
1957 Siegel Hall – Classroom
1953 American Association of Railroads Laboratory Building – Research
1958 Metals Technology Building Extension – Research
See also
Online Architecture – lets the construction purpose of building online
International style (architecture)
References
Further reading
Lamster, Mark (2018). "The man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century" (hardcover,528 pages) Little, Brown & Co. English; ;
Rovira, Josep M; Casais, Lluis (2002). Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: Reflections,71 pages. Publisher:Triangle Postal.
External links
Mies van der Rohe Society
Mies van der Rohe Foundation
Mies in Berlin-Mies in America
Great Buildings Architects
Mies van der Rohe Spotlight – ArchDaily
Elmhurst Art Museum, featuring McCormick House
Richard King Mellon Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Mies, IIT, and the Second Chicago School
Mies in America exhibition
Travel guide to Mies Buildings
Construction underway to transform famed Nuns’ Island gas station
Mies' Lafayette Park in Detroit
Mies in IR
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural and furniture drawings, 1946–1961, held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Finding aid for the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students collection , Canadian Centre for Architecture
Functionalist architects
1886 births
1969 deaths
19th-century Prussian people
20th-century American architects
Bauhaus teachers
Burials at Graceland Cemetery (Chicago)
20th-century German architects
German emigrants to the United States
German furniture designers
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
Architecture educators
International style architects
Modernist architects from Germany
People from Aachen
Artists from Chicago
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal | true | [
"Hubert Stanley Wall (December 2, 1902 – September 12, 1971)\nwas an American mathematician who worked primarily in the field of continued fractions. He is also known as one of the leading proponents of the Moore method of teaching.\n\nEarly life and education\nWall was born in Rockwell City, Iowa on December 2, 1902. He received the Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa in 1924. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin (now University of Wisconsin–Madison) in 1927.\n\nHe married Mary Kate Parker, a lawyer and Texas assistant Attorney General. Her specialty was election law.\n\nCareer\nUpon receiving his Ph.D. Wall joined the faculty at Northwestern University and stayed until 1944 except for the academic year 1938–1939 when he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He then went to the Illinois Institute of Technology for two years before moving in 1946 to the University of Texas where he spent the rest of his career. He became an emeritus professor in 1970.\n\nMost of Wall's mathematical research was in various aspects of the analytic theory of continued fractions. This included the theory of positive-definite continued fractions, convergence results for continued fractions, parabola theorems, Hausdorff moments, and Hausdorff summability. He studied the polynomials now named Wall polynomials after him.\n\nWhile at Northwestern he started a collaboration with Ernst Hellinger, and he was very interested in Hellinger integrals throughout his career, but did publish anything on them. \n\nWhile at Texas Wall was a prominent practitioner of the Moore method of teaching. John Parker wrote, \"Wall had long ago thrown himself wholeheartedly into the Moore tradition, with his own interpretation of the Moore method, and there was a good deal of cross pollination of students through their courses, some steered to the PhD by Moore and others by Wall and [Hyman J.] Ettlinger. Between them, they continued to dominate PhD guidance in Pure Mathematics throughout the 1950s and 1960s.\" The University of Texas memorial to Wall suggests that he may have picked up some of these ideas at Northwestern from Van Vleck and Hellinger and says, \"Since there were already people on the Texas faculty who had used innovative techniques (chiefly Robert Lee Moore and some of his colleagues), Wall tried their methods. For him and for his students it was an unqualified success.\"\n\nWall had 66 doctoral students, 61 at the University of Texas.\n\nWall died in Austin on September 12, 1971.\n\nSelected publications\n\nNotes\n\nExternal links\n\n1902 births\n1971 deaths\nPeople from Calhoun County, Iowa\n20th-century American mathematicians\nMathematical analysts\nInstitute for Advanced Study visiting scholars\nIllinois Institute of Technology faculty\nNorthwestern University faculty\nUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison alumni\nUniversity of Texas at Austin faculty",
"Richard Carl Bradt (17 November 1938 – 3 January 2019) was an American materials engineer.\n\nBradt was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised in Mascoutah, Illinois. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in metallurgy and began working for Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation. After four years with Fansteel, Bradt enrolled at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for graduate study in materials engineering. He earned a master's degree in 1965 and a doctorate in 1967. Bradt joined the Pennsylvania State University faculty upon earning his Ph.D. He taught at Penn State until 1983, when he became a member of the University of Washington faculty. While in Seattle, Beadt was appointed to the Kyocera Professorship. In 1989, Bradt began teaching at the Mackay School of Mines within the University of Nevada, Reno. He was a professor at the University of Alabama between 1994 and 2009. Five years prior to retirement, Bradt was named Alton N. Scott Professor of Engineering. He died at UAB Hospital, in Birmingham, Alabama, on 3 January 2019, aged 80.\n\nReferences\n\n1938 births\n2019 deaths\nAmerican materials scientists\n20th-century American engineers\n21st-century American engineers\nScientists from St. Louis\nScientists from Illinois\nPeople from St. Clair County, Illinois\nRensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni\nMassachusetts Institute of Technology alumni\nPennsylvania State University faculty\nUniversity of Alabama faculty\nUniversity of Nevada, Reno faculty\nUniversity of Washington faculty"
]
|
[
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe",
"Educator",
"What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while as an educator?",
"architecture",
"At which school did Rohe teach at?",
"Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago,",
"What year did he begin teaching at the Illinois Instite of Technology?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he contribute any acclaimed ideas while he was teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology?",
" Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT,"
]
| C_b455de4bbfad4424aa200fd1ac95172f_0 | Was Ludwig still creating buildings while teaching? | 5 | Was Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe still creating buildings while teaching? | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today. Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death. CANNOTANSWER | His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. Mies strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".
Early career
Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and using the Dutch "van der", because the German form "von" was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes.
Personal life
In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914–2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915–2003), and Waltraut (1917–1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900–1989) was his primary companion. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from the 15th of October until the 8th of November 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.
Traditionalism to Modernism
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles.
The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He constructed his first modernist house with the Villa Wolf in 1926 in Guben (today Gubin, Poland) for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. This was shortly followed by Haus Lange and Haus Esters in 1928.
He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, completed in 1930.
He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G, which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. He served as its last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the day, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance of the traditional design styles. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had proposed that art and crafts should be entirely independent of architecture, that the architect should no longer control those cultural elements as the Beaux Arts principles had dictated. Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
The bold work of leading American architects was admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that encompass their outdoor surroundings, as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the Wright's American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction, and American skyscrapers were greatly admired.
Emigration to the United States
Commission opportunities dwindled with the Great Depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.
Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School, which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe.
Career in the United States
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.
In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass.
His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herbert Greenwald, presented to Americans a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
American work
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860–880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects. He also built homes for wealthy clients.
Chicago Federal Complex
Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the high-rise John C. Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post Office building. The complex's plot area extends over two blocks; a one-block site, bounded by Jackson, Clark, Adams, and Dearborn streets, contains the Kluczynski Federal Building and U.S. Post Office Loop Station, while a parcel on an adjacent block to the east contains the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The structural framing of the buildings is formed of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs. The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat black graphite paint. The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules. This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground-floor lobbies of the two tower buildings with the grid lines continuing vertically up the buildings and integrating each component of the complex. Associated architects that have played a role in the complex's long history from 1959 to 1974 include Schmidt, Garden & Erickson; C.F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein & Sons.
Farnsworth House
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-paneled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.
The Farnsworth House and its wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.
The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are configured to express their own individual character.
The Promontory – Lake Shore Drive
The Promontory Apartments is a 22-story skyscraper in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, that overlooks Promontory Point in Burnham Park and its Lake Michigan beaches. It is the first residential skyscraper Mies designed and the first of his buildings to feature concepts such as an exposed skeleton. An active community cooperative, the building which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, has 122 units. Its building was initiated by developer Herbert Greenwald for wealthier occupants. Mies employed a Double T design with the horizontal cross-bars joined; the stems of the T's form wings to the rear. Each T is its own building with separate addresses, elevators, and interior stairways. This tripartite design would feature prominently in future Mies designs. Starting with the third story, each floor of each T has three apartments that share an elevator lobby. A solarium and party room on the roof provides excellent views of the park and beaches to the east, and the University of Chicago to the west.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby.
The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other.
Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.
Seagram Building
Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
During 1951–1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass, and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one-story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum. He also built a residence for John M. van Beuren on a family estate near Morristown, New Jersey.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Wiess Law Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in the world.
Two buildings in Baltimore, MD
The One Charles Center, built in 1962, is a 23-story aluminum and glass building that heralded the beginning of Baltimore's downtown modern buildings. The Highfield House, just to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, was built in 1964 as a rental apartment building. The 15-story concrete tower became a residential condominium building in 1979. Both buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Gallery, Berlin
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. Art installations by Ulrich Rückriem (1998) or Jenny Holzer, as much as exhibitions on the work of Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas have demonstrated the exceptional possibilities of this space.
The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for temporary exhibits. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the museum's total built area with conventional white-walled art gallery spaces and support functions. A large window running along all the West facade opens these spaces up to the large sculpture garden which is part of the podium building.
Mies Building at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
In 1952, a fraternity commissioned Mies to design a building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The plan was not realized during his lifetime, but the design was rediscovered in 2013, and in 2019 the university's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design announced they would be constructing it with blessing of his grandchildren. The building is scheduled to open in September 2021.
Furniture
Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Educator
Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance.
Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision.
In 1961, a program at Columbia University's School of Architecture celebrated the four great founders of contemporary architecture: Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. It included addresses by Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as an interview with Mies van der Rohe. Discussion focused upon philosophies of design, aspects of their various architectural projects, and the juncture of architecture and city planning.
Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death.
Later years and death
Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfill himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969, from esophageal cancer caused by his smoking habit. After cremation, his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by an intentionally unadorned, clean-line black slab of polished granite and a large honey locust tree.
Archives
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, was established in 1968 by the museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the museum. The archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929–1969 (bulk 1948–1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
Other archives are held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (personal book collection), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (drawings and photos) in Montreal, the Newberry Library in Chicago (personal correspondence), and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (professional correspondence).
Gallery
List of works
Early career in Europe (1907–1938)
1908 Riehl House – Residential home, Potsdam, Germany
1911 Perls House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1913 Werner House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1917 Urbig House – Residential home, Potsdam
1922 Kempner House – Residential home, Charlottenburg
1922 Eichstaedt House – Residential home, Wannsee
1922 Feldmann House – Residential home, Wilmersdorf
1923 Ryder House – Residential home, Wiesbaden
1925 Villa Wolf – Residential home, Guben
1926 Mosler House – Residential home, Babelsberg
1926 – Monument dedicated to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
1927 Afrikanische Straße Apartments – Multi-Family Residential, Berlin, Germany
1927 Weissenhof Estate – Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart
1928 Haus Lange and Haus Esters – Residential home and an art museum, Krefeld
1929 Barcelona Pavilion – World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain
1930 Villa Tugendhat – Residential home, Brno, Czechia, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001
1930 Verseidag Factory – Dyeing and HE Silk Mill building Krefeld, Germany
1932 Lemke House – Residential home, Weissensee
Buildings after emigration to the United States (1939–1960)
1939–1958 – Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, academic campus & buildings, Chicago, Illinois
1949 The Promontory Apartments – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Sheridan-Oakdale Apartments (2933 N Sheridan Rd ) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments – Residential apartment towers, Chicago
1951 Algonquin Apartments – Residential apartments, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Farnsworth House – Vacation home, Plano, Illinois
1952 Arts Club of Chicago Interior Renovation – Art gallery, demolished in 1997, Chicago, Illinois
1952 Robert H. McCormick House – Residential home, relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1954 Cullinan Hall – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1956 Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture – Academic building, Chicago, Illinois
1956 900-910 North Lake Shore (Esplanade Apartments) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1957 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (330–330 W Diversey Parkway) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago (1957)
1958 Seagram Building – Office tower, New York City, New York
1958 Caroline Wiess Law Building, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1959 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Building – Office building, Des Moines, Iowa
1959 Lafayette Park – Residential development, Detroit, Michigan.
1960 Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments– Residential complex, Newark, New Jersey
Late career Worldwide (1961–69)
1961 Bacardi Office Building – Office Building, Mexico City
1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive – Residential apartment complex of three towers, Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1962 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Des Moines Building – Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa
1962 One Charles Center – Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland
1963 2400 North Lakeview Apartments – Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1963 Morris Greenwald House – Vacation Home, Weston, Connecticut
1964 Chicago Federal Center – Civic Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1960–1964 Dirksen Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
Kluczynski Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
United States Post Office Loop Station – General Post Office, Chicago
1964 Highfield House, 4000 North Charles – Originally Rental Apartments, and now Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland
1965 University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration – Academic Building Chicago, Illinois
1965 Richard King Mellon Hall – Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
1965 Meredith Hall – School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
1967 Westmount Square – Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount, Island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1968 Neue Nationalgalerie – Modern Art Museum, Berlin, Germany
1965–1968 Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1967–1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre – Office Tower Complex, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1969 Filling station – Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (closed)
1970 One Illinois Center – Office Tower, Chicago, Illinois (completed post-mortem)
1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library – District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. (completed post-mortem)
1973 American Life Building – Louisville, Kentucky (completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)
1973 IBM Plaza – Office Tower, Chicago (completed post-mortem)
Buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus (1939–1958)
1943 Minerals & Metals Research Building – Research
1945 Engineering Research Building – Research
1946 Alumni Memorial Hall – Classroom
1946 Wishnick Hall – Classroom
1946 Perlstein Hall – Classroom
1950 I.I.T. Boiler Plant – Academic
1950 Institute of Gas Technology Building – Research
1950 American Association of Railroads Administration Building (now the College of Music Building) – Administration
1952 Mechanical Engineering Research Building I – Research
1952 Carr Memorial Chapel – Religious
1953 American Association of Railroads Mechanical Engineering Building – Research
1953 Carman Hall at IIT – Dormitory
1955 Cunningham Hall – Dormitory
1955 Bailey Hall – Dormitory
1955 I.I.T. Commons Building
1956 Crown Hall – Academic, College of Architecture
1957 Physics & Electrical Engineering Research Building – Research
1957 Siegel Hall – Classroom
1953 American Association of Railroads Laboratory Building – Research
1958 Metals Technology Building Extension – Research
See also
Online Architecture – lets the construction purpose of building online
International style (architecture)
References
Further reading
Lamster, Mark (2018). "The man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century" (hardcover,528 pages) Little, Brown & Co. English; ;
Rovira, Josep M; Casais, Lluis (2002). Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: Reflections,71 pages. Publisher:Triangle Postal.
External links
Mies van der Rohe Society
Mies van der Rohe Foundation
Mies in Berlin-Mies in America
Great Buildings Architects
Mies van der Rohe Spotlight – ArchDaily
Elmhurst Art Museum, featuring McCormick House
Richard King Mellon Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Mies, IIT, and the Second Chicago School
Mies in America exhibition
Travel guide to Mies Buildings
Construction underway to transform famed Nuns’ Island gas station
Mies' Lafayette Park in Detroit
Mies in IR
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural and furniture drawings, 1946–1961, held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Finding aid for the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students collection , Canadian Centre for Architecture
Functionalist architects
1886 births
1969 deaths
19th-century Prussian people
20th-century American architects
Bauhaus teachers
Burials at Graceland Cemetery (Chicago)
20th-century German architects
German emigrants to the United States
German furniture designers
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
Architecture educators
International style architects
Modernist architects from Germany
People from Aachen
Artists from Chicago
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal | true | [
"Ludwig Bernoully (23 May 1873 – 13 January 1928) was a German architect. Most of his buildings were constructed in and around Frankfurt am Main, the city where he was born and where he died, suddenly.\n\nHe was a scion of a distinguished family of mathematicians and physicists: his ancestor Jacob Bernoulli had emigrated from Antwerp (at that time still controlled by Spain) in 1570, to Frankfurt, in order to escape a persecution campaign targeting the city's (Protestant) Huguenot minority.\n\nBernoully studied at the Städel Arts Institute in Frankfurt, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (where he was taught by Carl Schäfer) and then at Stuttgart University. He then took a job in the office of Hermann Billing in Karlsruhe. Competition designs from this period survive, produced by Ludwig Bernoully and others, which were published in print in 1900.\n\nBy 1899 Ludwig Bernoully had settled in Frankfurt as a self-employed architect. He also taught for a time at the City Business Academy. His early style followed the Historicism popular at the time, but he later switched to Modernist architecture. His best known building is the \"Haus der Technik\" (\"Technology Building\") in Frankfurt's exhibition zone.\n\nBetween 1903 and 1906 Ludwig Bernoully employed as an assistant architect one of Germany's most important Bauhaus pioneers, Otto Haesler.\n\nReferences\n\nArchitects from Frankfurt\nLudwig\n1873 births\n1928 deaths",
"Ludwig Elster (26 March 1856 – 30 December 1935) was a Prussian economist and university lecturer. He also worked, between 1897 and 1916, as a senior officer in the Prussian Ministry for Religion, Education and Medical affairs.\n\nBiography \nLudwig Hermann Alexander Elster was born in Frankfurt am Main. Carl Elster (1826-1902), his father, came from a Braunschweig family and was the son of a master baker: he had worked as a Hanoverian diplomat, and represented Hanover at the Frankfurt Bundesversammlung (literally, \"... Federal Convention\"). After his sons were born Carl Elster moved into the private sector in 1866, when he became chairman of the Leipzig-based \"Teutonia\" Insurance business. Ludwig Elster's mother, born Amalie Nolte (1829-1890), was a daughter of the head of the Hanoverian libraries service. As a small boy he was privately tutored in Berlin. Later, like his younger brother Ernst Elster (1860-1940), he attended the prestigious St. Thomas' [secondary] School in Leipzig.\n\nPassing the Reifeprüfung (exam) in 1875 opened the way to university-level education. He studied Jurisprudence and Economics at Göttingen, Leipzig and Jena. It was at Jena, supervised by the traditionalist economist Bruno Hildebrand, that Ludwig Elster received his doctorate in 1878. That year he became a member of the Prussian civil service when he joined the City of Berlin Statistical Office as a volunteer, while continuing to pursue his university studies. Encouraged and mentored in his further studies by Johannes Conrad, Elster received his habilitation (higher degree) in Economics from the University of Halle, an hour's train ride to the south-west of the Prussian capital.\n\nIn 1881 Ludwig Elster married Helene Thöle at Osnabrück. Elster came from a Protestant family while the Thöles were a catholic family, but there is nothing in the sources consulted to suggest that this became an issue. The bride's father, August Wilheln Hermann Heinrich Thöle, was a physician. The marriage between Ludwig and Helen Elster produced five recorded children - two sons and three daughters.\n\nAfter three years as a junior university-level tutor, Elster's career took off in 1883 after he was offered a lectureship with the so-called Technical University at Aachen. Despite his relative youth, the post came with a junior professorship. Nevertheless, before the year was finished he had moved on again, this time to the opposite side of the country. By the end of 1883 he had accepted a professorship at Königsberg. He stayed here till 1887, but there are nevertheless suggestions that the East Prussian academic establishment undervalued his contribution. While still at Königsberg he founded the \"Staatswissenschaftliche Studien\" series of academic studies. Some of the contributions came from his own students. In 1887 Elster accepted an invitation to move to Breslau. He took a full professorship and a teaching chair in Nationalökonomie (very loosely, \"applied political micro-economics\"), which he would occupy for the next ten years.\n\nFollowing the promotion within the ministry of Friedrich Althoff, Ludwig Elster succeeded him in 1897 as \"Vortragender Rat\" (loosely, \"presiding councillor\") in the Prussian Ministry for Religion, Education and Medical affairs. The role, which had no very precise equivalent in the Anglo-American national governance structure, gave him hands-on oversight responsibilities across the entire Prussian higher education network. Between 1897 and 1907 his predecessor, now serving as \"Ministerial Director of the First Education Department\" (), was also his boss. Althoff had been able to undertake his responsibilities as \"Vortragender Rat\" with a remarkable degree of autonomy: that luxury was not available to Elster, who in most respects sustained the widely accepted \"Althoff system\". There are nevertheless instances where he was able to place his own stamp on universities administration. He promoted further major expansion of the Münster Academy, to the point at which it could be relaunched as the \"Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität\" / WWU. He encouraged an increase in the study of economics and political sciences through creation of research institutes and new teaching chairs.\n\nLudwig Elster won various marks of public recognition for his work at the ministry. He was appointed a Geheimrat (loosely, \"privy councillor\") of the Royal Order 1st class and of the Order of the Red Eagle 2nd class. He was also awarded honorary doctorates from at least three universities such as Münster, Breslau and Kiel.\n\nIn 1916, as a response to what had become a massive workload, Elster, now aged 60, quit the ministry and moved to Jena. Here, from 1922 he served as an honorary professor and delivered lectures on social sciences and economics at the university. His political instincts, like those of most senior civil servants, were politically conservative. Early on during the Weimar years he joined the National People's Party (\"Deutschnationale Volkspartei\" / DNVP). As politics became ever more polarised he was also listed as a supporting member (\"Förderndes Mitglied\") of the SS (National Socialist paramilitaries). After the National Socialists took power, in January 1933, he was required to resign as producer of the \"Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik\" series, however.\n\nLudwig Elster's substantial documentary archive is held by the Thüringen University and State Library in Jena.\n\nWork \nThe focus of Elster's early academic output was on the insurance and banking sectors. During his time as a lecturer he published several essays and books on those subjects. His later publications were more expressly intended to support university-level teaching requirements. With Johannes Conrad, Wilhelm Lexis and Edgar Loening he produced the \"Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften\" series of teaching texts. Between 1890 and 1921 these extended to four editions. Elster himself supplemented the series with his own \"Dictionary of Applied Economics\" (\"Wörterbuch der Volkswirtschaft\"), intended for use by students and professionals. This also ran to four editions during his lifetime.\n\nFor most of his working life Elster was engaged with the annually published \"Jahrbüchern für Nationalökonomie und Statistik\" (statistical and economics year books). While still a student he was recruited by its then producer, Bruno Hildebrand, for editorial work. From the 1880s he regularly published essays and academic book reviews in it, Johannes Conrad having taken over the publication, following the death of his father-in-law. Elster himself joined Conrad as co-publisher between 1891 and 1897. When Conrad died, in 1915, Elster returned to the Jahrbüchern, now as sole publisher.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences \n\n1856 births\n1935 deaths\nWriters from Frankfurt\n19th-century German politicians\nPrussian politicians\n19th-century economists\n20th-century economists\nRWTH Aachen University faculty\nUniversity of Königsberg faculty\nUniversity of Jena faculty\nGerman National People's Party politicians\nFörderndes Mitglied der SS"
]
|
[
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe",
"Educator",
"What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while as an educator?",
"architecture",
"At which school did Rohe teach at?",
"Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago,",
"What year did he begin teaching at the Illinois Instite of Technology?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he contribute any acclaimed ideas while he was teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology?",
" Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT,",
"Was Ludwig still creating buildings while teaching?",
"His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types"
]
| C_b455de4bbfad4424aa200fd1ac95172f_0 | Why did Ludwig decide to begin teaching? | 6 | Why did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe decide to begin teaching? | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today. Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death. CANNOTANSWER | believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. Mies strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".
Early career
Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and using the Dutch "van der", because the German form "von" was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes.
Personal life
In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914–2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915–2003), and Waltraut (1917–1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900–1989) was his primary companion. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from the 15th of October until the 8th of November 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.
Traditionalism to Modernism
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles.
The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He constructed his first modernist house with the Villa Wolf in 1926 in Guben (today Gubin, Poland) for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. This was shortly followed by Haus Lange and Haus Esters in 1928.
He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, completed in 1930.
He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G, which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. He served as its last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the day, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance of the traditional design styles. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had proposed that art and crafts should be entirely independent of architecture, that the architect should no longer control those cultural elements as the Beaux Arts principles had dictated. Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
The bold work of leading American architects was admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that encompass their outdoor surroundings, as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the Wright's American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction, and American skyscrapers were greatly admired.
Emigration to the United States
Commission opportunities dwindled with the Great Depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.
Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School, which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe.
Career in the United States
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.
In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass.
His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herbert Greenwald, presented to Americans a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
American work
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860–880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects. He also built homes for wealthy clients.
Chicago Federal Complex
Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the high-rise John C. Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post Office building. The complex's plot area extends over two blocks; a one-block site, bounded by Jackson, Clark, Adams, and Dearborn streets, contains the Kluczynski Federal Building and U.S. Post Office Loop Station, while a parcel on an adjacent block to the east contains the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The structural framing of the buildings is formed of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs. The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat black graphite paint. The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules. This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground-floor lobbies of the two tower buildings with the grid lines continuing vertically up the buildings and integrating each component of the complex. Associated architects that have played a role in the complex's long history from 1959 to 1974 include Schmidt, Garden & Erickson; C.F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein & Sons.
Farnsworth House
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-paneled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.
The Farnsworth House and its wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.
The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are configured to express their own individual character.
The Promontory – Lake Shore Drive
The Promontory Apartments is a 22-story skyscraper in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, that overlooks Promontory Point in Burnham Park and its Lake Michigan beaches. It is the first residential skyscraper Mies designed and the first of his buildings to feature concepts such as an exposed skeleton. An active community cooperative, the building which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, has 122 units. Its building was initiated by developer Herbert Greenwald for wealthier occupants. Mies employed a Double T design with the horizontal cross-bars joined; the stems of the T's form wings to the rear. Each T is its own building with separate addresses, elevators, and interior stairways. This tripartite design would feature prominently in future Mies designs. Starting with the third story, each floor of each T has three apartments that share an elevator lobby. A solarium and party room on the roof provides excellent views of the park and beaches to the east, and the University of Chicago to the west.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby.
The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other.
Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.
Seagram Building
Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
During 1951–1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass, and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one-story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum. He also built a residence for John M. van Beuren on a family estate near Morristown, New Jersey.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Wiess Law Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in the world.
Two buildings in Baltimore, MD
The One Charles Center, built in 1962, is a 23-story aluminum and glass building that heralded the beginning of Baltimore's downtown modern buildings. The Highfield House, just to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, was built in 1964 as a rental apartment building. The 15-story concrete tower became a residential condominium building in 1979. Both buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Gallery, Berlin
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. Art installations by Ulrich Rückriem (1998) or Jenny Holzer, as much as exhibitions on the work of Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas have demonstrated the exceptional possibilities of this space.
The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for temporary exhibits. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the museum's total built area with conventional white-walled art gallery spaces and support functions. A large window running along all the West facade opens these spaces up to the large sculpture garden which is part of the podium building.
Mies Building at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
In 1952, a fraternity commissioned Mies to design a building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The plan was not realized during his lifetime, but the design was rediscovered in 2013, and in 2019 the university's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design announced they would be constructing it with blessing of his grandchildren. The building is scheduled to open in September 2021.
Furniture
Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Educator
Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance.
Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision.
In 1961, a program at Columbia University's School of Architecture celebrated the four great founders of contemporary architecture: Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. It included addresses by Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as an interview with Mies van der Rohe. Discussion focused upon philosophies of design, aspects of their various architectural projects, and the juncture of architecture and city planning.
Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death.
Later years and death
Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfill himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969, from esophageal cancer caused by his smoking habit. After cremation, his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by an intentionally unadorned, clean-line black slab of polished granite and a large honey locust tree.
Archives
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, was established in 1968 by the museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the museum. The archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929–1969 (bulk 1948–1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
Other archives are held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (personal book collection), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (drawings and photos) in Montreal, the Newberry Library in Chicago (personal correspondence), and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (professional correspondence).
Gallery
List of works
Early career in Europe (1907–1938)
1908 Riehl House – Residential home, Potsdam, Germany
1911 Perls House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1913 Werner House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1917 Urbig House – Residential home, Potsdam
1922 Kempner House – Residential home, Charlottenburg
1922 Eichstaedt House – Residential home, Wannsee
1922 Feldmann House – Residential home, Wilmersdorf
1923 Ryder House – Residential home, Wiesbaden
1925 Villa Wolf – Residential home, Guben
1926 Mosler House – Residential home, Babelsberg
1926 – Monument dedicated to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
1927 Afrikanische Straße Apartments – Multi-Family Residential, Berlin, Germany
1927 Weissenhof Estate – Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart
1928 Haus Lange and Haus Esters – Residential home and an art museum, Krefeld
1929 Barcelona Pavilion – World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain
1930 Villa Tugendhat – Residential home, Brno, Czechia, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001
1930 Verseidag Factory – Dyeing and HE Silk Mill building Krefeld, Germany
1932 Lemke House – Residential home, Weissensee
Buildings after emigration to the United States (1939–1960)
1939–1958 – Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, academic campus & buildings, Chicago, Illinois
1949 The Promontory Apartments – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Sheridan-Oakdale Apartments (2933 N Sheridan Rd ) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments – Residential apartment towers, Chicago
1951 Algonquin Apartments – Residential apartments, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Farnsworth House – Vacation home, Plano, Illinois
1952 Arts Club of Chicago Interior Renovation – Art gallery, demolished in 1997, Chicago, Illinois
1952 Robert H. McCormick House – Residential home, relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1954 Cullinan Hall – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1956 Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture – Academic building, Chicago, Illinois
1956 900-910 North Lake Shore (Esplanade Apartments) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1957 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (330–330 W Diversey Parkway) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago (1957)
1958 Seagram Building – Office tower, New York City, New York
1958 Caroline Wiess Law Building, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1959 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Building – Office building, Des Moines, Iowa
1959 Lafayette Park – Residential development, Detroit, Michigan.
1960 Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments– Residential complex, Newark, New Jersey
Late career Worldwide (1961–69)
1961 Bacardi Office Building – Office Building, Mexico City
1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive – Residential apartment complex of three towers, Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1962 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Des Moines Building – Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa
1962 One Charles Center – Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland
1963 2400 North Lakeview Apartments – Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1963 Morris Greenwald House – Vacation Home, Weston, Connecticut
1964 Chicago Federal Center – Civic Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1960–1964 Dirksen Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
Kluczynski Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
United States Post Office Loop Station – General Post Office, Chicago
1964 Highfield House, 4000 North Charles – Originally Rental Apartments, and now Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland
1965 University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration – Academic Building Chicago, Illinois
1965 Richard King Mellon Hall – Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
1965 Meredith Hall – School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
1967 Westmount Square – Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount, Island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1968 Neue Nationalgalerie – Modern Art Museum, Berlin, Germany
1965–1968 Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1967–1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre – Office Tower Complex, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1969 Filling station – Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (closed)
1970 One Illinois Center – Office Tower, Chicago, Illinois (completed post-mortem)
1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library – District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. (completed post-mortem)
1973 American Life Building – Louisville, Kentucky (completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)
1973 IBM Plaza – Office Tower, Chicago (completed post-mortem)
Buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus (1939–1958)
1943 Minerals & Metals Research Building – Research
1945 Engineering Research Building – Research
1946 Alumni Memorial Hall – Classroom
1946 Wishnick Hall – Classroom
1946 Perlstein Hall – Classroom
1950 I.I.T. Boiler Plant – Academic
1950 Institute of Gas Technology Building – Research
1950 American Association of Railroads Administration Building (now the College of Music Building) – Administration
1952 Mechanical Engineering Research Building I – Research
1952 Carr Memorial Chapel – Religious
1953 American Association of Railroads Mechanical Engineering Building – Research
1953 Carman Hall at IIT – Dormitory
1955 Cunningham Hall – Dormitory
1955 Bailey Hall – Dormitory
1955 I.I.T. Commons Building
1956 Crown Hall – Academic, College of Architecture
1957 Physics & Electrical Engineering Research Building – Research
1957 Siegel Hall – Classroom
1953 American Association of Railroads Laboratory Building – Research
1958 Metals Technology Building Extension – Research
See also
Online Architecture – lets the construction purpose of building online
International style (architecture)
References
Further reading
Lamster, Mark (2018). "The man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century" (hardcover,528 pages) Little, Brown & Co. English; ;
Rovira, Josep M; Casais, Lluis (2002). Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: Reflections,71 pages. Publisher:Triangle Postal.
External links
Mies van der Rohe Society
Mies van der Rohe Foundation
Mies in Berlin-Mies in America
Great Buildings Architects
Mies van der Rohe Spotlight – ArchDaily
Elmhurst Art Museum, featuring McCormick House
Richard King Mellon Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Mies, IIT, and the Second Chicago School
Mies in America exhibition
Travel guide to Mies Buildings
Construction underway to transform famed Nuns’ Island gas station
Mies' Lafayette Park in Detroit
Mies in IR
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural and furniture drawings, 1946–1961, held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Finding aid for the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students collection , Canadian Centre for Architecture
Functionalist architects
1886 births
1969 deaths
19th-century Prussian people
20th-century American architects
Bauhaus teachers
Burials at Graceland Cemetery (Chicago)
20th-century German architects
German emigrants to the United States
German furniture designers
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
Architecture educators
International style architects
Modernist architects from Germany
People from Aachen
Artists from Chicago
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal | true | [
"Ludwig's Law is the one and only album released by trio of Dieter Moebius, Conny Plank, and Mayo Thompson. It was actually the fourth album recorded by the team of Moebius & Plank. In 1983 the duo recorded a series of electronic tracks using an Emulator, an early form of sampling keyboard that enabled them to duplicate other instruments without having to deal with the musicians who played them. Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola recorded a series of monologues and vocal tracks which were added to the music Moebius & Plank had recorded. According to the Earpiece website \"topics include the fate of chickens owned by a 'farmer gabriel' and the effect of lack of sunlight on human intelligence.\" Sky Records, which had released the first three Moebius & Plank album, rejected the master and Ludwig's Law was relegated to the vault. It was finally released on November 16, 1998 on the Drag City label.\n\nBill Meyer, who wrote the editorial review for Amazon.com, describes the album, in part: \"The duo recorded a series of stately fanfares and brittle Talking Heads funk, over which Thompson narrated a series of skewed monologues about philosophy, art, history, and careless farmers.\"\n\nDespite the rejection of Ludwig's Law by Sky, Moebius & Plank did decide to tour and perform the music, albeit without Mayo Thompson. Conny Plank fell ill while touring in South America and finally succumbed to cancer in 1987.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Scientists\" - 0:38\n\"Das Apartment\" - 4:30\n\"The Truth?\" - 5:14\n\"Ludwig's Law\" - 4:20\n\"42\" - 3:44\n\"Farmer Gabriel\" - 4:51\n\"Gestalt\" - 4:43\n\"Taras Bulba\" - 5:06\n\"Boy Boy Boy\" - 3:16\n\nPersonnel\nDieter Moebius \nConny Plank \nMayo Thompson - vocals\n\nNotes\n\nReferences \n Album liner notes\n Amazon.com Ludwig's Law Retrieved September 28, 2007.\n Drag City catalog Moebius Plank Thompson - Ludwig's Law Retrieved September 28, 2007.\n Forced Exposure Moebius/Plank/Thompson Retrieved September 28, 2007.\n Interlog Ludwig's Law description Retrieved September 28, 2007.\n\nExternal links\n Anonymous Random Writings on Music and Other Things: German Rock Retrieved September 7, 2007.\n\n1998 albums\nMoebius & Plank albums\nAlbums produced by Conny Plank",
"Hagen von Lahnstein is a fictional character on the German soap opera Verbotene Liebe. The character has been played by Christoph Mory, after being introduced by Tom Viehöfer.\n\nCasting\nIn late 2010 the producers of Verbotene Liebe decided to introduce another member of the Lahnstein family. In order to do that part of the history of the family was rewritten. Sebastian von Lahnstein was originally named as Ludwig's eldest son and caretaker of the family while Ludwig had to spend years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. With the announcement of the casting of Tom Viehöfer as Hagen von Lahnstein, he was named the eldest son who left the family and didn't have any connections to his family in almost two decades. The writers used this fact to explain why Hagen wasn't mentioned prior to his arrival. Viehöfer filmed his first scenes in October 2010 and was first seen on-screen on 14 January 2011. Hagen was introduced to the show with a major love triangle with two sisters. Viehöfer didn't match the producers vision for the role and was recast after only a few months. Christoph Mory took over the role who previously worked with the production company UFA on the telenovela Bianca – Wege zum Glück. Viehöfer last appeared on 18 May 2011. Mory took over the role on-screen on 23 May 2011.\n\nChristoph Mory played the role for two years. After this his contract wasn't renewed and Mory left the show with his on-screen father Krystian Martinek (Ludwig) on 23 April 2013. Hagen and Ludwig went missing on a boat trip and soon would both be declared dead. Mory returned a year later together with Martinek to give viewers closure to what happened to both characters. Christoph Mory returned on 5 May 2014. New flashbacks were shown which saw Ludwig dying in his son's arms after promising that he would take over as his heir if he ever would get back home. Mory stayed for another four months and will leave the show again with his on-screen wife Diane Willems (Dana) on 10 September 2014.\n\nStorylines\n\nBackground\nHagen von Lahnstein is the eldest child of Ludwig von Lahnstein. He has four younger siblings, Sebastian von Lahnstein, Helena von Lahnstein and Tristan von Lahnstein and Rebecca von Lahnstein. After the death of his mother, with his father supposedly dead as well, he refused to take care of his siblings, leaving the family and letting Sebastian do all the work.\n\nStorylines\nAfter over a decade since a terrible falling out with his siblings, Hagen returns to his family in January 2011 to help his father Ludwig battle leukemia by donating his bone marrow. His siblings aren't too happy to see him. His brother Sebastian confronts Hagen with the fact that he walked out on the family and left him alone to take care of his younger siblings. After a while Sebastian and Hagen try get past everything that happened. Hagen returns to Königsbrunn Castle and starts to become the caretaker of the family-owned stud farm. Hagen marries his girlfriend Marlene Wolf but soon develops feelings for her younger sister Dana. Hagen and Dana try to fight their feelings for each other but soon start having an affair. When the truth is revealed, Marlene and Hagen get a divorce.\n\nHagen and Dana become a couple and after making peace with Marlene, the two get married. After the wedding, the couple decides to try to have a baby. Then Dana is confronted with not being able to take a baby to the full term. They look for other options and decide to go for surrogacy which is forbidden by German law. As their plan doesn't work out the couple starts having problems. One night, a drunk Hagen ends up sleeping with Jessica Stiehl which further damages his relationship with Dana. But Hagen and Dana can work through their differences and as Jessica discovers that she's pregnant the three of them decide to raise the baby together. Jessica gives birth to a baby boy which she names Maximilian. \n \nIn mid-2013, Hagen and Ludwig go missing during a storm in the Caribbean while on a boat trip and are presumed dead. Hagen reappears a year later. Ludwig and Hagen spend months on a desert island before Ludwig dies in his son's arms. Before he dies, Ludwig makes Hagen promise that if he ever gets home he'd take over as the head of the family for him. Hagen returns after a year and tries to win back Dana who just started a new relationship with Ricardo Mendes. Hagen wins Dana back but his obsession with taking over as Ludwig's heir becomes a serious problem for their marriage. When Max turns sick and needs to move to the North Sea to live a healthy life, Hagen isn't sure if he's ready to give up on his father's dying wish. After Max' condition worsens, Hagen decides to step down as head of the family and move away with Dana and Jessica.\n\nWhen the family is unable to vote a new head, Hagen decides to solve the conflict. He uses his father's blood from a knife that he brought back from the island to forge another will of Ludwig's. In this will it says that Hagen could define his successor if he's unable to do it himself. Hagen wants his stepmother Elisabeth to take over. After Elisabeth sees how much the conflict over the position as head of the family is hurting the family she agrees. Sebastian and Hagen's cousin Ansgar are shocked and want to check if the will is real. When it's proven that the will is written in Ludwig's blood the family accepts it as Ludwig's last wish. Hagen reconciles with Sebastian who has been estranged to him since his return before leaving his life on Königsbrunn Castle behind and moving away with Dana, Jessica and Max.\n\nSee also\nThe Lahnstein Family\n\nReferences\n\nVerbotene Liebe characters\nTelevision characters introduced in 2011\nFictional counts and countesses"
]
|
[
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe",
"Educator",
"What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while as an educator?",
"architecture",
"At which school did Rohe teach at?",
"Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago,",
"What year did he begin teaching at the Illinois Instite of Technology?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he contribute any acclaimed ideas while he was teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology?",
" Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT,",
"Was Ludwig still creating buildings while teaching?",
"His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types",
"Why did Ludwig decide to begin teaching?",
"believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building."
]
| C_b455de4bbfad4424aa200fd1ac95172f_0 | Did he spend his entire teaching career at Illinois Institute of Technology? | 7 | Did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe spend his entire teaching career at Illinois Institute of Technology? | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today. Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. Mies strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".
Early career
Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and using the Dutch "van der", because the German form "von" was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes.
Personal life
In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914–2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915–2003), and Waltraut (1917–1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900–1989) was his primary companion. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from the 15th of October until the 8th of November 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.
Traditionalism to Modernism
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles.
The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He constructed his first modernist house with the Villa Wolf in 1926 in Guben (today Gubin, Poland) for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. This was shortly followed by Haus Lange and Haus Esters in 1928.
He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, completed in 1930.
He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G, which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. He served as its last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the day, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance of the traditional design styles. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had proposed that art and crafts should be entirely independent of architecture, that the architect should no longer control those cultural elements as the Beaux Arts principles had dictated. Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
The bold work of leading American architects was admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that encompass their outdoor surroundings, as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the Wright's American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction, and American skyscrapers were greatly admired.
Emigration to the United States
Commission opportunities dwindled with the Great Depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.
Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School, which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe.
Career in the United States
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.
In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass.
His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herbert Greenwald, presented to Americans a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
American work
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860–880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects. He also built homes for wealthy clients.
Chicago Federal Complex
Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the high-rise John C. Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post Office building. The complex's plot area extends over two blocks; a one-block site, bounded by Jackson, Clark, Adams, and Dearborn streets, contains the Kluczynski Federal Building and U.S. Post Office Loop Station, while a parcel on an adjacent block to the east contains the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The structural framing of the buildings is formed of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs. The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat black graphite paint. The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules. This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground-floor lobbies of the two tower buildings with the grid lines continuing vertically up the buildings and integrating each component of the complex. Associated architects that have played a role in the complex's long history from 1959 to 1974 include Schmidt, Garden & Erickson; C.F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein & Sons.
Farnsworth House
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-paneled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.
The Farnsworth House and its wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.
The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are configured to express their own individual character.
The Promontory – Lake Shore Drive
The Promontory Apartments is a 22-story skyscraper in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, that overlooks Promontory Point in Burnham Park and its Lake Michigan beaches. It is the first residential skyscraper Mies designed and the first of his buildings to feature concepts such as an exposed skeleton. An active community cooperative, the building which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, has 122 units. Its building was initiated by developer Herbert Greenwald for wealthier occupants. Mies employed a Double T design with the horizontal cross-bars joined; the stems of the T's form wings to the rear. Each T is its own building with separate addresses, elevators, and interior stairways. This tripartite design would feature prominently in future Mies designs. Starting with the third story, each floor of each T has three apartments that share an elevator lobby. A solarium and party room on the roof provides excellent views of the park and beaches to the east, and the University of Chicago to the west.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby.
The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other.
Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.
Seagram Building
Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
During 1951–1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass, and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one-story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum. He also built a residence for John M. van Beuren on a family estate near Morristown, New Jersey.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Wiess Law Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in the world.
Two buildings in Baltimore, MD
The One Charles Center, built in 1962, is a 23-story aluminum and glass building that heralded the beginning of Baltimore's downtown modern buildings. The Highfield House, just to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, was built in 1964 as a rental apartment building. The 15-story concrete tower became a residential condominium building in 1979. Both buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Gallery, Berlin
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. Art installations by Ulrich Rückriem (1998) or Jenny Holzer, as much as exhibitions on the work of Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas have demonstrated the exceptional possibilities of this space.
The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for temporary exhibits. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the museum's total built area with conventional white-walled art gallery spaces and support functions. A large window running along all the West facade opens these spaces up to the large sculpture garden which is part of the podium building.
Mies Building at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
In 1952, a fraternity commissioned Mies to design a building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The plan was not realized during his lifetime, but the design was rediscovered in 2013, and in 2019 the university's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design announced they would be constructing it with blessing of his grandchildren. The building is scheduled to open in September 2021.
Furniture
Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Educator
Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance.
Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision.
In 1961, a program at Columbia University's School of Architecture celebrated the four great founders of contemporary architecture: Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. It included addresses by Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as an interview with Mies van der Rohe. Discussion focused upon philosophies of design, aspects of their various architectural projects, and the juncture of architecture and city planning.
Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death.
Later years and death
Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfill himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969, from esophageal cancer caused by his smoking habit. After cremation, his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by an intentionally unadorned, clean-line black slab of polished granite and a large honey locust tree.
Archives
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, was established in 1968 by the museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the museum. The archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929–1969 (bulk 1948–1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
Other archives are held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (personal book collection), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (drawings and photos) in Montreal, the Newberry Library in Chicago (personal correspondence), and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (professional correspondence).
Gallery
List of works
Early career in Europe (1907–1938)
1908 Riehl House – Residential home, Potsdam, Germany
1911 Perls House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1913 Werner House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1917 Urbig House – Residential home, Potsdam
1922 Kempner House – Residential home, Charlottenburg
1922 Eichstaedt House – Residential home, Wannsee
1922 Feldmann House – Residential home, Wilmersdorf
1923 Ryder House – Residential home, Wiesbaden
1925 Villa Wolf – Residential home, Guben
1926 Mosler House – Residential home, Babelsberg
1926 – Monument dedicated to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
1927 Afrikanische Straße Apartments – Multi-Family Residential, Berlin, Germany
1927 Weissenhof Estate – Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart
1928 Haus Lange and Haus Esters – Residential home and an art museum, Krefeld
1929 Barcelona Pavilion – World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain
1930 Villa Tugendhat – Residential home, Brno, Czechia, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001
1930 Verseidag Factory – Dyeing and HE Silk Mill building Krefeld, Germany
1932 Lemke House – Residential home, Weissensee
Buildings after emigration to the United States (1939–1960)
1939–1958 – Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, academic campus & buildings, Chicago, Illinois
1949 The Promontory Apartments – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Sheridan-Oakdale Apartments (2933 N Sheridan Rd ) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments – Residential apartment towers, Chicago
1951 Algonquin Apartments – Residential apartments, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Farnsworth House – Vacation home, Plano, Illinois
1952 Arts Club of Chicago Interior Renovation – Art gallery, demolished in 1997, Chicago, Illinois
1952 Robert H. McCormick House – Residential home, relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1954 Cullinan Hall – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1956 Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture – Academic building, Chicago, Illinois
1956 900-910 North Lake Shore (Esplanade Apartments) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1957 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (330–330 W Diversey Parkway) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago (1957)
1958 Seagram Building – Office tower, New York City, New York
1958 Caroline Wiess Law Building, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1959 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Building – Office building, Des Moines, Iowa
1959 Lafayette Park – Residential development, Detroit, Michigan.
1960 Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments– Residential complex, Newark, New Jersey
Late career Worldwide (1961–69)
1961 Bacardi Office Building – Office Building, Mexico City
1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive – Residential apartment complex of three towers, Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1962 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Des Moines Building – Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa
1962 One Charles Center – Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland
1963 2400 North Lakeview Apartments – Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1963 Morris Greenwald House – Vacation Home, Weston, Connecticut
1964 Chicago Federal Center – Civic Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1960–1964 Dirksen Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
Kluczynski Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
United States Post Office Loop Station – General Post Office, Chicago
1964 Highfield House, 4000 North Charles – Originally Rental Apartments, and now Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland
1965 University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration – Academic Building Chicago, Illinois
1965 Richard King Mellon Hall – Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
1965 Meredith Hall – School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
1967 Westmount Square – Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount, Island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1968 Neue Nationalgalerie – Modern Art Museum, Berlin, Germany
1965–1968 Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1967–1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre – Office Tower Complex, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1969 Filling station – Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (closed)
1970 One Illinois Center – Office Tower, Chicago, Illinois (completed post-mortem)
1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library – District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. (completed post-mortem)
1973 American Life Building – Louisville, Kentucky (completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)
1973 IBM Plaza – Office Tower, Chicago (completed post-mortem)
Buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus (1939–1958)
1943 Minerals & Metals Research Building – Research
1945 Engineering Research Building – Research
1946 Alumni Memorial Hall – Classroom
1946 Wishnick Hall – Classroom
1946 Perlstein Hall – Classroom
1950 I.I.T. Boiler Plant – Academic
1950 Institute of Gas Technology Building – Research
1950 American Association of Railroads Administration Building (now the College of Music Building) – Administration
1952 Mechanical Engineering Research Building I – Research
1952 Carr Memorial Chapel – Religious
1953 American Association of Railroads Mechanical Engineering Building – Research
1953 Carman Hall at IIT – Dormitory
1955 Cunningham Hall – Dormitory
1955 Bailey Hall – Dormitory
1955 I.I.T. Commons Building
1956 Crown Hall – Academic, College of Architecture
1957 Physics & Electrical Engineering Research Building – Research
1957 Siegel Hall – Classroom
1953 American Association of Railroads Laboratory Building – Research
1958 Metals Technology Building Extension – Research
See also
Online Architecture – lets the construction purpose of building online
International style (architecture)
References
Further reading
Lamster, Mark (2018). "The man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century" (hardcover,528 pages) Little, Brown & Co. English; ;
Rovira, Josep M; Casais, Lluis (2002). Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: Reflections,71 pages. Publisher:Triangle Postal.
External links
Mies van der Rohe Society
Mies van der Rohe Foundation
Mies in Berlin-Mies in America
Great Buildings Architects
Mies van der Rohe Spotlight – ArchDaily
Elmhurst Art Museum, featuring McCormick House
Richard King Mellon Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Mies, IIT, and the Second Chicago School
Mies in America exhibition
Travel guide to Mies Buildings
Construction underway to transform famed Nuns’ Island gas station
Mies' Lafayette Park in Detroit
Mies in IR
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural and furniture drawings, 1946–1961, held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Finding aid for the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students collection , Canadian Centre for Architecture
Functionalist architects
1886 births
1969 deaths
19th-century Prussian people
20th-century American architects
Bauhaus teachers
Burials at Graceland Cemetery (Chicago)
20th-century German architects
German emigrants to the United States
German furniture designers
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
Architecture educators
International style architects
Modernist architects from Germany
People from Aachen
Artists from Chicago
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal | false | [
"Lloyd Hamilton Donnell (May 25, 1895 – November 7, 1997) was an American mechanical engineer, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is considered internationally renowned expert in engineering mechanics, specifically known for his work on shell analysis and thin-shell structure. He was recipient of the 1969 ASME Medal.\n\nBiography\n\nYouth, education and early career \nDonnell was born Kents Hill, Maine in 1895, son of Albert Webb Donnell and Annie Morrell Hamilton Donnell. His father was a teacher and his mother an author. After regular education he obtained his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1915. In 1930 he also obtained his PhD at the University of Michigan under Stephen Timoshenko.\n\nAfter his graduation in 1915, Donnell had started teaching at University of Michigan. From 1930 to 1933 he was research assistant at the Aeronautical Laboratory of Caltech at Theodore von Kármán. From 1933 to 1939 he was engineer at Goodyear Zeppelin Company, where he worked on the design of airships.\n\nFurther career and acknowledgment \nIn 1939 Donnell joined the Illinois Institute of Technology faculty, where he served as Professor of Mechanical Engineering until his retirement in 1962. Afterwards he was Professor at Stanford University, and in 1974 guest professor at the University of Houston.\n\nDonnell was founding editor of the engineering journal Applied Mechanics Reviews. He was awarded the honorary doctor degree by the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1960 he received the Worcester Reed Warner Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Theodore von Karman Medal in 1968 and the ASME Medal in 1969.\n\nWork \nDonnell is known for his \"stress-analysis research into cylindrical shells, which advanced development of monocoque (wherein the external frame helps supports structural load) bodies for automobiles and planes. He also studied dynamics, elasticity, instability, and wave propagation.\"\n\nSelected publications \n Donnell, Lloyd Hamilton. Longitudinal wave transmission and impact. University of Michigan, 1930.\n Donnell, Lloyd Hamilton. Stability of thin-walled tubes under torsion. NACA Report No. 479, 1935.\n Donnell, Lloyd Hamilton. Beams, plates and shells. McGraw-Hill Companies, 1976.\n Donnell, Lloyd Hamilton. Symposium on the Theory of Shells (1966 : University of Houston). Proceedings, 1967\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Lloyd H. Donnell, Illinois Institute of Technology, Hall of Fame\n\n1895 births\n1997 deaths\nAmerican mechanical engineers\nAmerican centenarians\nMen centenarians\nUniversity of Michigan faculty\nIllinois Institute of Technology faculty\nStanford University faculty\nPeople from Readfield, Maine\nASME Medal recipients\n20th-century American engineers\nUniversity of Michigan College of Engineering alumni",
"Henry Townley Heald (1904–1975) was the president of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).\n\nCareer\nHeald was president of Armour Institute of Technology from 1938 to 1940, when it became Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He is credited with bringing architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Chicago in 1938 to direct IIT's architecture program. He led a team that investigated the idea of a research institute on the west coast and made proposals that would result in the creation of SRI International.\n\nHe left IIT in 1952 to become president of New York University and later, the Ford Foundation. He appeared on the cover of Time in 1957 for his work at the Ford Foundation.\n\nLegacy\nA scholarship at IIT is named after him. Awarded the Hoover Medal in 1959.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1904 births\n1975 deaths\nPresidents of Illinois Institute of Technology\nIllinois Institute of Technology faculty\nPresidents of New York University"
]
|
[
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe",
"Educator",
"What subject did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe teach while as an educator?",
"architecture",
"At which school did Rohe teach at?",
"Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago,",
"What year did he begin teaching at the Illinois Instite of Technology?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he contribute any acclaimed ideas while he was teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology?",
" Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT,",
"Was Ludwig still creating buildings while teaching?",
"His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types",
"Why did Ludwig decide to begin teaching?",
"believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building.",
"Did he spend his entire teaching career at Illinois Institute of Technology?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_b455de4bbfad4424aa200fd1ac95172f_0 | Did Ludwig build any buildings with his current or former students? | 8 | Did Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe build any buildings with current or former students? | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today. Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. Mies strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".
Early career
Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and using the Dutch "van der", because the German form "von" was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes.
Personal life
In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914–2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915–2003), and Waltraut (1917–1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900–1989) was his primary companion. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from the 15th of October until the 8th of November 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.
Traditionalism to Modernism
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles.
The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He constructed his first modernist house with the Villa Wolf in 1926 in Guben (today Gubin, Poland) for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. This was shortly followed by Haus Lange and Haus Esters in 1928.
He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, completed in 1930.
He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G, which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. He served as its last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the day, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance of the traditional design styles. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had proposed that art and crafts should be entirely independent of architecture, that the architect should no longer control those cultural elements as the Beaux Arts principles had dictated. Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
The bold work of leading American architects was admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that encompass their outdoor surroundings, as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the Wright's American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction, and American skyscrapers were greatly admired.
Emigration to the United States
Commission opportunities dwindled with the Great Depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.
Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School, which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe.
Career in the United States
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.
In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass.
His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herbert Greenwald, presented to Americans a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
American work
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860–880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects. He also built homes for wealthy clients.
Chicago Federal Complex
Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the high-rise John C. Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post Office building. The complex's plot area extends over two blocks; a one-block site, bounded by Jackson, Clark, Adams, and Dearborn streets, contains the Kluczynski Federal Building and U.S. Post Office Loop Station, while a parcel on an adjacent block to the east contains the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The structural framing of the buildings is formed of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs. The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat black graphite paint. The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules. This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground-floor lobbies of the two tower buildings with the grid lines continuing vertically up the buildings and integrating each component of the complex. Associated architects that have played a role in the complex's long history from 1959 to 1974 include Schmidt, Garden & Erickson; C.F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein & Sons.
Farnsworth House
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-paneled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.
The Farnsworth House and its wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.
The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are configured to express their own individual character.
The Promontory – Lake Shore Drive
The Promontory Apartments is a 22-story skyscraper in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, that overlooks Promontory Point in Burnham Park and its Lake Michigan beaches. It is the first residential skyscraper Mies designed and the first of his buildings to feature concepts such as an exposed skeleton. An active community cooperative, the building which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, has 122 units. Its building was initiated by developer Herbert Greenwald for wealthier occupants. Mies employed a Double T design with the horizontal cross-bars joined; the stems of the T's form wings to the rear. Each T is its own building with separate addresses, elevators, and interior stairways. This tripartite design would feature prominently in future Mies designs. Starting with the third story, each floor of each T has three apartments that share an elevator lobby. A solarium and party room on the roof provides excellent views of the park and beaches to the east, and the University of Chicago to the west.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby.
The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other.
Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.
Seagram Building
Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
During 1951–1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass, and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one-story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum. He also built a residence for John M. van Beuren on a family estate near Morristown, New Jersey.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Wiess Law Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in the world.
Two buildings in Baltimore, MD
The One Charles Center, built in 1962, is a 23-story aluminum and glass building that heralded the beginning of Baltimore's downtown modern buildings. The Highfield House, just to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, was built in 1964 as a rental apartment building. The 15-story concrete tower became a residential condominium building in 1979. Both buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Gallery, Berlin
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. Art installations by Ulrich Rückriem (1998) or Jenny Holzer, as much as exhibitions on the work of Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas have demonstrated the exceptional possibilities of this space.
The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for temporary exhibits. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the museum's total built area with conventional white-walled art gallery spaces and support functions. A large window running along all the West facade opens these spaces up to the large sculpture garden which is part of the podium building.
Mies Building at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
In 1952, a fraternity commissioned Mies to design a building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The plan was not realized during his lifetime, but the design was rediscovered in 2013, and in 2019 the university's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design announced they would be constructing it with blessing of his grandchildren. The building is scheduled to open in September 2021.
Furniture
Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Educator
Mies served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. He played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He set up a new education at the department of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago replacing the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum by a three-step-education beginning with crafts of drawing and construction leading to planning skills and finishing with theory of architecture (compare Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas). He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance.
Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, including the precise drafting of brick construction details so unpopular with aspiring student architects. When none was able to match the quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong. Nevertheless, his achievements in creating a teachable architecture language that can be used to express the modern technological era survives until today.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Drive, the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, S. R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision.
In 1961, a program at Columbia University's School of Architecture celebrated the four great founders of contemporary architecture: Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. It included addresses by Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as an interview with Mies van der Rohe. Discussion focused upon philosophies of design, aspects of their various architectural projects, and the juncture of architecture and city planning.
Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued Mies's architectural language for years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Y.C. Wong, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. Proponents of the Post Modern style attacked the Modernism with clever statements such as "less is a bore" and with captivating images such as Crown Hall sinking in Lake Michigan. Mies had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures rejected by the general public. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories following his death.
Later years and death
Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfill himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969, from esophageal cancer caused by his smoking habit. After cremation, his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by an intentionally unadorned, clean-line black slab of polished granite and a large honey locust tree.
Archives
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design, was established in 1968 by the museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the museum. The archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929–1969 (bulk 1948–1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
Other archives are held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (personal book collection), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (drawings and photos) in Montreal, the Newberry Library in Chicago (personal correspondence), and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (professional correspondence).
Gallery
List of works
Early career in Europe (1907–1938)
1908 Riehl House – Residential home, Potsdam, Germany
1911 Perls House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1913 Werner House – Residential home, Zehlendorf
1917 Urbig House – Residential home, Potsdam
1922 Kempner House – Residential home, Charlottenburg
1922 Eichstaedt House – Residential home, Wannsee
1922 Feldmann House – Residential home, Wilmersdorf
1923 Ryder House – Residential home, Wiesbaden
1925 Villa Wolf – Residential home, Guben
1926 Mosler House – Residential home, Babelsberg
1926 – Monument dedicated to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
1927 Afrikanische Straße Apartments – Multi-Family Residential, Berlin, Germany
1927 Weissenhof Estate – Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart
1928 Haus Lange and Haus Esters – Residential home and an art museum, Krefeld
1929 Barcelona Pavilion – World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain
1930 Villa Tugendhat – Residential home, Brno, Czechia, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001
1930 Verseidag Factory – Dyeing and HE Silk Mill building Krefeld, Germany
1932 Lemke House – Residential home, Weissensee
Buildings after emigration to the United States (1939–1960)
1939–1958 – Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, academic campus & buildings, Chicago, Illinois
1949 The Promontory Apartments – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Sheridan-Oakdale Apartments (2933 N Sheridan Rd ) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments – Residential apartment towers, Chicago
1951 Algonquin Apartments – Residential apartments, Chicago, Illinois
1951 Farnsworth House – Vacation home, Plano, Illinois
1952 Arts Club of Chicago Interior Renovation – Art gallery, demolished in 1997, Chicago, Illinois
1952 Robert H. McCormick House – Residential home, relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1954 Cullinan Hall – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1956 Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture – Academic building, Chicago, Illinois
1956 900-910 North Lake Shore (Esplanade Apartments) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago, Illinois
1957 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (330–330 W Diversey Parkway) – Residential apartment complex, Chicago (1957)
1958 Seagram Building – Office tower, New York City, New York
1958 Caroline Wiess Law Building, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1959 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Building – Office building, Des Moines, Iowa
1959 Lafayette Park – Residential development, Detroit, Michigan.
1960 Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments– Residential complex, Newark, New Jersey
Late career Worldwide (1961–69)
1961 Bacardi Office Building – Office Building, Mexico City
1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive – Residential apartment complex of three towers, Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1962 Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Des Moines Building – Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa
1962 One Charles Center – Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland
1963 2400 North Lakeview Apartments – Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1963 Morris Greenwald House – Vacation Home, Weston, Connecticut
1964 Chicago Federal Center – Civic Complex, Chicago, Illinois
1960–1964 Dirksen Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
Kluczynski Federal Building – Office Tower, Chicago
United States Post Office Loop Station – General Post Office, Chicago
1964 Highfield House, 4000 North Charles – Originally Rental Apartments, and now Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland
1965 University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration – Academic Building Chicago, Illinois
1965 Richard King Mellon Hall – Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
1965 Meredith Hall – School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
1967 Westmount Square – Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount, Island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1968 Neue Nationalgalerie – Modern Art Museum, Berlin, Germany
1965–1968 Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Art, Houston
1967–1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre – Office Tower Complex, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1969 Filling station – Nuns' Island, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (closed)
1970 One Illinois Center – Office Tower, Chicago, Illinois (completed post-mortem)
1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library – District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. (completed post-mortem)
1973 American Life Building – Louisville, Kentucky (completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)
1973 IBM Plaza – Office Tower, Chicago (completed post-mortem)
Buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus (1939–1958)
1943 Minerals & Metals Research Building – Research
1945 Engineering Research Building – Research
1946 Alumni Memorial Hall – Classroom
1946 Wishnick Hall – Classroom
1946 Perlstein Hall – Classroom
1950 I.I.T. Boiler Plant – Academic
1950 Institute of Gas Technology Building – Research
1950 American Association of Railroads Administration Building (now the College of Music Building) – Administration
1952 Mechanical Engineering Research Building I – Research
1952 Carr Memorial Chapel – Religious
1953 American Association of Railroads Mechanical Engineering Building – Research
1953 Carman Hall at IIT – Dormitory
1955 Cunningham Hall – Dormitory
1955 Bailey Hall – Dormitory
1955 I.I.T. Commons Building
1956 Crown Hall – Academic, College of Architecture
1957 Physics & Electrical Engineering Research Building – Research
1957 Siegel Hall – Classroom
1953 American Association of Railroads Laboratory Building – Research
1958 Metals Technology Building Extension – Research
See also
Online Architecture – lets the construction purpose of building online
International style (architecture)
References
Further reading
Lamster, Mark (2018). "The man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century" (hardcover,528 pages) Little, Brown & Co. English; ;
Rovira, Josep M; Casais, Lluis (2002). Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: Reflections,71 pages. Publisher:Triangle Postal.
External links
Mies van der Rohe Society
Mies van der Rohe Foundation
Mies in Berlin-Mies in America
Great Buildings Architects
Mies van der Rohe Spotlight – ArchDaily
Elmhurst Art Museum, featuring McCormick House
Richard King Mellon Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Mies, IIT, and the Second Chicago School
Mies in America exhibition
Travel guide to Mies Buildings
Construction underway to transform famed Nuns’ Island gas station
Mies' Lafayette Park in Detroit
Mies in IR
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural and furniture drawings, 1946–1961, held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Finding aid for the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students collection , Canadian Centre for Architecture
Functionalist architects
1886 births
1969 deaths
19th-century Prussian people
20th-century American architects
Bauhaus teachers
Burials at Graceland Cemetery (Chicago)
20th-century German architects
German emigrants to the United States
German furniture designers
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
Architecture educators
International style architects
Modernist architects from Germany
People from Aachen
Artists from Chicago
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal | false | [
"Will County School District 92 is a public grade school district which serves grades K-8. It mainly serves the communities of Lockport, Illinois and Homer Glen, Illinois. It contains four buildings: Walsh (Pre K, K-1st), Reed (2nd-3rd), Ludwig (4th-5th), and Oak Prairie (6th-8th) with the administration building adjacent to Ludwig. Ludwig is the oldest school, and Oak Prairie is the newest. All of the D92 schools have high ratings. Students at Walsh, Reed and Ludwig stay in one classroom, but goes to another classroom for activities such as gym, art, media center, or music. Students at Oak Prairie go to a different class for each subject on a schedule to prepare for high school.\n\nExternal links\n \n\nSchool districts in Will County, Illinois",
"Alfred Runge (1881–1946) was a German architect active in Bremen and its surroundings. He is remembered in particular for the Böttcherstraße houses he and his associate Eduard Scotland built for coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius.\n\nEarly life\nBorn in Osnabrück, he completed an apprenticeship as a mason until he moved to Bremen in 1898 where he attended the Technical College, graduating in 1903.\n\nCareer\nIn July 1904, he joined his student friend Eduard Scotland (1885–1945) to work as an architect and building contractor in Bremen, founding the firm \"Runge & Scotland\". From 1906 to 1915, they designed a number of residential and commercial buildings in the Lower Saxony style in Bremen and its surroundings. The pair attracted the attention of Norddeutscher Lloyd, Heinrich Wiegand, who commissioned them to build him a residence on Wagner-Straße.\n\nHe and Scotland attracted the attention of the director of Norddeutscher Lloyd, Heinrich Wiegand, who commissioned him together with Runge to build a residence for him on Bremen's Wagner-Straße. Thereafter he received numerous assignments in Schwachhausen and the Bremen surroundings. \n\nIn 1907 Wiegard trusted Scotland and Runge with the interior design of the which his company launched in 1907 to be the regular ocean liner that linked Bremen with New York. They designed luxury cabins where the beds would convert to sofas and the washstands would convert into tables. All of the metalwork was gilded; the surfaces were generally white while the wooden surfaces of amaranth was inlaid with agate, ivory and citron wood.\nFrom 1906, the pair established a relationship with Ludwig Roselius, assisting him with the presentation and marketing of his goods, especially designs for Café HAG. In 1916, they planned the conversion of his residence on Bleicherstraße. Runge and Scotland went on to design several buildings for Ludwig Roselius on Bremen's Böttcherstraße including the Glockenspiel House (1924), the House of the Seven Lazy Brothers (1927), St Petrus House (1927), Atlantis House (1931), and Robinson Crusoe House (1931),\n\nReferences\n\n20th-century German architects\nArchitects from Bremen\nArchitects from Osnabrück\n1881 births\n1946 deaths"
]
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"Mel Blanc",
"Radio work"
]
| C_468706df3fb14611a302dff9005581bf_1 | What did he do on the radio? | 1 | What did Mel Blanc do on the radio? | Mel Blanc | Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909-2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.-owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show. Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael, the tormented department store clerk, and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's most memorable characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. The famous "Si ... Sy ... Sue ... sew" routine was so effective that no matter how many times it was performed, the laughter was always there, thanks to the comedic timing of Blanc and Benny. Blanc continued to work with him on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s. They last appeared together on a Johnny Carson Tonight Show in January 1974. A few months later, Blanc spoke highly of Benny on a Tom Snyder Tomorrow show special aired the night of the comedian's death. By 1946, Blanc appeared on over 15 radio programs in supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake". CANNOTANSWER | KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. | Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Melvin Jerome Blank ; May 30, 1908July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.
However, he became internationally known for his work in the Golden Age of American Animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and most of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons. He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons.
Referred to as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry.
Early life
Blanc was born on May 30, 1908 in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a German Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children. He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School. He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10. He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.
Career
Radio work
Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909–2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.
With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.–owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show.
Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. He continued to work with Benny on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s.
Radio Daily magazine wrote in 1942 that Blanc "specialize[d] in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects", and by 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake".
Animation voice work during the golden age of Hollywood
In December 1936, Mel Blanc joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, which was producing theatrical cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. After sound man Treg Brown was put in charge of cartoon voices, and Carl Stalling became music director, Brown introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, who loved his voices. The first cartoon Blanc worked on was Picador Porky (1937) as the voice of a drunken bull. He soon after received his first starring role when he replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig's voice in Porky's Duck Hunt, which marked the debut of Daffy Duck, also voiced by Blanc.
Following this, Blanc became a very prominent vocal artist for Warner Bros., voicing a wide variety of the "Looney Tunes" characters. Bugs Bunny, as whom Blanc made his debut in A Wild Hare (1940), was known for eating carrots frequently (especially while saying his catchphrase "Eh, what's up, doc?"). To follow this sound with the animated voice, Blanc would bite into a carrot and then quickly spit into a spittoon. One often-repeated story is that Blanc was allergic to carrots, which Blanc denied.
In Disney's Pinocchio, Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, Gideon eventually was decided to be a mute character (similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film.
Blanc also originated the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker for the theatrical cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures, but stopped voicing Woody after the character's first three shorts when he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Despite this, his laugh was still used in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons until 1951, when Grace Stafford recorded a softer version, while his "Guess who!?" signature line was used in the opening titles until the end of the series and closure of Walter Lantz Productions in 1972.
During World War II, Blanc served as the voice of the hapless Private Snafu in a series of shorts produced by Warner Bros. as a way of training recruited soldiers through the medium of animation.
Throughout his career, Blanc, aware of his talents, protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. He, and later his estate, never hesitated to take civil action when those rights were violated. Voice actors at the time rarely received screen credits, but Blanc was an exception; by 1944, his contract with Warner Bros. stipulated a credit reading "Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc". According to his autobiography, Blanc asked for and received this screen credit from studio boss Leon Schlesinger after he was denied a salary raise. Initially, Blanc's screen credit was limited only to cartoons in which he voiced Bugs Bunny. This changed in March 1945 when the contract was amended to also include a screen credit for cartoons featuring Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck. This however, excluded any shorts with the two characters made before that amendment occurred, even if they released after the fact (Book Revue and Baby Bottleneck are both examples of this). By the end of 1946, Blanc began receiving a screen credit in any subsequent Warner Bros. cartoon for which he provided voices.
Voice work for Hanna-Barbera and others
In 1960, after the expiration of his exclusive contract with Warner Bros., Blanc continued working for them, but also began providing voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera; his roles during this time included Barney Rubble of The Flintstones and Cosmo Spacely of The Jetsons. His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbera included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy, and Captain Caveman, as well as voices for Wally Gator and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
Blanc also worked with former "Looney Tunes" director Chuck Jones, who by this time was directing shorts with his own company Sib Tower 12 (later MGM Animation/Visual Arts), doing vocal effects for the Tom and Jerry series from 1963 to 1967. Blanc was the first voice of Toucan Sam in Froot Loops commercials.
Blanc reprised some of his Warner Bros. characters when the studio contracted him to make new theatrical cartoons in the mid- to late 1960s. For these, Blanc voiced Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, the characters who received the most frequent use in these shorts (later, newly introduced characters such as Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse were voiced by Larry Storch). Blanc also continued to voice the "Looney Tunes" for the bridging sequences of The Bugs Bunny Show, as well as in numerous animated advertisements and several compilation features, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979). He also voiced Granny on Peter Pan Records in 4 More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (1974) and Holly-Daze (1974), in place of June Foray, and replaced the late Arthur Q. Bryan as Elmer Fudd's voice during the post-golden age era.
Car accident and aftermath
On January 24, 1961, Blanc was driving alone when his sports car was involved in a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard; his legs and his pelvis were fractured as a result. About two weeks later, one of Blanc's neurologists at the UCLA Medical Center tried a different approach than just trying to address the unconscious Blanc himself: address his characters. Blanc was asked, "How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?" After a slight pause, Blanc answered, in a weak voice, "Eh... just fine, Doc. How are you?" The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there, too. "I tawt I taw a puddy tat", was the reply. Blanc returned home on March 17. Four days later, Blanc filed a US $500,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His accident, one of 26 in the preceding two years at the intersection known as Dead Man's Curve, resulted in the city funding the restructuring of curves at the location.
Years later, Blanc revealed that during his recovery, his son Noel "ghosted" several Warner Bros. cartoons' voice tracks for him. Warner Bros. had also asked Stan Freberg to provide the voice for Bugs Bunny, but Freberg declined, out of respect for Blanc. At the time of the accident, Blanc was also serving as the voice of Barney Rubble in The Flintstones. His absence from the show was relatively brief; Daws Butler provided the voice of Barney for a few episodes, after which the show's producers set up recording equipment in Blanc's hospital room and later at his home to allow him to work from there. Some of the recordings were made while he was in full-body cast as he lay flat on his back with the other Flintstones co-stars gathered around him. He returned to The Jack Benny Program to film the program's 1961 Christmas show, moving around by crutches and a wheelchair.
Later years
In the 1970s, Blanc gave a series of college lectures across the US and appeared in commercials for American Express. Mel's production company, Blanc Communications Corporation, collaborated on a special with the Boston-based Shriners' Burns Institute called Ounce of Prevention, which became a 30-minute TV special.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Blanc performed his "Looney Tunes" characters for bridging sequences in various compilation films of Golden Age-era Warner Bros. cartoons, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales, Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island, and Daffy Duck's Quackbusters. His final performance of his "Looney Tunes" roles was in Bugs Bunny's Wild World of Sports (1989). After spending most of two seasons voicing the diminutive robot Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Blanc's last original character was Heathcliff from 1980 to 1988.
In the live-action film Strange Brew (1983), Blanc voiced the father of Bob and Doug MacKenzie, at the request of comedian Rick Moranis. In the live-action/animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Blanc reprised several of his roles from Warner Bros. cartoons (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, and Sylvester), but left Yosemite Sam to Joe Alaskey (who later became one of Blanc's regular replacements until his death in 2016). The film was one of the few Disney projects in which Blanc was involved. Blanc died just a year after the film's release. His final recording session was for Jetsons: The Movie (1990).
On January 29, 1962, Mel and his son Noel formed Blanc Communications Corporation, a media company which produced over 5000 public service announcements and commercials, which remains in operation. Mel and Noel appeared with many stars, including Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball, Vincent Price, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, and The Who.
Personal life
Blanc and his wife Estelle Rosenbaum were married on January 4, 1933, and remained married until his death in 1989. Their son, Noel Blanc, is also a voice actor.
Death
Blanc began smoking cigarettes when he was 9 years old. He continued his pack-a-day habit until age 77, after he was diagnosed with emphysema. On May 19, 1989, his family checked him into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when they noticed he had a bad cough while shooting a commercial. He was originally expected to recover, but when his health worsened, doctors discovered he had advanced coronary artery disease. After nearly two months in hospital, Blanc died on July 10, 1989 at Cedars-Sinai of complications from both illnesses. He was 81. He is interred in Hollywood Forever Cemetery section 13, Pinewood section, plot #149 in Hollywood. His will specified that his gravestone read ""—the phrase with which Blanc's character, Porky Pig, concluded Warner Bros. cartoons.
Legacy
Blanc is regarded as the most prolific voice actor in entertainment history. He was the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit.
His death was considered a significant loss to the cartoon industry because of his skill, expressive range, and the sheer number of the continuing characters he portrayed, whose roles were subsequently assumed by several other voice talents. As film critic Leonard Maltin observed, "It is astounding to realize that Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam are the same man!"
Blanc said that Sylvester the Cat was the easiest character for him to voice, because "[he's] just my normal speaking voice with a spray at the end"; and that Yosemite Sam was the hardest, because of his loudness and raspiness.
A doctor who examined Blanc's throat found that he possessed unusually thick, powerful vocal cords that gave him an exceptional range, and compared them to those of opera singer Enrico Caruso.
After his death, Blanc's voice continued to be heard in newly released productions, such as recordings of Dino the Dinosaur in the live-action films The Flintstones (1994) and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000). Similarly, recordings of Blanc as Jack Benny's Maxwell were featured in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). More recently, archive recordings of Blanc have been featured in new computer-generated imagery-animated Looney Tunes theatrical shorts; I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat (shown with Happy Feet Two) and Daffy's Rhapsody (shown with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island).
For his contributions to the radio industry, Blanc has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard. His character Bugs Bunny was also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 10, 1985.
Blanc trained his son Noel in the field of voice characterization. Noel performed his father's characters (particularly Porky Pig) on some programs, but did not become a full-time voice artist. Warner Bros. expressed reluctance to have a single voice actor succeed Blanc, and employed multiple new voice actors to fill the roles in the 1990s, including Noel Blanc, Jeff Bergman, Joe Alaskey and Greg Burson.
Filmography
Radio
Film
Television
Live-action
Discography
Yah, Das Ist Ein Christmas Tree and I Tan't Wait Til Quithmuth Day (Capitol, 1950, Album CAS-3191)
Clink, Clink, Another Drink (Bluebird, 1942) as Drunk
Bugs Bunny Stories for Children (Capitol, 1947) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
The Woody Woodpecker Song (Capitol, 1948) as Woody Woodpecker
Bugs Bunny and the Tortoise (Capitol, 1948) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Henery Hawk, additional voices
That's All Folks! (Capitol, 1948) as Porky Pig
Won't You Ever Get Together With Me (Capitol, 1948) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny in Storyland (Capitol, 1949) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Beaky Buzzard, Old King Cole, Fiddlers Three, Mary's Lamb, Bo Peep's Sheep, Big Bad Wolf
Woody Woodpecker and His Talent Show (Capitol, 1949) as Woody Woodpecker, Stanley Squirrel, Billy Goat, Plato Platypus, Fido, Happy Hedgehog, Harry Humbug
Bugs Bunny Sings with Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny Meets Hiawatha (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny
Daffy Duck Meets Yosemite Sam (Capitol, 1950) as Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam
Tweety Pie (Capitol, 1950) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker's Picnic (Capitol, 1951) as Woody Woodpecker, Tommy Turtle, English Bulldog, German Shepherd, Irish Setter, Scotty
Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1951) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck
Tweety's Puddy Tat Twouble (Capitol, 1951) as Tweety, Sylvester
Tweet, Tweet, Tweety (Capitol, 1952) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny and the Grow-Small Juice (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck
Henery Hawk's Chicken Hunt (Capitol, 1952) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Aladdin's Lamp (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Genie
Woody Woodpecker and the Scarecrow (Capitol, 1952) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Feathered Friend (Capitol, 1952) as Daffy Duck
Sylvester and Hippety Hopper (Capitol, 1952) as Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Animal Crackers (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Lost Monkey (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Rabbit Seasoning (Capitol, 1953) as Bugs Bunny
Snowbound Tweety (Capitol, 1953) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker and His Spaceship (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Wild West Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1953) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Pied Piper Pussycat (Capitol, 1953) as Sylvester, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Duck Inn (Capitol, 1954) as Daffy Duck, Dog
Bugs Bunny and the Pirate (Capitol, 1954) as Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam
Woody Woodpecker and the Truth Tonic (Capitol, 1954) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Tweety's Good Deed (Capitol, 1954) as Tweety, Sylvester, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Fairy Godmother (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker in Mixed-Up Land (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker Meets Davy Crockett (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Family Album (Decca, 1957) as Pepito, Sailor, Malamute, Andy Panda, Fluten Bluten, Heinie the Hyena, Homer Pigeon, Cuckoo, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Bugs Bunny Songfest (Golden, 1961) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Henery Hawk, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Hippety Hopper, Foghorn Leghorn, Cicero Pig
Speedy Gonzales (Dot, 1962) as Speedy Gonzales
Magilla Gorilla and His Pals (Golden, 1964) as Droop-A-Long
The Flintstones: Flip Fables (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Chubby, Tubby, Stubby, Landlord, Beowolfe
The Flintstones: Hansel and Gretel (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Hansel, Gretel, Strudelmeyer, Fang, Witch, Reporter
Treasure Island Starring Sinbad, Jr. (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Salty
Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole in: Super Spy (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Secret Squirrel, Tyrone
The New Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Hanna-Barbera, 1966) as Barney Rubble, March Hare, Prosecuting Attorney/King's Son
The Flintstones Meet the Orchestra Family (Sunset, 1968) as Barney Rubble
The New Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1973) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Petunia Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Pablo, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, additional voices
Four More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Petunia Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Granny, additional voices
Holly Daze (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Granny, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Junior, Santa Claus, Narrator, Radio Announcer
Looney Tunes Learn About Numbers (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About The Alphabet (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Going To School (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., Tweety, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Sing-Along Songs (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Colors (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Shapes and Sizes (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
See also
Voice acting
References
Bibliography
That's Not All, Folks!, 1988 by Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe. Warner Books, (Softcover), (Hardcover)
Terrace, Vincent. Radio Programs, 1924–1984. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.
External links
Toonopedia article about Mel Blanc
40 MP3 downloads of The Mel Blanc Show
The Mel Blanc Show on Outlaws Old Time Radio
1908 births
1989 deaths
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
American Freemasons
American male radio actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
American people of German-Jewish descent
American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Articles containing video clips
Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Comedians from California
Deaths from emphysema
Hanna-Barbera people
Infectious disease deaths in California
Inkpot Award winners
Jewish American comedians
Jewish American male actors
Lincoln High School (Portland, Oregon) alumni
Looney Tunes
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from Portland, Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio people
Walter Lantz Productions people
Warner Bros. Cartoons voice actors
MGM Animation/Visual Arts | true | [
"\"What Do You Want from Me?\" is a 2007 song recorded by Cascada. It was released in Germany on 7 March 2008 and was released on 24 March 2008 for the UK.\n\nBackground and writing\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" was leaked online in advance of the Perfect Day album release, and was speculated to be title \"Tell Me Why\". In late 2007, All Around the World announced \"What Do You Want From Me?\" would be the U.K. follow-up to \"What Hurts the Most\".\n\nThis track and \"Everytime We Touch\" share a similar chord structure.\n\nMusic video \n\nCascada's UK music label, All Around the World, released the music video on 19 January 2008, on their official site. In the video, Natalie and 3 friends are seen at a beach-side house, on the beach, and at a late night party, singing and dancing. In all scenes, she is continuously being followed or somehow connected by a young man, hence the song title \"What Do You Want From Me?\".\n\nTrack listing\nGerman release\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Radio Edit)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Extended Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (S & H Project Radio Edit)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (DJ Gollum Radio Edit)\n\nUK release\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Radio Edit)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (K-Klass Classic Radio Edit)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Original/Extended Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Hypasonic Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (K-Klass Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Manox Remix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Fugitive's Freedom Mix)\n\nOfficial remixes\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Radio Edit) 2:50\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Extended Mix) 4:46\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (K-Klass Remix) 6:28\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (K-Klass Radio Edit) 3:34\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Flip and Fill Remix) 6:07\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Hypasonic Remix) 6:07\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Fugitives Freedom Remix) 5:22\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Manox Remix) 6:02\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Manox Radio Edit) 3:31\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Fugitives Freedom Radio Edit) 3:57\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Ti-Mo Vs Stefan Rio Remix) 5:08\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Ti-Mo Vs Stefan Rio Radio Edit) 3:43\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (DJ Cyrus Remix) 5:35\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (DJ Cyrus Radio Edit) 3:33\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Club Mix) 4:59\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Alex K Remix) 4:20\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Original Mix) 4:44\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (S & H Project Radio Edit) 3:34\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (S & H Project Remix) 5:47\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (DJ Gollum Radio Edit) 3:35\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (DJ Gollum Remix) 5:24\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Basslovers United Radio Edit) 3:40\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Basslovers United Extended Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Studio Acapella With Out Effects)\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Scotty-Donk Project 2010 Remix)\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\nCascada songs\n2008 singles\nSongs written by Yanou\nSongs written by DJ Manian\n2008 songs",
"\"Don't Know What to Do\" is an electro pop/rock track by New Zealand singer Dane Rumble. It is the second single taken from Rumble's debut solo album, The Experiment. The track was released as a digital single in February 2009.\n\nSingle information\nRumble says the song is about his love/hate relationship with music. \"I've experienced so many ups and downs in this game... and I still can't stop.\" Dane once again worked with Ivan Slavov for the music video, who had already directed the video for \"Always Be Here\". The song was sent to Australian contemporary hit radio on 29 November 2010.\n\n\"Don't Know What to Do\" debuted on the New Zealand Singles Chart on 27 July 2009 at #36. The song has so far peaked at number 10, becoming Rumble's second consecutive top 20 single as a solo artist and his first top ten hit.\n\n\"Don't Know What to Do\" also debuted on the Top 40 the same week Dane's previous single \"Always Be Here\" drops out of the Top 40.\n\nOn 31 January 2010, \"Don't Know What to Do\" was certified Gold with sales of over 7,500 in New Zealand.\n\nMusic video\n\nThe music video for \"Don't Know What to Do\" was released at the iTunes Store on 16 February 2009, the same day as the single and \"Always Be Here\".\n\nPromotional events\n24 August 2009 – More FM Radio\n25 August 2009 – ZM Radio Interview\n18 September 2009 – The Transmission Room Gig\n24 September 2009 – The Edge Nudie Nuptials Performance\n24 September 2009 – Juice Bar Gig\n26 September 2009 – C4 Top 40 Countdown\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n2009 singles\nDane Rumble songs"
]
|
[
"Mel Blanc",
"Radio work",
"What did he do on the radio?",
"KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention."
]
| C_468706df3fb14611a302dff9005581bf_1 | Did he get any awards for his work in radio? | 2 | Did Mel Blanc get any awards for his work in radio? | Mel Blanc | Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909-2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.-owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show. Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael, the tormented department store clerk, and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's most memorable characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. The famous "Si ... Sy ... Sue ... sew" routine was so effective that no matter how many times it was performed, the laughter was always there, thanks to the comedic timing of Blanc and Benny. Blanc continued to work with him on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s. They last appeared together on a Johnny Carson Tonight Show in January 1974. A few months later, Blanc spoke highly of Benny on a Tom Snyder Tomorrow show special aired the night of the comedian's death. By 1946, Blanc appeared on over 15 radio programs in supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake". CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Melvin Jerome Blank ; May 30, 1908July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.
However, he became internationally known for his work in the Golden Age of American Animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and most of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons. He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons.
Referred to as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry.
Early life
Blanc was born on May 30, 1908 in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a German Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children. He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School. He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10. He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.
Career
Radio work
Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909–2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.
With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.–owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show.
Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. He continued to work with Benny on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s.
Radio Daily magazine wrote in 1942 that Blanc "specialize[d] in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects", and by 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake".
Animation voice work during the golden age of Hollywood
In December 1936, Mel Blanc joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, which was producing theatrical cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. After sound man Treg Brown was put in charge of cartoon voices, and Carl Stalling became music director, Brown introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, who loved his voices. The first cartoon Blanc worked on was Picador Porky (1937) as the voice of a drunken bull. He soon after received his first starring role when he replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig's voice in Porky's Duck Hunt, which marked the debut of Daffy Duck, also voiced by Blanc.
Following this, Blanc became a very prominent vocal artist for Warner Bros., voicing a wide variety of the "Looney Tunes" characters. Bugs Bunny, as whom Blanc made his debut in A Wild Hare (1940), was known for eating carrots frequently (especially while saying his catchphrase "Eh, what's up, doc?"). To follow this sound with the animated voice, Blanc would bite into a carrot and then quickly spit into a spittoon. One often-repeated story is that Blanc was allergic to carrots, which Blanc denied.
In Disney's Pinocchio, Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, Gideon eventually was decided to be a mute character (similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film.
Blanc also originated the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker for the theatrical cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures, but stopped voicing Woody after the character's first three shorts when he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Despite this, his laugh was still used in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons until 1951, when Grace Stafford recorded a softer version, while his "Guess who!?" signature line was used in the opening titles until the end of the series and closure of Walter Lantz Productions in 1972.
During World War II, Blanc served as the voice of the hapless Private Snafu in a series of shorts produced by Warner Bros. as a way of training recruited soldiers through the medium of animation.
Throughout his career, Blanc, aware of his talents, protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. He, and later his estate, never hesitated to take civil action when those rights were violated. Voice actors at the time rarely received screen credits, but Blanc was an exception; by 1944, his contract with Warner Bros. stipulated a credit reading "Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc". According to his autobiography, Blanc asked for and received this screen credit from studio boss Leon Schlesinger after he was denied a salary raise. Initially, Blanc's screen credit was limited only to cartoons in which he voiced Bugs Bunny. This changed in March 1945 when the contract was amended to also include a screen credit for cartoons featuring Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck. This however, excluded any shorts with the two characters made before that amendment occurred, even if they released after the fact (Book Revue and Baby Bottleneck are both examples of this). By the end of 1946, Blanc began receiving a screen credit in any subsequent Warner Bros. cartoon for which he provided voices.
Voice work for Hanna-Barbera and others
In 1960, after the expiration of his exclusive contract with Warner Bros., Blanc continued working for them, but also began providing voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera; his roles during this time included Barney Rubble of The Flintstones and Cosmo Spacely of The Jetsons. His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbera included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy, and Captain Caveman, as well as voices for Wally Gator and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
Blanc also worked with former "Looney Tunes" director Chuck Jones, who by this time was directing shorts with his own company Sib Tower 12 (later MGM Animation/Visual Arts), doing vocal effects for the Tom and Jerry series from 1963 to 1967. Blanc was the first voice of Toucan Sam in Froot Loops commercials.
Blanc reprised some of his Warner Bros. characters when the studio contracted him to make new theatrical cartoons in the mid- to late 1960s. For these, Blanc voiced Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, the characters who received the most frequent use in these shorts (later, newly introduced characters such as Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse were voiced by Larry Storch). Blanc also continued to voice the "Looney Tunes" for the bridging sequences of The Bugs Bunny Show, as well as in numerous animated advertisements and several compilation features, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979). He also voiced Granny on Peter Pan Records in 4 More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (1974) and Holly-Daze (1974), in place of June Foray, and replaced the late Arthur Q. Bryan as Elmer Fudd's voice during the post-golden age era.
Car accident and aftermath
On January 24, 1961, Blanc was driving alone when his sports car was involved in a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard; his legs and his pelvis were fractured as a result. About two weeks later, one of Blanc's neurologists at the UCLA Medical Center tried a different approach than just trying to address the unconscious Blanc himself: address his characters. Blanc was asked, "How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?" After a slight pause, Blanc answered, in a weak voice, "Eh... just fine, Doc. How are you?" The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there, too. "I tawt I taw a puddy tat", was the reply. Blanc returned home on March 17. Four days later, Blanc filed a US $500,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His accident, one of 26 in the preceding two years at the intersection known as Dead Man's Curve, resulted in the city funding the restructuring of curves at the location.
Years later, Blanc revealed that during his recovery, his son Noel "ghosted" several Warner Bros. cartoons' voice tracks for him. Warner Bros. had also asked Stan Freberg to provide the voice for Bugs Bunny, but Freberg declined, out of respect for Blanc. At the time of the accident, Blanc was also serving as the voice of Barney Rubble in The Flintstones. His absence from the show was relatively brief; Daws Butler provided the voice of Barney for a few episodes, after which the show's producers set up recording equipment in Blanc's hospital room and later at his home to allow him to work from there. Some of the recordings were made while he was in full-body cast as he lay flat on his back with the other Flintstones co-stars gathered around him. He returned to The Jack Benny Program to film the program's 1961 Christmas show, moving around by crutches and a wheelchair.
Later years
In the 1970s, Blanc gave a series of college lectures across the US and appeared in commercials for American Express. Mel's production company, Blanc Communications Corporation, collaborated on a special with the Boston-based Shriners' Burns Institute called Ounce of Prevention, which became a 30-minute TV special.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Blanc performed his "Looney Tunes" characters for bridging sequences in various compilation films of Golden Age-era Warner Bros. cartoons, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales, Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island, and Daffy Duck's Quackbusters. His final performance of his "Looney Tunes" roles was in Bugs Bunny's Wild World of Sports (1989). After spending most of two seasons voicing the diminutive robot Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Blanc's last original character was Heathcliff from 1980 to 1988.
In the live-action film Strange Brew (1983), Blanc voiced the father of Bob and Doug MacKenzie, at the request of comedian Rick Moranis. In the live-action/animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Blanc reprised several of his roles from Warner Bros. cartoons (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, and Sylvester), but left Yosemite Sam to Joe Alaskey (who later became one of Blanc's regular replacements until his death in 2016). The film was one of the few Disney projects in which Blanc was involved. Blanc died just a year after the film's release. His final recording session was for Jetsons: The Movie (1990).
On January 29, 1962, Mel and his son Noel formed Blanc Communications Corporation, a media company which produced over 5000 public service announcements and commercials, which remains in operation. Mel and Noel appeared with many stars, including Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball, Vincent Price, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, and The Who.
Personal life
Blanc and his wife Estelle Rosenbaum were married on January 4, 1933, and remained married until his death in 1989. Their son, Noel Blanc, is also a voice actor.
Death
Blanc began smoking cigarettes when he was 9 years old. He continued his pack-a-day habit until age 77, after he was diagnosed with emphysema. On May 19, 1989, his family checked him into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when they noticed he had a bad cough while shooting a commercial. He was originally expected to recover, but when his health worsened, doctors discovered he had advanced coronary artery disease. After nearly two months in hospital, Blanc died on July 10, 1989 at Cedars-Sinai of complications from both illnesses. He was 81. He is interred in Hollywood Forever Cemetery section 13, Pinewood section, plot #149 in Hollywood. His will specified that his gravestone read ""—the phrase with which Blanc's character, Porky Pig, concluded Warner Bros. cartoons.
Legacy
Blanc is regarded as the most prolific voice actor in entertainment history. He was the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit.
His death was considered a significant loss to the cartoon industry because of his skill, expressive range, and the sheer number of the continuing characters he portrayed, whose roles were subsequently assumed by several other voice talents. As film critic Leonard Maltin observed, "It is astounding to realize that Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam are the same man!"
Blanc said that Sylvester the Cat was the easiest character for him to voice, because "[he's] just my normal speaking voice with a spray at the end"; and that Yosemite Sam was the hardest, because of his loudness and raspiness.
A doctor who examined Blanc's throat found that he possessed unusually thick, powerful vocal cords that gave him an exceptional range, and compared them to those of opera singer Enrico Caruso.
After his death, Blanc's voice continued to be heard in newly released productions, such as recordings of Dino the Dinosaur in the live-action films The Flintstones (1994) and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000). Similarly, recordings of Blanc as Jack Benny's Maxwell were featured in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). More recently, archive recordings of Blanc have been featured in new computer-generated imagery-animated Looney Tunes theatrical shorts; I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat (shown with Happy Feet Two) and Daffy's Rhapsody (shown with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island).
For his contributions to the radio industry, Blanc has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard. His character Bugs Bunny was also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 10, 1985.
Blanc trained his son Noel in the field of voice characterization. Noel performed his father's characters (particularly Porky Pig) on some programs, but did not become a full-time voice artist. Warner Bros. expressed reluctance to have a single voice actor succeed Blanc, and employed multiple new voice actors to fill the roles in the 1990s, including Noel Blanc, Jeff Bergman, Joe Alaskey and Greg Burson.
Filmography
Radio
Film
Television
Live-action
Discography
Yah, Das Ist Ein Christmas Tree and I Tan't Wait Til Quithmuth Day (Capitol, 1950, Album CAS-3191)
Clink, Clink, Another Drink (Bluebird, 1942) as Drunk
Bugs Bunny Stories for Children (Capitol, 1947) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
The Woody Woodpecker Song (Capitol, 1948) as Woody Woodpecker
Bugs Bunny and the Tortoise (Capitol, 1948) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Henery Hawk, additional voices
That's All Folks! (Capitol, 1948) as Porky Pig
Won't You Ever Get Together With Me (Capitol, 1948) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny in Storyland (Capitol, 1949) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Beaky Buzzard, Old King Cole, Fiddlers Three, Mary's Lamb, Bo Peep's Sheep, Big Bad Wolf
Woody Woodpecker and His Talent Show (Capitol, 1949) as Woody Woodpecker, Stanley Squirrel, Billy Goat, Plato Platypus, Fido, Happy Hedgehog, Harry Humbug
Bugs Bunny Sings with Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny Meets Hiawatha (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny
Daffy Duck Meets Yosemite Sam (Capitol, 1950) as Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam
Tweety Pie (Capitol, 1950) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker's Picnic (Capitol, 1951) as Woody Woodpecker, Tommy Turtle, English Bulldog, German Shepherd, Irish Setter, Scotty
Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1951) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck
Tweety's Puddy Tat Twouble (Capitol, 1951) as Tweety, Sylvester
Tweet, Tweet, Tweety (Capitol, 1952) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny and the Grow-Small Juice (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck
Henery Hawk's Chicken Hunt (Capitol, 1952) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Aladdin's Lamp (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Genie
Woody Woodpecker and the Scarecrow (Capitol, 1952) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Feathered Friend (Capitol, 1952) as Daffy Duck
Sylvester and Hippety Hopper (Capitol, 1952) as Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Animal Crackers (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Lost Monkey (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Rabbit Seasoning (Capitol, 1953) as Bugs Bunny
Snowbound Tweety (Capitol, 1953) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker and His Spaceship (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Wild West Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1953) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Pied Piper Pussycat (Capitol, 1953) as Sylvester, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Duck Inn (Capitol, 1954) as Daffy Duck, Dog
Bugs Bunny and the Pirate (Capitol, 1954) as Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam
Woody Woodpecker and the Truth Tonic (Capitol, 1954) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Tweety's Good Deed (Capitol, 1954) as Tweety, Sylvester, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Fairy Godmother (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker in Mixed-Up Land (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker Meets Davy Crockett (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Family Album (Decca, 1957) as Pepito, Sailor, Malamute, Andy Panda, Fluten Bluten, Heinie the Hyena, Homer Pigeon, Cuckoo, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Bugs Bunny Songfest (Golden, 1961) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Henery Hawk, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Hippety Hopper, Foghorn Leghorn, Cicero Pig
Speedy Gonzales (Dot, 1962) as Speedy Gonzales
Magilla Gorilla and His Pals (Golden, 1964) as Droop-A-Long
The Flintstones: Flip Fables (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Chubby, Tubby, Stubby, Landlord, Beowolfe
The Flintstones: Hansel and Gretel (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Hansel, Gretel, Strudelmeyer, Fang, Witch, Reporter
Treasure Island Starring Sinbad, Jr. (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Salty
Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole in: Super Spy (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Secret Squirrel, Tyrone
The New Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Hanna-Barbera, 1966) as Barney Rubble, March Hare, Prosecuting Attorney/King's Son
The Flintstones Meet the Orchestra Family (Sunset, 1968) as Barney Rubble
The New Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1973) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Petunia Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Pablo, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, additional voices
Four More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Petunia Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Granny, additional voices
Holly Daze (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Granny, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Junior, Santa Claus, Narrator, Radio Announcer
Looney Tunes Learn About Numbers (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About The Alphabet (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Going To School (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., Tweety, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Sing-Along Songs (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Colors (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Shapes and Sizes (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
See also
Voice acting
References
Bibliography
That's Not All, Folks!, 1988 by Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe. Warner Books, (Softcover), (Hardcover)
Terrace, Vincent. Radio Programs, 1924–1984. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.
External links
Toonopedia article about Mel Blanc
40 MP3 downloads of The Mel Blanc Show
The Mel Blanc Show on Outlaws Old Time Radio
1908 births
1989 deaths
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
American Freemasons
American male radio actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
American people of German-Jewish descent
American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Articles containing video clips
Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Comedians from California
Deaths from emphysema
Hanna-Barbera people
Infectious disease deaths in California
Inkpot Award winners
Jewish American comedians
Jewish American male actors
Lincoln High School (Portland, Oregon) alumni
Looney Tunes
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from Portland, Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio people
Walter Lantz Productions people
Warner Bros. Cartoons voice actors
MGM Animation/Visual Arts | false | [
"Below is a list of awards received by Twins since they were formed in 2001 as a cantopop girl group. They average to receive about 2-3 awards in each Hong Kong music awards. Their major accomplishment is in 2007 when they received the Asia Pacific Most Popular Female Artist Award from Jade Solid Gold Top 10 Awards.\n\nBecause of the Edison Chen photo scandal in 2008, Gillian took a short leave from the group. And thus the group did not record any songs or receive any awards between March 2008 to 2009.\n\nCommercial Radio Hong Kong Ultimate Song Chart Awards\nThe Ultimate Song Chart Awards Presentation (叱咤樂壇流行榜頒獎典禮) is a cantopop award ceremony from one of the famous channel in Commercial Radio Hong Kong known as Ultimate 903 (FM 90.3). Unlike other cantopop award ceremonies, this one is judged based on the popularity of the song/artist on the actual radio show.\n\nGlobal Chinese Music Awards\n\nIFPI Hong Kong Sales Awards\nIFPI Awards is given to artists base on the sales in Hong Kong at the end of the year.\n\nJade Solid Gold Top 10 Awards\nThe Jade Solid Gold Songs Awards Ceremony(十大勁歌金曲頒獎典禮) is held annually in Hong Kong since 1984. The awards are based on Jade Solid Gold show on TVB.\n\nMetro Radio Mandarin Music Awards\n\nMetro Showbiz Hit Awards\nThe Metro Showbiz Hit Awards (新城勁爆頒獎禮) is held in Hong Kong annually by Metro Showbiz radio station. It focus mostly in cantopop music.\n\nRTHK Top 10 Gold Songs Awards\nThe RTHK Top 10 Gold Songs Awards Ceremony(十大中文金曲頒獎音樂會) is held annually in Hong Kong since 1978. The awards are determined by Radio and Television Hong Kong based on the work of all Asian artists (mostly cantopop) for the previous year.\n\nSprite Music Awards\nThe Sprite Music Awards Ceremony is an annual event given by Sprite China for work artists performed in previous years; awards received on 2008 are actually for the work and accomplishment for 2007.\n\nReferences\n\nTwins\nCantopop",
"Bryan Burnett is a Scottish television and radio presenter, currently best known for his work with BBC Radio Scotland.\n\nBurnett began his career at Northsound Radio in Aberdeen, before spending six years with Radio Clyde in Glasgow, where he presented the Top 40 chart show.\n\nDuring the 1990s and early 2000s he presented numerous programmes for Scottish Television, including holiday show Scottish Passport and game shows Passport Quiz, Red Amber Green and Party Animals.\n\nFor 15 years Burnett presented Brand New Country on BBC Radio Scotland, earning him the title International Broadcaster of the Year at the 2005 Country Music Association awards in Nashville. He currently presents Get It On a music requests show whereby listeners submit requests based on a particular theme.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Get it on... with Brian Burnett (BBC Radio Scotland)\n\nLiving people\nScottish television presenters\nPlace of birth missing (living people)\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nScottish radio presenters\nPeople from Aberdeen"
]
|
[
"Mel Blanc",
"Radio work",
"What did he do on the radio?",
"KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention.",
"Did he get any awards for his work in radio?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_468706df3fb14611a302dff9005581bf_1 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 3 | Besides his radio work, where else did Mel Blanc perform? | Mel Blanc | Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909-2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.-owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show. Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael, the tormented department store clerk, and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's most memorable characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. The famous "Si ... Sy ... Sue ... sew" routine was so effective that no matter how many times it was performed, the laughter was always there, thanks to the comedic timing of Blanc and Benny. Blanc continued to work with him on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s. They last appeared together on a Johnny Carson Tonight Show in January 1974. A few months later, Blanc spoke highly of Benny on a Tom Snyder Tomorrow show special aired the night of the comedian's death. By 1946, Blanc appeared on over 15 radio programs in supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake". CANNOTANSWER | Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, | Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Melvin Jerome Blank ; May 30, 1908July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.
However, he became internationally known for his work in the Golden Age of American Animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and most of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons. He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons.
Referred to as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry.
Early life
Blanc was born on May 30, 1908 in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a German Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children. He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School. He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10. He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.
Career
Radio work
Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909–2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.
With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.–owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show.
Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. He continued to work with Benny on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s.
Radio Daily magazine wrote in 1942 that Blanc "specialize[d] in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects", and by 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake".
Animation voice work during the golden age of Hollywood
In December 1936, Mel Blanc joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, which was producing theatrical cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. After sound man Treg Brown was put in charge of cartoon voices, and Carl Stalling became music director, Brown introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, who loved his voices. The first cartoon Blanc worked on was Picador Porky (1937) as the voice of a drunken bull. He soon after received his first starring role when he replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig's voice in Porky's Duck Hunt, which marked the debut of Daffy Duck, also voiced by Blanc.
Following this, Blanc became a very prominent vocal artist for Warner Bros., voicing a wide variety of the "Looney Tunes" characters. Bugs Bunny, as whom Blanc made his debut in A Wild Hare (1940), was known for eating carrots frequently (especially while saying his catchphrase "Eh, what's up, doc?"). To follow this sound with the animated voice, Blanc would bite into a carrot and then quickly spit into a spittoon. One often-repeated story is that Blanc was allergic to carrots, which Blanc denied.
In Disney's Pinocchio, Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, Gideon eventually was decided to be a mute character (similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film.
Blanc also originated the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker for the theatrical cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures, but stopped voicing Woody after the character's first three shorts when he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Despite this, his laugh was still used in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons until 1951, when Grace Stafford recorded a softer version, while his "Guess who!?" signature line was used in the opening titles until the end of the series and closure of Walter Lantz Productions in 1972.
During World War II, Blanc served as the voice of the hapless Private Snafu in a series of shorts produced by Warner Bros. as a way of training recruited soldiers through the medium of animation.
Throughout his career, Blanc, aware of his talents, protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. He, and later his estate, never hesitated to take civil action when those rights were violated. Voice actors at the time rarely received screen credits, but Blanc was an exception; by 1944, his contract with Warner Bros. stipulated a credit reading "Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc". According to his autobiography, Blanc asked for and received this screen credit from studio boss Leon Schlesinger after he was denied a salary raise. Initially, Blanc's screen credit was limited only to cartoons in which he voiced Bugs Bunny. This changed in March 1945 when the contract was amended to also include a screen credit for cartoons featuring Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck. This however, excluded any shorts with the two characters made before that amendment occurred, even if they released after the fact (Book Revue and Baby Bottleneck are both examples of this). By the end of 1946, Blanc began receiving a screen credit in any subsequent Warner Bros. cartoon for which he provided voices.
Voice work for Hanna-Barbera and others
In 1960, after the expiration of his exclusive contract with Warner Bros., Blanc continued working for them, but also began providing voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera; his roles during this time included Barney Rubble of The Flintstones and Cosmo Spacely of The Jetsons. His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbera included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy, and Captain Caveman, as well as voices for Wally Gator and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
Blanc also worked with former "Looney Tunes" director Chuck Jones, who by this time was directing shorts with his own company Sib Tower 12 (later MGM Animation/Visual Arts), doing vocal effects for the Tom and Jerry series from 1963 to 1967. Blanc was the first voice of Toucan Sam in Froot Loops commercials.
Blanc reprised some of his Warner Bros. characters when the studio contracted him to make new theatrical cartoons in the mid- to late 1960s. For these, Blanc voiced Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, the characters who received the most frequent use in these shorts (later, newly introduced characters such as Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse were voiced by Larry Storch). Blanc also continued to voice the "Looney Tunes" for the bridging sequences of The Bugs Bunny Show, as well as in numerous animated advertisements and several compilation features, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979). He also voiced Granny on Peter Pan Records in 4 More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (1974) and Holly-Daze (1974), in place of June Foray, and replaced the late Arthur Q. Bryan as Elmer Fudd's voice during the post-golden age era.
Car accident and aftermath
On January 24, 1961, Blanc was driving alone when his sports car was involved in a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard; his legs and his pelvis were fractured as a result. About two weeks later, one of Blanc's neurologists at the UCLA Medical Center tried a different approach than just trying to address the unconscious Blanc himself: address his characters. Blanc was asked, "How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?" After a slight pause, Blanc answered, in a weak voice, "Eh... just fine, Doc. How are you?" The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there, too. "I tawt I taw a puddy tat", was the reply. Blanc returned home on March 17. Four days later, Blanc filed a US $500,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His accident, one of 26 in the preceding two years at the intersection known as Dead Man's Curve, resulted in the city funding the restructuring of curves at the location.
Years later, Blanc revealed that during his recovery, his son Noel "ghosted" several Warner Bros. cartoons' voice tracks for him. Warner Bros. had also asked Stan Freberg to provide the voice for Bugs Bunny, but Freberg declined, out of respect for Blanc. At the time of the accident, Blanc was also serving as the voice of Barney Rubble in The Flintstones. His absence from the show was relatively brief; Daws Butler provided the voice of Barney for a few episodes, after which the show's producers set up recording equipment in Blanc's hospital room and later at his home to allow him to work from there. Some of the recordings were made while he was in full-body cast as he lay flat on his back with the other Flintstones co-stars gathered around him. He returned to The Jack Benny Program to film the program's 1961 Christmas show, moving around by crutches and a wheelchair.
Later years
In the 1970s, Blanc gave a series of college lectures across the US and appeared in commercials for American Express. Mel's production company, Blanc Communications Corporation, collaborated on a special with the Boston-based Shriners' Burns Institute called Ounce of Prevention, which became a 30-minute TV special.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Blanc performed his "Looney Tunes" characters for bridging sequences in various compilation films of Golden Age-era Warner Bros. cartoons, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales, Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island, and Daffy Duck's Quackbusters. His final performance of his "Looney Tunes" roles was in Bugs Bunny's Wild World of Sports (1989). After spending most of two seasons voicing the diminutive robot Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Blanc's last original character was Heathcliff from 1980 to 1988.
In the live-action film Strange Brew (1983), Blanc voiced the father of Bob and Doug MacKenzie, at the request of comedian Rick Moranis. In the live-action/animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Blanc reprised several of his roles from Warner Bros. cartoons (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, and Sylvester), but left Yosemite Sam to Joe Alaskey (who later became one of Blanc's regular replacements until his death in 2016). The film was one of the few Disney projects in which Blanc was involved. Blanc died just a year after the film's release. His final recording session was for Jetsons: The Movie (1990).
On January 29, 1962, Mel and his son Noel formed Blanc Communications Corporation, a media company which produced over 5000 public service announcements and commercials, which remains in operation. Mel and Noel appeared with many stars, including Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball, Vincent Price, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, and The Who.
Personal life
Blanc and his wife Estelle Rosenbaum were married on January 4, 1933, and remained married until his death in 1989. Their son, Noel Blanc, is also a voice actor.
Death
Blanc began smoking cigarettes when he was 9 years old. He continued his pack-a-day habit until age 77, after he was diagnosed with emphysema. On May 19, 1989, his family checked him into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when they noticed he had a bad cough while shooting a commercial. He was originally expected to recover, but when his health worsened, doctors discovered he had advanced coronary artery disease. After nearly two months in hospital, Blanc died on July 10, 1989 at Cedars-Sinai of complications from both illnesses. He was 81. He is interred in Hollywood Forever Cemetery section 13, Pinewood section, plot #149 in Hollywood. His will specified that his gravestone read ""—the phrase with which Blanc's character, Porky Pig, concluded Warner Bros. cartoons.
Legacy
Blanc is regarded as the most prolific voice actor in entertainment history. He was the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit.
His death was considered a significant loss to the cartoon industry because of his skill, expressive range, and the sheer number of the continuing characters he portrayed, whose roles were subsequently assumed by several other voice talents. As film critic Leonard Maltin observed, "It is astounding to realize that Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam are the same man!"
Blanc said that Sylvester the Cat was the easiest character for him to voice, because "[he's] just my normal speaking voice with a spray at the end"; and that Yosemite Sam was the hardest, because of his loudness and raspiness.
A doctor who examined Blanc's throat found that he possessed unusually thick, powerful vocal cords that gave him an exceptional range, and compared them to those of opera singer Enrico Caruso.
After his death, Blanc's voice continued to be heard in newly released productions, such as recordings of Dino the Dinosaur in the live-action films The Flintstones (1994) and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000). Similarly, recordings of Blanc as Jack Benny's Maxwell were featured in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). More recently, archive recordings of Blanc have been featured in new computer-generated imagery-animated Looney Tunes theatrical shorts; I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat (shown with Happy Feet Two) and Daffy's Rhapsody (shown with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island).
For his contributions to the radio industry, Blanc has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard. His character Bugs Bunny was also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 10, 1985.
Blanc trained his son Noel in the field of voice characterization. Noel performed his father's characters (particularly Porky Pig) on some programs, but did not become a full-time voice artist. Warner Bros. expressed reluctance to have a single voice actor succeed Blanc, and employed multiple new voice actors to fill the roles in the 1990s, including Noel Blanc, Jeff Bergman, Joe Alaskey and Greg Burson.
Filmography
Radio
Film
Television
Live-action
Discography
Yah, Das Ist Ein Christmas Tree and I Tan't Wait Til Quithmuth Day (Capitol, 1950, Album CAS-3191)
Clink, Clink, Another Drink (Bluebird, 1942) as Drunk
Bugs Bunny Stories for Children (Capitol, 1947) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
The Woody Woodpecker Song (Capitol, 1948) as Woody Woodpecker
Bugs Bunny and the Tortoise (Capitol, 1948) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Henery Hawk, additional voices
That's All Folks! (Capitol, 1948) as Porky Pig
Won't You Ever Get Together With Me (Capitol, 1948) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny in Storyland (Capitol, 1949) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Beaky Buzzard, Old King Cole, Fiddlers Three, Mary's Lamb, Bo Peep's Sheep, Big Bad Wolf
Woody Woodpecker and His Talent Show (Capitol, 1949) as Woody Woodpecker, Stanley Squirrel, Billy Goat, Plato Platypus, Fido, Happy Hedgehog, Harry Humbug
Bugs Bunny Sings with Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny Meets Hiawatha (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny
Daffy Duck Meets Yosemite Sam (Capitol, 1950) as Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam
Tweety Pie (Capitol, 1950) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker's Picnic (Capitol, 1951) as Woody Woodpecker, Tommy Turtle, English Bulldog, German Shepherd, Irish Setter, Scotty
Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1951) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck
Tweety's Puddy Tat Twouble (Capitol, 1951) as Tweety, Sylvester
Tweet, Tweet, Tweety (Capitol, 1952) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny and the Grow-Small Juice (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck
Henery Hawk's Chicken Hunt (Capitol, 1952) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Aladdin's Lamp (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Genie
Woody Woodpecker and the Scarecrow (Capitol, 1952) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Feathered Friend (Capitol, 1952) as Daffy Duck
Sylvester and Hippety Hopper (Capitol, 1952) as Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Animal Crackers (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Lost Monkey (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Rabbit Seasoning (Capitol, 1953) as Bugs Bunny
Snowbound Tweety (Capitol, 1953) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker and His Spaceship (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Wild West Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1953) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Pied Piper Pussycat (Capitol, 1953) as Sylvester, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Duck Inn (Capitol, 1954) as Daffy Duck, Dog
Bugs Bunny and the Pirate (Capitol, 1954) as Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam
Woody Woodpecker and the Truth Tonic (Capitol, 1954) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Tweety's Good Deed (Capitol, 1954) as Tweety, Sylvester, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Fairy Godmother (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker in Mixed-Up Land (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker Meets Davy Crockett (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Family Album (Decca, 1957) as Pepito, Sailor, Malamute, Andy Panda, Fluten Bluten, Heinie the Hyena, Homer Pigeon, Cuckoo, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Bugs Bunny Songfest (Golden, 1961) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Henery Hawk, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Hippety Hopper, Foghorn Leghorn, Cicero Pig
Speedy Gonzales (Dot, 1962) as Speedy Gonzales
Magilla Gorilla and His Pals (Golden, 1964) as Droop-A-Long
The Flintstones: Flip Fables (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Chubby, Tubby, Stubby, Landlord, Beowolfe
The Flintstones: Hansel and Gretel (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Hansel, Gretel, Strudelmeyer, Fang, Witch, Reporter
Treasure Island Starring Sinbad, Jr. (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Salty
Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole in: Super Spy (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Secret Squirrel, Tyrone
The New Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Hanna-Barbera, 1966) as Barney Rubble, March Hare, Prosecuting Attorney/King's Son
The Flintstones Meet the Orchestra Family (Sunset, 1968) as Barney Rubble
The New Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1973) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Petunia Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Pablo, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, additional voices
Four More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Petunia Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Granny, additional voices
Holly Daze (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Granny, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Junior, Santa Claus, Narrator, Radio Announcer
Looney Tunes Learn About Numbers (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About The Alphabet (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Going To School (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., Tweety, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Sing-Along Songs (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Colors (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Shapes and Sizes (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
See also
Voice acting
References
Bibliography
That's Not All, Folks!, 1988 by Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe. Warner Books, (Softcover), (Hardcover)
Terrace, Vincent. Radio Programs, 1924–1984. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.
External links
Toonopedia article about Mel Blanc
40 MP3 downloads of The Mel Blanc Show
The Mel Blanc Show on Outlaws Old Time Radio
1908 births
1989 deaths
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
American Freemasons
American male radio actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
American people of German-Jewish descent
American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Articles containing video clips
Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Comedians from California
Deaths from emphysema
Hanna-Barbera people
Infectious disease deaths in California
Inkpot Award winners
Jewish American comedians
Jewish American male actors
Lincoln High School (Portland, Oregon) alumni
Looney Tunes
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from Portland, Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio people
Walter Lantz Productions people
Warner Bros. Cartoons voice actors
MGM Animation/Visual Arts | true | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
]
|
[
"Mel Blanc",
"Radio work",
"What did he do on the radio?",
"KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention.",
"Did he get any awards for his work in radio?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen,"
]
| C_468706df3fb14611a302dff9005581bf_1 | Did he have his own radio show? | 4 | Did Mel Blanc have his own radio show? | Mel Blanc | Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909-2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.-owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show. Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael, the tormented department store clerk, and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's most memorable characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. The famous "Si ... Sy ... Sue ... sew" routine was so effective that no matter how many times it was performed, the laughter was always there, thanks to the comedic timing of Blanc and Benny. Blanc continued to work with him on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s. They last appeared together on a Johnny Carson Tonight Show in January 1974. A few months later, Blanc spoke highly of Benny on a Tom Snyder Tomorrow show special aired the night of the comedian's death. By 1946, Blanc appeared on over 15 radio programs in supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake". CANNOTANSWER | produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, | Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Melvin Jerome Blank ; May 30, 1908July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.
However, he became internationally known for his work in the Golden Age of American Animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and most of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons. He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons.
Referred to as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry.
Early life
Blanc was born on May 30, 1908 in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a German Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children. He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School. He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10. He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.
Career
Radio work
Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909–2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.
With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.–owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show.
Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. He continued to work with Benny on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s.
Radio Daily magazine wrote in 1942 that Blanc "specialize[d] in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects", and by 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake".
Animation voice work during the golden age of Hollywood
In December 1936, Mel Blanc joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, which was producing theatrical cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. After sound man Treg Brown was put in charge of cartoon voices, and Carl Stalling became music director, Brown introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, who loved his voices. The first cartoon Blanc worked on was Picador Porky (1937) as the voice of a drunken bull. He soon after received his first starring role when he replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig's voice in Porky's Duck Hunt, which marked the debut of Daffy Duck, also voiced by Blanc.
Following this, Blanc became a very prominent vocal artist for Warner Bros., voicing a wide variety of the "Looney Tunes" characters. Bugs Bunny, as whom Blanc made his debut in A Wild Hare (1940), was known for eating carrots frequently (especially while saying his catchphrase "Eh, what's up, doc?"). To follow this sound with the animated voice, Blanc would bite into a carrot and then quickly spit into a spittoon. One often-repeated story is that Blanc was allergic to carrots, which Blanc denied.
In Disney's Pinocchio, Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, Gideon eventually was decided to be a mute character (similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film.
Blanc also originated the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker for the theatrical cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures, but stopped voicing Woody after the character's first three shorts when he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Despite this, his laugh was still used in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons until 1951, when Grace Stafford recorded a softer version, while his "Guess who!?" signature line was used in the opening titles until the end of the series and closure of Walter Lantz Productions in 1972.
During World War II, Blanc served as the voice of the hapless Private Snafu in a series of shorts produced by Warner Bros. as a way of training recruited soldiers through the medium of animation.
Throughout his career, Blanc, aware of his talents, protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. He, and later his estate, never hesitated to take civil action when those rights were violated. Voice actors at the time rarely received screen credits, but Blanc was an exception; by 1944, his contract with Warner Bros. stipulated a credit reading "Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc". According to his autobiography, Blanc asked for and received this screen credit from studio boss Leon Schlesinger after he was denied a salary raise. Initially, Blanc's screen credit was limited only to cartoons in which he voiced Bugs Bunny. This changed in March 1945 when the contract was amended to also include a screen credit for cartoons featuring Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck. This however, excluded any shorts with the two characters made before that amendment occurred, even if they released after the fact (Book Revue and Baby Bottleneck are both examples of this). By the end of 1946, Blanc began receiving a screen credit in any subsequent Warner Bros. cartoon for which he provided voices.
Voice work for Hanna-Barbera and others
In 1960, after the expiration of his exclusive contract with Warner Bros., Blanc continued working for them, but also began providing voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera; his roles during this time included Barney Rubble of The Flintstones and Cosmo Spacely of The Jetsons. His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbera included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy, and Captain Caveman, as well as voices for Wally Gator and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
Blanc also worked with former "Looney Tunes" director Chuck Jones, who by this time was directing shorts with his own company Sib Tower 12 (later MGM Animation/Visual Arts), doing vocal effects for the Tom and Jerry series from 1963 to 1967. Blanc was the first voice of Toucan Sam in Froot Loops commercials.
Blanc reprised some of his Warner Bros. characters when the studio contracted him to make new theatrical cartoons in the mid- to late 1960s. For these, Blanc voiced Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, the characters who received the most frequent use in these shorts (later, newly introduced characters such as Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse were voiced by Larry Storch). Blanc also continued to voice the "Looney Tunes" for the bridging sequences of The Bugs Bunny Show, as well as in numerous animated advertisements and several compilation features, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979). He also voiced Granny on Peter Pan Records in 4 More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (1974) and Holly-Daze (1974), in place of June Foray, and replaced the late Arthur Q. Bryan as Elmer Fudd's voice during the post-golden age era.
Car accident and aftermath
On January 24, 1961, Blanc was driving alone when his sports car was involved in a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard; his legs and his pelvis were fractured as a result. About two weeks later, one of Blanc's neurologists at the UCLA Medical Center tried a different approach than just trying to address the unconscious Blanc himself: address his characters. Blanc was asked, "How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?" After a slight pause, Blanc answered, in a weak voice, "Eh... just fine, Doc. How are you?" The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there, too. "I tawt I taw a puddy tat", was the reply. Blanc returned home on March 17. Four days later, Blanc filed a US $500,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His accident, one of 26 in the preceding two years at the intersection known as Dead Man's Curve, resulted in the city funding the restructuring of curves at the location.
Years later, Blanc revealed that during his recovery, his son Noel "ghosted" several Warner Bros. cartoons' voice tracks for him. Warner Bros. had also asked Stan Freberg to provide the voice for Bugs Bunny, but Freberg declined, out of respect for Blanc. At the time of the accident, Blanc was also serving as the voice of Barney Rubble in The Flintstones. His absence from the show was relatively brief; Daws Butler provided the voice of Barney for a few episodes, after which the show's producers set up recording equipment in Blanc's hospital room and later at his home to allow him to work from there. Some of the recordings were made while he was in full-body cast as he lay flat on his back with the other Flintstones co-stars gathered around him. He returned to The Jack Benny Program to film the program's 1961 Christmas show, moving around by crutches and a wheelchair.
Later years
In the 1970s, Blanc gave a series of college lectures across the US and appeared in commercials for American Express. Mel's production company, Blanc Communications Corporation, collaborated on a special with the Boston-based Shriners' Burns Institute called Ounce of Prevention, which became a 30-minute TV special.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Blanc performed his "Looney Tunes" characters for bridging sequences in various compilation films of Golden Age-era Warner Bros. cartoons, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales, Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island, and Daffy Duck's Quackbusters. His final performance of his "Looney Tunes" roles was in Bugs Bunny's Wild World of Sports (1989). After spending most of two seasons voicing the diminutive robot Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Blanc's last original character was Heathcliff from 1980 to 1988.
In the live-action film Strange Brew (1983), Blanc voiced the father of Bob and Doug MacKenzie, at the request of comedian Rick Moranis. In the live-action/animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Blanc reprised several of his roles from Warner Bros. cartoons (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, and Sylvester), but left Yosemite Sam to Joe Alaskey (who later became one of Blanc's regular replacements until his death in 2016). The film was one of the few Disney projects in which Blanc was involved. Blanc died just a year after the film's release. His final recording session was for Jetsons: The Movie (1990).
On January 29, 1962, Mel and his son Noel formed Blanc Communications Corporation, a media company which produced over 5000 public service announcements and commercials, which remains in operation. Mel and Noel appeared with many stars, including Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball, Vincent Price, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, and The Who.
Personal life
Blanc and his wife Estelle Rosenbaum were married on January 4, 1933, and remained married until his death in 1989. Their son, Noel Blanc, is also a voice actor.
Death
Blanc began smoking cigarettes when he was 9 years old. He continued his pack-a-day habit until age 77, after he was diagnosed with emphysema. On May 19, 1989, his family checked him into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when they noticed he had a bad cough while shooting a commercial. He was originally expected to recover, but when his health worsened, doctors discovered he had advanced coronary artery disease. After nearly two months in hospital, Blanc died on July 10, 1989 at Cedars-Sinai of complications from both illnesses. He was 81. He is interred in Hollywood Forever Cemetery section 13, Pinewood section, plot #149 in Hollywood. His will specified that his gravestone read ""—the phrase with which Blanc's character, Porky Pig, concluded Warner Bros. cartoons.
Legacy
Blanc is regarded as the most prolific voice actor in entertainment history. He was the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit.
His death was considered a significant loss to the cartoon industry because of his skill, expressive range, and the sheer number of the continuing characters he portrayed, whose roles were subsequently assumed by several other voice talents. As film critic Leonard Maltin observed, "It is astounding to realize that Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam are the same man!"
Blanc said that Sylvester the Cat was the easiest character for him to voice, because "[he's] just my normal speaking voice with a spray at the end"; and that Yosemite Sam was the hardest, because of his loudness and raspiness.
A doctor who examined Blanc's throat found that he possessed unusually thick, powerful vocal cords that gave him an exceptional range, and compared them to those of opera singer Enrico Caruso.
After his death, Blanc's voice continued to be heard in newly released productions, such as recordings of Dino the Dinosaur in the live-action films The Flintstones (1994) and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000). Similarly, recordings of Blanc as Jack Benny's Maxwell were featured in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). More recently, archive recordings of Blanc have been featured in new computer-generated imagery-animated Looney Tunes theatrical shorts; I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat (shown with Happy Feet Two) and Daffy's Rhapsody (shown with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island).
For his contributions to the radio industry, Blanc has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard. His character Bugs Bunny was also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 10, 1985.
Blanc trained his son Noel in the field of voice characterization. Noel performed his father's characters (particularly Porky Pig) on some programs, but did not become a full-time voice artist. Warner Bros. expressed reluctance to have a single voice actor succeed Blanc, and employed multiple new voice actors to fill the roles in the 1990s, including Noel Blanc, Jeff Bergman, Joe Alaskey and Greg Burson.
Filmography
Radio
Film
Television
Live-action
Discography
Yah, Das Ist Ein Christmas Tree and I Tan't Wait Til Quithmuth Day (Capitol, 1950, Album CAS-3191)
Clink, Clink, Another Drink (Bluebird, 1942) as Drunk
Bugs Bunny Stories for Children (Capitol, 1947) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
The Woody Woodpecker Song (Capitol, 1948) as Woody Woodpecker
Bugs Bunny and the Tortoise (Capitol, 1948) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Henery Hawk, additional voices
That's All Folks! (Capitol, 1948) as Porky Pig
Won't You Ever Get Together With Me (Capitol, 1948) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny in Storyland (Capitol, 1949) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Beaky Buzzard, Old King Cole, Fiddlers Three, Mary's Lamb, Bo Peep's Sheep, Big Bad Wolf
Woody Woodpecker and His Talent Show (Capitol, 1949) as Woody Woodpecker, Stanley Squirrel, Billy Goat, Plato Platypus, Fido, Happy Hedgehog, Harry Humbug
Bugs Bunny Sings with Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny Meets Hiawatha (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny
Daffy Duck Meets Yosemite Sam (Capitol, 1950) as Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam
Tweety Pie (Capitol, 1950) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker's Picnic (Capitol, 1951) as Woody Woodpecker, Tommy Turtle, English Bulldog, German Shepherd, Irish Setter, Scotty
Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1951) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck
Tweety's Puddy Tat Twouble (Capitol, 1951) as Tweety, Sylvester
Tweet, Tweet, Tweety (Capitol, 1952) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny and the Grow-Small Juice (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck
Henery Hawk's Chicken Hunt (Capitol, 1952) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Aladdin's Lamp (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Genie
Woody Woodpecker and the Scarecrow (Capitol, 1952) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Feathered Friend (Capitol, 1952) as Daffy Duck
Sylvester and Hippety Hopper (Capitol, 1952) as Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Animal Crackers (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Lost Monkey (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Rabbit Seasoning (Capitol, 1953) as Bugs Bunny
Snowbound Tweety (Capitol, 1953) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker and His Spaceship (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Wild West Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1953) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Pied Piper Pussycat (Capitol, 1953) as Sylvester, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Duck Inn (Capitol, 1954) as Daffy Duck, Dog
Bugs Bunny and the Pirate (Capitol, 1954) as Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam
Woody Woodpecker and the Truth Tonic (Capitol, 1954) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Tweety's Good Deed (Capitol, 1954) as Tweety, Sylvester, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Fairy Godmother (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker in Mixed-Up Land (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker Meets Davy Crockett (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Family Album (Decca, 1957) as Pepito, Sailor, Malamute, Andy Panda, Fluten Bluten, Heinie the Hyena, Homer Pigeon, Cuckoo, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Bugs Bunny Songfest (Golden, 1961) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Henery Hawk, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Hippety Hopper, Foghorn Leghorn, Cicero Pig
Speedy Gonzales (Dot, 1962) as Speedy Gonzales
Magilla Gorilla and His Pals (Golden, 1964) as Droop-A-Long
The Flintstones: Flip Fables (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Chubby, Tubby, Stubby, Landlord, Beowolfe
The Flintstones: Hansel and Gretel (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Hansel, Gretel, Strudelmeyer, Fang, Witch, Reporter
Treasure Island Starring Sinbad, Jr. (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Salty
Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole in: Super Spy (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Secret Squirrel, Tyrone
The New Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Hanna-Barbera, 1966) as Barney Rubble, March Hare, Prosecuting Attorney/King's Son
The Flintstones Meet the Orchestra Family (Sunset, 1968) as Barney Rubble
The New Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1973) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Petunia Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Pablo, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, additional voices
Four More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Petunia Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Granny, additional voices
Holly Daze (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Granny, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Junior, Santa Claus, Narrator, Radio Announcer
Looney Tunes Learn About Numbers (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About The Alphabet (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Going To School (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., Tweety, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Sing-Along Songs (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Colors (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Shapes and Sizes (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
See also
Voice acting
References
Bibliography
That's Not All, Folks!, 1988 by Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe. Warner Books, (Softcover), (Hardcover)
Terrace, Vincent. Radio Programs, 1924–1984. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.
External links
Toonopedia article about Mel Blanc
40 MP3 downloads of The Mel Blanc Show
The Mel Blanc Show on Outlaws Old Time Radio
1908 births
1989 deaths
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
American Freemasons
American male radio actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
American people of German-Jewish descent
American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Articles containing video clips
Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Comedians from California
Deaths from emphysema
Hanna-Barbera people
Infectious disease deaths in California
Inkpot Award winners
Jewish American comedians
Jewish American male actors
Lincoln High School (Portland, Oregon) alumni
Looney Tunes
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from Portland, Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio people
Walter Lantz Productions people
Warner Bros. Cartoons voice actors
MGM Animation/Visual Arts | true | [
"Mike Trivisonno (September 20, 1947 – October 28, 2021) was an American radio broadcaster, known for hosting his own self-titled afternoon talk show on Cleveland radio station WTAM AM 1100. He was widely referred to simply as \"Triv\" by callers and the Cleveland media.\n\nCareer\nHe was a frequent caller on the Sportsline radio show on WTAM AM 1100 (during this period the station was operating under the WWWE call letters). The show was hosted by the acerbic Pete Franklin and dealt with Cleveland sports. Franklin, who would typically cut off most callers, began giving \"Mike from Mayfield\" some latitude due to knowledgeable commentary, particularly regarding the Cleveland Browns. Franklin began mockingly referring to Trivisonno as \"Mr. Know It All,\" a moniker he would carry into his own radio career.\n\nTrivisonno eventually began his own broadcasting career in 1987, working for a time at WNCX, commenting on sports (particularly boxing) and becoming a full-time personality from 1989–1992.\n\nHe began hosting Sportsline on WWWE in 1994. At first, the show aired from 6-11 p.m. The show did well in the ratings, even though it was usually up against Cleveland Indians games on WKNR. It did so well, the decision was made to put Trivisonno in afternoon drive-time (under the Sportsline banner until 1998; under his own name since) ultimately leaving Sportsline to other hosts. Throughout the program's history, The Mike Trivisonno Show was usually either first or second in ratings in its time slot in the market.\n\nHis show had been originally dedicated mostly to sports, but over time became a forum for discussing sports, politics, local issues, current events, or whatever else was on Trivisonno's mind at the time. He discussed topics (and frequently argued) with listeners who called in to the show and/or with his various producers and sidekicks that worked alongside him.\n\nTrivisonno's popularity and high ratings led him to be ranked numerous times among Talkers Magazine's \"Heavy Hundred\", including most recently in 2015, when he came in at #72. He was also a nominee for the Large Market Personality of the Year Marconi Award in 2010.\n\nPersonal life\nTrivisonno was born in East Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Mayfield High School in Cleveland's eastern suburbs. He was married to his high school sweetheart Linda Conforto, who died of lung and brain cancer in 2009, at age 61. The couple have three children, two sons and a daughter, and two grandchildren.\n\nOn April 1, 2011, Trivisonno married his girlfriend, Tami in Las Vegas. His brother, Gary, a golfer, was also a radio personality on WTAM, hosting a weekly golf show. His son, Michael Jr., owns an upscale restaurant called Trivs in suburban Strongsville, Ohio.\n\nHe died unexpectedly on October 28, 2021, at the age of 74. The cause of death is unknown.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nMike Trivisonno's subsite on WTAM\n\n1947 births\n2021 deaths\nAmerican talk radio hosts\nRadio personalities from Cleveland\nPeople from East Cleveland, Ohio\nAmerican people of Italian descent",
"The Tavis Smiley Show was an American public broadcasting radio talk show.\n\nPublic Radio International\nThe Tavis Smiley Show was broadcast on Public Radio International (PRI). It was a one-hour weekly program featuring interviews with news makers, thought leaders and artists and seeks to bring diverse perspectives to the airwaves. It was produced by Smiley Radio Properties, Inc., in partnership with PRI at Smiley's studio in Los Angeles, California. The program ran two hours per week until October 2010 when the second hour became the sister program Smiley & West, co-hosted by longtime Smiley collaborator Dr. Cornel West. The show ended in 2017.\n\nHistory of radio show \nThe first version of The Tavis Smiley Show was on National Public Radio (NPR). It was broadcast daily from January 2002 to December 16, 2004, in Los Angeles, when the host Tavis Smiley decided not to renew his contract with NPR. Some of the reasons cited based on an article by Howard Kurtz for not renewing the contract were 1) Tavis Smiley wanted to tape his show a day in advance, and NPR did not agree; 2) against federal funding policies, Tavis Smiley wished to own the right to rebroadcast the show; and 3) Tavis Smiley appealed to have the budget for promoting the program significantly increased, and NPR did not have the budget to do so.\n\nThe show was a news and opinion program focusing upon issues of race, diversity, and ethnicity and often featured guest speakers. It was an hour-long show.\n\nThe show was helped through a collaboration with various public radio stations. It was replaced on some radio stations by News & Notes which follows much the same format and topics. Many other radio stations replaced it with the short-lived NPR News with Tony Cox.\n\nNotes\n\nExternal links\n Official website of the PRI show\n Official website of the PBS show\n Official website of the NPR show\n\nAmerican talk radio programs\nPublic Radio International programs\n2004 radio programme debuts\n2017 radio programme endings"
]
|
[
"Mel Blanc",
"Radio work",
"What did he do on the radio?",
"KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention.",
"Did he get any awards for his work in radio?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen,",
"Did he have his own radio show?",
"produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle,"
]
| C_468706df3fb14611a302dff9005581bf_1 | Was it successful? | 5 | Was Mel Blanc's own radio show successful? | Mel Blanc | Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909-2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.-owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show. Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael, the tormented department store clerk, and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's most memorable characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. The famous "Si ... Sy ... Sue ... sew" routine was so effective that no matter how many times it was performed, the laughter was always there, thanks to the comedic timing of Blanc and Benny. Blanc continued to work with him on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s. They last appeared together on a Johnny Carson Tonight Show in January 1974. A few months later, Blanc spoke highly of Benny on a Tom Snyder Tomorrow show special aired the night of the comedian's death. By 1946, Blanc appeared on over 15 radio programs in supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake". CANNOTANSWER | by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. | Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Melvin Jerome Blank ; May 30, 1908July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.
However, he became internationally known for his work in the Golden Age of American Animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and most of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons. He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons.
Referred to as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry.
Early life
Blanc was born on May 30, 1908 in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a German Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children. He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School. He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10. He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.
Career
Radio work
Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909–2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.
With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.–owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show.
Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. He continued to work with Benny on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s.
Radio Daily magazine wrote in 1942 that Blanc "specialize[d] in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects", and by 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake".
Animation voice work during the golden age of Hollywood
In December 1936, Mel Blanc joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, which was producing theatrical cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. After sound man Treg Brown was put in charge of cartoon voices, and Carl Stalling became music director, Brown introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, who loved his voices. The first cartoon Blanc worked on was Picador Porky (1937) as the voice of a drunken bull. He soon after received his first starring role when he replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig's voice in Porky's Duck Hunt, which marked the debut of Daffy Duck, also voiced by Blanc.
Following this, Blanc became a very prominent vocal artist for Warner Bros., voicing a wide variety of the "Looney Tunes" characters. Bugs Bunny, as whom Blanc made his debut in A Wild Hare (1940), was known for eating carrots frequently (especially while saying his catchphrase "Eh, what's up, doc?"). To follow this sound with the animated voice, Blanc would bite into a carrot and then quickly spit into a spittoon. One often-repeated story is that Blanc was allergic to carrots, which Blanc denied.
In Disney's Pinocchio, Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, Gideon eventually was decided to be a mute character (similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film.
Blanc also originated the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker for the theatrical cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures, but stopped voicing Woody after the character's first three shorts when he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Despite this, his laugh was still used in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons until 1951, when Grace Stafford recorded a softer version, while his "Guess who!?" signature line was used in the opening titles until the end of the series and closure of Walter Lantz Productions in 1972.
During World War II, Blanc served as the voice of the hapless Private Snafu in a series of shorts produced by Warner Bros. as a way of training recruited soldiers through the medium of animation.
Throughout his career, Blanc, aware of his talents, protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. He, and later his estate, never hesitated to take civil action when those rights were violated. Voice actors at the time rarely received screen credits, but Blanc was an exception; by 1944, his contract with Warner Bros. stipulated a credit reading "Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc". According to his autobiography, Blanc asked for and received this screen credit from studio boss Leon Schlesinger after he was denied a salary raise. Initially, Blanc's screen credit was limited only to cartoons in which he voiced Bugs Bunny. This changed in March 1945 when the contract was amended to also include a screen credit for cartoons featuring Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck. This however, excluded any shorts with the two characters made before that amendment occurred, even if they released after the fact (Book Revue and Baby Bottleneck are both examples of this). By the end of 1946, Blanc began receiving a screen credit in any subsequent Warner Bros. cartoon for which he provided voices.
Voice work for Hanna-Barbera and others
In 1960, after the expiration of his exclusive contract with Warner Bros., Blanc continued working for them, but also began providing voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera; his roles during this time included Barney Rubble of The Flintstones and Cosmo Spacely of The Jetsons. His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbera included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy, and Captain Caveman, as well as voices for Wally Gator and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
Blanc also worked with former "Looney Tunes" director Chuck Jones, who by this time was directing shorts with his own company Sib Tower 12 (later MGM Animation/Visual Arts), doing vocal effects for the Tom and Jerry series from 1963 to 1967. Blanc was the first voice of Toucan Sam in Froot Loops commercials.
Blanc reprised some of his Warner Bros. characters when the studio contracted him to make new theatrical cartoons in the mid- to late 1960s. For these, Blanc voiced Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, the characters who received the most frequent use in these shorts (later, newly introduced characters such as Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse were voiced by Larry Storch). Blanc also continued to voice the "Looney Tunes" for the bridging sequences of The Bugs Bunny Show, as well as in numerous animated advertisements and several compilation features, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979). He also voiced Granny on Peter Pan Records in 4 More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (1974) and Holly-Daze (1974), in place of June Foray, and replaced the late Arthur Q. Bryan as Elmer Fudd's voice during the post-golden age era.
Car accident and aftermath
On January 24, 1961, Blanc was driving alone when his sports car was involved in a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard; his legs and his pelvis were fractured as a result. About two weeks later, one of Blanc's neurologists at the UCLA Medical Center tried a different approach than just trying to address the unconscious Blanc himself: address his characters. Blanc was asked, "How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?" After a slight pause, Blanc answered, in a weak voice, "Eh... just fine, Doc. How are you?" The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there, too. "I tawt I taw a puddy tat", was the reply. Blanc returned home on March 17. Four days later, Blanc filed a US $500,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His accident, one of 26 in the preceding two years at the intersection known as Dead Man's Curve, resulted in the city funding the restructuring of curves at the location.
Years later, Blanc revealed that during his recovery, his son Noel "ghosted" several Warner Bros. cartoons' voice tracks for him. Warner Bros. had also asked Stan Freberg to provide the voice for Bugs Bunny, but Freberg declined, out of respect for Blanc. At the time of the accident, Blanc was also serving as the voice of Barney Rubble in The Flintstones. His absence from the show was relatively brief; Daws Butler provided the voice of Barney for a few episodes, after which the show's producers set up recording equipment in Blanc's hospital room and later at his home to allow him to work from there. Some of the recordings were made while he was in full-body cast as he lay flat on his back with the other Flintstones co-stars gathered around him. He returned to The Jack Benny Program to film the program's 1961 Christmas show, moving around by crutches and a wheelchair.
Later years
In the 1970s, Blanc gave a series of college lectures across the US and appeared in commercials for American Express. Mel's production company, Blanc Communications Corporation, collaborated on a special with the Boston-based Shriners' Burns Institute called Ounce of Prevention, which became a 30-minute TV special.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Blanc performed his "Looney Tunes" characters for bridging sequences in various compilation films of Golden Age-era Warner Bros. cartoons, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales, Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island, and Daffy Duck's Quackbusters. His final performance of his "Looney Tunes" roles was in Bugs Bunny's Wild World of Sports (1989). After spending most of two seasons voicing the diminutive robot Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Blanc's last original character was Heathcliff from 1980 to 1988.
In the live-action film Strange Brew (1983), Blanc voiced the father of Bob and Doug MacKenzie, at the request of comedian Rick Moranis. In the live-action/animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Blanc reprised several of his roles from Warner Bros. cartoons (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, and Sylvester), but left Yosemite Sam to Joe Alaskey (who later became one of Blanc's regular replacements until his death in 2016). The film was one of the few Disney projects in which Blanc was involved. Blanc died just a year after the film's release. His final recording session was for Jetsons: The Movie (1990).
On January 29, 1962, Mel and his son Noel formed Blanc Communications Corporation, a media company which produced over 5000 public service announcements and commercials, which remains in operation. Mel and Noel appeared with many stars, including Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball, Vincent Price, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, and The Who.
Personal life
Blanc and his wife Estelle Rosenbaum were married on January 4, 1933, and remained married until his death in 1989. Their son, Noel Blanc, is also a voice actor.
Death
Blanc began smoking cigarettes when he was 9 years old. He continued his pack-a-day habit until age 77, after he was diagnosed with emphysema. On May 19, 1989, his family checked him into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when they noticed he had a bad cough while shooting a commercial. He was originally expected to recover, but when his health worsened, doctors discovered he had advanced coronary artery disease. After nearly two months in hospital, Blanc died on July 10, 1989 at Cedars-Sinai of complications from both illnesses. He was 81. He is interred in Hollywood Forever Cemetery section 13, Pinewood section, plot #149 in Hollywood. His will specified that his gravestone read ""—the phrase with which Blanc's character, Porky Pig, concluded Warner Bros. cartoons.
Legacy
Blanc is regarded as the most prolific voice actor in entertainment history. He was the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit.
His death was considered a significant loss to the cartoon industry because of his skill, expressive range, and the sheer number of the continuing characters he portrayed, whose roles were subsequently assumed by several other voice talents. As film critic Leonard Maltin observed, "It is astounding to realize that Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam are the same man!"
Blanc said that Sylvester the Cat was the easiest character for him to voice, because "[he's] just my normal speaking voice with a spray at the end"; and that Yosemite Sam was the hardest, because of his loudness and raspiness.
A doctor who examined Blanc's throat found that he possessed unusually thick, powerful vocal cords that gave him an exceptional range, and compared them to those of opera singer Enrico Caruso.
After his death, Blanc's voice continued to be heard in newly released productions, such as recordings of Dino the Dinosaur in the live-action films The Flintstones (1994) and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000). Similarly, recordings of Blanc as Jack Benny's Maxwell were featured in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). More recently, archive recordings of Blanc have been featured in new computer-generated imagery-animated Looney Tunes theatrical shorts; I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat (shown with Happy Feet Two) and Daffy's Rhapsody (shown with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island).
For his contributions to the radio industry, Blanc has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard. His character Bugs Bunny was also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 10, 1985.
Blanc trained his son Noel in the field of voice characterization. Noel performed his father's characters (particularly Porky Pig) on some programs, but did not become a full-time voice artist. Warner Bros. expressed reluctance to have a single voice actor succeed Blanc, and employed multiple new voice actors to fill the roles in the 1990s, including Noel Blanc, Jeff Bergman, Joe Alaskey and Greg Burson.
Filmography
Radio
Film
Television
Live-action
Discography
Yah, Das Ist Ein Christmas Tree and I Tan't Wait Til Quithmuth Day (Capitol, 1950, Album CAS-3191)
Clink, Clink, Another Drink (Bluebird, 1942) as Drunk
Bugs Bunny Stories for Children (Capitol, 1947) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
The Woody Woodpecker Song (Capitol, 1948) as Woody Woodpecker
Bugs Bunny and the Tortoise (Capitol, 1948) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Henery Hawk, additional voices
That's All Folks! (Capitol, 1948) as Porky Pig
Won't You Ever Get Together With Me (Capitol, 1948) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny in Storyland (Capitol, 1949) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Beaky Buzzard, Old King Cole, Fiddlers Three, Mary's Lamb, Bo Peep's Sheep, Big Bad Wolf
Woody Woodpecker and His Talent Show (Capitol, 1949) as Woody Woodpecker, Stanley Squirrel, Billy Goat, Plato Platypus, Fido, Happy Hedgehog, Harry Humbug
Bugs Bunny Sings with Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny Meets Hiawatha (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny
Daffy Duck Meets Yosemite Sam (Capitol, 1950) as Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam
Tweety Pie (Capitol, 1950) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker's Picnic (Capitol, 1951) as Woody Woodpecker, Tommy Turtle, English Bulldog, German Shepherd, Irish Setter, Scotty
Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1951) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck
Tweety's Puddy Tat Twouble (Capitol, 1951) as Tweety, Sylvester
Tweet, Tweet, Tweety (Capitol, 1952) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny and the Grow-Small Juice (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck
Henery Hawk's Chicken Hunt (Capitol, 1952) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Aladdin's Lamp (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Genie
Woody Woodpecker and the Scarecrow (Capitol, 1952) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Feathered Friend (Capitol, 1952) as Daffy Duck
Sylvester and Hippety Hopper (Capitol, 1952) as Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Animal Crackers (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Lost Monkey (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Rabbit Seasoning (Capitol, 1953) as Bugs Bunny
Snowbound Tweety (Capitol, 1953) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker and His Spaceship (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Wild West Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1953) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Pied Piper Pussycat (Capitol, 1953) as Sylvester, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Duck Inn (Capitol, 1954) as Daffy Duck, Dog
Bugs Bunny and the Pirate (Capitol, 1954) as Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam
Woody Woodpecker and the Truth Tonic (Capitol, 1954) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Tweety's Good Deed (Capitol, 1954) as Tweety, Sylvester, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Fairy Godmother (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker in Mixed-Up Land (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker Meets Davy Crockett (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Family Album (Decca, 1957) as Pepito, Sailor, Malamute, Andy Panda, Fluten Bluten, Heinie the Hyena, Homer Pigeon, Cuckoo, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Bugs Bunny Songfest (Golden, 1961) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Henery Hawk, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Hippety Hopper, Foghorn Leghorn, Cicero Pig
Speedy Gonzales (Dot, 1962) as Speedy Gonzales
Magilla Gorilla and His Pals (Golden, 1964) as Droop-A-Long
The Flintstones: Flip Fables (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Chubby, Tubby, Stubby, Landlord, Beowolfe
The Flintstones: Hansel and Gretel (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Hansel, Gretel, Strudelmeyer, Fang, Witch, Reporter
Treasure Island Starring Sinbad, Jr. (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Salty
Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole in: Super Spy (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Secret Squirrel, Tyrone
The New Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Hanna-Barbera, 1966) as Barney Rubble, March Hare, Prosecuting Attorney/King's Son
The Flintstones Meet the Orchestra Family (Sunset, 1968) as Barney Rubble
The New Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1973) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Petunia Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Pablo, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, additional voices
Four More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Petunia Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Granny, additional voices
Holly Daze (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Granny, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Junior, Santa Claus, Narrator, Radio Announcer
Looney Tunes Learn About Numbers (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About The Alphabet (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Going To School (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., Tweety, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Sing-Along Songs (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Colors (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Shapes and Sizes (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
See also
Voice acting
References
Bibliography
That's Not All, Folks!, 1988 by Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe. Warner Books, (Softcover), (Hardcover)
Terrace, Vincent. Radio Programs, 1924–1984. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.
External links
Toonopedia article about Mel Blanc
40 MP3 downloads of The Mel Blanc Show
The Mel Blanc Show on Outlaws Old Time Radio
1908 births
1989 deaths
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
American Freemasons
American male radio actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
American people of German-Jewish descent
American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Articles containing video clips
Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Comedians from California
Deaths from emphysema
Hanna-Barbera people
Infectious disease deaths in California
Inkpot Award winners
Jewish American comedians
Jewish American male actors
Lincoln High School (Portland, Oregon) alumni
Looney Tunes
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from Portland, Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio people
Walter Lantz Productions people
Warner Bros. Cartoons voice actors
MGM Animation/Visual Arts | true | [
"Merry Legs (1911-1932) was a Tennessee Walking Horse mare who was given foundation registration for her influence as a broodmare. She was also a successful show horse.\n\nLife\nMerry Legs was foaled in April 1911. She was a bay with sabino markings. She was sired by the foundation stallion Black Allan F-1, out of the American Saddlebred mare Nell Dement, registration number F-3, and bred by the early breeder Albert Dement. She was a large mare at maturity, standing high and weighing . Merry Legs was a successful show horse; as a three-year-old, she won the stake class at the Tennessee State Fair. She was also successful as a broodmare, giving birth to 13 foals, among them the well-known Bud Allen, Last Chance, Major Allen, and Merry Boy. For her influence on the breed, she was given the foundation number F-4 when the TWHBEA was formed in 1935. She died in 1932.\n\nReferences\n\nIndividual Tennessee Walking Horses\n1911 animal births\n1932 animal deaths",
"The UCI Road World Championships – Men's team time trial was a world championship for road bicycle racing in the discipline of team time trial (TTT). It is organized by the world governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI).\n\nNational teams (1962–1994)\nA championship for national teams was introduced in 1962 and held until 1994. It was held annually, except that from 1972 onward, the TTT was not held in Olympic years. There were 4 riders per team on a route around 100 kilometres long. Italy is the most successful nation with seven victories.\n\nMedal winners\n\nMedals by nation\n\nMost successful riders\n\nUCI teams (2012–2018)\nThere was a long break until a championship for trade teams was introduced in 2012. There were 6 riders per team. The championship was held up to 2018.\n\nMedal winners\n\nMost successful teams\n\nMost successful riders\n\nReferences \n \n \n\n \nMen's Team Time Trial\nRecurring sporting events established in 1962\nUCI World Tour races\nMen's road bicycle races\nLists of UCI Road World Championships medalists\nRecurring sporting events disestablished in 2018"
]
|
[
"Mel Blanc",
"Radio work",
"What did he do on the radio?",
"KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention.",
"Did he get any awards for his work in radio?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen,",
"Did he have his own radio show?",
"produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle,",
"Was it successful?",
"by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm."
]
| C_468706df3fb14611a302dff9005581bf_1 | What did they talk about on the show? | 6 | What did Mel Blanc talk about on his radio show? | Mel Blanc | Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909-2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.-owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show. Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael, the tormented department store clerk, and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's most memorable characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. The famous "Si ... Sy ... Sue ... sew" routine was so effective that no matter how many times it was performed, the laughter was always there, thanks to the comedic timing of Blanc and Benny. Blanc continued to work with him on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s. They last appeared together on a Johnny Carson Tonight Show in January 1974. A few months later, Blanc spoke highly of Benny on a Tom Snyder Tomorrow show special aired the night of the comedian's death. By 1946, Blanc appeared on over 15 radio programs in supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake". CANNOTANSWER | Cobweb and Nuts | Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Melvin Jerome Blank ; May 30, 1908July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.
However, he became internationally known for his work in the Golden Age of American Animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and most of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons. He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons.
Referred to as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry.
Early life
Blanc was born on May 30, 1908 in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a German Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children. He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School. He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10. He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.
Career
Radio work
Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909–2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland. He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15. The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.
With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.–owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935. He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show.
Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael and the train announcer. The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself. The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role. One of Blanc's characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time. He continued to work with Benny on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s.
Radio Daily magazine wrote in 1942 that Blanc "specialize[d] in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects", and by 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles. His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie. Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime. During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal. Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake".
Animation voice work during the golden age of Hollywood
In December 1936, Mel Blanc joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, which was producing theatrical cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. After sound man Treg Brown was put in charge of cartoon voices, and Carl Stalling became music director, Brown introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, who loved his voices. The first cartoon Blanc worked on was Picador Porky (1937) as the voice of a drunken bull. He soon after received his first starring role when he replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig's voice in Porky's Duck Hunt, which marked the debut of Daffy Duck, also voiced by Blanc.
Following this, Blanc became a very prominent vocal artist for Warner Bros., voicing a wide variety of the "Looney Tunes" characters. Bugs Bunny, as whom Blanc made his debut in A Wild Hare (1940), was known for eating carrots frequently (especially while saying his catchphrase "Eh, what's up, doc?"). To follow this sound with the animated voice, Blanc would bite into a carrot and then quickly spit into a spittoon. One often-repeated story is that Blanc was allergic to carrots, which Blanc denied.
In Disney's Pinocchio, Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, Gideon eventually was decided to be a mute character (similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film.
Blanc also originated the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker for the theatrical cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures, but stopped voicing Woody after the character's first three shorts when he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Despite this, his laugh was still used in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons until 1951, when Grace Stafford recorded a softer version, while his "Guess who!?" signature line was used in the opening titles until the end of the series and closure of Walter Lantz Productions in 1972.
During World War II, Blanc served as the voice of the hapless Private Snafu in a series of shorts produced by Warner Bros. as a way of training recruited soldiers through the medium of animation.
Throughout his career, Blanc, aware of his talents, protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. He, and later his estate, never hesitated to take civil action when those rights were violated. Voice actors at the time rarely received screen credits, but Blanc was an exception; by 1944, his contract with Warner Bros. stipulated a credit reading "Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc". According to his autobiography, Blanc asked for and received this screen credit from studio boss Leon Schlesinger after he was denied a salary raise. Initially, Blanc's screen credit was limited only to cartoons in which he voiced Bugs Bunny. This changed in March 1945 when the contract was amended to also include a screen credit for cartoons featuring Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck. This however, excluded any shorts with the two characters made before that amendment occurred, even if they released after the fact (Book Revue and Baby Bottleneck are both examples of this). By the end of 1946, Blanc began receiving a screen credit in any subsequent Warner Bros. cartoon for which he provided voices.
Voice work for Hanna-Barbera and others
In 1960, after the expiration of his exclusive contract with Warner Bros., Blanc continued working for them, but also began providing voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera; his roles during this time included Barney Rubble of The Flintstones and Cosmo Spacely of The Jetsons. His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbera included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy, and Captain Caveman, as well as voices for Wally Gator and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
Blanc also worked with former "Looney Tunes" director Chuck Jones, who by this time was directing shorts with his own company Sib Tower 12 (later MGM Animation/Visual Arts), doing vocal effects for the Tom and Jerry series from 1963 to 1967. Blanc was the first voice of Toucan Sam in Froot Loops commercials.
Blanc reprised some of his Warner Bros. characters when the studio contracted him to make new theatrical cartoons in the mid- to late 1960s. For these, Blanc voiced Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, the characters who received the most frequent use in these shorts (later, newly introduced characters such as Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse were voiced by Larry Storch). Blanc also continued to voice the "Looney Tunes" for the bridging sequences of The Bugs Bunny Show, as well as in numerous animated advertisements and several compilation features, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979). He also voiced Granny on Peter Pan Records in 4 More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (1974) and Holly-Daze (1974), in place of June Foray, and replaced the late Arthur Q. Bryan as Elmer Fudd's voice during the post-golden age era.
Car accident and aftermath
On January 24, 1961, Blanc was driving alone when his sports car was involved in a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard; his legs and his pelvis were fractured as a result. About two weeks later, one of Blanc's neurologists at the UCLA Medical Center tried a different approach than just trying to address the unconscious Blanc himself: address his characters. Blanc was asked, "How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?" After a slight pause, Blanc answered, in a weak voice, "Eh... just fine, Doc. How are you?" The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there, too. "I tawt I taw a puddy tat", was the reply. Blanc returned home on March 17. Four days later, Blanc filed a US $500,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His accident, one of 26 in the preceding two years at the intersection known as Dead Man's Curve, resulted in the city funding the restructuring of curves at the location.
Years later, Blanc revealed that during his recovery, his son Noel "ghosted" several Warner Bros. cartoons' voice tracks for him. Warner Bros. had also asked Stan Freberg to provide the voice for Bugs Bunny, but Freberg declined, out of respect for Blanc. At the time of the accident, Blanc was also serving as the voice of Barney Rubble in The Flintstones. His absence from the show was relatively brief; Daws Butler provided the voice of Barney for a few episodes, after which the show's producers set up recording equipment in Blanc's hospital room and later at his home to allow him to work from there. Some of the recordings were made while he was in full-body cast as he lay flat on his back with the other Flintstones co-stars gathered around him. He returned to The Jack Benny Program to film the program's 1961 Christmas show, moving around by crutches and a wheelchair.
Later years
In the 1970s, Blanc gave a series of college lectures across the US and appeared in commercials for American Express. Mel's production company, Blanc Communications Corporation, collaborated on a special with the Boston-based Shriners' Burns Institute called Ounce of Prevention, which became a 30-minute TV special.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Blanc performed his "Looney Tunes" characters for bridging sequences in various compilation films of Golden Age-era Warner Bros. cartoons, such as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales, Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island, and Daffy Duck's Quackbusters. His final performance of his "Looney Tunes" roles was in Bugs Bunny's Wild World of Sports (1989). After spending most of two seasons voicing the diminutive robot Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Blanc's last original character was Heathcliff from 1980 to 1988.
In the live-action film Strange Brew (1983), Blanc voiced the father of Bob and Doug MacKenzie, at the request of comedian Rick Moranis. In the live-action/animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Blanc reprised several of his roles from Warner Bros. cartoons (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, and Sylvester), but left Yosemite Sam to Joe Alaskey (who later became one of Blanc's regular replacements until his death in 2016). The film was one of the few Disney projects in which Blanc was involved. Blanc died just a year after the film's release. His final recording session was for Jetsons: The Movie (1990).
On January 29, 1962, Mel and his son Noel formed Blanc Communications Corporation, a media company which produced over 5000 public service announcements and commercials, which remains in operation. Mel and Noel appeared with many stars, including Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball, Vincent Price, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, and The Who.
Personal life
Blanc and his wife Estelle Rosenbaum were married on January 4, 1933, and remained married until his death in 1989. Their son, Noel Blanc, is also a voice actor.
Death
Blanc began smoking cigarettes when he was 9 years old. He continued his pack-a-day habit until age 77, after he was diagnosed with emphysema. On May 19, 1989, his family checked him into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when they noticed he had a bad cough while shooting a commercial. He was originally expected to recover, but when his health worsened, doctors discovered he had advanced coronary artery disease. After nearly two months in hospital, Blanc died on July 10, 1989 at Cedars-Sinai of complications from both illnesses. He was 81. He is interred in Hollywood Forever Cemetery section 13, Pinewood section, plot #149 in Hollywood. His will specified that his gravestone read ""—the phrase with which Blanc's character, Porky Pig, concluded Warner Bros. cartoons.
Legacy
Blanc is regarded as the most prolific voice actor in entertainment history. He was the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit.
His death was considered a significant loss to the cartoon industry because of his skill, expressive range, and the sheer number of the continuing characters he portrayed, whose roles were subsequently assumed by several other voice talents. As film critic Leonard Maltin observed, "It is astounding to realize that Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam are the same man!"
Blanc said that Sylvester the Cat was the easiest character for him to voice, because "[he's] just my normal speaking voice with a spray at the end"; and that Yosemite Sam was the hardest, because of his loudness and raspiness.
A doctor who examined Blanc's throat found that he possessed unusually thick, powerful vocal cords that gave him an exceptional range, and compared them to those of opera singer Enrico Caruso.
After his death, Blanc's voice continued to be heard in newly released productions, such as recordings of Dino the Dinosaur in the live-action films The Flintstones (1994) and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000). Similarly, recordings of Blanc as Jack Benny's Maxwell were featured in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). More recently, archive recordings of Blanc have been featured in new computer-generated imagery-animated Looney Tunes theatrical shorts; I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat (shown with Happy Feet Two) and Daffy's Rhapsody (shown with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island).
For his contributions to the radio industry, Blanc has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard. His character Bugs Bunny was also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 10, 1985.
Blanc trained his son Noel in the field of voice characterization. Noel performed his father's characters (particularly Porky Pig) on some programs, but did not become a full-time voice artist. Warner Bros. expressed reluctance to have a single voice actor succeed Blanc, and employed multiple new voice actors to fill the roles in the 1990s, including Noel Blanc, Jeff Bergman, Joe Alaskey and Greg Burson.
Filmography
Radio
Film
Television
Live-action
Discography
Yah, Das Ist Ein Christmas Tree and I Tan't Wait Til Quithmuth Day (Capitol, 1950, Album CAS-3191)
Clink, Clink, Another Drink (Bluebird, 1942) as Drunk
Bugs Bunny Stories for Children (Capitol, 1947) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
The Woody Woodpecker Song (Capitol, 1948) as Woody Woodpecker
Bugs Bunny and the Tortoise (Capitol, 1948) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Henery Hawk, additional voices
That's All Folks! (Capitol, 1948) as Porky Pig
Won't You Ever Get Together With Me (Capitol, 1948) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny in Storyland (Capitol, 1949) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Beaky Buzzard, Old King Cole, Fiddlers Three, Mary's Lamb, Bo Peep's Sheep, Big Bad Wolf
Woody Woodpecker and His Talent Show (Capitol, 1949) as Woody Woodpecker, Stanley Squirrel, Billy Goat, Plato Platypus, Fido, Happy Hedgehog, Harry Humbug
Bugs Bunny Sings with Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny Meets Hiawatha (Capitol, 1950) as Bugs Bunny
Daffy Duck Meets Yosemite Sam (Capitol, 1950) as Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam
Tweety Pie (Capitol, 1950) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker's Picnic (Capitol, 1951) as Woody Woodpecker, Tommy Turtle, English Bulldog, German Shepherd, Irish Setter, Scotty
Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1951) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck
Tweety's Puddy Tat Twouble (Capitol, 1951) as Tweety, Sylvester
Tweet, Tweet, Tweety (Capitol, 1952) as Tweety, Sylvester
Bugs Bunny and the Grow-Small Juice (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck
Henery Hawk's Chicken Hunt (Capitol, 1952) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Aladdin's Lamp (Capitol, 1952) as Bugs Bunny, Genie
Woody Woodpecker and the Scarecrow (Capitol, 1952) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Feathered Friend (Capitol, 1952) as Daffy Duck
Sylvester and Hippety Hopper (Capitol, 1952) as Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Animal Crackers (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker and the Lost Monkey (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Bugs Bunny and Rabbit Seasoning (Capitol, 1953) as Bugs Bunny
Snowbound Tweety (Capitol, 1953) as Tweety, Sylvester
Woody Woodpecker and His Spaceship (Capitol, 1953) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Wild West Henery Hawk (Capitol, 1953) as Henery Hawk, Foghorn Leghorn, additional voices
Pied Piper Pussycat (Capitol, 1953) as Sylvester, additional voices
Daffy Duck's Duck Inn (Capitol, 1954) as Daffy Duck, Dog
Bugs Bunny and the Pirate (Capitol, 1954) as Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam
Woody Woodpecker and the Truth Tonic (Capitol, 1954) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Tweety's Good Deed (Capitol, 1954) as Tweety, Sylvester, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Fairy Godmother (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker in Mixed-Up Land (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker Meets Davy Crockett (Capitol, 1955) as Woody Woodpecker, additional voices
Woody Woodpecker's Family Album (Decca, 1957) as Pepito, Sailor, Malamute, Andy Panda, Fluten Bluten, Heinie the Hyena, Homer Pigeon, Cuckoo, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Bugs Bunny Songfest (Golden, 1961) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Henery Hawk, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Hippety Hopper, Foghorn Leghorn, Cicero Pig
Speedy Gonzales (Dot, 1962) as Speedy Gonzales
Magilla Gorilla and His Pals (Golden, 1964) as Droop-A-Long
The Flintstones: Flip Fables (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Chubby, Tubby, Stubby, Landlord, Beowolfe
The Flintstones: Hansel and Gretel (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Barney Rubble, Hansel, Gretel, Strudelmeyer, Fang, Witch, Reporter
Treasure Island Starring Sinbad, Jr. (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Salty
Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole in: Super Spy (Hanna-Barbera, 1965) as Secret Squirrel, Tyrone
The New Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Hanna-Barbera, 1966) as Barney Rubble, March Hare, Prosecuting Attorney/King's Son
The Flintstones Meet the Orchestra Family (Sunset, 1968) as Barney Rubble
The New Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1973) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Petunia Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Pablo, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, additional voices
Four More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Petunia Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Granny, additional voices
Holly Daze (Peter Pan, 1974) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Granny, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Junior, Santa Claus, Narrator, Radio Announcer
Looney Tunes Learn About Numbers (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About The Alphabet (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Going To School (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., Tweety, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Sing-Along Songs (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Colors (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, additional voices
Looney Tunes Learn About Shapes and Sizes (Warner Audio Publishing, 1986) as Bugs Bunny, Cecil Turtle, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, additional voices
See also
Voice acting
References
Bibliography
That's Not All, Folks!, 1988 by Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe. Warner Books, (Softcover), (Hardcover)
Terrace, Vincent. Radio Programs, 1924–1984. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.
External links
Toonopedia article about Mel Blanc
40 MP3 downloads of The Mel Blanc Show
The Mel Blanc Show on Outlaws Old Time Radio
1908 births
1989 deaths
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
American Freemasons
American male radio actors
American male television actors
American male voice actors
American people of German-Jewish descent
American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Articles containing video clips
Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Comedians from California
Deaths from emphysema
Hanna-Barbera people
Infectious disease deaths in California
Inkpot Award winners
Jewish American comedians
Jewish American male actors
Lincoln High School (Portland, Oregon) alumni
Looney Tunes
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from Portland, Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio people
Walter Lantz Productions people
Warner Bros. Cartoons voice actors
MGM Animation/Visual Arts | true | [
"Benefis is a weekly one-hour talk show hosted by an Armenian presenter Avet Barseghyan, and airing on Yerevan-based Public Television company of Armenia. The show featured one-on-one interviews with notable residents of Armenia, their best performances, and interesting facts about their lives and creative paths. The talk-show aired every Sunday.\n\nEpisodes\n\nEpisode 1 \nThe episode aired on September 17, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer-songwriter Hayko.\n\nEpisode 2 \nThe episode aired on September 24, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Silva Hakobyan.\n\nEpisode 3 \nThe episode aired on October 1, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Arame.\n\nEpisode 4 \nThe episode aired on October 8, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer-songwriter Forsh.\n\nEpisode 5 \nThe episode aired on October 15, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Varduhi Vardanyan, who died in a car accident on Sevan - Martuni highway on October 15, 2006.\n\nEpisode 6 \nThe episode aired on October 22, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Razmik Amyan, his friend Hayko was also there.\n\nEpisode 7 \nThe episode aired on October 29, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Nune Yesayan.\n\nEpisode 8 \nThe episode aired on November 5, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Hasmik Karapetyan.\n\nEpisode 9 \nThe episode aired on November 19, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Erik.\n\nEpisode 10 \nThe episode aired on November 26, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Arminka.\n\nEpisode 11 \nThe episode aired on December 3, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Emmy.\n\nEpisode 12 \nThe episode aired on December 17, 2016. The talk-show was about Armenian singer SONA.\n\nEpisode 22 \nThe episode aired on April 29, 2017. The talk-show was about Armenian singer Andre.\n\nEpisode 23 \nThe episode aired on May 20, 2017. The talk-show was about Armenian musician and actress Iveta Mukuchyan. The show was also featuring Gohar Gasparyan, Hayk Petrosyan.\n\nEpisode 29 \nThe last episode of the series aired on July 29, 2017 at 22:20 pm. The talk-show was about Armenian musician Avet Barseghyan (the presenter of the show). The episode was hosted by many Armenian well-known artists, such as Aram Mp3 and Gohar Gasparyan.\n\nAwards and nominations\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n Benefis at the Internet Movie Database\n\nArmenia 1 television shows\n2010s Armenian television series\nArmenian-language television shows\nArmenian television talk shows",
"Intentional Talk is an hour long (during the regular season) and a 30-minute-long (during the offseason) talk show shown live Monday-Friday at 5:00 ET (during the regular season) or at 3:30 ET (during the offseason) on MLB Network. Hosts Stephen Nelson and Kevin Millar talk about the major events in baseball. Viewers are also allowed to tweet to the hosts during the show to voice their opinions and some of the tweets are shown on a marquee at the bottom of the screen, seen in \"Ask Kevin\" and/or read by Stephen. Nelson was named the new co-host of IT in 2021 after former co-host Chris Rose left the show at the end of 2020 because MLB Network was unable to renew his contract.\n\nThe show is filmed from Studio 42 of the MLB Network facility in Secaucus, New Jersey. Most times, when they are not in the studio, they will film the show from the hosts' homes. When this happens, the show is shown as a split-screen, using Cisco TelePresence, in which Kevin hosts from his house in Austin, Texas (also known as \"Studio 1-5\").\n\nDuring the 2011 season, MLB Network started showing a special one-hour, recorded Best of Intentional Talk each weekend, showcasing the best segments of the show from the past week to be topped off with the weekly, \"This Week in MLB Network\" segment.\n\nOn the Friday, January 25, 2013 show, the hosts allowed viewers to call the shots. Everything on the show that day was fan-based, including \"Ask Kevin\", \"Five for Friday\", the Got HEEEEM and HELLOOOOO introduction. On Twitter, they asked for YouTube videos for segments, such as \"What just Happened?\" and \"That was Awkward\". The IT Fan Show returned for the July 24, 2013 show.\n\nOn March 13, 2013, the show announced it was getting a new introduction for the 2013 season, as seen here. This was the show's first introduction change, as the older version was with the show since the start. The new introduction seems to take place in a pinball machine with slots, bumpers and a pinball going around signs, such as \"Got HEEEEM\" and \"Outta Here\", ending off with the ball hitting the word \"grand slam\". The intro debuted on Opening Day 2013 (April 1, 2013). The intro and theme song changed starting with the April 4, 2016 episode to a circus-themed intro with Rose and Millar as ringmasters and the theme song changed to \"Ladies and Gentlemen\" by Saliva. For the ESPN2 airings, some MLB Network logos are replaced by the ESPN logo.\n\nEach episode is uploaded to podcast applications the morning after each airing.\n\nThe show was added to the ESPN2 weekday afternoon lineup from 4-5 PM eastern starting May 1, 2017, and the show continues to air on MLB Network in its current timeslot.\n\nPersonalities\n\nHosts\nChris Rose (2011-2020)\nKevin Millar\nStephen Nelson\n\nGuest Hosts\nGreg Amsinger\nEric Byrnes\nSean Casey\nMark DeRosa\nCliff Floyd\nAl Leiter\nDan Plesac\nHarold Reynolds\nBill Ripken\nPaul Severino\nJohn Smoltz\nMatt Vasgersian\nTom Verducci\nMatt Yallof\nBrian Kenny\nHeidi Watney\nRobert Flores\nPedro Martínez\nTim Flannery\nRon Darling\nPreston Wilson\nFran Charles\nAdnan Virk\n\nReporters\nHazel Mae (2011)\nAlanna Rizzo (2012-2013)\nKristina Fitzpatrick (2014)\nHeidi Watney (2015-)\nScott Braun (2017-)\n\nSegments\n\nSeen Daily\nBaseball Announcers Filling Time - A segment in which a video is shown listening to baseball announcers talking about random and unrelated things.\nBest Interview in Baseball - A segment in which Stephen and Kevin talk to a different player each day using the Cisco Ballpark Cam (or Skype during the offseason).\nGot HEEEEM! - A segment where Kevin shows a clip of a player or fan caught in an embarrassing or awkward situation on camera. This is usually the last bit of the show. If the victim is female, the segment ends with Millar saying \"Got SHEEEEM!\".\nIrrelevant Video of the Day - A segment in which a random video is shown. This video has no relation to what was being talked about and usually has no relation to baseball at all.\nKevin's Highlights - A segment in which Kevin Millar goes through what happened the night before or earlier on that day, that usually is funny and/or odd.\nShow Biz - A segment where Stephen and Kevin discuss the biggest topic of the day. This leads off the show. On April 4, 2016, this segment's title was changed to \"Opening Act\" in accordance with the change to a circus theme.\nSound Check - A segment in which a collection of sound bites are put together to recap some highlights over the past day.\nThat Was Awkward! - A segment where a clip of an uncomfortable moment is shown.\nWhat Just Happened? - A segment when they show a clip with a huge oddity and ask \"What just happened?\"\n\nSeen Often\nAsk Kevin - A segment in which viewers ask Kevin questions through Twitter and he answers them. Starting in July 2013, Millar would give away an item to the person who asked the best question.\nBaseball Updates - When there are games going on, Stephen and Kevin usually show updates of the games in progress during the show.\nCool Story Bro - A segment where an MLB Network personality is seen rambling on about an unrelated topic.\nGoin' Back in Time - A segment when the show goes back in time to show a clip or a person.\nHeidi's Headlines - Heidi Watney delivers some baseball news and tests the hosts' baseball knowledge with a trivia question.\nStick to Baseball - A segment when a baseball-related person does something unrelated to baseball and is told to stick to baseball.\nTurning Two - A segment in which Kevin and Stephen ask each other several questions.\n\nSeen Weekly\nFive For Friday - A weekly segment where Stephen and Kevin ask each other five questions for the weekend series, exclusively seen on Fridays.\nThis Week in MLB Network - A 1:15 minute blooper reel of MLB Network personalities and hosts, shown during the last episode of the week, usually Fridays.\n\nSeen Sometimes\nI'm Buyin' or Keep Tryin' - A segment where Stephen and Kevin decide if they are buying or not buying a statement by a baseball player.\nBoys Club - A segment where an MLB Network analyst comes out to discuss the news with Stephen and Kevin.\nDeep Thoughts with Kevin Millar - A segment where Kevin goes and gives his deep thoughts on topics or certain people, giving people credit.\nInternational Talk - A short segment featuring a baseball play with someone calling the game in a different language.\nMoments From Our Grand Game - A segment where they show a clip about the game or a mistake from a broadcast that was corrected about baseball.\nStick to Broadcasting - A segment when a baseball-related broadcaster does something unrelated to broadcasting and is told to stick to broadcasting.\nWheel of Stuff - A segment where an analyst spins a wheel and asks a question relating to what the wheel lands on.\nColon-Oscopy - A segment usually shown after every start Atlanta Braves pitcher Bartolo Colón makes. It features highlights from Colón in the game, and they usually find humorous stuff to make fun of.\n\nSponsorships\nFor The Love of Beer - A segment that had Chris and Kevin at the Samuel Adams factory, discovering beer, looking at beer and having beer contests. It was only seen in episodes sponsored with Samuel Adams (in mid-2012).\nHome Field Advantage - A segment where Chris and Kevin discuss baseball stadiums or Studio 42 in MLB Network. It was only seen in episodes sponsored by Scott's (in April 2013).\nMillion Dollar Question - A segment that has a question about baseball that is worth \"a million dollars\" that Chris asks Kevin (in April 2011) or the quiz Alanna Rizzo gives Chris and Kevin (in April 2012). It was only seen in episodes sponsored with MLB 2K 12.\nUSAA Salutes - A segment where an army member asks Kevin a question and he responds, usually before the Rizzo Report. It was sponsored by USAA.\nValvoline NextGen Performance - A segment where Chris and Kevin showcase a rookie or a younger player that had a great performance or did well in a baseball game. It was only seen in episodes sponsored by Valvoline NextGen (in May 2013).\n\nSeen Rarely\nBig Leaguing a Big Leaguer - A segment showing a number of clips of Chris Rose making big league comments to a big leaguer, during interviews.\nCircling the Pillows - A segment when Chris and Kevin show the viewer mammoth home run shots from the previous night.\nIntriguing or Intriguing-er - A segment where Chris asks Kevin about two topics and which one is more intriguing.\nMayor's Office - A segment with Sean Casey, who was subbing for Alanna Rizzo, giving out headlines and doing a trivia question. It was interrupted for a few minutes, due to gibberish language and a Matt Vasgersian cameo. The segment reappears when Sean Casey hosts if they have time for it.\nWhat's the Bigger Number? - A segment in which Chris asks Kevin which one of two things will have the bigger number (ex: more homers or more runs).\nWordplay - A segment where Chris and Kevin finished a sentence with a word. Kevin kept using large words that he didn't know. Mitch filled in for Kevin once.\n\nSeen Specifically\nGot TEEEEM - A segment seen in February, that was previously known as Got Team, this segment features Stephen asking Kevin three questions about each of the thirty baseball teams before the upcoming season. In the 2011-2012 offseason, following the questions were team-related Kevin's Highlights.\nGreat Moments in Fatherhood - A segment where Kevin's fatherhood abilities are shown off.\nMarch to March - Seen during the postseason, this is a segment about a team that had just been eliminated from the postseason.\nMath with Millar - Seen during early to mid September, this is a segment in which Kevin does math to figure out several team's faith heading into the postseason.\nThree For the Road - Seen during the postseason, this is a segment during the postseason, where three questions are asked about each series, starting with the LCS and ending with the World Series. The questions are: What will you be surprised to see? What are you worried about? What will be trending on Twitter?\nTop 50 Players Right Now - Judging by stats and their interviews with the show, Stephen and Kevin rated the top 50 players to appear on Intentional Talk.\n\nOne-Timers\nBanana in the Tailpipe - A segment showing a number of clips of someone doing the banana in the tailpipe challenge.\nCy or Sigh? - A segment where Chris asked Kevin how much impact each of the seven Cy Young award starters that were starting on that night will make for the 2013 season.\nInspirational Talk - A segment where the Cleveland Indians radio broadcasters talked about Terry Francona's hilarious interview with the show earlier on in the day on April 22, 2013 and complemented the show and wanted fans to watch the episode on reruns.\nIT Call To Arms - A segment where Chris and Kevin picked three starting pitchers each one night and whoever did the best would win in the next show.\nIntriguing or Intriguing-er - A segment where Chris brings up two topics and asks which one is more intriguing (or intriguing-er) to Kevin.\nRiskier or Reward-er - A segment where Chris and Kevin decide if four of thirteen players who got qualified offers in 2013 will be riskier or reward-er in the offers.\nStamp On It - A segment where Chris and Dan Plesac graded offseason deals from one to three stamps (one being bad and three being great).\nTaste Test - A segment where they see the stats of two anonymous players and pick which guy they'd rather have. After Chris and Kevin both pick which player they'd rather have, they reveal who the players are.\nWhat Are The Chances? - A segment where Chris and Kevin wonder if some individual records will be broken over or under a certain percentage.\nWhat's Adam Up To? - A segment featuring Adam (Kevin Millar's behind the scene technologist during shows) looking around and sitting in Kevin's seat.\nWhat's in Kevin's Stocking? - A segment with Kevin Millar's four children driving around in go-karts (that said \"GOT HEEEEM\" and \"ONE-FIVE\") they got for Christmas.\nWhat's the Deal 1-5? - A segment with Kevin and Chris rated the deals, moves and transactions from a scale of one through five in the 2013 Trade Deadline.\n You Sure This is a Good Idea? - A segment featuring Chris asking Kevin if it is a good idea to eat twinkies instead of a salad. This segment birthed Chris' nickname as \"Puddin Face\"\n\nFormer\nCall IT Like You See IT - A segment where Chris and Kevin post a picture on Facebook and ask for the best captions. They would be revealed on the bottom of the screen or read out loud.\nDon't Be That Guyer - A segment in which Kevin looks at players who are not doing what they should be or doing something they shouldn't do. At the end of this segment, Kevin looks at players working hard and this is called \"Be that Guyer\".\nHazel's Headlines - A segment with former reporter Hazel Mae, who brings up smaller baseball headlines and a quiz for Chris and Kevin. It was usually seen daily in the middle of the show. It was retired after she left the network in 2011.\nRizzo Report - A segment with reporter Alanna Rizzo, who brings up smaller baseball headlines and a quiz for Chris and Kevin. Anthony Rizzo's interviews are also headlined as the Rizzo Report. It started in 2012 and was retired after she left the network in 2013.\nMeet and Tweet - A segment where people tweet a picture with an Intentional Talk sign and they will get their pictures seen toward the middle or end of the show.\nRemembering One-Five - A segment, where former baseball players or people Millar knows sends him an eGraph.\nSneaky Hot - A segment in which Chris and Kevin looks at players who go unnoticed but are really doing well.\nThree Up, Three Down - A segment in which Chris and Kevin take turns talking about the good and bad things going on in baseball every Monday until 2013.\nWould You Rather - A segment where Chris asks Kevin if you would rather see one of two options.\n\nAudio podcast\nMLB Network launched the \"Intentional Talk: Caught Listening\" audio podcast, hosted by Rose and Millar, in late-March 2018.\n\nMLB Now Crossover\nOn June 19, 2013 Intentional Talk crossed over with the MLB Network Original Series MLB Now. It counted as an MLB Now episode and not an Intentional Talk episode. Kevin Millar guest starred on the episode while Chris Rose did not appear. The crossover was titled MLB Intentional Now.\n\nThe Rundown Crossover\nIn January 2014 Intentional Talk crossed over with The Rundown. It counted as an Intentional Talk episode and not an Rundown episode. Matt Yallof appeared while Lauren Shehadi did not. The crossover was titled Intentional Rundown Talk.\n\nHot Stove Crossover\nIn February 2014 Hot Stove crossed over with Intentional Talk. It counted as an Intentional Talk episode and not a Hot Stove episode. Harold Reynolds appeared while Matt Vasgersian did not. The crossover was titled Hot Talk.\n\nHigh Heat Crossover\nOn April 14, 2014 Intentional Talk crossed over with High Heat. It counted as a High Heat episode and not an Intentional Talk episode. Kevin Millar appeared while Chris Rose did not. The crossover was titled Intentional Heat Talk.\n\nMLB Central Crossovers\nSince MLB Central premiered in Spring 2015, Intentional Talk has had a crossover segment on MLB Central called Breakfast with the Millars. The segment features Kevin Millar while Chris Rose does not appear.\n\nSecond Hot Stove crossover \nOn February 17, 2016 Intentional Talk crossed over with Hot Stove. Chris Rose, Kevin Millar, Matt Vasgersian, and Harold Reynold's all appeared in the special crossover event. This is the first crossover in which all the main cast members from both Intentional Talk and the other show appeared in.\n\nReferences\n\n2010s American television talk shows\n2011 American television series debuts\nMLB Network original programming\nAmerican sports television series"
]
|
[
"George M. Cohan",
"Early career"
]
| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | What did he do firts | 1 | What did George Cohan do first? | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | began writing original skits | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
American male singers
American male songwriters
American male stage actors
American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
Broadway theatre directors
Broadway theatre producers
Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)
Catholics from Massachusetts
Catholics from Rhode Island
George M.
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Eccentric dancers
Male actors from Rhode Island
Male musical theatre composers
Musicians from Providence, Rhode Island
People from North Brookfield, Massachusetts
Vaudeville performers
Writers from Providence, Rhode Island
Members of The Lambs Club | true | [
"\"What Did I Do to You?\" is a song recorded by British singer Lisa Stansfield for her 1989 album, Affection. It was written by Stansfield, Ian Devaney and Andy Morris, and produced by Devaney and Morris. The song was released as the fourth European single on 30 April 1990. It included three previously unreleased songs written by Stansfield, Devaney and Morris: \"My Apple Heart,\" \"Lay Me Down\" and \"Something's Happenin'.\" \"What Did I Do to You?\" was remixed by Mark Saunders and by the Grammy Award-winning American house music DJ and producer, David Morales. The single became a top forty hit in the European countries reaching number eighteen in Finland, number twenty in Ireland and number twenty-five in the United Kingdom. \"What Did I Do to You?\" was also released in Japan.\n\nIn 2014, the remixes of \"What Did I Do to You?\" were included on the deluxe 2CD + DVD re-release of Affection and on People Hold On ... The Remix Anthology. They were also featured on The Collection 1989–2003 box set (2014), including previously unreleased Red Zone Mix by David Morales.\n\nCritical reception\nThe song received positive reviews from music critics. Matthew Hocter from Albumism viewed it as a \"upbeat offering\". David Giles from Music Week said it is \"beautifully performed\" by Stansfield. A reviewer from Reading Eagle wrote that \"What Did I Do to You?\" \"would be right at home on the \"Saturday Night Fever\" soundtrack.\"\n\nMusic video\nA music video was produced to promote the single, directed by Philip Richardson, who had previously directed the videos for \"All Around the World\" and \"Live Together\". It features Stansfield with her kiss curls, dressed in a white outfit and performing with her band on a stage in front of a jumping audience. The video was later published on Stansfield's official YouTube channel in November 2009. It has amassed more than 1,6 million views as of October 2021.\n\nTrack listings\n\n European/UK 7\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix Edit) – 4:20\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n European/UK/Japanese CD single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix Edit) – 4:20\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 5:19\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 4:17\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n UK 10\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix) – 5:52\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 5:19\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 4:17\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n European/UK 12\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Morales Mix) – 7:59\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 4:22\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 3:19\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:15\n\n UK 12\" promotional single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Morales Mix) – 7:59\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Anti Poll Tax Dub) – 6:31\n\n Other remixes\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Red Zone Mix) – 7:45\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nLisa Stansfield songs\n1990 singles\nSongs written by Lisa Stansfield\n1989 songs\nArista Records singles\nSongs written by Ian Devaney\nSongs written by Andy Morris (musician)",
"\"What Would Steve Do?\" is the second single released by Mumm-Ra on Columbia Records, which was released on February 19, 2007. It is a re-recorded version of the self-release they did in April 2006. It reached #40 in the UK Singles Chart, making it their highest charting single.\n\nTrack listings\nAll songs written by Mumm-Ra.\n\nCD\n\"What Would Steve Do?\"\n\"Cute As\"\n\"Without You\"\n\n7\"\n\"What Would Steve Do?\"\n\"What Would Steve Do? (Floorboard Mix)\"\n\nGatefold 7\"\n\"What Would Steve Do?\"\n\"Cute As\"\n\nReferences\n\n2007 singles\nMumm-Ra (band) songs\n2006 songs\nColumbia Records singles"
]
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"George M. Cohan",
"Early career",
"What did he do firts",
"began writing original skits"
]
| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | How many skits | 2 | How many skits did George Cohan write? | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | over 150 of them | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
American male singers
American male songwriters
American male stage actors
American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
Broadway theatre directors
Broadway theatre producers
Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)
Catholics from Massachusetts
Catholics from Rhode Island
George M.
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Eccentric dancers
Male actors from Rhode Island
Male musical theatre composers
Musicians from Providence, Rhode Island
People from North Brookfield, Massachusetts
Vaudeville performers
Writers from Providence, Rhode Island
Members of The Lambs Club | true | [
"A hip hop skit is a form of sketch comedy that appears on a hip hop album or mixtape, and is usually written and performed by the artists themselves. Skits can appear on albums or mixtapes as individual tracks, or at the beginning or end of a song. Some skits are part of concept albums and contribute to an album's concept. Skits also occasionally appear on albums of other genres.\n\nThe hip-hop skit was more or less pioneered by De La Soul and their producer Prince Paul who incorporated many skits on their 1989 debut album 3 Feet High and Rising, however an even earlier example may be found at the end of the Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five hit, The Message.\n\nThe Hip Hop Skit, although dominant throughout the 90s and the early 2000s, began to be phased out in the latter half of the 2000s and the early 2010s. Reasons for this include the popularity of MP3.\n\nWriting for The AV Club, Evan Rytlewski opined that skits may have originally been in vogue because an expanded track listing would look more appealing to would be buyers, although he noted that their first inclusion on a De La Soul record was most likely just them being \"eccentric\".\n\nSome skits by certain artists have the same theme throughout. For example, Eminem regularly has conversations with his manager Paul Rosenberg or plays the character Ken Kaniff. Royce da 5'9 uses skits to give background and context to his storytelling raps, like on Book of Ryan. La Toya Jackson uses skits to show her fancy lifestyle in her EP Starting Over. Hip hop and trip hop French producer Wax Tailor also uses skits on each album, mixing beats with 50's movies cuts.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Wefunkradio.com - Show 217 : 2 hours of hip-hop skits, interludes, intros, and bonus beats.\n\nHistory of hip hop\nSketch comedy",
"Ban This is a 1989 skateboarding documentary film featuring the Bones Brigade. It presents a commentary on how many people view skateboarders as delinquents or lawbreakers. The video starts with a scientist posing a question to the viewer, what is skateboarding? Then it cuts to a montage of the skaters in the video. As the video progresses it intercuts skits with the solo video parts of the skaters. These skits are meant to show how ludicrous people's reactions are to skateboarders in an area ridden with robbery, drugs, and prostitution. In one, a cop arrests a kid for skateboarding on the sidewalk. The skits also present the skaters in a \"classy\" scenario: Four skaters are in a parking lot dressed as golfers. They have caddies and golf bags with skateboards in them. The video is presented as a broadcast of a golf tournament with the quiet commentator marveling at the skill of the players. There are also interjections of a panel of people who oppose everything in the video. For example, they say, \"That's not art,\" following a scene in which the skaters paint on a ramp. The video ends with a downhill scooter race. The skaters in the video battle with each other on their way to the finish. Lance Mountain is victorious and gets the prize and the girl. The video is known for the slow-motion sequences of Tony Hawk demonstrating some of the most difficult tricks and maneuvers of the time.\n\nSee also \n Powell Peralta\n The Search for Animal Chin - 1987 Skateboard video featuring the Bones Brigade\n\nExternal links\n Ban This on Amazon\n Ban This at skatevideosite.com\n\nSkateboarding videos\n1989 films"
]
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"George M. Cohan",
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"What did he do firts",
"began writing original skits",
"How many skits",
"over 150 of them"
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| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | who did he write these for | 3 | who did George Cohan write over 150 skits for? | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
American male singers
American male songwriters
American male stage actors
American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
Broadway theatre directors
Broadway theatre producers
Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)
Catholics from Massachusetts
Catholics from Rhode Island
George M.
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Eccentric dancers
Male actors from Rhode Island
Male musical theatre composers
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Members of The Lambs Club | true | [
"A write-in candidate is a candidate whose name does not appear on the ballot but seeks election by asking voters to cast a vote for the candidate by physically writing in the person's name on the ballot. Depending on electoral law it may be possible to win an election by winning a sufficient number of such write-in votes, which count equally as if the person was formally listed on the ballot.\n\nWriting in a name that is not already on the election ballot is considered a practice of the United States. However, some other jurisdictions have allowed this practice. In the United States, there are variations in laws governing write-in candidates, depending on the office (federal or local) and whether the election is a primary election or the general election; general practice is an empty field close by annotated to explain its purpose on the ballot if it applies. In five U.S. states there are no elections to which it can apply, under their present laws. Election laws are enacted by each state and in the District of Columbia, to apply to their voters.\n\nHow to write in the name\nSome U.S. states and local jurisdictions allow a voter to affix a sticker, with the write-in candidate's name, to the ballot in lieu of actually writing in the candidate's name.\n\nWrite-in candidacies are sometimes a result of a candidate being legally or procedurally ineligible to run under their own name or party; write-in candidacies may be permitted where term limits bar an incumbent candidate from being officially nominated for, or being listed on the ballot for, re-election. They are also typically used when a candidate, often an incumbent has lost a primary election but still wishes to contest the general election.\n\nIn some cases, write-in campaigns have been organized to support a candidate who is not personally involved in running; this may be a form of draft campaign.\n\nWrite-in candidates may have to register as candidates\nWrite-in candidates have won elections on rare occasions. Also, write-in votes are sometimes cast for ineligible people or fictional characters.\n\nSome jurisdictions require write-in candidates be registered as official candidates before the election. This is standard in elections with a large pool of potential candidates, as there may be multiple candidates with the same name that could be written in.\n\nThe spoiler effect\nIn some cases, the number of write-in votes cast in an election is greater than the entire margin of victory, suggesting that the write-ins may have been sufficient to tip the balance and change the outcome of the election by creating a spoiler effect.\n\nPrimary elections in the United States\nMany U.S. states and municipalities allow for write-in votes in a partisan primary election where no candidate is listed on the ballot to have the same functional effect as nominating petitions: for example, if there are no Reform Party members on the ballot for state general assembly and a candidate receives more than 200 write-in votes when the primary election is held (or the other number of signatures that were required for ballot access), the candidate will be placed on the ballot on that ballot line for the general election. In most places, this provision is in place for non-partisan elections as well.\n\nWrite-in option in a referendum\nA write-in option may occasionally be available in a multiple-choice referendum; for example in the January 1982 Guamanian status referendum.\n\nContrast from a blank ballot election system\nThe term \"write-in candidate\" is used in elections in which names of candidates or parties are preprinted on a paper ballot or displayed on an electronic voting machine. The term is not generally used in elections in which all ballots are blank and thus all voters must write in the names of their preferred candidates. Blank ballot election systems reduce the cost of printing the ballots, but increase the complexity of casting and counting votes. Such systems are used in Japan, and used in the past in the French Second Republic, and in elections in the Philippines from World War 2 until the 2010 general election. Some systems use a semi-blank ballot, such as Finland, where the voter must fill in a candidate's given number or letter from a separate ballot, but where there is a clear-cut arrangement with a circle or box with a description of how to vote for a given candidate. Blank-ballot systems typically require candidates to be nominated in advance.\n\nUnited States\n\nThe requirements to appear on the general election ballot as an independent candidate or to have write-in votes counted vary by state and by political office sought.\n\nForty-one states and the District of Columbia allow write-in votes on their ballots, including for president; Arkansas, New Mexico and South Carolina allow write-in candidates for some offices but not for president; Mississippi allows write-in votes only to substitute a candidate listed on the ballot who was removed, withdrew or died; Hawaii, Louisiana, Nevada, Oklahoma and South Dakota do not allow any write-in votes. Most of the jurisdictions allowing write-in votes require that the write-in candidates register by a certain date for their votes to be counted. Typically this registration consists only of a declaration of candidacy, but some states also require signatures of a certain number of voters, additional paperwork or fees. The deadline to register as a write-in candidate is usually later than to petition to be listed on the ballot.\n\n2020 presidential general election \n\nNotes\n\nU.S. Senate\n\nRepublican William Knowland was elected in 1946 to the U.S. Senate from California, for a two-month term. The special election for the two-month term featured a November ballot with no names printed on it, and all candidates in that special election were write-in candidates.\nDemocrat Strom Thurmond was elected in 1954 to the United States Senate in South Carolina as a write-in candidate, after state Democratic leaders had blocked him from receiving the party's nomination.\nIn 2010 incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski lost the Republican primary to Joe Miller. Following her defeat she ran in the general election as a write-in candidate. Murkowski had filed, and won, a lawsuit requiring election officials to have the list of names of write-in candidates distributed at the polls, and subsequently won the election with a wide enough margin over both Miller, and Democratic Party candidate Scott T. McAdams, to make moot the write-in ballots that had been challenged by Miller.\nIn 2020, Chris Janicek won the Democratic Senatorial nomination, but during the campaign he sent out sexually inappropriate text messages to staffers causing the Nebraska Democratic Party to withdraw its support from him. The Nebraska Democratic Party attempted to replace Janicek with Alisha Shelton, but Janicek refused to drop out preventing the replacement. Preston Love Jr. later announced his intention to run a write-in senatorial campaign and received the support of the Nebraska Democratic Party, making him the first black person to receive the support of a major party for United States Senate in Nebraska.\n\nU.S. House of Representatives\nIn 1918, Peter F. Tague was elected to the U.S. House as a write-in independent Democrat, defeating the Democratic nominee, John F. Fitzgerald.\nIn 1930 Republican Charles F. Curry, Jr. was elected to the House as a write-in from Sacramento, California. His father, Congressman Charles F. Curry Sr., would have been listed on the ballot unopposed but, due to his untimely death, his name was removed and no candidate's name was listed on the ballot.\nIn 1958, Democrat Dale Alford was elected as a write-in candidate to the United States House of Representatives in Arkansas. As member of the Little Rock school board, Alford launched his write-in campaign a week before the election because the incumbent, Brooks Hays, was involved in the incident in which president Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce racial integration at Little Rock Central High School. Racial integration was unpopular at the time, and Alford won by approximately 1,200 votes, a 2% margin.\nIn 1964 Democrat Gale Schisler was nominated for Congress in Illinois as a write-in candidate when no Democrat filed to run in the primary election. He defeated incumbent Robert McLoskey in the November General Election.\nIn November 1980, Republican Joe Skeen was elected to Congress in New Mexico as a write-in candidate, because of a spoiler candidate who also happened to be a write-in. No Republican had filed to run against the incumbent Democrat, Harold L. Runnels, before the close of filing. Runnels died on August 5, 1980, and the Democrats requested a special primary to pick a replacement candidate. The New Mexico Secretary of State allowed the Democrats to have a special primary, but did not allow the Republicans to have a special primary, because they had already gone with no candidate. So Skeen ran as a write-in candidate. After Runnels' widow lost the Democratic special primary, she launched her own write-in candidacy, which split the Democratic vote, taking enough votes from the Democratic nominee to give the election to the Republican, Skeen, who won with a 38% plurality.\nRon Packard of California finished in second place in the 18-candidate Republican primary to replace the retiring Clair Burgener. Packard lost the primary by 92 votes in 1982, and then mounted a write-in campaign as an independent. He won the election with a 37% plurality against both a Republican and a Democratic candidate. Following the elections, he re-aligned himself as a Republican.\nDemocrat Charlie Wilson was the endorsed candidate of the Democratic Party for Ohio's 6th congressional district in Ohio to replace Ted Strickland in 2006. Strickland was running for Governor, and had to give up his congressional seat. Wilson, though, did not qualify for the ballot because only 46 of the 96 signatures on his candidacy petition were deemed valid, while 50 valid signatures were required for ballot placement. The Democratic Party continued to support Wilson, and an expensive primary campaign ensued – over $1 million was spent by both parties. Wilson overwhelmingly won the Democratic primary as a write-in candidate on May 2, 2006 against two Democratic candidates whose names were on the ballot, with Wilson collecting 44,367 votes, 67% of the Democratic votes cast. Wilson faced Republican Chuck Blasdel in the general election on November 7, 2006, and won, receiving 61% of the votes.\nDemocrat Dave Loebsack entered the 2006 Democratic primary in Iowa's second congressional district as a write-in candidate after failing to get the required number of signatures. He won the primary and in the general election he defeated 15-term incumbent Jim Leach by a 51% to 49% margin.\nJerry McNerney ran as a write-in candidate in the March 2004 Democratic Primary in California's 11th congressional district. He received 1,667 votes (3% of the votes cast), and, having no opposition (no candidates were listed on the Democratic primary ballot), won the primary. Although he lost the November 2004 general election to Republican Richard Pombo, McNerney ran again in 2006 (as a candidate listed on the ballot) and won the Democratic Primary in June, and then the rematch against Pombo in November.\nShelley Sekula-Gibbs failed as a write-in candidate in the November 7, 2006 election to represent the 22nd Texas congressional district in the 110th Congress (for the full term commencing January 3, 2007). The seat had been vacant since June 9, 2006, due to the resignation of the then representative Tom DeLay. Therefore, on the same ballot, there were two races: one for the 110th Congress, as well as a race for the unexpired portion of the term during the 109th Congress (until January 3, 2007). Sekula-Gibbs won the race for the unexpired portion of the term during the 109th Congress as a candidate listed on the ballot. She could not be listed on the ballot for the full term because Texas law did not allow a replacement candidate to be listed on the ballot after the winner of the primary (Tom DeLay) has resigned.\nPeter Welch, a Democrat representing Vermont's sole congressional district, became both the Democratic and Republican nominee for the House when he ran for re-election in 2008 and 2016. Because the Republicans did not field any candidate on the primary ballot in those elections, Welch won enough write-in votes to win the Republican nomination.\n\nState legislatures\nSeveral members of the Alaska House of Representatives were elected as write-in candidates during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly from rural districts in the northern and western portions of the state. Factors in play at the time include the newness of Alaska as a state and the previous absence of electoral politics in many of the rural communities, creating an environment which made it hard to attract candidates to file for office during the official filing period. Most of the areas in question were largely populated by Alaska natives, who held little political power in Alaska at the time. This only began to change following the formation of the Alaska Federation of Natives and the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Known examples of successful write-in candidates include Kenneth A. Garrison and Father Segundo Llorente (1960), Frank R. Ferguson (1972), James H. \"Jimmy\" Huntington (1974), and Nels A. Anderson, Jr. (1976). The incumbent in Llorente's election, Axel C. Johnson, ran for re-election as a write-in candidate after failing to formally file his candidacy paperwork. Johnson and Llorente, as write-in candidates, both outpolled the one candidate who did appear on the ballot. Ferguson and Anderson were both incumbents who launched their write-in campaigns after being defeated in the primary election. Anderson's main opponent, Joseph McGill, had himself won election to the House in 1970 against a write-in candidate by only 5 votes.\nCarl Hawkinson of Galesburg, Illinois won the Republican primary for the Illinois Senate from Illinois's 47th District in 1986 as a write-in candidate. He went on to be elected in the general election and served until 2003. Hawkinson defeated another write-in, David Leitch, in the primary. Incumbent State Senator Prescott Bloom died in a home fire after the filing date for the primary had passed.\n Arizona state senator Don Shooter won the 2010 primary as a write-in and went on to win the general election.\nAfter failing to receive the Republican Party's 1990 Wilson Pakula nomination, incumbent and registered Conservative New York State Senator Serphin Maltese won the party's nomination as a write-in candidate.\nCharlotte Burks won as a Democratic write-in candidate for the Tennessee Senate seat left vacant when the incumbent, her husband Tommy, was assassinated by his opponent, Byron Looper, two weeks before the elections of November 2, 1998. The assassin was the only name on the ballot, so Charlotte ran as a write-in candidate.\nWinnie Brinks was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives in 2012 after a series of unusual events. In May of that year, State Representative Roy Schmidt – who had previously filed to run for re-election as a Democrat – withdrew from the Democratic primary and re-filed as a Republican. A friend of Schmidt's nephew filed to run as a Democrat, but withdrew two days later amid anger among local Democrats. This left Democrats without a candidate. Brinks ran as a write-in to be the Democratic nominee. She won the primary and was listed on the ballot in the general election, which she also won. Coincidentally, the general election also saw a write-in candidate, Bing Goei, receive significant support.\nScott Wagner was elected as an anti-establishment Republican write-in candidate to the Pennsylvania Senate in a March 2014 special election over endorsed Republican nominee Ron Miller and Democrat Linda Small.\nNick Freitas was re-elected as a write-in candidate after missing a filing deadline to appear on the ballot in the Virginia House of Delegates.\n\nLocal government\n Angela Allen was elected Mayor of Tar Heel, North Carolina (population 115) as a write-in candidate in 2003.\n Julia Allen of Readington, New Jersey won a write-in campaign in the November 2005 elections for the Township Committee, after a candidate accused of corruption had won the primary.\n Tom Ammiano, President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, entered the race for Mayor of San Francisco as a write-in candidate two weeks before the 1999 general election. He received 25% of the vote, coming in second place and forcing incumbent Mayor Willie Brown into a runoff election, which Brown won by margin of 59% to 40%. In 2001, the campaign was immortalized in the award-winning documentary film See How They Run.\n John R. Brinkley ran as a write-in candidate for governor of Kansas in 1930. He was motivated at least in part by the state's revocation of his medical license and attempts to shut down his clinic, where he performed alternative medical procedures including transplantation of goat glands into humans. He won 29.5% of the vote in a three-way race. Brinkley's medical and political career are documented in Pope Brock's book Charlatan.\n Mike Duggan filed petition to run for mayor of Detroit in 2013; however, following a court challenge, Duggan's name was removed from the ballot. Duggan then campaigned as a write-in in the August 2013 primary, with the intent of being one of the top two vote-getters and thus advancing to the general election in November. Duggan received the highest number of votes in the primary, and advanced to the runoff in November. He eventually defeated challenger Sheriff Benny Napoleon and became the Mayor of Detroit.\n Donna Frye ran as a write-in candidate for Mayor of San Diego in 2004. A controversy erupted when several thousand votes for her were not counted because the voters had failed to fill in the bubble next to the write-in line. Had those votes been counted, she would have won the election.\n Michael Jarjura was re-elected Mayor of Waterbury, Connecticut in 2005 as a write-in candidate after losing the Democratic party primary to Karen Mulcahy, who used to serve as Waterbury's tax collector before Jarjura fired her in 2004 \"for what he claimed was her rude and abusive conduct toward citizens\". After spending $100,000 on a general elections write-in campaign, Jarjura received 7,907 votes, enough for a plurality of 39%.\n James Maher won the mayorship of Baxter Estates, New York on March 15, 2005 as a write-in candidate with 29 votes. Being the only one on the ballot, the incumbent mayor, James Neville, did not campaign, as he did not realize that there was a write-in campaign going on. Neville received only 13 votes.\n Beverly O'Neil won a third term as Mayor of Long Beach, California as a write-in candidate in 2002. The Long Beach City City Charter has a term limit amendment that says a candidate cannot be on the ballot after two full terms, but does not prevent the person from running as a write-in candidate. She finished first in a seven-candidate primary, but did not receive more than 50% of the vote, forcing a runoff contest. In the runoff, still restricted from the ballot, she got roughly 47% of the vote in a three-way election that included a second write-in candidate.\n Michael Sessions, an 18-year-old high school senior, won as a write-in candidate for Mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan in 2005. He was too young to qualify for the ballot.\n In 2021, Byron Brown, the incumbent mayor of Buffalo, New York, defeated Democratic challenger India Walton, by running a successful write-in campaign after losing the Democratic primary to Walton.\n In Galesburg, Illinois, an error by the Galesburg Election Commission in late 2010 gave city council candidate Chuck Reynolds the wrong number of signatures he required to be on the ballot for the April 2011 city council election, resulting in his removal from the ballot when challenged by incumbent Russell Fleming. Reynolds ran as a write-in vote in the April 2011 election, and lost by 9 votes.\n Anthony A. Williams, then incumbent Mayor of Washington, D.C., was forced to run as a write-in candidate in the 2002 Democratic primary, because he had too many invalid signatures for his petition. He won the Democratic primary, and went on to win re-election.\n In the November 8, 2011, election for Commonwealth's Attorney of Richmond County, Virginia, 16-year incumbent Wayne Emery was certified the winner as a write-in candidate over challenger James Monroe by a margin of 53 votes (2.4%) out of 2,230 votes cast, after his petitions were challenged and his name was removed from the ballot.\n In the August 4, 2020, primary election of Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, Monica Ross-Williams, a then Ypsilanti Township Trustee, received 3,478 write-in votes for Ypsilanti Township Clerk, for the highest number of write-in votes in any election in Washtenaw County, Michigan history.\n In the 1997 election for Mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, Stubbs the Cat won over the two human candidates. He was re-elected every mayoral election thereafter, and served until his death on July 2, 2017.\n In 2011, in Pacific, Washington, Marine veteran Cy Sun ousted incumbent mayor Rich Hildreth as a write-in candidate, using a comprehensive ground game in the small town to convince locals to support him over Hildreth, whom he accused of corruption. After the election, the county elections office reported that a sufficient number of write-ins votes had made it possible that a write-in could win, and after a count of the write-ins, Sun beat Hildreth by 464 to 401. Sun's mayorship was plagued by political and physical challenges, and Sun would be recalled in 2013.\n Eau Claire County, Wisconsin sheriff Ron Cramer, formerly a sheriff's deputy, won election as Eau Claire County's 47th sheriff, defeating disgraced 10-year incumbent sheriff Richard M. Hewitt in a write-in campaign hastily organized just weeks before the election in 1996. He has handily won reelection every 4 years since, usually running unopposed.\n Lynda Neuwirth defeated the lone candidate on the ballot, Joseph DiPasquale, for the Ellicottville, New York village justice position on March 19, 2019; Neuwirth received three votes to DiPasquale's two. Neuwirth was ousted after only two months in the position, as voters had approved a referendum abolishing the court the previous November; when the abolition was delayed two months, Neuwirth was not allowed to retain her seat and was replaced by a justice from the surrounding town, which will absorb the village court's jurisdiction.\n\nOther elections\nAaron Schock was elected to the District 150 School Board in Peoria, Illinois in 2001 by a write-in vote, after his petitions were challenged and his name was removed from the ballot. He defeated the incumbent by over 2,000 votes, approximately 6,400 to 4,300 votes. He went on to serve in the Illinois House of Representatives, and was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 2008. He was later forced to resign in an expenses scandal.\nJohn Adams became an Orange County, California judge in November 2002 after running along with 10 other write-in candidates in the primaries on March 5, 2002 against incumbent Judge Ronald Kline. After the filing deadline in which no candidate filed to run against Kline, a computer hacker discovered that Judge Kline had child pornography on his home computer. Kline got less than 50% of the vote in the primaries, requiring a runoff between him and write-in candidate John Adams (who actually received more votes than Kline). After some legal maneuvers, Kline's name was removed from the general elections, leaving the general election a runoff between Adams and Gay Sandoval, who was the second highest write-in vote getter. Charges against Kline were eventually thrown out.\nOn September 15, 2009, four write-in candidates in the Independence Party primaries for various offices in Putnam County, New York defeated their on-ballot opponents.\nIn a May 2011 school board election for the Bentley School Board in Michigan, Lisa Osborn ran as a write-in candidate and needed just one vote to win a seat. However, she did not receive any votes, even from herself. She explained herself by saying that she was at her son's baseball game and did not have time to go to the polls.\n\nCalifornia's Proposition 14 impact on write-in candidates\nIn 2010, California voters passed Proposition 14 which set up a new election system for the United States Senate, United States House of Representatives, all statewide offices (governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, state treasurer, state controller, attorney general, insurance commissioner, and superintendent of public instruction), California Board of Equalization, and for the California State Legislature. In the system set up by Proposition 14, there are two rounds of voting, and the top two vote-getters for each race in the first round (the primary, held in June 2004 – 2018 and March 2020-present) advance to a second round (the general election, held in November). Proposition 14 specifically prohibits write-in candidates in the second round, and this prohibition was upheld in a court challenge. Another court challenge to the prohibition on write-in candidates in the second round was filed in July 2014.\n\nAlthough Proposition 14 prohibits write-in candidates in the second round of voting, it has made it easier for write-in candidates in the first round to advance to the second round. This generally happens in elections where only one candidate is listed on the ballot. Since in each race the top two vote-getters from the first round are guaranteed to advance to the second round, if only one candidate is listed on the ballot, a write-in candidate can easily advance to the second round, as the write-in candidate would only have to compete with other write-in candidates for the 2nd spot, not with any listed candidates. In some jungle primary systems, if the winner in the first round wins by more than 50% of the vote, then the second (runoff) round gets cancelled, but in the system set up by Proposition 14, a second (runoff) round is required regardless of the percent of the vote that the winner of the first round received. Proposition 14 therefore guarantees that if only one candidate is listed on the ballot in the first round, a write-in candidate running against the one listed candidate can earn a spot for the second round with as little as one vote.\n\nThe first election in which Proposition 14 went into effect was the 2012 elections.\n\nAnother impact of Proposition 14 on write-in candidates is that since the passage of Proposition 14, candidates who are not affiliated with any party can be listed on the ballot for election to offices affected by Proposition 14. Prior to passage of Proposition 14, candidates who were not affiliated with any party, could not run in any party primaries, and were required to run in the general election as write-in candidates.\n\nOther countries\n\nWith a few exceptions, the practice of recognizing write-in candidates is typically viewed internationally as an American tradition.\n\nA bizarre incident involving a fictitious write-in candidacy occurred in the small town of Picoazá, Ecuador in 1967. A company ran a series of campaign-themed advertisements for a foot powder called Pulvapies. Some of the slogans used included \"Vote for any candidate, but if you want well-being and hygiene, vote for Pulvapies\", and \"For Mayor: Honorable Pulvapies\". The foot powder Pulvapies ended up receiving the most votes in the election.\nIn Brazil, until the introduction of electronic voting in 1994, the ballot had no names written for legislative candidates, so many voters would protest by voting on fictional characters or religious figures. In a famous case, the São Paulo city zoo rhinoceros Cacareco got around 100,000 votes in the 1959 elections for the municipal council, more than any candidate. However, those votes were not considered because Brazilian law stipulates that a candidate must be affiliated to a political party to take office.\n Until 2013, write-in candidates were permitted at municipal elections in France for councils of communes with a population of less than 2500.\n Elections in Sweden are open list, with voters placing into the ballot box an envelope containing their choice of either a ballot preprinted with the name of a registered party or else a blank ballot on which they write the name of a party (registered or unregistered) and optionally that of a candidate. A person must consent to being a candidate listed on a preprinted ballot, but there was no such obligation for write-in names until the 2018 general election. In the 2006 municipal elections, the Sweden Democrats (SD) won seats on several councils where they had no nominee or preprinted ballots; most SD voters wrote the party name but no candidate name. The seats were filled by the name most often written, if any, and left empty if no voter wrote in a name. One example was Vårgårda Municipality, where only three of 143 SD voters wrote in names, of which two were for an ineligible non-resident; the winner resigned his seat as he opposed the SD and his sole vote was cast by his father as a joke. In 2010 one Jimmy Åkesson was elected to Staffanstorp Municipality council after a single SD voter wrote his name. The voter apparently intended SD leader Jimmie Åkesson, not resident in Staffanstorp.\n In elections in Austria, writing on a ballot paper does not invalidate a vote provided the voter's preference is clear. In the 1990 legislative election the unpopular SPÖ, worried that voters would not select it on the party-list ballot, advised them to write in the name of Franz Vranitzky, its popular leader. Such ballots would be interpreted as SPÖ votes.\n\nProtest\nMad magazine satirically called to vote for Alfred E. Neuman as a write-in candidate for every U.S. presidential election from 1960 to 1980 with slogans like \"You could do worse–and you already have\" and \"There are Bigger Idiots running for office!\".\nIn the 1980 U.S. presidential election, guitarist Joe Walsh ran a mock write-in campaign, promising to make his song \"Life's Been Good\" the new national anthem if he won, and running on a platform of \"Free Gas for Everyone.\" Though Walsh (then aged 33) was not old enough to actually assume the office, he wanted to raise public awareness of the election. (In 1992, Walsh purportedly ran for vice-president, in his song \"Vote For Me\", a track on his album Songs for a Dying Planet, which was released that year.)\nDuring the 2000 United States Congress Elections, film-maker Michael Moore led a campaign for voters to submit a ficus tree as a write-in candidate. This campaign was replicated across the country and was recounted in an episode of The Awful Truth.\nIn 2012, a campaign was waged to write in Charles Darwin against Georgia congressman Paul Broun (who was running unopposed) after Broun \"called evolution and other areas of science 'lies straight from the pit of hell.' \" Darwin received approximately 4,000 votes. However, because Darwin was not registered as an official candidate (some states require even write-ins to be pre-registered), the Georgia Secretary of State did not tabulate those votes.\nIn 2016, several grassroots campaigns to elect Bernie Sanders President as a write-in candidate were established on social media in the run-up to the United States presidential election. Though Sanders continued to campaign for Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, supporters pointed to alleged DNC bias in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries against Sanders, and Clinton's email scandal, and continued to support him. Both Clinton and Donald Trump would have had to win less than the required 270 electoral college votes for Sanders to have denied either candidate the presidency, and for the election to be passed to the House of Representatives – thus the initial write-in campaign around Vermont, offering only three college votes, was not successful, but Sanders did receive almost six percent of the vote there. The campaign expanded to include all 12 eligible states (one of which listed Sanders as an official write-in candidate), and relied on states such as California, with a high electoral college vote count and large support for Sanders, to be successful in denying both Trump and Clinton.\n In Sweden, all handwritten votes are scanned by computer and the results published online, although only votes for valid parties count towards determining successful candidates. In the 2010 general election, ineffective votes included 120 for Donald Duck and 2 for \"myself\", as well as several computer code snippets apparently intended as code injection attacks aimed at either the program which tallied the votes or the browsers of users who accessed the results website.\n In the 2018 Egyptian presidential election, owing to a large number of candidates being arrested or barred from running, Egyptian football star Mohamed Salah received over a million votes, as many Egyptians cancelled out the names of both candidates and wrote his instead. This was higher than the number of votes received by the second place candidate, Moussa Mostafa Moussa. Write-in votes are not deemed valid in Egypt.\n\nSee also\n\nNone of the above\nNone of these candidates - Nevada's implementation of the \"None of the above\" voting option\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nElections in the United States\nPolitics of the United States",
"The 2014 United States Senate election in Alabama took place on November 4, 2014, to elect a member of the United States Senate for Alabama.\n\nIncumbent Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, who served in the position since 1997, ran for re-election to a fourth term in office. As the Democrats did not field a candidate, he was the only candidate to file before the deadline and was therefore unopposed in the Republican primary election and only faced write-in opposition in the general election.\n\nSessions was re-elected with 97.25% of the vote. The remaining votes were write-ins.\n\nAs of 2021, this, along with the concurrent gubernatorial election, is the last time Jefferson County has voted Republican in any statewide election.\n\nRepublican\n\nCandidates\n\nDeclared\n Jeff Sessions, incumbent U.S. Senator since 1997\n\nIndependents\nAn independent candidate would have been able to challenge Sessions if at least 44,828 signatures had been submitted by June 3, 2014. None did so.\n\nGeneral election\n\nCandidates\n\nOn ballot\n Jeff Sessions (Republican), incumbent U.S. Senator\n\nWrite-in\n Victor Sanchez Williams (Democratic), attorney\n\nFundraising\n\nPredictions\n\nPolling\n\nResults\n\nAftermath\nSessions did not complete this term, which ran through January 3, 2021; he resigned on February 9, 2017, to become Attorney General under the Trump administration. This triggered the interim appointment of Luther Strange to fill the vacancy until Democrat Doug Jones won a special election later that year. On November 7, 2019, Sessions announced that he would stand for this US Senate seat again in 2020 when it was due for its regularly-scheduled election, though he was defeated in the runoff primary by football coach Tommy Tuberville, who would go onto win the general election.\n\nSee also\n 2014 Alabama elections\n\n 2014 United States Senate elections\n 2014 United States elections\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nU.S. Senate elections in Alabama, 2014 at Ballotpedia\nCampaign contributions at OpenSecrets.org\nJeff Sessions for U.S. Senate\n\n2014\nAlabama\n2014 Alabama elections\nSingle-candidate elections"
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"George M. Cohan",
"Early career",
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"How many skits",
"over 150 of them",
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"and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows"
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| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | When did he write theses | 4 | When did George Cohan write songs for the family act. | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | while in his teens. | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
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American male dramatists and playwrights
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American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
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American male songwriters
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American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
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George M.
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Members of The Lambs Club | true | [
"The Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences is a list of propositions for an academic disputation written in 1517 by Martin Luther, professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany, at the time controlled by the Electorate of Saxony. Retrospectively considered to signal the birth of Protestantism, this document advances Luther's positions against what he saw as the abuse of the practice of clergy selling plenary indulgences, which were certificates believed to reduce the temporal punishment in purgatory for sins committed by the purchasers or their loved ones. In the Theses, Luther claimed that the repentance required by Christ in order for sins to be forgiven involves inner spiritual repentance rather than merely external sacramental confession. He argued that indulgences led Christians to avoid true repentance and sorrow for sin, believing that they could forgo it by obtaining an indulgence. These indulgences, according to Luther, discouraged Christians from giving to the poor and performing other acts of mercy, which he attributed to a belief that indulgence certificates were more spiritually valuable (despite the fact that indulgences were granted for such actions). Though Luther claimed that his positions on indulgences accorded with those of the Pope, the Theses challenge a 14th-century papal bull stating that the pope could use the treasury of merit and the good deeds of past saints to forgive temporal punishment for sins. The Theses are framed as propositions to be argued in debate rather than necessarily representing Luther's opinions, but Luther later clarified his views in the Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences.\n\nLuther sent the Theses enclosed with a letter to Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, on 31 October 1517, a date now considered the start of the Reformation and commemorated annually as Reformation Day. Luther may have also posted the Ninety-five Theses on the door of All Saints' Church and other churches in Wittenberg, in accordance with University custom, on 31 October or in mid-November. The Theses were quickly reprinted and translated, and distributed throughout Germany and Europe. They initiated a pamphlet war with the indulgence preacher Johann Tetzel, which spread Luther's fame even further. Luther's ecclesiastical superiors had him tried for heresy, which culminated in his excommunication in 1521. Though the Theses were the start of the Reformation, Luther did not consider indulgences to be as important as other theological matters which would divide the church, such as justification by faith alone and the bondage of the will. His breakthrough on these issues would come later, and he did not see the writing of the Theses as the point at which his beliefs diverged from those of the Roman Catholic Church.\n\nBackground\nMartin Luther, professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg and town preacher, wrote the Ninety-five Theses against the contemporary practice of the church with respect to indulgences. In the Roman Catholic Church, practically the only Christian church in Western Europe at the time, indulgences are part of the economy of salvation. In this system, when Christians sin and confess, they are forgiven and no longer stand to receive eternal punishment in hell, but may still be liable to temporal punishment. This punishment could be satisfied by the penitent's performing works of mercy. If the temporal punishment is not satisfied during life, it needs to be satisfied in Purgatory, a place believed by Catholics to exist between Heaven and Hell. By an indulgence (which may be understood in the sense of \"kindness\"), this temporal punishment could be lessened. Under abuses of the system of indulgences, clergy benefited by selling indulgences and the pope gave official sanction in exchange for a fee.\n\nPopes are empowered to grant plenary indulgences, which provide complete satisfaction for any remaining temporal punishment due to sins, and these were purchased on behalf of people believed to be in purgatory. This led to the popular saying, \"As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs\". Theologians at the University of Paris had criticized this saying late in the 15th century. Earlier critics of indulgences included John Wycliffe, who denied that the pope had jurisdiction over Purgatory. Jan Hus and his followers had advocated a more severe system of penance, in which indulgences were not available. Johannes von Wesel had also attacked indulgences late in the 15th century. Political rulers had an interest in controlling indulgences because local economies suffered when the money for indulgences left a given territory. Rulers often sought to receive a portion of the proceeds or prohibited indulgences altogether, as Duke George did in Luther's Electoral Saxony.\n\nIn 1515, Pope Leo X granted a plenary indulgence intended to finance the construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It would apply to almost any sin, including adultery and theft. All other indulgence preaching was to cease for the eight years in which it was offered. Indulgence preachers were given strict instructions on how the indulgence was to be preached, and they were much more laudatory of the indulgence than those of earlier indulgences. Johann Tetzel was commissioned to preach and offer the indulgence in 1517, and his campaign in cities near Wittenberg drew many Wittenbergers to travel to these cities and purchase them, since sales had been prohibited in Wittenberg and other Saxon cities.\n\nLuther also had a rather negative experience and idea with the indulgences connected to All Saints' Church, Wittenberg. By venerating the large collection of relics at the church, one could receive an indulgence. He had preached as early as 1514 against the abuse of indulgences and the way they cheapened grace rather than requiring true repentance. Luther became especially concerned in 1517 when his parishioners, returning from purchasing Tetzel's indulgences, claimed that they no longer needed to repent and change their lives in order to be forgiven of sin. After hearing what Tetzel had said about indulgences in his sermons, Luther began to study the issue more carefully, and contacted experts on the subject. He preached about indulgences several times in 1517, explaining that true repentance was better than purchasing an indulgence. He taught that receiving an indulgence presupposed that the penitent had confessed and repented, otherwise it was worthless. A truly repentant sinner would also not seek an indulgence, because they loved God's righteousness and desired the inward punishment of their sin. These sermons seem to have ceased from April to October 1517, presumably while Luther was writing the Ninety-five Theses. He composed a Treatise on Indulgences, apparently in early autumn 1517. It is a cautious and searching examination of the subject. He contacted church leaders on the subject by letter, including his superior , Bishop of Brandenburg, sometime on or before 31 October, when he sent the Theses to Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg.\n\nContent\n\nThe iconic first thesis states, \"When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent,' he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.\" In the first few theses Luther develops the idea of repentance as the Christian's inner struggle with sin rather than the external system of sacramental confession. Theses 5–7 then state that the pope can only release people from the punishments he has administered himself or through the church's system of penance, not the guilt of sin. The pope can only announce God's forgiveness of the guilt of sin in his name. In theses 14–29, Luther challenged common beliefs about purgatory. Theses 14–16 discuss the idea that the punishment of purgatory can be likened to the fear and despair felt by dying people. In theses 17–24 he asserts that nothing can be definitively said about the spiritual state of people in purgatory. He denies that the pope has any power over people in purgatory in theses 25 and 26. In theses 27–29, he attacks the idea that as soon as payment is made, the payer's loved one is released from purgatory. He sees it as encouraging sinful greed, and says it is impossible to be certain because only God has ultimate power in forgiving punishments in purgatory.\n\nTheses 30–34 deal with the false certainty Luther believed the indulgence preachers offered Christians. Since no one knows whether a person is truly repentant, a letter assuring a person of his forgiveness is dangerous. In theses 35 and 36, he attacks the idea that an indulgence makes repentance unnecessary. This leads to the conclusion that the truly repentant person, who alone may benefit from the indulgence, has already received the only benefit the indulgence provides. Truly repentant Christians have already, according to Luther, been forgiven of the penalty as well as the guilt of sin. In thesis 37, he states that indulgences are not necessary for Christians to receive all the benefits provided by Christ. Theses 39 and 40 argue that indulgences make true repentance more difficult. True repentance desires God's punishment of sin, but indulgences teach one to avoid punishment, since that is the purpose of purchasing the indulgence.\n\nIn theses 41–47 Luther criticizes indulgences on the basis that they discourage works of mercy by those who purchase them. Here he begins to use the phrase, \"Christians are to be taught...\" to state how he thinks people should be instructed on the value of indulgences. They should be taught that giving to the poor is incomparably more important than buying indulgences, that buying an indulgence rather than giving to the poor invites God's wrath, and that doing good works makes a person better while buying indulgences does not. In theses 48–52 Luther takes the side of the pope, saying that if the pope knew what was being preached in his name he would rather St. Peter's Basilica be burned down than \"built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep\". Theses 53–55 complain about the restrictions on preaching while the indulgence was being offered.\n\nLuther criticizes the doctrine of the treasury of merit on which the doctrine of indulgences is based in theses 56–66. He states that everyday Christians do not understand the doctrine and are being misled. For Luther, the true treasure of the church is the gospel of Jesus Christ. This treasure tends to be hated because it makes \"the first last\", in the words of Matthew 19:30 and 20:16. Luther uses metaphor and wordplay to describe the treasures of the gospel as nets to catch wealthy people, whereas the treasures of indulgences are nets to catch the wealth of men.\n\nIn theses 67–80, Luther discusses further the problems with the way indulgences are being preached, as he had done in the letter to Archbishop Albert. The preachers have been promoting indulgences as the greatest of the graces available from the church, but they actually only promote greed. He points out that bishops have been commanded to offer reverence to indulgence preachers who enter their jurisdiction, but bishops are also charged with protecting their people from preachers who preach contrary to the pope's intention. He then attacks the belief allegedly propagated by the preachers that the indulgence could forgive one who had violated the Virgin Mary. Luther states that indulgences cannot take away the guilt of even the lightest of venial sins. He labels several other alleged statements of the indulgence preachers as blasphemy: that Saint Peter could not have granted a greater indulgence than the current one, and that the indulgence cross with the papal arms is as worthy as the cross of Christ.\n\nLuther lists several criticisms advanced by laypeople against indulgences in theses 81–91. He presents these as difficult objections his congregants are bringing rather than his own criticisms. How should he answer those who ask why the pope does not simply empty purgatory if it is in his power? What should he say to those who ask why anniversary masses for the dead, which were for the sake of those in purgatory, continued for those who had been redeemed by an indulgence? Luther claimed that it seemed strange to some that pious people in purgatory could be redeemed by living impious people. Luther also mentions the question of why the pope, who is very rich, requires money from poor believers to build St. Peter's Basilica. Luther claims that ignoring these questions risks allowing people to ridicule the pope. He appeals to the pope's financial interest, saying that if the preachers limited their preaching in accordance with Luther's positions on indulgences (which he claimed was also the pope's position), the objections would cease to be relevant. Luther closes the Theses by exhorting Christians to imitate Christ even if it brings pain and suffering. Enduring punishment and entering heaven is preferable to false security.\n\nLuther's intent\n\nThe Theses are written as propositions to be argued in a formal academic disputation, though there is no evidence that such an event ever took place. In the heading of the Theses, Luther invited interested scholars from other cities to participate. Holding such a debate was a privilege Luther held as a doctor, and it was not an unusual form of academic inquiry. Luther prepared twenty sets of theses for disputation at Wittenberg between 1516 and 1521. Andreas Karlstadt had written a set of such theses in April 1517, and these were more radical in theological terms than Luther's. He posted them on the door of All Saints' Church, as Luther was alleged to have done with the Ninety-five Theses. Karlstadt posted his theses at a time when the relics of the church were placed on display, and this may have been considered a provocative gesture. Similarly, Luther posted the Ninety-five Theses on the eve of All Saints' Day, the most important day of the year for the display of relics at All Saints' Church.\n\nLuther's theses were intended to begin a debate among academics, not a popular revolution, but there are indications that he saw his action as prophetic and significant. Around this time, he began using the name \"Luther\" and sometimes \"Eleutherius\", Greek for \"free\", rather than \"Luder\". This seems to refer to his being free from the scholastic theology which he had argued against earlier that year. Luther later claimed not to have desired the Theses to be widely distributed. Elizabeth Eisenstein has argued that his claimed surprise at their success may have involved self-deception and Hans Hillerbrand has claimed that Luther was certainly intending to instigate a large controversy. At times, Luther seems to use the academic nature of the Theses as a cover to allow him to attack established beliefs while being able to deny that he intended to attack church teaching. Since writing a set of theses for a disputation does not necessarily commit the author to those views, Luther could deny that he held the most incendiary ideas in the Theses.\n\nDistribution and publication\n\nOn 31 October 1517, Luther sent a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, Albert of Brandenburg, under whose authority the indulgences were being sold. In the letter, Luther addresses the archbishop out of a loyal desire to alert him to the pastoral problems created by the indulgence sermons. He assumes that Albert is unaware of what is being preached under his authority, and speaks out of concern that the people are being led away from the gospel, and that the indulgence preaching may bring shame to Albert's name. Luther does not condemn indulgences or the current doctrine regarding them, nor even the sermons which had been preached themselves, as he had not seen them firsthand. Instead he states his concern regarding the misunderstandings of the people about indulgences which have been fostered by the preaching, such as the belief that any sin could be forgiven by indulgences or that the guilt as well as the punishment for sin could be forgiven by an indulgence. In a postscript, Luther wrote that Albert could find some theses on the matter enclosed with his letter, so that he could see the uncertainty surrounding the doctrine of indulgences in contrast to the preachers who spoke so confidently of the benefits of indulgences.\n\nIt was customary when proposing a disputation to have the theses printed by the university press and publicly posted. No copies of a Wittenberg printing of the Ninety-five Theses have survived, but this is not surprising as Luther was not famous and the importance of the document was not recognized. In Wittenberg, the university statutes demand that theses be posted on every church door in the city, but Philip Melanchthon, who first mentioned the posting of the Theses, only mentioned the door of All Saints' Church. Melanchthon also claimed that Luther posted the Theses on 31 October, but this conflicts with several of Luther's statements about the course of events, and Luther always claimed that he brought his objections through proper channels rather than inciting a public controversy. It is possible that while Luther later saw the 31 October letter to Albert as the beginning of the Reformation, he did not post the Theses to the church door until mid-November, but he may not have posted them on the door at all. Regardless, the Theses were well known among the Wittenberg intellectual elite soon after Luther sent them to Albert.\n\nThe Theses were copied and distributed to interested parties soon after Luther sent the letter to Archbishop Albert. The Latin Theses were printed in a four-page pamphlet in Basel, and as placards in Leipzig and Nuremberg. In all, several hundred copies of the Latin Theses were printed in Germany in 1517. in Nuremberg translated them into German later that year, and copies of this translation were sent to several interested parties across Germany, but it was not necessarily printed.\n\nReaction\nAlbert seems to have received Luther's letter with the Theses around the end of November. He requested the opinion of theologians at the University of Mainz and conferred with his advisers. His advisers recommended he have Luther prohibited from preaching against indulgences in accordance with the indulgence bull. Albert requested such action from the Roman Curia. In Rome, Luther was immediately perceived as a threat. In February 1518, Pope Leo asked the head of the Augustinian Hermits, Luther's religious order, to convince him to stop spreading his ideas about indulgences. Sylvester Mazzolini was also appointed to write an opinion which would be used in the trial against him. Mazzolini wrote A Dialogue against Martin Luther's Presumptuous Theses concerning the Power of the Pope, which focused on Luther's questioning of the pope's authority rather than his complaints about indulgence preaching. Luther received a summons to Rome in August 1518. He responded with Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences, in which he attempted to clear himself of the charge that he was attacking the pope. As he set down his views more extensively, Luther seems to have recognized that the implications of his beliefs set him further from official teaching than he initially knew. He later said he might not have begun the controversy had he known where it would lead. The Explanations have been called Luther's first Reformation work.\n\nJohann Tetzel responded to the Theses by calling for Luther to be burnt for heresy and having theologian Konrad Wimpina write 106 theses against Luther's work. Tetzel defended these in a disputation before the University of Frankfurt on the Oder in January 1518. 800 copies of the printed disputation were sent to be sold in Wittenberg, but students of the University seized them from the bookseller and burned them. Luther became increasingly fearful that the situation was out of hand and that he would be in danger. To placate his opponents, he published a Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, which did not challenge the pope's authority. This pamphlet, written in German, was very short and easy for laypeople to understand. Luther's first widely successful work, it was reprinted twenty times. Tetzel responded with a point-by-point refutation, citing heavily from the Bible and important theologians. His pamphlet was not nearly as popular as Luther's. Luther's reply to Tetzel's pamphlet, on the other hand, was another publishing success for Luther.\n\nAnother prominent opponent of the Theses was Johann Eck, Luther's friend and a theologian at the University of Ingolstadt. Eck wrote a refutation, intended for the Bishop of Eichstätt, entitled the Obelisks. This was in reference to the obelisks used to mark heretical passages in texts in the Middle Ages. It was a harsh and unexpected personal attack, charging Luther with heresy and stupidity. Luther responded privately with the Asterisks, titled after the asterisk marks then used to highlight important texts. Luther's response was angry and he expressed the opinion that Eck did not understand the matter on which he wrote. The dispute between Luther and Eck would become public in the 1519 Leipzig Debate.\n\nLuther was summoned by authority of the pope to defend himself against charges of heresy before Thomas Cajetan at Augsburg in October 1518. Cajetan did not allow Luther to argue with him over his alleged heresies, but he did identify two points of controversy. The first was against the 58th thesis, which stated that the pope could not use the treasury of merit to forgive temporal punishment of sin. This contradicted the papal bull Unigenitus promulgated by Clement VI in 1343. The second point was whether one could be assured that they had been forgiven when their sin had been absolved by a priest. Luther's Explanations on thesis seven asserted that one could based on God's promise, but Cajetan argued that the humble Christian should never presume to be certain of their standing before God. Luther refused to recant and requested that the case be reviewed by university theologians. This request was denied, so Luther appealed to the pope before leaving Augsburg. Luther was finally excommunicated in 1521 after he burned the papal bull threatening him to recant or face excommunication.\n\nLegacy\n\nThe indulgence controversy set off by the Theses was the beginning of the Reformation, a schism in the Roman Catholic Church which initiated profound and lasting social and political change in Europe. Luther later stated that the issue of indulgences was insignificant relative to controversies which he would enter into later, such as his debate with Erasmus over the bondage of the will, nor did he see the controversy as important to his intellectual breakthrough regarding the gospel. Luther later wrote that at the time he wrote the Theses he remained a \"papist\", and he did not seem to think the Theses represented a break with established Roman Catholic doctrine. But it was out of the indulgences controversy that the movement which would be called the Reformation began, and the controversy propelled Luther to the leadership position he would hold in that movement. The Theses also made evident that Luther believed the church was not preaching properly and that this put the laity in serious danger. Further, the Theses contradicted the decree of Pope Clement VI, in 1343, that indulgences are the treasury of the church. This disregard for papal authority presaged later conflicts.\n\n31 October 1517, the day Luther sent the Theses to Albert, was commemorated as the beginning of the Reformation as early as 1527, when Luther and his friends raised a glass of beer to commemorate the \"trampling out of indulgences\". The posting of the Theses was established in the historiography of the Reformation as the beginning of the movement by Philip Melanchthon in his 1548 Historia de vita et actis Lutheri. During the 1617 Reformation Jubilee, the centenary of 31 October was celebrated by a procession to the Wittenberg Church where Luther was believed to have posted the Theses. An engraving was made showing Luther writing the Theses on the door of the church with a gigantic quill. The quill penetrates the head of a lion symbolizing Pope Leo X. In 1668, 31 October was made Reformation Day, an annual holiday in Electoral Saxony, which spread to other Lutheran lands. 31 October 2017, the 500th Anniversary of Reformation Day, was celebrated with a national public holiday throughout Germany.\n\nSee also \n Chinese 95 theses\n\nNotes and references\n\nNotes\n\nCitations\n\nSources\n\nExternal links\n\n Ninety-five Theses Modern English translation with commentary and notes\n \n Latin original\n Luther 2017 Official website of 500th anniversary celebrations\n\n1510s in Germany\n1517 works\n16th-century Christian texts\nWittenberg\nWorks by Martin Luther\nDisputations\nLatin texts\nReformation in Germany\n1517 in Christianity",
"An open thesis, also known as an open dissertation, is a thesis that is freely available for members of the public to access upon publication, and often also during the planning and writing process. The decision to write an open thesis is made by the author, who will usually explain their rationale for creating an open thesis as part of the final published work or while developing it. Writing an open thesis is a process with many decision points regarding where and when to share information openly - from the planning stage, through research and writing, the defense/ voce viva and ultimate publication. Open theses are usually created and located in digital and multimodal formats.\n\nOpen theses fall into two categories:\n Those that are available under an open license. Many in this category are also drafted openly, for example they are discussed in public well before submission by way of open notebook science, open data or other elements of open research and open scholarship.\n Those that are freely available as open access publications, but not necessarily under an open license.\n\nProcess and production \nAn individual's decision to create an open thesis is generally made in consultation with a supervisor, committee members, and collaboration in networks of learning such as the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN). The process for completing a thesis in the open is individual and context-specific; it is up to the author how much of the process they want to share openly. For example, Doug Belshaw shared the process, the first draft, and the final thesis document; Bonnie Stewart shared her processes openly via her blog, her challenges via Twitter, and her outputs openly; and Chrissi Nerantzi blogged throughout her PhD, sharing the process and outputs as she went along.\n\nViva voce \nIn many countries, thesis authors are required to defend their work in front of an examination committee. This gate-keeping event is the final hurdle in the successful completion of a degree of study. In the case of open theses, authors sometimes decide, with the approval of their supervisor and committee members, to present their defense summary, also called a viva voce or viva, publicly. This can be done through live social media messaging or live video streaming. This usually closed session provides time for the candidate to deliver a summary of the \"research niche, data collection methods, key findings, and field contributions.\" The second part of the thesis defense includes a period of questioning by the committee members, which can also be conducted publicly, in the open, with or without being recorded, depending on the approval of the institution and committee members. Those who present their thesis defense in the open will publicly share information on how to engage, and will ask trusted colleagues to manage the additional requirements for an open and public viva. Concerns with open viva voce include issues of knowing or not knowing, scholarly identity, privacy, security, permission, and copyright. Examples of open thesis defense formats include live streaming and live tweeting.\n\nRepositories \nThe practice of making theses and dissertations available openly online in electronic formats is growing internationally. There are visibility and citation benefits to providing open access to theses. Open theses repositories can be managed and curated by institutions, organizations, or governments. \n \nThe following list contains links to databases of openly available theses. Unless specified, the databases include both openly licensed and non-openly licensed theses. \nDART-Europe E-Theses Portal - managed by the University College London (UCL) Library Service. This repository contains over a million research theses from over 500 universities in 29 European countries\nEThOS (E-Theses Online Service) - published by the British Library. EThOS aims to help institutions to meet the expectation of the UK Research Councils that PhDs supported by a Research Council Training Grant should be made freely available in an open access repository\nOpen Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) - this is an index of over 3.5 million electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). To the extent possible, the index is limited to records of graduate-level theses that are freely available online. The OATD site defines open access broadly to cover ETDs that are free to access and read online. They encourage authors to consider formally specifying use permissions, for example by publishing their theses with a Creative Commons license\nShodhganga - a repository of open access theses for universities in India, organized in 2010, as a result of the creation of the National Knowledge Commission. Students in participating universities who complete Masters or PhD theses are required to submit a copy for curation. A total of 40,175 theses were curated as of June 30, 2015. Shodhganga encourages the submission of content under Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).\nThesis Commons - published by the Center for Open Science. Thesis Commons is \"a free, cloud-based, open-source platform for the submission, dissemination, and discovery of graduate and undergraduate theses and dissertations from any discipline. Authors can share their electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) with a quick and easy submission workflow. Readers can search, discover, and download with a clean and simple interface. Institutions can sign-up for a branded version of the service for their institutional community for hosting ETDs, preprints, or other scholarship\" \nTheses Canada - open and searchable repository of dissertations and theses from Canadian, with guidelines provided to universities and higher education institutions on how to submit documents to the Library and Archives Canada organization \nTuwhera Open Access Theses & Dissertations - published by the Auckland University of Technology (AUT). This repository contains digital copies of theses, dissertations and research projects by postgraduate students at AUT since 2002. Full text files are available where authors have given permission for their works to be available open access\n\nSee also \n Open access\n Open science\n Open research\n Open educational resources\n Open educational practices\n Open data\n Open-source software\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Open Theses workshop at EURODOC 2011\n Opening access to PhD theses (2016)\n Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN)\n Opening the Dissertation: Why We Need to Make Open the Default by Bonnie Stewart\n Granularities of the Open Dissertation by Laura Gogia \n Shifting my research question by Rebecca J Hogue\n thesis live in full and open to all to read ;) #go_gn by Chrissi Nerantzi\n What is digital literacy? by Doug Belshaw\n\nTheses"
]
|
[
"George M. Cohan",
"Early career",
"What did he do firts",
"began writing original skits",
"How many skits",
"over 150 of them",
"who did he write these for",
"and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows",
"When did he write theses",
"while in his teens."
]
| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | what was his next acomplishment | 5 | what was George Cohan's next acomplishment | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
American male singers
American male songwriters
American male stage actors
American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
Broadway theatre directors
Broadway theatre producers
Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)
Catholics from Massachusetts
Catholics from Rhode Island
George M.
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Eccentric dancers
Male actors from Rhode Island
Male musical theatre composers
Musicians from Providence, Rhode Island
People from North Brookfield, Massachusetts
Vaudeville performers
Writers from Providence, Rhode Island
Members of The Lambs Club | true | [
"Channel 4 was a free-to-air digital channel. It was only available in Sydney, Australia.\n\nChannel 4 was an electronic program guide that lists ABC, Channel Seven, Channel Nine, Channel Ten and SBS, it showed what was on each channel, then changed to what was coming up next. The station logo, time the program starts, and classification are shown. At the bottom of the screen, is a list of primetime programming for each station plus ABC2 and Digital Channel 44. ABC2 and ABC1 alternate in the same row in the now/next section.\n\nDigital terrestrial television in Australia",
"The NeXT Introduction sub-titled \"the Introduction to the NeXT Generation of Computers for Education\"\" was a lavish, invitation-only gala launch event for The NeXT Computer (also called the NeXT Computer System) was described as a multimedia extravaganza. It was held at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, California on Wednesday October 12, 1988. The event ran from 9:30am till 12 noon. Attendees were all given a unique launch event poster.\n\nAfter Steve Jobs departed Apple three years prior to this event, he sank from sight only emerging once in 1986 to unveil the NeXT logo and once in early 1987 to announce that H. Ross Perot had invested $20 million in NeXT inc. Otherwise, Steve Jobs shunned public appearances at computer-industry events to avoid having to comment publicly about his new company's activities. But then he re-emerged with this Launch in what was described as having \"the subtlety of a Hollywood première\" in what was his first major public appearance since leaving Apple. Jobs hired multimedia artist George Coates to stage the unveiling.\n\nAt the time, it was considered that this event was the launch of not just a new computer but also a new Steve Jobs. With Jobs himself telling his audience \"It's great to be back.\"\n\nMore than 3000 invitations were sent out to educators, software developers & reporters for the launch event but not a single Apple employee was invited.\n\nThe company rented the Davies Symphony Hall, supposedly because of its good acoustics, to show off the DSPs that allowed the Cube to play full stereo sound. The machine played a duet with one of the symphony’s violinists.\n\nJobs opened the show with a purpose built animation built by NeXT UI Architect Keith Ohlfs, demonstrating the history of computer interfaces and the multi-tasking capabilities of the NeXT computer.\n\nThe following day 13 October saw the follow-up event \"The NeXT Day\" where selected educators and software developers were invited (for $100 registration fee) to send up to four key individuals to attend the first public technical overview of the NeXT computer which was held at the San Francisco Hilton. This event gave developers interested in developing NeXT software an insight into the software architecture, object-oriented programming and developing for the NeXT Computer. The luncheon speaker was Steve Jobs.\n\nThe program was designed for experienced developers and provided a technical overview of the NeXT software architecture and development environment.\n\nThis Launch event was replicated at other venues over the following days at other locations such as Boston’s Symphony Hall and University of California, Riverside.\n\nThe Agenda\n\nEach attendee received an agenda for the day:\n\nLaunch Poster\n\nThe launch poster was given to delegates of the launch event. It measured 37\" by 17\" and was printed on heavy poster paper. The poster's design consisted of a NeXT Computer, Screen, Keyboard, Mouse and Laser Printer. It also incorporated the NeXT logo designed by Paul Rand and the text \"October 12, 1988 - Computing Advances To The NeXT Level\".\n\nReferences\n\n1988 in San Francisco\nNeXT"
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| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | When did he write his first musical | 6 | When did George Cohan write his first musical | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | 1901 | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
American male singers
American male songwriters
American male stage actors
American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
Broadway theatre directors
Broadway theatre producers
Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)
Catholics from Massachusetts
Catholics from Rhode Island
George M.
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Eccentric dancers
Male actors from Rhode Island
Male musical theatre composers
Musicians from Providence, Rhode Island
People from North Brookfield, Massachusetts
Vaudeville performers
Writers from Providence, Rhode Island
Members of The Lambs Club | true | [
"Love in Syncopation is a 1946 musical comedy film released in the United States. The film featured Henri Woode and his band as well as Ruby Dee. Leonard Anderson directed and William D. Alexander produced. The film features dance and musical performances including by the Congaroos.\n\nThe cast included Harrel Tillman who went on to become a reverend, lawyer, and judge in Houston, Texas. He is credited as the state's first African American judge.\n\nThe Pittsburgh Courier did an extensive write up of the film when it was released. The Courier praised the film as fast moving, full of musical variety, and lauded it for progressing African American cinema.\n\nCast\nHenri Woode and His Band\nRuby Dee\nMaxine Johnson\nHarrel Tillman\nPowell Lindsay\nJune Eckstine (wife of Billy Eckstine)\nTaps and Wilda\nRonell and Edna\n\nReferences\n\nMusical comedy films\n1940s musical comedy films",
"Jacques Leon Wolfe (April 29, 1896 – June 22, 1973) was a Romanian-born American songwriter.\n\nWolfe was born into a Jewish family in Botoşani, Romania. His family emigrated to New York when he was a very young child. He displayed musical talent as a youngster and, at 16, he entered the Institute of Musical Art, now known as Juilliard School. During World War I, he was stationed at Governor’s Island, where he played clarinet in a military band. Transferred south, Wolfe made his first direct contact with African-American music. He was fascinated with the genre and did extensive research on the history of black folk songs and spirituals. He became inspired to write his own music based on the style. His spirituals and “work songs” became very popular in sheet music form in the early 1930s. In 1934 Wolfe collaborated with poet Langston Hughes to write \"Sad Song in de Air,\" published by Robbins Music Corp.\n\nJacques Wolfe is credited with writing \"Short'nin' Bread\" in 1928. The song is a vaudeville \"blackface\" song written for stage during blackface shows. The music was published by Harold Flammer and distributed by G. Schirmer in New York City.\n\nAlso set \"Three Negro Poems\" by Clement Wood to music for \"medium or low voice and piano\". Published in 1928 by G. Schirmer, the three songs are entitled: \"Debil-Foot\", \"De Glory Road\" and \"Gwine to Hebb'n\". \"De Glory Road\" appears dedicated to Paul Robeson.\n\nWolfe wrote the music for the 1931 film The Prodigal and in 1938, composed the music for a Broadway musical based on Roark Bradford’s John Henry, starring Paul Robeson in the title role. The musical opened in January 1940 and, some reviewers thought because of a weak script, closed five days later.\n\nNotes\n\nExternal links\n\n1896 births\n1973 deaths\nPeople from Botoșani\nAmerican male songwriters\nAmerican people of Romanian-Jewish descent\nMoldavian Jews\nRomanian emigrants to the United States\n20th-century American musicians\n20th-century male musicians"
]
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"began writing original skits",
"How many skits",
"over 150 of them",
"who did he write these for",
"and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows",
"When did he write theses",
"while in his teens.",
"what was his next acomplishment",
"selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893.",
"When did he write his first musical",
"1901"
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| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | What was it called | 7 | What was George Cohan's first musical called | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | The Governor's Son, | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
American male singers
American male songwriters
American male stage actors
American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
Broadway theatre directors
Broadway theatre producers
Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)
Catholics from Massachusetts
Catholics from Rhode Island
George M.
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Eccentric dancers
Male actors from Rhode Island
Male musical theatre composers
Musicians from Providence, Rhode Island
People from North Brookfield, Massachusetts
Vaudeville performers
Writers from Providence, Rhode Island
Members of The Lambs Club | true | [
"1961 Soviet Class B was the twelfth season of the Soviet Class B football competitions since their establishment in 1950. It was also the 21st season of what was eventually became known as the Soviet First League.\n\nRussian Federation\n\nI Zone\n\nNotes:\n Textilshchik Kostroma was called Spartak.\n\nII Zone\n\nNotes:\n Trud Glukhovo relocated to Noginsk.\n Spartak Smolensk was called Textilshchik.\n\nIII Zone\n\nNotes:\n Sokol Saratov was called Lokomotiv.\n Spartak Ryazan was called Trud.\n Torpedo Lipetsk was called Trudoviye Rezervy.\n\nIV Zone\n\nNotes:\n Dinamo Makhachkala was called Temp.\n\nV Zone\n\nVI Zone\n\nNotes:\n Tomich Tomsk was called SibElectroMotor.\n Angara Irkutsk was called Mashinostroitel.\n Baykal Ulan-Ude was called Lokomotiv.\n\nFinal\n [Oct 24 – Nov 5, Krasnodar]\n\nUkraine\n\nFinal\n Chernomorets Odessa 2-1 0-0 SKA Odessa\n\nUnion republics\n\nI Zone\n\nNotes:\n SelMash Liepaja was called Krasny Metallurg.\n\nII Zone\n\nNotes:\n Nairi Yerevan was called Burevestnik.\n Alga Frunze was called Spartak.\n Metallurg Chimkent was called Yenbek.\n Temp Sumgait was called Metallurg.\n Start Tashkent was called Mehnat.\n\nPromotion/Relegation Tournament\n [Oct 25 – Nov 5, Kishinev]\n\nSee also\n Soviet First League\n\nExternal links\n 1961 Soviet Championship and Cup\n 1961 season at rsssf.com\n\n1961\n2\nSoviet\nSoviet",
"Port Discovery, Washington is the historical name of what is now called Discovery Bay, a bay in the U.S. state of Washington on the south side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. It was also called Port Discovery Bay for some time, a name that can be found on maps from the 1940s and earlier. Port Discovery is also the name of a historically significant community that was located on the bay for roughly a hundred years; it disappeared in the late 20th century, with the collapse of the local timber industry.\n\nThe bay\nThe bay was first visited by Europeans in 1790, during the expedition of Manuel Quimper in the Princesa Real, with Juan Carrasco as pilot. They gave it the name Puerto de Quadra, after Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, their commander at San Blas. In 1791 Francisco de Eliza used Port Discovery as his base of operations for further explorations.\n\nThe name Port Discovery was given by George Vancouver in his 1792 visit to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and honors his ship the Discovery. Vancouver's landing place was apparently at what was later called Carr Point (also Contractors Point).\n\nPort Discovery was a regular port of call for ships traversing the Pacific until the mid 20th century, and in particular for many U.S. ships involved in World War II, such as , , and . The wreck of War Hawk, a clipper ship which burned and sank in 1883, is a popular dive site in the bay, near Mill Point.\n\nThe community\nIn the 19th century, Port Discovery became an important coastal community, centered on a large sawmill that was established in 1858. The settlement called Port Discovery was located at what now is called Mill Point, on the west shore of the bay, to the east of U.S. Highway 101 at what is now Broders Road. This spot is several miles north of the current settlements at the foot of Discovery Bay.\n\nThe town at Mill Point dwindled after the closing of the sawmill, and vanished after the later collapse of the local timber industry. Only a couple of houses and an old pier remain at the site, which is private property.\n\nUntil around 2008, the prominent remains of another famous sawmill were visible farther down the shore from Mill Point, near what was Maynard, Washington, at the foot of the bay. The romantic, derelict building was adjacent to Highway 101, and was thus seen by every passing motorist; it was one of the most-photographed sites in the area for decades. Many such photos are mislabeled as the Port Discovery mill, although the Maynard mill was built later. By 2010, the building's vestiges were removed, in efforts to restore Discovery Bay salmon and shellfish habitat.\n\nReferences \n\nBays of Washington (state)\nBays of Jefferson County, Washington\nHistory of Washington (state)"
]
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"Early career",
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"began writing original skits",
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"over 150 of them",
"who did he write these for",
"and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows",
"When did he write theses",
"while in his teens.",
"what was his next acomplishment",
"selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893.",
"When did he write his first musical",
"1901",
"What was it called",
"The Governor's Son,"
]
| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | what was it made for | 8 | what was the governor's son made for | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | for The Four Cohans. | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
American male singers
American male songwriters
American male stage actors
American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
Broadway theatre directors
Broadway theatre producers
Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)
Catholics from Massachusetts
Catholics from Rhode Island
George M.
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Eccentric dancers
Male actors from Rhode Island
Male musical theatre composers
Musicians from Providence, Rhode Island
People from North Brookfield, Massachusetts
Vaudeville performers
Writers from Providence, Rhode Island
Members of The Lambs Club | true | [
"\"Show 'Em (What You're Made Of)\" is a song by American pop group Backstreet Boys from their eighth studio album In a World Like This. It was released as the second single from the album on November 18, 2013. The song was written by Morgan Taylor Reid, Mika Guillory, and Backstreet Boys members AJ McLean and Kevin Richardson.\n\nIt is also the theme song of the documentary film Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of, and was featured in the German movie Saphirblau soundtrack.\n\nBackground and recording \n\nRichardson got the inspiration for the title of the song from his late father's words. The song was co-written by bandmate AJ McLean and is meant to be a pep talk for their children, and also as a positive reinforcement for the world in general. \"This is as a positive reinforcement-type song because there’s so much negativity out there. The world needs positivity! The song turned out beyond what we ever expected. It became this huge emotional record,\" McLean said.\n\nMusic video \nA music video for the song, directed by Jon Vulpine, was filmed in Miami, Florida. It was premiered on the group's official Facebook page and then released on Vevo a day later.\n\nThe video takes on a minimalistic approach, showing individual shots of each band member against a black background. A.J. and Brian were shirtless as they were going by the theme song and show something important for them personally—a tattoo dedicated to his daughter for A.J. and a heart surgery scar for Brian. Brian had an open heart surgery in 1998 to correct a birth defect and hadn't been seen shirtless publicly ever since.\n\nTrack listing\nDigital download\n\"Show 'Em (What You're Made Of)\" – 3:44\n\n UK Promo CD single\n\"Show 'Em (What You're Made Of) (Ash Howes Radio Mix)\" – 3:44\n\"Show 'Em (What You're Made Of) (Album Version)\" – 3:47\n\"Show 'Em (What You're Made Of) (Morgan Taylor Reid Mix)\" – 3:41\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2010s ballads\n2013 songs\n2013 singles\nBackstreet Boys songs\nPop ballads",
"\"For What It's Worth\" is the first official single from Placebo's sixth studio album, Battle for the Sun.\n\nRelease\nIt was released on 20 April 2009, in a similar fashion to \"Battle for the Sun\"; it first played on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 programme, and then was made available as a digital download from iTunes and emusic. The single featured a cover of Nik Kershaw's \"Wouldn't It Be Good\" as the B-side.\n\nThe video for the song was released on the following day, on the band's MySpace page. The single was released in the U.S. via iTunes and UK via emusic on 5 May 2009.\n\nReception\nThe single debuted in the UK Singles Chart at No. 97 after it was released exclusively via iTunes. It was nominated for the Kerrang! Award for Best Single.\n\nTrack listing\nCD\n\"For What It's Worth\" \n\"Wouldn't It Be Good\" (Nik Kershaw cover)\n\"For What It's Worth\" (demo version)\n\n7\"\n<li>\"For What It's Worth\" \n<li>\"Wouldn't It Be Good\" (Nik Kershaw cover)\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nPlacebo (band) songs\n2009 singles\nSongs written by Brian Molko\nSongs written by Stefan Olsdal\nSong recordings produced by David Bottrill\n2009 songs\nPIAS Recordings singles\nMusic videos directed by Howard Greenhalgh\nSongs written by Steve Forrest (musician)\nSongs written by William Patrick Lloyd"
]
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[
"George M. Cohan",
"Early career",
"What did he do firts",
"began writing original skits",
"How many skits",
"over 150 of them",
"who did he write these for",
"and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows",
"When did he write theses",
"while in his teens.",
"what was his next acomplishment",
"selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893.",
"When did he write his first musical",
"1901",
"What was it called",
"The Governor's Son,",
"what was it made for",
"for The Four Cohans."
]
| C_cd023b545b524e50a360f7a1fe5fbc64_0 | What was his first hit | 9 | What was George cohan's first hit | George M. Cohan | Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", which was recorded by Enrico Caruso among others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1925, he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took To Get There. CANNOTANSWER | Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." | George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878November 5, 1942) was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940.
Known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway", he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M! A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.
Early life
Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.
Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you."
As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."
Career
Early career
Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name," "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," "Life's a Funny Proposition After All," "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune," "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band," "The Small Town Gal," "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All," "That Haunting Melody," "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye", and America's most popular World War I song "Over There", recorded by Nora Bayes and by Enrico Caruso, and others. The latter song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played.
From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris, including Give My Regards to Broadway and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association.
In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.
Later career
Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film.
Cohan earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast.
In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.
Legacy
Although Cohan mainly is remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of the "book musical", using his engaging libretti to bridge the gaps between drama and music. More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle, but to advance the plot. Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes" who appealed to a wide American audience.
In 1914, Cohan became one of the founding members of ASCAP. Although Cohan was known as generous to his fellow actors in need, in 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors' employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor, which hampered his ability to appear in his own productions. Cohan sought a waiver from Equity allowing him to act in any theatrical production. In 1930, Cohan won a law case against the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the deduction, for federal income tax purposes, of his business travel and entertainment expenses, even though he was not able to document them with certainty. This became known as the "Cohan rule" and frequently is cited in tax cases.
Cohan wrote numerous Broadway musicals and straight plays in addition to contributing material to shows written by others—more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Little Johnny Jones (1904), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The American Idea, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Little Nellie Kelly, The Cohan Revue of 1916 (and 1918; co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Molly Malone, The Miracle Man, Hello Broadway, American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life, he walked in and out of retirement.
Cohan was called "the greatest single figure the American theatre ever produced – as a player, playwright, actor, composer and producer". On May 1, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular with the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". Cohan was the first person in any artistic field selected for this honor, which previously had gone only to military and political leaders, philanthropists, scientists, inventors, and explorers.
In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.
The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe. On July 3, 2009, a bronze bust of Cohan, by artist Robert Shure, was unveiled at the corner of Wickenden and Governor Streets in Fox Point, Providence, a few blocks from his birthplace. The city renamed the corner the George M. Cohan Plaza and announced an annual George M. Cohan Award for Excellence in Art & Culture. The first award went to Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company.
Personal life and death
From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler), a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery.
In 1908, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the former New York Giants.
He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.
In popular culture
James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side.
Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.
Filmography
Cohan acted in the following films:
Gallery
Notes
References
McCabe, John: George M. Cohan. The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973)
Further reading
Cohan, George M.: Twenty Years on Broadway (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924)
Gilbert, Douglas: American Vaudeville. Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963)
Jones, John Bush: Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003)
Morehouse, Ward: George M. Cohan. Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943)
External links
George M. Cohan at Internet off-Broadway Database
George M. Cohan In America's Theater
George M. Cohan on musicals101.com
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, "Dancing after retirement: Cohan plays Roosevelt, 1937", New York Daily News, March 20, 2004.
Chip Deffaa's extensive George M. Cohan site
George M. Cohan; PeriodPaper.com c. 1910
Finding aid for the Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 at the Museum of the City of New York
George M. Cohan recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings
1878 births
1942 deaths
19th-century American dramatists and playwrights
19th-century American male actors
19th-century American male writers
19th-century American singers
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American singers
Actors from Providence, Rhode Island
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male silent film actors
American male singers
American male songwriters
American male stage actors
American musical theatre composers
American musical theatre directors
American people of Irish descent
American tap dancers
American theatre directors
Broadway composers and lyricists
Broadway theatre directors
Broadway theatre producers
Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)
Catholics from Massachusetts
Catholics from Rhode Island
George M.
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Eccentric dancers
Male actors from Rhode Island
Male musical theatre composers
Musicians from Providence, Rhode Island
People from North Brookfield, Massachusetts
Vaudeville performers
Writers from Providence, Rhode Island
Members of The Lambs Club | false | [
"\"What's Up Doc? (Can We Rock)\" is the lead single from the Fu-Schnickens second studio album, Nervous Breakdown. The song featured NBA star Shaquille O'Neal and was produced by Main Source member K-Cut. The song was a top-40 hit in 1993 and was certified gold by the RIAA for sales of 500,000 copies.\n\nBackground\nReleased in the summer of 1993, \"What's Up Doc? (Can We Rock)\" became a top 40 hit, peaking at No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song had previously been simply titled \"What's Up Doc?\" and featured a sample of Bugs Bunny saying the title, but because the group could not get sample clearance from Warner Bros., this version was not released. Meanwhile, NBA player Shaquille O'Neal had become a media sensation in his first season. In many interviews, he talked about his love of hip hop music and stated that Fu-Schnickens were his favorite group. This prompted the group to contact O'Neal for a collaboration. O'Neal recorded a verse that was added to the song, along with the spoken line \"What's up, doc?\" to replace the Bugs Bunny sample. Although the group had not yet completed recording their album Nervous Breakdown, the song was quickly released as a single to capitalize on O'Neal's popularity. The single was a Top 40 hit in the summer of 1993, briefly propelling the group into the mainstream. The song first appeared on an album recorded by O'Neal, Shaq Diesel. Nervous Breakdown was finally released in October 1994, over a year after the single's release. The music video was filmed underneath the Manhattan Bridge, on the Manhattan side.\n\nSingle track listing\n\"What's up Doc? (Can We Rock)\" (LP Version)- 3:57\n\"What's up Doc? (Can We Rock)\" (K-Cut's Mad Master Remix)- 4:04\n\"What's up Doc? (Can We Rock)\" (K-Cut's Fat Trac Remix)- 3:59\n\"True Fuschnick\" (Phase 5 Euro-Dub Remix)- 4:19\n\"Heavenly Father\" (Tempted 2 Touch Murder Mix)- 5:10\n\"What's Up Doc? (Can We Rock)\"- 3:56\n\nCharts\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\n1993 singles\nFu-Schnickens songs\nShaquille O'Neal songs\n1993 songs\nSongs written by Shaquille O'Neal\nJive Records singles",
"Alright Guy is the fourth studio album by American country music singer Gary Allan. It was released in October 2001 via MCA Records Nashville. It produced three singles. The album's first single, \"Man of Me\", reached number 18 on the US Billboard Hot Country Songs charts. The second single, \"The One\", became Allan's second Top 5 hit with a peak at number 3. The third and final single, \"Man to Man\", became Allan's first number one hit. Like his previous album, Smoke Rings in the Dark (1999), Alright Guy was also certified platinum by the RIAA.\n\nThe title track was written by Todd Snider and originally appeared on his 1994 album Songs for the Daily Planet. \"What I'd Say\" was a number 1 hit for Earl Thomas Conley in 1989 from his 1988 album The Heart of It All. \"What's on My Mind\" was later recorded by Blake Shelton on his 2004 album Blake Shelton's Barn & Grill. \"What Would Willie Do\" had been released a month prior by the songwriter, Bruce Robison, on his 2001 Country Sunshine album.\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nGary Allan - lead vocals\nChad Cromwell - drums\nJake Kelly - acoustic guitar\nJoe Manuel - acoustic guitar\nSteve Nathan - keyboards\nMichael Rhodes - bass guitar\nBrent Rowan - electric guitar\nJohn Wesley Ryles - background vocals\nHank Singer - fiddle, mandolin\nHarry Stinson - background vocals\nRobby Turner - steel guitar\nJohn Willis - acoustic guitar\n\nChart performance\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nSingles\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\nSee also\nAOL Music\n\n2001 albums\nGary Allan albums\nAlbums produced by Tony Brown (record producer)\nAlbums produced by Mark Wright (record producer)\nMCA Records albums"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights"
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | Who was involved in making Havoc? | 1 | Who was involved in making Havoc and Bright Lights? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
Actresses from Ottawa
Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
American dance musicians
American women pop singers
American women rock singers
American women singer-songwriters
American feminists
American film actresses
American harmonica players
American mezzo-sopranos
American music video directors
American people of French descent
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Irish descent
American rock songwriters
American stage actresses
American television actresses
American women record producers
Brit Award winners
Canadian child actresses
Canadian dance musicians
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian women pop singers
Canadian women rock singers
Canadian women singer-songwriters
Canadian feminists
Canadian film actresses
Canadian harmonica players
Canadian mezzo-sopranos
Canadian music video directors
Canadian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Canadian people of Irish descent
Canadian record producers
Canadian Buddhists
Canadian stage actresses
Canadian television actresses
Canadian women guitarists
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Child pop musicians
Echo (music award) winners
Female music video directors
Feminist musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Franco-Ontarian people
Fraternal twin actresses
Grammy Award winners
Guitarists from California
Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award winners
Juno Award for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Single of the Year winners
Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year winners
Juno Award for Video of the Year winners
Juno International Achievement Award winners
Maverick Records artists
MCA Records artists
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musicians from Ottawa
Naturalized citizens of the United States
People from Brentwood, Los Angeles
Record producers from Los Angeles
Singers from Los Angeles
Twin musicians
Twin people from Canada
Warner Music Group artists
Women post-grunge singers
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from Ottawa
20th-century Canadian actresses
20th-century Canadian guitarists
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20th-century Canadian women writers
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21st-century American guitarists
21st-century American women singers
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21st-century Buddhists
21st-century Canadian actresses
21st-century Canadian guitarists
21st-century Canadian women singers
21st-century Canadian women writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
Singer-songwriters from California | false | [
"NXT 2.0: Halloween Havoc was a special episode of WWE's weekly television series NXT, broadcast on the USA Network. It took place on October 26, 2021 at the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, Florida for their NXT brand division. It was hosted by Chucky in a crosspromotion for the Chucky TV series, with Grayson Waller and LA Knight also serving as hosts.\n\nProduction\n\nBackground \nHalloween Havoc is a professional wrestling event currently produced by WWE. As the name implies, it is a Halloween-themed show held in October. It was originally produced as an annual pay-per-view (PPV) by World Championship Wrestling (WCW) from 1989 until 2000 as WWE—at that time still known as the World Wrestling Federation—purchased WCW in 2001. The 2000 event was the final Halloween Havoc until WWE revived the show for their NXT brand division in 2020. On the October 5, 2021 episode of NXT 2.0, it was announced by Tommaso Ciampa that Halloween Havoc would be making its return to NXT.\n\nStorylines \nNXT: Halloween Havoc featured professional wrestling matches that involved different wrestlers from pre-existing scripted feuds and storylines. Wrestlers portrayed heroes, villains, or less distinguishable characters in scripted events that built tension and culminated in a wrestling match or series of matches.\n\nOn the September 14 episode of NXT 2.0, Bron Breakker made his debut and defeat LA Knight. Later on the same night, Tommaso Ciampa captured the vacant NXT Championship by defeating Pete Dunne, Knight and Von Wagner in a Fatal four-way match. On the October 5 episode of NXT 2.0, Breakker challenged Ciampa to a match for the championship at Halloween Havoc, which Ciampa accepted.\n\nOn the October 12 episode of NXT 2.0, after Indi Hartwell and Persia Pirotta's match, they staked their claims for the NXT Women's Tag team Championship, after which Io Shirai and Zoey Stark and Toxic Attraction showed up and started brawling. Later, William Regal decided that at Halloween Havoc, Shirai and Stark will defend their titles against Toxic Attraction and Hartwell and Pirotta in a Spin The Wheel, Make the Deal triple threat tag team match. The following week, Shirai defeated Jayne and Pirotta to earn the right to choose the match's stipulation, which was a Scareway to Hell match.\n\nOn the October 19 episode of NXT 2.0, after Imperium's tag team match, MSK showed up and gave Imperium a tag team title shot at Halloween Havoc.\n\nOn the September 28 episode of NXT 2.0, after Raquel González successfully defense of the NXT Women's Championship against Franky Monet, Toxic Attraction showed up and attacked González. The following week, a Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal match between González and Mandy Rose was made for the NXT Women's Championship at Halloween Havoc.\n\nResults\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\nHalloween Havoc\n2021 in professional wrestling in Florida\n2021 in professional wrestling\nEvents in Orlando, Florida\nOctober 2021 events in the United States\nProfessional wrestling in Orlando, Florida\nHolidays themed professional wrestling events\nWWE NXT",
"James McAhren (born 19 March 1984) is a British former professional wrestler best known under the ring name Jimmy Havoc. He is known for his work with Progress Wrestling, Defiant Wrestling, Insane Championship Wrestling (ICW), Major League Wrestling (MLW) and All Elite Wrestling (AEW). Between the five promotions Havoc is a former and longest reigning Progress World Champion and was one-half of the Defiant Tag Team Champions alongside Primate, and Mark Haskins. He was also one-half of the Progress Tag Team Champions with Haskins. He was also the longest reigning Defiant Wrestling Hardcore Champion and a former IPW:UK World Champion.\n\nNot much is known about his current whereabouts, although an image of him in a courier's uniform circulated around the internet in 2021.\n\nProfessional wrestling career\n\nIndependent circuit (2004–2020)\nJimmy Havoc trained at NWA UK Hammerlock under Andre Baker and Jon Ryan, alongside the likes of Zack Sabre Jr. and Fergal Devitt before making his debut in 2004. Wrestling exclusively under the Hammerlock banner until 2006, he made his first appearances outside of the promotion for Triple X Wrestling where he first started appearing as a \"deathmatch\" or hardcore wrestler. He quickly became known as one of the top deathmatch wrestlers in Europe, debuting for International Pro Wrestling: United Kingdom in 2008, Germany's Westside Xtreme Wrestling in 2009 and appearing on a joint show between wXw and U.S. hardcore promotion Combat Zone Wrestling in 2010. Havoc appeared in European versions of the CZW Tournament of Death in both 2010 and 2012. As of 2013, he has made appearances in other independent companies such as Mid-Atlantic Wrestling and Full Impact Pro.\n\nIn February 2015, he captured the FPW Championship, adding the IPW:UK All-England Championship in March. In August 2015, he became IPW:UK World Heavyweight Champion after defeating Bad Bones in a TLC match.\n\nAlso towards the end of February 2016, Havoc made special appearances for Melbourne City Wrestling. His first one was at MCW At Out Best where he faced Mikey Nicholls from TMDK. However, he got injured at the St Kilda Festival, and missed out on facing Mr Juicy at MCW Uncensored.\n\nOn 4 October 2016, it was announced that Jimmy Havoc would be making his Canadian debut for Smash Wrestling on their 4th Anniversary Tour in November 2016.\n\nOn 18 March 2017, he and Clint Margera wrestled as \"Callous Hearts\" in a losing effort against #CCK (Chris Brookes & Kid Lykos) in the Dream Tag Team Invitational qualifier match at Fight Club: Pro The First Female Of Fight Club.\n\nOn 23 July 2017, Havoc defeated Carlito retaining the IPW:UK World Heavyweight Championship. On 6 July Havoc defeated Joseph Conners and Pete Dunne for the British Wrestling Revolution Heavyweight Championship.\n\nInsane Championship Wrestling (2012–2018)\nOn 1 April 2012, Havoc made his debut for Insane Championship Wrestling, at 'So's Yer Maw' in The Garage, tagging with Iceman against Jack Jester & Chris Renfrew. Just a few months later, Havoc would face Renfrew again, in the first ever Scottish Rules match, with the final result coming to 1-1. One month later, he would compete as part of Team ICW in a Glasgow Street Fight, defeating The Official Community.\n\nIn 2013, Havoc would enter a rivalry with James Scott, who took exception to Jimmy's hardcore style of wrestling. This led to a 2 out of 3 falls match, which Havoc would go on to win. Shortly after this, Havoc was at odds with the New Age Kliq, first competing in tag team match alongside Jack Jester, that was deemed too violent to air on YouTube. As the rivalry continued, Jimmy defeated BT Gunn in ICW's first ever Thumbtack Kickpad match, for the right to face Rhyno at Fear & Loathing VI. After James Scott was later added to the match, Havoc defeated both Scott & Rhyno in a Three Way Dance at Fear & Loathing VI.\n\nOn 24 January 2016, Havoc entered the ICW Square Go! match. On 19 November, Havoc defeated Bram.\n\nAfter competing in the Square Go match in early 2017, Havoc returned at Shug's Hoose Party 4, appearing from inside a coffin to attack Mikey Whiplash, and announce the first ever King Of Insanity match at Fear & Loathing X. Battling Mikey Whiplash, Chris Renfrew & Stevie Boy on the Road To Fear & Loathing Tour, Havoc would be unsuccessful in the King Of Insanity match, losing to Stevie Boy.\n\nHavoc would not be seen again in ICW until 1 April 2018, when he returned to The Garage to face Mikey Whiplash in a Death Match for the chance to challenge for the ICW World Heavyweight Championship, with Mikey gaining the victory by delivering a Zombie Maker to Havoc through a sheet of glass. Havoc then teamed with Mark Haskins in late 2018, defeating the Kings Of Catch, and gaining a spot in a 6 team Tables, Ladders, and Chairs match at Fear & Loathing XI.\n\nProgress Wrestling (2012–2019)\nHavoc debuted for Progress Wrestling on the Chapter Two event in May 2012 and went on to lose six matches without registering a victory, though became very popular with the Progress fans as an underdog babyface. In November 2013, at Chapter Nine, Havoc attacked promoter Jim Smallman, and aligned himself with the London Riots, turning heel in the process. Havoc would then use an open contract given to him by Smallman to defeat Progress Champion Mark Andrews (who had just wrestled both Paul Robinson and Rampage Brown in consecutive matches) to become champion and pick up his first victory in Progress.\n\nIn his first title defense at Chapter Eleven, Havoc defeated Zack Sabre Jr. with the help of his newest associate, Progress trainee \"The Omega\" Isaac Zercher. Havoc was joined at Chapter Thirteen by Paul Robinson, and the group later christened themselves \"Regression\" as a play on the name of the company and to symbolize their hatred of Progress Wrestling. The group lost its first members at Chapter Fifteen, as the four members of the group (not including Zercher) took on Progress Tag Team Champions Eddie Dennis and Mark Andrews, Will Ospreay and Noam Dar in a \"titles vs careers\" match. Ospreay pinned James Davis of the London Riots, meaning that the Riots were gone from Progress. Havoc eventually lost the title at Chapter Twenty to Ospreay in a no disqualification match, with his 609-day reign equaling that of all previous champions combined. At Chapter Twenty-One, Havoc and Robinson were placed in a number one contenders no disqualification match against each other. The two engaged in a bloody contest with Robinson emerging victorious, seemingly signalling the end of Regression. After the match, a beaten and bloody Havoc was helped to his feet by Smallman, his longtime nemesis, and left the Electric Ballroom to a thunderous standing ovation from a respectful crowd.\n\nOn 25 September 2016, over a year since he was last seen in the promotion, Havoc returned to Progress at Chapter Thirty-Six during the main event for the Progress Championship involving Marty Scurll, Tommy End and Mark Haskins. Havoc would cost Scurll the title whilst saving Smallman from an attack from the then-champion, turning face again in the process. After attacking Scurll again at Chapter 37, Havoc was part of a triple-threat match for the Progress Championship at Chapter 38, facing both Scurll and then-champion Haskins, who retained the title.\nAt Chapter 39, he defeated Scurll by DQ, thus advancing to a 7-way elimination match for the vacant Progress championship making to the final two but lost to Pete Dunne after Tyler Bate attacked him. At Chapter 40 Havoc defeat Scurll in a No Disqualification match, ending their feud and becoming the number one contender to the Progress World Championship.\nOn Progress's final show of 2016, Havoc faced his old rival Will Ospreay in a winning effort, after the match Havoc apologized to Ospreay for his past actions and ask to join him and fight British Strong Style. Ospreay initially accepted, but then brutally attacked Havoc alongside Paul Robinson, turning heel and restarting their feud.\n\nAt Chapter 43, Havoc defeated Pete Dunne in a championship match by disqualification after Trent Seven interfered. After the match Dunne and Seven continued attacking Havoc until Mark Haskins and Flash Morgan Webster rescued Havoc, leading to a six-man tag match at Chapter 44, where Haskins, Webster, and Havoc defeated British Strong Style, when Havoc pinned Dunne, thus winning another championship match.\nHavoc got his opportunity at Chapter 45 but was defeated by Dunne after Ospreay's interference, leading to a Fans Bring The Weapons match at chapter 46. During the match, Ospreay challenged Havoc to put their Progress contracts at stake, Havoc defeated Ospreay, thus expelling him from Progress and ending the feud.\nIn May, Havoc entered the Super Strong Style 16 tournament, but was eliminated in the first round by the eventual winner, Travis Banks. Havoc then started to team with Mark Haskins, but they were defeated by The Origin (Zack Gibson & Nathan Cruz) at Chapter 50 and by British Strong Style(Trent Seven & Tyler Bate) in a match for the Progress Tag Team Championships at Chapter 53, after the latter match Havoc confronted Haskins about being distracted during the match, when Dunne took Haskins' wife hostage, and started a brawl thus turning heel once again. At Chapter 54 they were forced to team again against rivals Pete Dunne and Travis Banks in a losing effort, when Havoc walked out on Haskins. This led to Haskins challenging Havoc to a Deathmatch at Chapter 55, where Havoc was victorious. In the following chapter, Jimmy joined with Haskins and his wife to form a new faction by attacking a defenseless Jack Sexsmith who was then saved by David Starr. At Chapter 57, Havoc and Haskins defeated Sexsmith and Matt Riddle.\n\nAt Chapter 63, Havoc and Haskins defeated the Grizzled Young Veterans to win the Progress Tag Team Titles. At Chapter 64, Havoc & Haskins lost the tag titles back to Grizzled Young Veterans. After failed to regain the championships at Chapter 65, Havoc and Haskins would ally with Morgan Webster, starting a victory streak in six man tag team matches. Havoc would start a losing streak in Death matches losing against Joey Janela at Chapter 68, Spike Trivet at Chapter 71 and against Drew Parker on Chapter 73. He would finally defeat Ricky Shane Page in an ECW rules match at the first night of the Coust to Coast tour on the USA. On the four night of the tour, Havoc unsiccesfully challenged Walter for the Progress World Championship. Havoc was challenged by his former rival Will Ospreay, who had recently returned to the promotion, to a 2 out of 3 falls No Disqualification match at Chapter 75, Ospreay would win the match 2-1 after the special guest referee Paul Robinson interfered and attacked Havoc. This led to a match at Chapter 76: Hello Wembley!, where Havoc defeated Paul Robinson in a No Disqualification match. At Chapter 77, Havoc was defeated by his tag team partner Mark Haskins in a triple threat match that also included Chris Brookes to become the number one contender for the Progress World Championship, during the match he was attacked and taken out by Drew Parker. This led to a match between the two at Chapter 79, however, before the match could start Havoc was attacked by Spike Trivet who was joined by Drew Parker, William Eaver and Chuck Mambo, thus starting a new faction called Do Not Resuscitate.\n\nOn 18 April 2019 it was announced by Progress Wrestling that Havoc would be wrestling his final match for the company on 6 May 2019, day 3 of that year's Super Strong Style 16 tournament. Havoc subsequently lost to Paul Robinson. He returned to PROGRESS Chapter 100: Unboxing Live IV - A New Hope where he defeated David Starr in a deathmatch.\n\nTotal Nonstop Action Wrestling (2016)\nIn February 2016, Havoc entered Total Nonstop Action Wrestling saying he had \"unfinished business\" with Decay's valet Rosemary, Decay would later confront Havoc, with the ensuing beat down leading to Havoc taking on Abyss in a losing effort in a \"no disqualification match\" on 1 March episode of Impact Wrestling. On 4 March, Havoc teamed with Big Damo for TNA's One Night Only: Joker's Wild pay-per-view losing to Drew Galloway and Mike Bennett. Havoc also unsuccessfully competed for the TNA King of the Mountain Championship in a King of the Mountain match against champion Eric Young, Bram, Big Damo and Will Ospreay on the edition of 8 March of Impact Wrestling.\n\nWhat Culture Pro/Defiant Wrestling (2016–2018)\nHavoc moved to What Culture Pro Wrestling after his stint in CZW, Havoc faced Primate to crown the inaugural WCPW Hardcore Championship. On 11 February 2017, it was announced he, along with other wrestlers, would make his What Culture Pro Wrestling (WCPW) debut in the Pro Wrestling World Cup 2017, participating in the English Qualifier that will take place on 21 March 2017.\n\nAt WCPW Refuse To Lose, after War Machine retained the WCPW Tag Team Championships against The Young Bucks, Primate came out to get his Hardcore Championship back from ringside. War Machine didn't let him get his belt back. Havoc came out and announced that on Loaded, Havoc and Primate would face War Machine for the WCPW Tag Team Championships, which Havoc and Primate won. At #WeAreDefiant Havoc faced Primate for the new Defiant Hardcore Championship in a losing effort. On the second episode of Defiant, Havoc and Primate defeated BT Gunn and Joe Coffey to retain the Defiant Tag Team Championships.\n\nOn the edition of 9 February 2018 of Defiant's YouTube show, Havoc defeated his tag team partner to win the Hardcore Championship.\n\nOn edition of 9 March 2018 of Defiant' YouTube show Havoc turned on his tag team partner Primate and would voluntarily take the pin allowing Aussie Open (Kyle Fletcher and Mark Davis) to capture the tag team titles. However, Mark Haskins would attack them afterwards with Havoc joining him. Havoc would then announce to the crowd that he and Haskins are now a team. On 19 March, at Lights Out, Havoc and Haskins would participate in a triple threat for the tag titles, but would lose after mysteriously Primate's ape mask was thrown into the ring causing a distraction and allowing Aussie Open to capitalize and retain the titles. On 26 March, at Road to No Regrets, in a rematch they would beat Aussie Open and the team of Joe Coffey and BT Gunn to capture the tag titles. Haskins & Havoc eventually lost the tag titles back to Aussie Open. Some time after losing the tag titles, Havoc and Haskins turned face and entered into a rivalry with the Anti-Fun Police.\n\nAt Unstoppable, Havoc was set to defend the Hardcore Title against No Fun Dunne, but had to vacate the title due to an injury.\n\nCombat Zone Wrestling (2017)\nIt was announced via Twitter in February 2017, that Havoc would be the first British wrestler to compete in CZW's Tournament of Death. He defeated Conor Claxton in the finals to win the tournament. Havoc then faced Jimmy Jacobs on 9 December at CZW Cage of Death 19. in a losing effort.\n\nMajor League Wrestling (2017–2019) \nJimmy Havoc wrestled for Major League Wrestling starting in December 2017 until October 2018. He competed in no-rules match against Sami Callihan in October. Callihan put Havoc in a body bag and hit him with a piledriver to finish the match. Following the loss, he disappeared from the promotion. In early 2019 vignettes begun airing hyping his return. In early March, it was announced that he would be wrestling MLW World Heavyweight Champion Tom Lawlor for the championship, at MLW Rise of the Renegades in a street fight. On 4 April 2019 the match took place, when Havoc lost. He later joined Promociones Dorado and began being promoted by Salina de la Renta and also started feuding with Mance Warner.\n\nAll Elite Wrestling (2019–2020) \nOn 5 February 2019, Jimmy Havoc announced that he had officially signed with All Elite Wrestling (AEW). He debuted at Double or Nothing as a part of the pre-show battle royale for an AEW World Championship opportunity. He lasted until the final four, before being eliminated by Luchasaurus. At Fyter Fest, he lost a 4-Way match against Jungle Boy, Maxwell Jacob Friedman and Hangman Page, with Page emerging victorious. At Fight For The Fallen, Havoc lost a six-man tag team match with Darby Allin and Joey Janela against the team of Maxwell Jacob Friedman, Sammy Guevara and Shawn Spears. At All Out, Jimmy Havoc defeated Darby Allin and Joey Janela in a Cracker Barrel Clash Three Way match, pinning Janela with an Acid Rainmaker through a barrel. After that, he worked in Dynamite but mostly in YouTube's program Dark.\n\nOn 9 November 2019, it was reported that Havoc (who had been drinking at the time) had an altercation with Excalibur at Tony Schiavone's birthday party, which was being held at Jimmy's Famous Seafood in Baltimore. Tony Khan commented on the fight between the two during the media scrum for AEW Full Gear,, claiming that \"I wouldn’t call it a fight, I’ve seen a lot worse in the world of football, both in England and the NFL — I’ve seen a lot worse, and I saw a lot worse tonight. They scrapped around and it was cool yesterday.\".\n\nOn 15 April 2020, Havoc began teaming with Kip Sabian after he delivered a DDT to Orange Cassidy on the floor during Sabian's match against Chuck Taylor. They made their tag team debut losing to Best Friends in a no disqualifications tag team match on the 29 April 2020 edition of Dynamite. They would subsequently call themselves The SuperBad Squad. They defeated SoCal Uncensored's Frankie Kazarian and Scorpio Sky in a number one contender's match for the AEW World Tag Team Championship on 2 May. They faced the champions Kenny Omega and \"Hangman\" Adam Page on 3 June for the titles in a losing effort.\n\nOn 19 June, it was announced that Havoc would attend counseling and rehabilition after allegations were made that Havoc physically assaulted a fan, as well as domestic abuse. The allegations were made during the Speaking Out movement. AEW stated his employment status would be evaluated following the completion of treatment. Havoc was released by AEW on August 13.\n\nChampionships and accomplishments\nAnarchy Pro Wrestling\nAnarchy Pro Heavyweight Championship (1 time)\nBritish Wrestling Revolution\n BWR Heavyweight Championship (1 time)\nChampionship of Wrestling\nCoW Interstate Championship (1 time)\nCombat Zone Wrestling\n Tournament of Death 16 (2017)\nDefiant Wrestling/WhatCulture Pro Wrestling \nDefiant Hardcore Championship (1 time)\nDefiant/WCPW Tag Team Championship (2 times) - with Primate (1) and Mark Haskins (1) \nDragon Pro Wrestling\nAll-Wales Championship (1 time)\nFuture Pro Wrestling\nFuture Pro Wrestling Championship (1 time)\nInternational Pro Wrestling: United Kingdom\nIPW:UK All-England Championship (1 time)\nIPW:UK World Championship (1 time)\nTag Team Tournament (2017) – with Zack Sabre Jr.\nLucha Britannia\nLucha Britannia World Champion (1 time)\nNWA UK Hammerlock\nNWA United Kingdom Junior Heavyweight Championship (1 time)\nHardcore Lottery Tournament (2007)\nProgress Wrestling\nProgress Championship (1 time)\nProgress Tag Team Championship (1 time) - with Mark Haskins\nPro Wrestling Illustrated\nPWI ranked him #147 of the top 500 singles wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2017\nRoyal Imperial Wrestling\nRIW Heavyweight Championship(1 time)\nSouthside Wrestling Entertainment\nSWE Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Joseph Connors and The Pledge\nSWE Speed King Championship (1 time)\nTriple X Wrestling\nTXW Smash Championship (1 time)\nX Wrestling Alliance\nGoldrush (2015)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n Havoc's profile at WrestlingData.com\n\n1984 births\nEnglish male professional wrestlers\nLiving people\nSportspeople from Dartford\nAll Elite Wrestling personnel"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution."
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | What year did it come out? | 2 | What year did Havoc and Bright Lights come out? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | 2012, | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
Actresses from Ottawa
Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
American dance musicians
American women pop singers
American women rock singers
American women singer-songwriters
American feminists
American film actresses
American harmonica players
American mezzo-sopranos
American music video directors
American people of French descent
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Irish descent
American rock songwriters
American stage actresses
American television actresses
American women record producers
Brit Award winners
Canadian child actresses
Canadian dance musicians
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian women pop singers
Canadian women rock singers
Canadian women singer-songwriters
Canadian feminists
Canadian film actresses
Canadian harmonica players
Canadian mezzo-sopranos
Canadian music video directors
Canadian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Canadian people of Irish descent
Canadian record producers
Canadian Buddhists
Canadian stage actresses
Canadian television actresses
Canadian women guitarists
Canadian women record producers
Child pop musicians
Echo (music award) winners
Female music video directors
Feminist musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Franco-Ontarian people
Fraternal twin actresses
Grammy Award winners
Guitarists from California
Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award winners
Juno Award for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Single of the Year winners
Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year winners
Juno Award for Video of the Year winners
Juno International Achievement Award winners
Maverick Records artists
MCA Records artists
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musicians from Ottawa
Naturalized citizens of the United States
People from Brentwood, Los Angeles
Record producers from Los Angeles
Singers from Los Angeles
Twin musicians
Twin people from Canada
Warner Music Group artists
Women post-grunge singers
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from Ottawa
20th-century Canadian actresses
20th-century Canadian guitarists
20th-century Canadian women singers
20th-century Canadian women writers
20th-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American singers
21st-century American women guitarists
21st-century American guitarists
21st-century American women singers
21st-century American women writers
21st-century Buddhists
21st-century Canadian actresses
21st-century Canadian guitarists
21st-century Canadian women singers
21st-century Canadian women writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
Singer-songwriters from California | true | [
"\"Come What May\" is a song written by Frank Tableporter and recorded by Elvis Presley on May 28, 1966. RCA Records released it as a single on June 8, 1966. The song is credited to Elvis Presley with The Jordanaires. Document from the files of RCA Records listed the song as the A-side with \"Love Letters\" on the B-side for the 1966 release, although other sources give \"Love Letters\" as the A-side and \"Come What May\" the B-side. \"Come What May\" did not make the Billboard Hot 100, but listed as \"Bubbling Under\" at No. 109, and No. 94 on the Cash Box Top 100.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n1966 songs\nElvis Presley songs\nRCA Records singles",
"Come What May may refer to:\n\nFilm \n Come What May (2015 film), a French historical drama\n\nMusic \nCome What May (album), a 2019 album by Joshua Redman\nCome What(ever) May, a 2006 album by Stone Sour\n\"Come What May\" (1952 song), a song popularized by Patti Page\n\"Come What May\", a song by Patti LaBelle from the 1979 album It's Alright with Me\n\"Come What May\" (2001 song), a song popularized by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, from the movie Moulin Rouge!\n\"Come What May\", a song by Air Supply from the 1982 album Now and Forever\n\"Come What May\", an English language version of \"Après toi\", a 1972 song by Vicky Leandros\nCome What May (band), an American Christian band"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution.",
"What year did it come out?",
"2012,"
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | How many copies did it sell? | 3 | How many copies did Havoc and Bright Lights sell? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
Actresses from Ottawa
Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
American dance musicians
American women pop singers
American women rock singers
American women singer-songwriters
American feminists
American film actresses
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American mezzo-sopranos
American music video directors
American people of French descent
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Irish descent
American rock songwriters
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Brit Award winners
Canadian child actresses
Canadian dance musicians
Canadian emigrants to the United States
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Canadian women rock singers
Canadian women singer-songwriters
Canadian feminists
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Canadian music video directors
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Child pop musicians
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Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award winners
Juno Award for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Album of the Year winners
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Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Single of the Year winners
Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year winners
Juno Award for Video of the Year winners
Juno International Achievement Award winners
Maverick Records artists
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Musicians from Ottawa
Naturalized citizens of the United States
People from Brentwood, Los Angeles
Record producers from Los Angeles
Singers from Los Angeles
Twin musicians
Twin people from Canada
Warner Music Group artists
Women post-grunge singers
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from Ottawa
20th-century Canadian actresses
20th-century Canadian guitarists
20th-century Canadian women singers
20th-century Canadian women writers
20th-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American singers
21st-century American women guitarists
21st-century American guitarists
21st-century American women singers
21st-century American women writers
21st-century Buddhists
21st-century Canadian actresses
21st-century Canadian guitarists
21st-century Canadian women singers
21st-century Canadian women writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
Singer-songwriters from California | false | [
"My So-Called Life is the second and final album by the Chicago-based nu metal music group From Zero. The album was released on May 6, 2003 via Arista Records. Due to a lack of promotion by Arista Records, poor reviews, and general changes in mainstream music tastes, the album did not sell many copies. The album features a cover of Phil Collins' \"I Don't Care Anymore\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nJett – vocals, bass\nPete Capizzi – guitar, backing vocals\nJoe Pettinato – guitar\nKid – drums\n\nReferences\n\n2003 albums\nFrom Zero albums\nArista Records albums",
"is the third studio album and debut major Japanese release by South Korean girl group Kara. It was released on November 24, 2010 in four editions: CD+DVD, CD+Photobook (28-pages), CD-Only First Press coming with Korean versions of the songs \"Sweet Days\", \"Love Is\", and \"Binks\" and a CD-Only Normal Press coming with no bonus tracks. The album has topped the Oricon Weekly Album Charts several times and was eventually certified as Double Platinum by the RIAJ.\n\nComposition \nThe album contains two original Japanese songs. There are five songs that were included on the group's fourth Korean mini-album Jumping (2010) including \"Sweet Days\" which was titled \"With\" on the mini-album and the second single Jumping. There are two songs which was previously released in Korean on their third mini-album Lupin (2010) and these are \"Lupin\" and \"Umbrella\". The debut single, Mister was previously released in Korean on their second studio album Revolution (2009).\n\nChart performance \n\nGirl's Talk had sold over 107,000 copies which placed on number 2 at the Oricon Weekly Album charts, behind Hikaru Utada's Utada Hikaru Single Collection Vol. 2, which sold over 231,000 copies in the same week. This is the first time in 6 years and 9 months for a foreign Asian girl group to sell over 100,000 copies on its first week in Japan since Twelve Girls Band did back in March 2004 with the release of their album Kikō: Shining Energy. The album's first week sales doubles that of Kara Best 2007–2010 first week sales (51,000 copies) which was released back in September.\n\nThe album spent 14 weeks in the Top 10 spot of the Oricon Weekly Album charts. It was eventually certified Platinum by the RIAJ. On February 12, 2011, the album eventually peaked at number one after spending over 12 weeks in the charts, making it their first number-one album. The album managed to sell over 300,000 copies making them the first foreign female group to sell over 300,000 copies since Destiny's Child's #1's (2005). On November 18, 2011, it was announced that the album had already sold over 500,000 copies.\n\nTrack listings\n\nCharts\n\nOricon\n\nSingles and other songs charted\n\nCertifications\n\nSources \n\n2010 albums\nDance-pop albums by South Korean artists\nKara (South Korean band) albums\nUniversal Records albums\nJapanese-language albums"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution.",
"What year did it come out?",
"2012,",
"How many copies did it sell?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | What singles were released from it? | 4 | What singles were released from Havoc and Bright Lights? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | The album's lead single, "Guardian", | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
Actresses from Ottawa
Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
American dance musicians
American women pop singers
American women rock singers
American women singer-songwriters
American feminists
American film actresses
American harmonica players
American mezzo-sopranos
American music video directors
American people of French descent
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Irish descent
American rock songwriters
American stage actresses
American television actresses
American women record producers
Brit Award winners
Canadian child actresses
Canadian dance musicians
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian women pop singers
Canadian women rock singers
Canadian women singer-songwriters
Canadian feminists
Canadian film actresses
Canadian harmonica players
Canadian mezzo-sopranos
Canadian music video directors
Canadian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Canadian people of Irish descent
Canadian record producers
Canadian Buddhists
Canadian stage actresses
Canadian television actresses
Canadian women guitarists
Canadian women record producers
Child pop musicians
Echo (music award) winners
Female music video directors
Feminist musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Franco-Ontarian people
Fraternal twin actresses
Grammy Award winners
Guitarists from California
Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award winners
Juno Award for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Single of the Year winners
Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year winners
Juno Award for Video of the Year winners
Juno International Achievement Award winners
Maverick Records artists
MCA Records artists
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musicians from Ottawa
Naturalized citizens of the United States
People from Brentwood, Los Angeles
Record producers from Los Angeles
Singers from Los Angeles
Twin musicians
Twin people from Canada
Warner Music Group artists
Women post-grunge singers
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from Ottawa
20th-century Canadian actresses
20th-century Canadian guitarists
20th-century Canadian women singers
20th-century Canadian women writers
20th-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American singers
21st-century American women guitarists
21st-century American guitarists
21st-century American women singers
21st-century American women writers
21st-century Buddhists
21st-century Canadian actresses
21st-century Canadian guitarists
21st-century Canadian women singers
21st-century Canadian women writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
Singer-songwriters from California | true | [
"What You Need is the tenth studio album by American contemporary R&B singer Stacy Lattisaw, released October 17, 1989 via Motown Records. It did not chart on the Billboard 200, but it peaked at #16 on the Billboard R&B chart. It was also Lattisaw's final album before she retired from the music industry.\n\nFour singles were released from the album: \"What You Need\", \"Where Do We Go from Here\", \"Dance for You\" and \"I Don't Have the Heart\". \"Where Do We Go from Here\" was the most successful single from the album, peaking at #1 on the Billboard R&B singles chart in 1990.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n1989 albums\nStacy Lattisaw albums\nAlbums produced by Timmy Regisford\nMotown albums",
"This article gives the discography for the English rock band The Zutons. Between their formation in 2001 and 2008 they released three studio albums and 14 singles, nine of which entered the top 40 UK singles chart.\n\nThe band released their debut album, entitled \"Who Killed...... The Zutons?\", in April 2004 to critical acclaim and it sold quite well, reaching number 6 in the UK album chart with Platinum status. Five singles were released from the album: \"Pressure Point\", \"You Will You Won't\", \"Remember Me\", \"Don't Ever Think (Too Much)\" and \"Confusion\" all released in 2004 and achieving number 19, number 22, number 39, number 15 and number 37 in the UK singles chart respectively.\n\nIn 2006 The Zutons released their second album, Tired of Hanging Around. It sold very well and reached number 2 in the UK album chart going Platinum. From this album, they released four singles: \"Why Won't You Give Me Your Love?\", \"Valerie\", \"Oh Stacey (Look What You've Done!)\" and \"It's the Little Things We Do\" all in 2006 achieving number 9, number 9, number 24 and number 47, in the UK singles chart respectively.\n\nIn June 2008, the band released their third studio album, \"You Can Do Anything\" which peaked at number 6 in the UK album chart. They released two singles from the album: \"Always Right Behind You\", which reached number 26 in the UK singles chart, and \"What's Your Problem\", which did not chart.\n\nAlbums\n\nStudio albums\n\nLive albums\n\nSingles\n\nNotes\n\nAlbum appearances\n\nReferences\n\n \nDiscographies of British artists\nRock music group discographies"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution.",
"What year did it come out?",
"2012,",
"How many copies did it sell?",
"I don't know.",
"What singles were released from it?",
"The album's lead single, \"Guardian\","
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | Did Guardian make the charts? | 5 | Did the single Guardian make the charts? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
Actresses from Ottawa
Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
American dance musicians
American women pop singers
American women rock singers
American women singer-songwriters
American feminists
American film actresses
American harmonica players
American mezzo-sopranos
American music video directors
American people of French descent
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Irish descent
American rock songwriters
American stage actresses
American television actresses
American women record producers
Brit Award winners
Canadian child actresses
Canadian dance musicians
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian women pop singers
Canadian women rock singers
Canadian women singer-songwriters
Canadian feminists
Canadian film actresses
Canadian harmonica players
Canadian mezzo-sopranos
Canadian music video directors
Canadian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Canadian people of Irish descent
Canadian record producers
Canadian Buddhists
Canadian stage actresses
Canadian television actresses
Canadian women guitarists
Canadian women record producers
Child pop musicians
Echo (music award) winners
Female music video directors
Feminist musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Franco-Ontarian people
Fraternal twin actresses
Grammy Award winners
Guitarists from California
Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award winners
Juno Award for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Single of the Year winners
Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year winners
Juno Award for Video of the Year winners
Juno International Achievement Award winners
Maverick Records artists
MCA Records artists
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musicians from Ottawa
Naturalized citizens of the United States
People from Brentwood, Los Angeles
Record producers from Los Angeles
Singers from Los Angeles
Twin musicians
Twin people from Canada
Warner Music Group artists
Women post-grunge singers
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from Ottawa
20th-century Canadian actresses
20th-century Canadian guitarists
20th-century Canadian women singers
20th-century Canadian women writers
20th-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American singers
21st-century American women guitarists
21st-century American guitarists
21st-century American women singers
21st-century American women writers
21st-century Buddhists
21st-century Canadian actresses
21st-century Canadian guitarists
21st-century Canadian women singers
21st-century Canadian women writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
Singer-songwriters from California | true | [
"The Proud One is the seventh studio album released by The Osmonds in 1975. Two singles, \"The Proud One\" and \"I'm Still Gonna Need You\" were released from the album. The album peaked at No. 160 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, a precipitous drop from their previous albums.\n\nThe title track gave the quintet its last top 40 hit in the US to date as well as its first and only number-one on the easy listening charts. \"I'm Still Gonna Need You\" did not make the Billboard Hot 100 but did make the top 40 in the UK and appeared on the easy listening charts.\n\nThe UK version of the album, released with the same tracks but under the title I'm Still Gonna Need You, reached No. 19 on the UK Albums Chart, their last studio album to make an appearance on the chart.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nhttp://osmondmania.com/Discography2/Album_Pages/ProudOne.html\n\nThe Osmonds albums\n1975 albums\nAlbums produced by Mike Curb\nMGM Records albums",
"\"Rotterdam (or Anywhere)\" is a song by English pop rock music group the Beautiful South, taken from their fifth studio album, Blue Is the Colour (1996). It features Jacqui Abbott on lead vocals. Released in September 1996, the song reached number five on the UK Singles Chart and stayed in the UK top 40 for nine weeks.\n\nBackground\nPaul Heaton told The Guardian: \"I wrote the lyrics to Rotterdam (Or Anywhere) sitting in a bar on the north end of Lijnbaan, Rotterdam's main shopping street. The bar was modern-looking and not friendly at all. It was in January 1996, about three in the afternoon. I'd probably been up all night drinking, I probably smelled, and I'd walked into their bar and plonked my bag down. I wasn't the sort the owners wanted in there. They probably thought: 'Oh God, we don't want this bloke to be our regular. Let’s make sure he never comes back.' So they were trying to think of different excuses to move me on, like: 'You can't sit there, there's a private party coming in.' I got really pissed off – and I wrote a short story that became a very bitchy song, scribbling it down while sitting there.\"\n\nMusic video\nThe music video features Jacqui Abbott walking down a motorway while carrying a fuel can, occasionally joined by a miscellaneous collection of extras. The rest of the band wait for Abbott while sitting on the back of their pick-up truck. Abbott told The Guardian: \"The Rotterdam video had a circus theme, and it was filmed on a stretch of disused motorway where they road-tested vehicles. All day, I walked up and down, miming and holding a petrol can, with jugglers and unicyclists behind me. I think the people watching just thought – as we did: 'What the hell is going on?'\"\n\nTrack listings\nUK 7-inch and cassette single\n \"Rotterdam\"\n \"A Minute's Silence\"\n\nUK CD single\n \"Rotterdam\"\n \"A Minute's Silence\"\n \"Pollard\"\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\nSongs about the Netherlands\nSongs about cities\n1996 singles\n1996 songs\nThe Beautiful South songs\nGo! Discs singles\nSongs written by David Rotheray\nSongs written by Paul Heaton"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution.",
"What year did it come out?",
"2012,",
"How many copies did it sell?",
"I don't know.",
"What singles were released from it?",
"The album's lead single, \"Guardian\",",
"Did Guardian make the charts?",
"charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada."
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 6 | Besides Guardian, are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
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Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
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21st-century Roman Catholics
Singer-songwriters from California | false | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution.",
"What year did it come out?",
"2012,",
"How many copies did it sell?",
"I don't know.",
"What singles were released from it?",
"The album's lead single, \"Guardian\",",
"Did Guardian make the charts?",
"charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion."
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | Was the Gershwin award for any particular song or album she did? | 7 | Was the Gershwin award for any particular song or album Alanis Morissette did? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
Actresses from Ottawa
Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
American dance musicians
American women pop singers
American women rock singers
American women singer-songwriters
American feminists
American film actresses
American harmonica players
American mezzo-sopranos
American music video directors
American people of French descent
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Irish descent
American rock songwriters
American stage actresses
American television actresses
American women record producers
Brit Award winners
Canadian child actresses
Canadian dance musicians
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian women pop singers
Canadian women rock singers
Canadian women singer-songwriters
Canadian feminists
Canadian film actresses
Canadian harmonica players
Canadian mezzo-sopranos
Canadian music video directors
Canadian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Canadian people of Irish descent
Canadian record producers
Canadian Buddhists
Canadian stage actresses
Canadian television actresses
Canadian women guitarists
Canadian women record producers
Child pop musicians
Echo (music award) winners
Female music video directors
Feminist musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Franco-Ontarian people
Fraternal twin actresses
Grammy Award winners
Guitarists from California
Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award winners
Juno Award for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Single of the Year winners
Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year winners
Juno Award for Video of the Year winners
Juno International Achievement Award winners
Maverick Records artists
MCA Records artists
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musicians from Ottawa
Naturalized citizens of the United States
People from Brentwood, Los Angeles
Record producers from Los Angeles
Singers from Los Angeles
Twin musicians
Twin people from Canada
Warner Music Group artists
Women post-grunge singers
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from Ottawa
20th-century Canadian actresses
20th-century Canadian guitarists
20th-century Canadian women singers
20th-century Canadian women writers
20th-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American singers
21st-century American women guitarists
21st-century American guitarists
21st-century American women singers
21st-century American women writers
21st-century Buddhists
21st-century Canadian actresses
21st-century Canadian guitarists
21st-century Canadian women singers
21st-century Canadian women writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
Singer-songwriters from California | false | [
"\"I've Got a Crush on You\" is a song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It is unique among Gershwin compositions in that it was used for two different Broadway productions: Treasure Girl (1928), when it was introduced by Clifton Webb and Mary Hay, and Strike Up the Band (1930), when it was sung by Doris Carson and Gordon Smith. It was later included in the tribute musical Nice Work If You Can Get It (2012), in which it was sung by Jennifer Laura Thompson. When covered by Frank Sinatra he was a part of Columbia records.\n\nIt is considered a jazz standard, primarily of the vocal repertoire, thanks to recordings by singers such as Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. Instrumental versions have also been recorded by Nat Adderley, Ike Quebec and others.\n\nNotable recordings\n\nLee Wiley, recorded on November 15, 1939 for Liberty Music Shop Records. She recorded it again in 1950 and it was included in her album Night in Manhattan. \nJoe Sullivan's Cafe Society Orchestra (vocal: Helen Ward). This charted briefly in October 1940 in the No. 24 spot.\nSarah Vaughan, recorded on July 18, 1946 for Musicraft Records (catalog No. 505). She recorded the song again in 1957 for the album Sarah Vaughan Sings George Gershwin and in 1982 with Michael Tilson Thomas for Gershwin Live!.\nFrank Sinatra, recorded on November 5, 1947 for Columbia Records. This charted briefly in 1948. He recorded the song again in 1960 and it was included in his album Nice 'n' Easy.\nElla Fitzgerald - Ella Sings Gershwin (1950), Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook (1959), and Nice Work If You Can Get It, a 1983 Pablo release with André Previn\nGene Kelly - an outtake from the film An American in Paris (1951).\nBing Crosby recorded the song in 1956 for use on his radio show and it was subsequently included in the box set The Bing Crosby CBS Radio Recordings (1954-56) issued by Mosaic Records (catalog MD7-245) in 2009. \nDinah Washington - In the Land of Hi-Fi (1956)\nNat Adderley - Work Song (1960)\nAnna Maria Alberghetti - for her album I Can't Resist You (1957).\nSammy Davis Jr. - for his album Mood to Be Wooed (1958).\nJulie London - included in her album Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast (1967).\nRosemary Clooney - Everything's Coming Up Rosie (1977) and for the album Gershwin 100 (1998).\nCleo Laine - for her album That Old Feeling (1987).\nLinda Ronstadt, on the album What's New (US AC #7, Canada AC #1, 1983). Ronstadt previously performed the song on \"The Muppet Show\".\nCarol Sloane on But Not For Me (1986)\nFrank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand from Duets (Frank Sinatra album) (1993)\nCarly Simon, on the album The Glory of Gershwin (1994)\nKeely Smith - for her album Keely Sings Sinatra (2001).\nRod Stewart and Diana Ross (duet) - from Stewart's album Thanks for the Memory: The Great American Songbook, Volume IV (2005).\nSteve Tyrell - included in his album This Guy's in Love (2003).\nChris Connor - for her album Chris Connor Sings the George Gershwin Almanac of Song (1957).\nJune Christy - A Friendly Session, Vol. 1 (1998) with the Johnny Guarnieri Quintet.\nStacey Kent - Dreamsville (2000).\nMichael Bublé, on the EP With Love (2006)\nBrian Wilson - Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin (2010)\nLuscious Jackson- Red Hot + Rhapsody (1998)\nMichael Feinstein - included in his album The Sinatra Project (2008).\nDarius de Haas and Steven Blier - Quiet Please (2010)\nJennifer Aniston sang this song during the Ellen Degeneres Show.\nUri Caine, on album Rhapsody in Blue (2013).\nKristin Chenoweth sings the song on her 2016 album The Art of Elegance.\n Emma Hedrick at Urban Vines in 2019\n\nFilm appearances \n 1951 Meet Danny Wilson - sung by Frank Sinatra.\n 1951 An American in Paris - played as background music. It had been recorded for the film by Gene Kelly but it was omitted from the released print.\n 1955 Three for the Show - performed by Betty Grable and Jack Lemmon.\n 1957 The Helen Morgan Story\n 1974 Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore - performed by Ellen Burstyn.\n 1977 The Choirboys - sung by Vic Tayback.\n 1979 Featured in Woody Allen's Manhattan which was scored exclusively with Gershwin music. Performed by The New York Philharmonic.\n1984 Bulaklak sa City Jail - sung by Nora Aunor\n 2003 Mona Lisa Smile - performed by Seal.\n 2003 Something's Gotta Give - sung by Steve Tyrell.\n 2008 Definitely, Maybe - the song was performed by actress Rachel Weisz as her character's favorite song\n\nReferences\n\n1928 songs\n1920s jazz standards\n1940 singles\n1948 singles\n1983 singles\nSongs from musicals\nSongs with music by George Gershwin\nSongs with lyrics by Ira Gershwin\nRecordings of music by George Gershwin\nLinda Ronstadt songs\nAsylum Records singles\nPop standards",
"\"The Man that Got Away\" is a torch song, published in 1953 and written for the 1954 version of the film A Star Is Born. The music was written by Harold Arlen, and the lyrics by Ira Gershwin. In 1955, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In 2004, Judy Garland's performance of the song was selected by the American Film Institute as the eleventh greatest song in American cinema history.\n\nComposition\n\"The Man That Got Away\" was one of several songs composed by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin for the 1954 film A Star is Born, a vehicle for Judy Garland, whom Arlen had already provided with the career-defining songs \"Over the Rainbow\" and \"That Old Black Magic\". Arlen and Gershwin would collaborate on songs for A Star is Born afternoons at Gershwin's Beverly Hills mansion, Arlen being seated at a Steinway while Gershwin would work on the lyrics seated at a card table. \"The Man That Got Away\" was written in response to screenwriter Moss Hart's request for a \"dive song\". Ira Gershwin's wife Leonore overheard the melody Arlen was working on and opined that it sounded as if it could have been written by Gershwin's deceased collaborator and brother George Gershwin. Not wanting to be an ersatz George Gershwin, Arlen swiftly began playing a melody he had written several years previously for a song which had evidently either never been completed or left unpublished, as its lyricist Johnny Mercer had penned forgettable lyrics for it. (To wit: \"I've seen Sequoia, it's really very pretty, the art of Goya, and Rockefeller City, but since I saw you, I can't believe my eyes.\" The Gershwin Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin contains a typescript draft of the lyrics with Ira Gershwin's handwritten changes.) Ira Gershwin was arrested by the melody, and came up with the title \"The Man That Got Away\" (Ira Gershwin quote:) \"as a paraphrase of the [fisherman's boast] 'You should have seen the one that got away'\". The composition of the song proved arduous, with hours passing before Gershwin had the opening stanza.\n\nIra Gershwin had not wanted any of the songs he and Arlen wrote for the film to be \"leaked\" prior to the score being finished and made Arlen promise to respect this, a request Gershwin reiterated when Arlen mentioned he would be visiting Palm Springs, where Judy Garland - along with her husband Sid Luft, producer of A Star is Born - would be at that time. While accompanying Garland and Sid Luft as they played their way around a Palm Springs golf course, Arlen began whistling the melody of \"The Man That Got Away\": Garland soon guessed the tune's provenance and insisted that the three of them retire to the clubhouse, where there was a piano for Arlen to play the song properly for Garland and Luft who (in Arlen's words) \"went wild with joy.\"\n\nJudy Garland performance and recording\n\nJudy Garland recorded \"The Man That Got Away\" with the Warner Bros. orchestra under the direction of Ray Heindorf using an arrangement by Skip Martin. Garland's performance of the song in A Star is Born is unusual for being filmed in one continuous shot. In the finished take, Garland (as Esther Blodgett) performs the song in a nightclub during a musicians-only session after closing time. The chairs are up on the tables for floor cleaning, the air is filled with cigarette smoke, and Garland's character, without an audience other than her musician friends, is encouraged by the pianist to rise from her seat on the piano bench and \"take it from the top.\"\n\n\"The Man That Got Away\" is arguably the most important single musical sequence in the entire film. As one of the first segments filmed for the movie, it was photographed in three costumes on three occasions, in over forty partial or complete takes. Judy Garland recorded the song on September 3, 1953, and the number was first filmed on Wednesday, October 21, 1953.\n\nDue to technical limitations of the medium at the time, the cameraman could not give director George Cukor what he wanted: \"low light levels, the impressionistic feeling of the musical instruments, Garland moving in and out of pools of light,\" so he was fired. Cukor realized later that the film stock itself was the problem, not the cinematographer, and re-employed him in a number of other films later on.\n\nChanges were then made to the costume and set and the number was filmed a second time the following Thursday, October 29. Art director Gene Allen said, \"The first time it looked as if we had painted a set to look like a bar. So to give it a slightly impressionistic look I...put a scrim between the musicians and the back bar. If you look very carefully at that scene you can see the scrim nailed down on the floor...\"\n\nAccording to sound man Earl Bellamy: \"When Judy sang to playback, you could never hear anything...She wanted me to start off at a full blast and then she topped that...her huge voice carrying out over the rafters. You could hear Judy clear as a bell, and she sang right with it...\"\n\nGarland did 27 takes of the number over three days, both partial and complete, but according to Allen, \"Cukor had her doing all sorts of different bits of business before the song. All of that action didn't really fit the song though — it was just too busy. Plus, she didn't look good — her costume was wrinkled, and didn't fit right....\" If that weren't enough, the color was too brown for her complexion as well.\n\nFour months later it was filmed for a third time in February 1954, with new hairstyle and costume and a totally brand new set. Cukor felt this time they had finally got it right: \"I think we've generated a lot of sex...She looks perfectly charming in a new Jean-Louis dress, and I know that this too is an enormous improvement over the way we first did it — it has fun and spirit.\"\n\nMain principal photography for the film began in earnest around the first week of February, 1954. Ten days later, the number was filmed in Technicolor and CinemaScope. As a result of the fabulous color renditions and faithful representations of the sweeping views, Jack L. Warner and Producer Sid Luft agreed to scrap nearly two weeks of footage to date and began the film again. The original takes are added as a special feature on the currently available DVD.\n\nGarland later sang this song as a regular part of her concert repertoire for the rest of her career as well as on the Sammy Davis Jr. Show in 1966.\n\n2019 dance version\nIn November 2019, Universal Records issued a new dance/club version of the song, which was remixed by Eric Kupper and as such, both Garland and Kupper received billing on the single. The track also gave Garland her first posthumous appearance on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart, debuting at number 41 in the November 9, 2019 issue.\n\nChart positions\n\nCovers\nThe song has occasionally been sung as \"The Gal That Got Away\" by male singers such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr. and Bobby Darin.\nClare Fischer's novel arrangement (recorded June 1960, released February 1962), scored for strings, harp, and a jazz quartet led by vibraphonist Cal Tjader, was one of the highlights of Cal Tjader Plays Harold Arlen, the earliest recorded document of Tjader's and Fischer's longstanding association.\nJeff Buckley frequently performed the song (under its original title) on his last tour before his death in 1997. His live performance of the song at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco made it on to his posthumous album Mystery White Boy in 2000.\nAudra McDonald also sang a version, which is on her album How Glory Goes. \nBarbra Streisand sang a version on her 1993-94 concert tour, publicly dedicating her rendition to Garland's memory. \nThe song was covered by Ella Fitzgerald on her album Jazz at the Philharmonic, The Ella Fitzgerald Set, in a recording featuring Ray Brown on bass. She recorded it again for Verve on her double-album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook (1961).\nJim Bailey sang the song as Garland on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1970 and retained the song in his repertoire. \nRufus Wainwright performed it in his tribute revues of Garland's best known songs, recorded on the live album Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall (2007). \nMaria Friedman covered the song on her self-titled album, which was reissued in the U.S. under the title Now & Then. \nCher recorded the song for her album Bittersweet White Light (1973).\nShirley Bassey recorded the song for her album The Fabulous Shirley Bassey (1959).\nSheena Easton also included a rather freeform rendition of the song on her album No Strings (1993).\nHilary Swank sings along with Garland while watching a DVD of the original movie during her lonely 30th birthday in the 2007 romantic comedy P.S. I Love You.\nIn 2008 on the BBC-TV show I'd Do Anything, Jessie Buckley sang this song. Andrew Lloyd Webber described it as \"the best performance by a girl your age I have ever heard\".\nLorna Luft (Garland's daughter from her marriage with Sid Luft) also sings the song on her album Songs My Mother Taught Me. She also sings it in concert from time to time.\nCourtney Love and her band Hole performed the song in concert on more than one occasion during their 2010 tour.\nSylvia Brooks recorded this song on her album Dangerous Liaisons (2009).\nIdina Menzel sang this song during her Spring 2009 tour promoting her album I Stand.\nRaul Esparza sang a moving rendition without changing the gender, leaving the lyric as \"man\", at the February 22, 2010 Broadway Backwards 5 benefit for NYC's Lesbian & Gay Community Center AND Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.\nOn May 1, 2010, on the BBC TV show Over the Rainbow, Lauren Samuels sang this song. Andrew Lloyd Webber said she made the song her own.\nKristin Chenoweth sang the song on her Coming Home Tour.\nBilly Porter sang the song on Pose while performing in an AIDS Cabaret, without changing the gender, leaving the lyric as \"man\" in 2018. \n Elizabeth Gilles sings the song on Dynasty while performing as a lounge singer in the imagined version of Liam Ridley’s dictated novel pitch in the episode “You See Most Things in Terms of Black & White” in 2020.\n\nReferences\n\nJudy Garland songs\nSongs with music by Harold Arlen\nSongs with lyrics by Ira Gershwin\n1953 songs\nPop standards\nSongs written for films\nTorch songs\n2019 songs\nHouse music songs"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution.",
"What year did it come out?",
"2012,",
"How many copies did it sell?",
"I don't know.",
"What singles were released from it?",
"The album's lead single, \"Guardian\",",
"Did Guardian make the charts?",
"charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion.",
"Was the Gershwin award for any particular song or album she did?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | When was Bright LIghts released? | 8 | When was Havoc and Bright Lights released? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | August 28 | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
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Singer-songwriters from California | true | [
"\"Bright Lights and Country Music\" is a song written and first recorded by American country singer-songwriter Bill Anderson. The track was also co-written with Jimmy Gateley. It was released as a single in 1965 via Decca Records and became a major hit.\n\nBackground and release\n\"Bright Lights and Country Music\" was recorded on June 24, 1965, at the Bradley Studio, located in Nashville, Tennessee. The sessions were produced by Owen Bradley, who would serve as Anderson's producer through most of years with Decca Records. Two additional tracks were recorded at the session as well.\n\n\"Bright Lights and Country Music\" was released as a single by Decca Records in August 1965. The song spent 16 weeks on the Billboard Hot Country Singles before reaching number 11 in November 1965. It was later released on his 1965 studio album, also called Bright Lights and Country Music.\n\nTrack listings\n7\" vinyl single\n \"Bright Lights and Country Music\" – 2:35\n \"Born\" – 2:30\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n1965 singles\n1965 songs\nBill Anderson (singer) songs\nDecca Records singles\nSong recordings produced by Owen Bradley\nSongs written by Bill Anderson (singer)",
"\"Bright Lights\" is the fourth official single from Placebo's sixth studio album, Battle for the Sun, released on 8 February 2010 as a digital download or CD single (limited to France and Germany). The new single version was mixed by Dave Bascombe, while the album version was mixed by Alan Moulder. The new single version would later be included in the Battle for the Sun: Redux Edition.\n\nAfter Placebo released their single, Bright Lights saw coverage on AOL, Drowned in Sound, Indie London and Metro Newspaper.\n\nTrack listing\nCD single (France/Germany only)\n \"Bright Lights\" (single version)\n \"The Never-Ending Why\" (SFR live)\n \"Bright Lights\" (Randomer Remix-Dub)\n\nDigital download bundle\n \"Bright Lights\" (single version)\n \"Bright Lights\" (album version)\n \"The Never-Ending Why\" (SFR live)\n \"Bright Lights\" (Randomer Remix-Dub)\n\niTunes deluxe bundle\n \"Bright Lights\" (single version)\n \"Bright Lights\" (album version)\n \"The Never-Ending Why\" (SFR live)\n \"Bright Lights\" (Randomer Remix-Dub)\n \"Bright Lights\" (video)\n\nCharts\nSource:\n\nReferences\n\nPlacebo (band) songs\n2010 singles\nSongs written by Brian Molko\nSongs written by Stefan Olsdal\n2009 songs\nPIAS Recordings singles\nSong recordings produced by David Bottrill\nSongs written by Steve Forrest (musician)\nSongs written by William Patrick Lloyd"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution.",
"What year did it come out?",
"2012,",
"How many copies did it sell?",
"I don't know.",
"What singles were released from it?",
"The album's lead single, \"Guardian\",",
"Did Guardian make the charts?",
"charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion.",
"Was the Gershwin award for any particular song or album she did?",
"I don't know.",
"When was Bright LIghts released?",
"August 28"
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | Which songs were on Bright Lights? | 9 | Which songs were on Havoc and Bright Lights? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | "Big Sur" | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
Actresses from Ottawa
Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
American dance musicians
American women pop singers
American women rock singers
American women singer-songwriters
American feminists
American film actresses
American harmonica players
American mezzo-sopranos
American music video directors
American people of French descent
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Irish descent
American rock songwriters
American stage actresses
American television actresses
American women record producers
Brit Award winners
Canadian child actresses
Canadian dance musicians
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian women pop singers
Canadian women rock singers
Canadian women singer-songwriters
Canadian feminists
Canadian film actresses
Canadian harmonica players
Canadian mezzo-sopranos
Canadian music video directors
Canadian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Canadian people of Irish descent
Canadian record producers
Canadian Buddhists
Canadian stage actresses
Canadian television actresses
Canadian women guitarists
Canadian women record producers
Child pop musicians
Echo (music award) winners
Female music video directors
Feminist musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Franco-Ontarian people
Fraternal twin actresses
Grammy Award winners
Guitarists from California
Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award winners
Juno Award for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year winners
Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Single of the Year winners
Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year winners
Juno Award for Video of the Year winners
Juno International Achievement Award winners
Maverick Records artists
MCA Records artists
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musicians from Ottawa
Naturalized citizens of the United States
People from Brentwood, Los Angeles
Record producers from Los Angeles
Singers from Los Angeles
Twin musicians
Twin people from Canada
Warner Music Group artists
Women post-grunge singers
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from Ottawa
20th-century Canadian actresses
20th-century Canadian guitarists
20th-century Canadian women singers
20th-century Canadian women writers
20th-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American singers
21st-century American women guitarists
21st-century American guitarists
21st-century American women singers
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21st-century Buddhists
21st-century Canadian actresses
21st-century Canadian guitarists
21st-century Canadian women singers
21st-century Canadian women writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
Singer-songwriters from California | true | [
"\"Bright Lights\" is the fourth official single from Placebo's sixth studio album, Battle for the Sun, released on 8 February 2010 as a digital download or CD single (limited to France and Germany). The new single version was mixed by Dave Bascombe, while the album version was mixed by Alan Moulder. The new single version would later be included in the Battle for the Sun: Redux Edition.\n\nAfter Placebo released their single, Bright Lights saw coverage on AOL, Drowned in Sound, Indie London and Metro Newspaper.\n\nTrack listing\nCD single (France/Germany only)\n \"Bright Lights\" (single version)\n \"The Never-Ending Why\" (SFR live)\n \"Bright Lights\" (Randomer Remix-Dub)\n\nDigital download bundle\n \"Bright Lights\" (single version)\n \"Bright Lights\" (album version)\n \"The Never-Ending Why\" (SFR live)\n \"Bright Lights\" (Randomer Remix-Dub)\n\niTunes deluxe bundle\n \"Bright Lights\" (single version)\n \"Bright Lights\" (album version)\n \"The Never-Ending Why\" (SFR live)\n \"Bright Lights\" (Randomer Remix-Dub)\n \"Bright Lights\" (video)\n\nCharts\nSource:\n\nReferences\n\nPlacebo (band) songs\n2010 singles\nSongs written by Brian Molko\nSongs written by Stefan Olsdal\n2009 songs\nPIAS Recordings singles\nSong recordings produced by David Bottrill\nSongs written by Steve Forrest (musician)\nSongs written by William Patrick Lloyd",
"\"Bright Lights and Country Music\" is a song written and first recorded by American country singer-songwriter Bill Anderson. The track was also co-written with Jimmy Gateley. It was released as a single in 1965 via Decca Records and became a major hit.\n\nBackground and release\n\"Bright Lights and Country Music\" was recorded on June 24, 1965, at the Bradley Studio, located in Nashville, Tennessee. The sessions were produced by Owen Bradley, who would serve as Anderson's producer through most of years with Decca Records. Two additional tracks were recorded at the session as well.\n\n\"Bright Lights and Country Music\" was released as a single by Decca Records in August 1965. The song spent 16 weeks on the Billboard Hot Country Singles before reaching number 11 in November 1965. It was later released on his 1965 studio album, also called Bright Lights and Country Music.\n\nTrack listings\n7\" vinyl single\n \"Bright Lights and Country Music\" – 2:35\n \"Born\" – 2:30\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n1965 singles\n1965 songs\nBill Anderson (singer) songs\nDecca Records singles\nSong recordings produced by Owen Bradley\nSongs written by Bill Anderson (singer)"
]
|
[
"Alanis Morissette",
"2011-14: Havoc and Bright Lights",
"Who was involved in making Havoc?",
"label \"Collective Sounds\", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution.",
"What year did it come out?",
"2012,",
"How many copies did it sell?",
"I don't know.",
"What singles were released from it?",
"The album's lead single, \"Guardian\",",
"Did Guardian make the charts?",
"charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion.",
"Was the Gershwin award for any particular song or album she did?",
"I don't know.",
"When was Bright LIghts released?",
"August 28",
"Which songs were on Bright Lights?",
"\"Big Sur\""
]
| C_9ced28d5993b44639e3c1006e003f40c_0 | How did Big Sur do on the charts? | 10 | How did Big Sur do on the charts? | Alanis Morissette | On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded thirty-one songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor. Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts. On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label "Collective Sounds", distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year. Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014 at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Alanis Nadine Morissette ( ; born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian-American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting, Morissette began her career in Canada in the early 1990s with two mildly successful dance-pop albums. Afterward, as part of a recording deal, she moved to Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. In 1995, she released Jagged Little Pill, an alt rock-oriented album with the elements of post-grunge, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and is her most critically acclaimed work to date. This earned her Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1996 and was made into a rock musical of the same name in 2017, which also earned 15 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical. The album also listed in 2003 and 2020 editions of the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Guide. Her highly anticipated, more experimental follow-up, electronic-infused album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998.
Morissette assumed creative control and producing duties for her subsequent studio albums, including Under Rug Swept (2002), So-Called Chaos (2004), Flavors of Entanglement (2008), and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012). Her latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, was released in 2020. Her well-known singles reached top 40 in the major charts around the world, including 10 top-40 hits in the UK, 3 top-10 in the US and Australia, 12 top-10 hits in her native Canada, "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U" and "Hands Clean". She also holds the record of the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among any female soloist, group leader or duo member. Morissette won 7 Grammy Awards, 14 Juno Awards, 1 Brit Award and has sold more than 75 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the "Queen of Alt-Rock Angst" by Rolling Stone.
Early life
Morissette was born June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to teacher Georgia Mary Ann ( Feuerstein) of Hungarian descent and high-school principal and French teacher Alan Richard Morissette. She has two brothers: older brother Chad is a business entrepreneur, and twin brother (12 minutes older) Wade Morissette is a musician. Her father is of French and Irish descent, whereas her mother has Hungarian and Jewish ancestry. Her parents were teachers in a military school and due to their work often had to move. Between the ages of three and six she lived with her parents in Lahr (Black Forest), Germany.
When she was six years old, she returned to Ottawa and started to play the piano. In 1981, at the age of seven, she began dance lessons. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for Grades 7 and 8 before completing the rest of her high school at Glebe Collegiate Institute. She appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes when she was in junior high school.
Music career
1987–1992: Alanis and Now Is the Time
Morissette recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. The dance-pop album went platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top 20 on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel Your Love" reached the top 40. Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance, particularly that of her hair, led her to become known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany were also common. During the same period, she was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "People could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever.' But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis (1991), Now Is the Time (1992) was released only in Canada and produced three top 40 singles—"An Emotion Away", the minor adult contemporary hit "No Apologies" as well as "(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". The industry considered it a commercial failure, however, since it sold only a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal with MCA Records Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.
1993–1997: Jagged Little Pill
In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living at home with her parents. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people. After graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. In the same year she learned how to play guitar. According to manager Welch, every label they approached, apart from Maverick, declined to sign Morissette.
Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation improved quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, and the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, kept Jagged Little Pill (1995) in the top 20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. Jagged Little Pill sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S.; it sold 33 million worldwide, making it the second biggest-selling album by a female artist (behind Shania Twain's Come On Over).
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill (1995) was credited with opening doors for female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Florence Welch. She was criticized for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous disco pop albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 16th Brit Awards she won Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.
Following the album release in 1995, Morissette embarked on an 18-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, who later joined the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. Radiohead joined as an opening act in the summer of 1996. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
Following the tour, Morissette began practicing Iyengar Yoga for balance. After the last December 1996 show, she went to India for six weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two friends. She said the trip was "incredible".
1998–2000: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard.
The label hoped to sell 1 million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies—a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill (1995), many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year.
Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy", where she paid homage to her roots by singing in Hungarian, "Hope", "Innocence" and "Faith", four tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Morissette toured with singer-songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 and a Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus and Back (1999).
2001–2005: Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney, and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.
Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-colored bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-flash incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on Adult Top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top 40 on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word "asshole", American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word "nightmare" instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse, although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit. Morissette embarked on a U.S. summer tour with long-time friends and fellow Canadians Barenaked Ladies, working with the non-profit environmental organization Reverb.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill (1995), Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing Morissette's other albums from sale for the duration of Starbucks's exclusive six-week sale. , Jagged Little Pill Acoustic had sold 372,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. The singer opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour in the autumn of 2005.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was an Adult Top 40 and dance hit in the U.S., but achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimidation" and "Can't Not". (A reworked version of "Can't Not" had also appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.) The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". , The Collection had sold 373,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. That same year, Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
2006–2010: Flavors of Entanglement
2006 marked the first year in Morissette's musical career without a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind".
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Black Eyed Peas's selection "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice, accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who act as if attempting to touch her breasts, had received 16,465,653 views as of February 15, 2009. Morissette did not take any interviews for a time to explain the song, and it was theorized that she did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. On the verge of the release of her following album, she finally elaborated on how the video came to be, citing that she became very much emotionally loaded while recording her new songs one after the other and one day she wished she could do a simple song like "My Humps" and the joke just took a life of its own.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman, a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles in April 2007. The following June, she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. (The NHL requires arenas to perform both the American and Canadian national anthems at games involving teams from both countries.) In early 2008, Morissette participated in a tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mutemath as a special guest.
Morissette's seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement, which was produced by Guy Sigsworth, was released in mid-2008. She has stated that in late 2008, she would embark on a North American headlining tour, but in the meantime she would be promoting the album internationally by performing at shows and festivals and making television and radio appearances. The album's first single was "Underneath", a video for which was submitted to the 2007 Elevate Film Festival, the purpose of which festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth. On October 3, 2008, Morissette released the video for her latest single, "Not as We".
Morissette contributed to 1 Giant Leap, performing "Arrival" with Zap Mama and she has released an acoustic version of her song "Still" as part of a compilation from Music for Relief in support of the 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis. In 2008 she contributed a recording of "Versions of Violence" for the album Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace to promote peace. Morissette has also recorded a cover of the 1984 Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias hit, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", re-written as "To All the Boys I've Loved Before". Nelson played rhythm guitar on the recording. In April 2010, Morissette released the song "I Remain", which she wrote for the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time soundtrack. On May 26, 2010, the season finale of American Idol, Morissette performed a duet of her song "You Oughta Know" with Runner Up Crystal Bowersox. Morissette left Maverick Records after all promotion for Flavors was completed.
2011–2016: Havoc and Bright Lights and Jagged Little Pill 20th anniversary
On November 20, 2011, Morissette appeared at the American Music Awards. When asked about the new album during a short interview, she said she had recorded 31 songs, and that the album would "likely be out next year, probably [in] summertime". On December 21, 2011, Morissette performed a duet of "Uninvited" with finalist Josh Krajcik during the performance finale of the X-Factor.
Morissette embarked on a European tour for the summer of 2012, according to Alanis.com. In early May 2012, a new song called "Magical Child" appeared on a Starbucks compilation called Every Mother Counts.
On May 2, 2012, Morissette revealed through her Facebook account that her eighth studio album, entitled Havoc and Bright Lights, would be released in August 2012, on new label Collective Sounds, distributed by Sony's RED Distribution. On the same day, Billboard specified the date as August 28 and revealed the album would contain twelve tracks. The album's lead single, "Guardian", was released on iTunes on May 15, 2012, and hit the radio airwaves four days prior to this. The single had minor success in North America, charting the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles in the US and almost reaching the top 40 in Canada. However, the song did become a hit in several countries in Europe. "Receive", the second single off the album, was released early December the same year.Morissette received the UCLA Spring Sing's George and Ira Gershwin Award on May 16, 2014, at Pauley Pavilion. On her website starting in the summer of 2014, in celebration of her fortieth birthday, the LP record for her song "Big Sur" was offered for sale, which was previously available on the Target edition of her 2012 album, Havoc and Bright Lights. July 25, 2014, was the start of the ten-show Intimate and Acoustic tour.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, a new four-disc collector's edition was released on October 30, 2015. The four-disc edition includes remastered audio of the original album as well as an entire disc of 10 unreleased demos from the era, handpicked by Morissette from her archives, offering a deeper and more personal look at the classic album. Also included is a previously unreleased concert from 1995 as well as 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.
2017–present: Such Pretty Forks in the Road
In August 2017, Morissette teased a song titled "I Miss The Band" while on tour. On October 27, 2017, she premiered a new song entitled "Rest", which was released officially in May 2021, and performed "Castle of Glass" with members of the band No Doubt and Mike Shinoda at the Linkin Park and Friends – Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington memorial concert. In November 2017, she tweeted that she was writing 22 songs with Michael Farrell.
On March 16, 2018, Morissette performed a new song called "Ablaze" during her 2018 tour. In October 2018, she revealed on social media that she had written 23 new songs, and hinted at a new album with hashtag "#alanismorissettenewrecord2019", after a six-year hiatus. Song titles from the writing session include "Reckoning", "Diagnosis", "Her" and "Legacy". On May 5, 2018, Jagged Little Pill, a jukebox musical featuring Morissette's songs, premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Morissette contributed two new songs to the musical, "Smiling" and "Predator". The musical transferred to Broadway in fall of 2019, starting previews on November 3 and opening on December 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production received fifteen Tony Award nominations, the most of any production that season.
In June 2019, Morissette went into studio in Los Angeles. According to an interview, she had written all the songs, and "Smiling" would be included on the new album, likely to be released early 2020. On August 8, 2019, she revealed that the new album was produced by Alex Hope and Catherine Marks. On December 1, 2019, Morissette announced her first studio album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, set for release on May 1, 2020. The first single off the record, "Reasons I Drink", was released on December 2, 2019.
Morissette was featured on Halsey's song "Alanis' Interlude", released on January 17, 2020. On February 5, 2020, she revealed that her upcoming album was mixed by Chris Dugan. The second single from the album, "Smiling", was released on February 20, 2020. On April 15, 2020, Morissette announced that the album's release would be postponed due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released on July 31, 2020.
Morissette was originally scheduled to embark on a world tour for 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill in June 2020 with Garbage and Liz Phair, both already opened for Morissette in 1999 during Junkie Tour. The latter cancelled her shows in North America and was replaced by Cat Power instead. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was postponed to summer 2021.
Acting career
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress in five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. She appeared on stage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.
In 1999, Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith comedy Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Morissette reprised her role as God for a post-credits scene in Smith's next film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to literally close the book on the View Askewniverse. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, appeared in the play The Vagina Monologues, and had brief cameos playing herself in the Brazilian hit soap operas Celebridade and Malhação.
In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent. In April 2006, MTV News reported that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated in London from May 23 until May 28.
She expanded her acting credentials with the July 2004 release of the Cole Porter biographical film De-Lovely, in which she performed the song "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" and had a brief role as an anonymous stage performer. In February 2005, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith. Also in 2005, Morissette, then engaged to Ryan Reynolds, made a cameo appearance as "herself" as a former client of Reynolds' character in the film Just Friends. This scene was deleted from the theatrical release, and is only available on the DVD.
In 2006, she guest-starred in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International as a homeless woman named Lucinda, three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian named Poppy, and the mockumentary-documentary Pittsburgh as herself.
Morissette has appeared in eight episodes of Weeds, playing Dr. Audra Kitson, a "no-nonsense obstetrician" who treats pregnant main character Nancy Botwin. Her first episode aired in July 2009.
In early 2010, Morissette returned to the stage, performing a one-night engagement in An Oak Tree, an experimental play in Los Angeles. The performance was a sell-out. In April 2010, Morissette was confirmed in the cast of Weeds season six, performing again her role as Dr. Audra Kitson.
Morissette also starred in a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette plays Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. Morissette stated that she is "...a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books" and that she "feel[s] blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film".
She appeared as Amanda, a former bandmate of main character Ava Alexander (played by Maya Rudolph), in one episode of NBC's Up All Night on February 16, 2012. Rudolph officiated as minister for Morissette's wedding with both performing the explicit version of their hit hip hop song "Back It Up (Beep Beep)".
In 2014, Morissette played the role of Marisa Damia, the lover of architect and designer Eileen Gray, in the film The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian.
In 2021, Morissette was featured as a recurring character on adult-animation show The Great North.
Other work
In October 2015, Conversation with Alanis Morissette features conversations with different individuals from different schools and walks of life discussing everything from psychology to art to spirituality to design to health and well-being, to relationships (whether they be romantic or colleagueship or parent with children relationships). The monthly podcast is currently available to download on iTunes and free to listen to on YouTube.
In January 2016, she began a short-lived advice column in The Guardian newspaper.
In May 2018, the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts) premiered Jagged Little Pill, a musical with music by Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, and directed by Diane Paulus.
Jagged, a documentary film about Morissette and Jagged Little Pill by filmmaker Alison Klayman, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival before airing on HBO as part of the Music Box series of documentary films about music history.
Personal life
Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in Canada. She became a US citizen in 2005, while retaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette has since then been a practising Buddhist.
Throughout her teen years and 20s, Morissette suffered from depression and various eating disorders. She recovered from them and started to eat a healthier diet. In 2009, she ran a marathon promoting awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association.
In the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette said that multiple men committed statutory rape against her when she was 15 years old.
Over a period of seven years, Morissette's business manager Jonathan Schwartz stole over $5 million from her. He confessed to doing so in April 2017 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
On October 22, 2019, Morissette shared her nearly decade-long experience with postpartum depression on CBS This Morning.
In 1996, Morissette bought a home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She also had an apartment in Ottawa and a home in Malibu, the latter of which was affected by the Woolsey Fire. In 2019, she and her family moved to Northern California, stating in an interview with The New York Times that she was "finally done with living in Los Angeles".
Relationships
Morissette dated actor and comedian Dave Coulier for a short time in the early 1990s. In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette's song "You Oughta Know"; Morissette has not commented on the subject of the song.
Morissette met Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, and the couple began dating soon afterwards. They announced their engagement in June 2004. In February 2007, representatives for Morissette and Reynolds announced they had decided to end their engagement. Morissette has stated that her album Flavors of Entanglement was created out of her grief after the breakup, saying that "it was cathartic."
On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in a private ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple have three children, a son born in 2010,
a daughter born in 2016,
and another son born in 2019.
Discography
Alanis (1991)
Now Is the Time (1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)
Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Stage
Tours
Opening act
To the Extreme Tour (1991) (opening act for Vanilla Ice)
1999 Summer Tour (1999) (opening act for Dave Matthews Band–Denver)
A Bigger Bang Tour (2005) (opening act for The Rolling Stones)
Headlining
Jagged Little Tour (1995)
Intellectual Intercourse Tour (1995–96)
Can't Not Tour (1996) featuring Radiohead
Dhanyavad Tour (1998)
Junkie Tour (1999) featuring Garbage and Liz Phair
One Tour (2000)
Under Rug Swept Tour (2001)
Toward Our Union Mended Tour (2002)
All I Really Want Tour (2003)
So-Called Chaos Tour (2004)
Diamond Wink Tour (2005) featuring Jason Mraz
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic Tour (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement Tour (2008–09)
Guardian Angel Tour (2012)
Intimate and Acoustic (2014)
World Tour (2018)
2021 World Tour: Celebrating 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill featuring Garbage and Cat Power (2021–22)
Co-headlining
5 ½ Weeks Tour (1999) (with Tori Amos)
Au Naturale Tour (2004) (with the Barenaked Ladies)
Exile in America Tour (2008) (with Matchbox Twenty)
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
List of diamond-certified albums in Canada
List of best-selling albums
References
Further reading
Rock on the Net
[ "Alanis Morissette – Artist Chart History"]. Billboard. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
[ "Alanis Morissette – Billboard Singles"]. Allmusic. Retrieved August 23, 2006.
Rock Chicks:The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now by Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Sydney. Rockpool Publishing.
External links
1974 births
Living people
Actresses from Los Angeles
Actresses from Ottawa
Alternative rock singers
American Buddhists
American dance musicians
American women pop singers
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American women singer-songwriters
American feminists
American film actresses
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American music video directors
American people of French descent
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
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Brit Award winners
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Canadian dance musicians
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian women pop singers
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Canadian women singer-songwriters
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Canadian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
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Canadian stage actresses
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Child pop musicians
Echo (music award) winners
Female music video directors
Feminist musicians
Former Roman Catholics
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Guitarists from California
Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award winners
Juno Award for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year winners
Juno Award for Album of the Year winners
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Juno Award for Single of the Year winners
Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year winners
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Maverick Records artists
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Musicians from Ottawa
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21st-century Canadian actresses
21st-century Canadian guitarists
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Singer-songwriters from California | false | [
"\"How Do I Deal\" is a song by American actress Jennifer Love Hewitt from the soundtrack to the film I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. The song was released as a single on November 17, 1998, with an accompanying music video. The single became Hewitt's one and only appearance on the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, peaking at number 59 in a seven-week run. Although not a big success in America, the single reached number five in New Zealand and peaked at number eight in Australia, where it is certified gold.\n\nTrack listings\nUS CD, 7-inch, and cassette single\n \"How Do I Deal\" (single version) – 3:23\n \"Try to Say Goodbye\" (performed by Jory Eve) – 3:36\n\nEuropean CD single\n \"How Do I Deal\" – 3:24\n \"Sugar Is Sweeter\" (performed by CJ Bolland) – 5:34\n\nAustralian CD single\n \"How Do I Deal\" – 3:23\n \"Sugar Is Sweeter\" (Danny Saber Remix featuring Justin Warfield, performed by CJ Bolland) – 4:57\n \"Try to Say Goodbye\" (performed by Jory Eve) – 3:35\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n143 Records singles\n1998 songs\n1999 singles\nJennifer Love Hewitt songs\nI Know What You Did Last Summer (franchise)\nMusic videos directed by Joseph Kahn\nSong recordings produced by Bruce Fairbairn\nSong recordings produced by David Foster\nSongs written for films\nWarner Records singles",
"\"Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far)\" is the debut single of Irish band the Thrills, taken from the album So Much for the City. It was released on 11 November 2002 but did not chart anywhere at first. After the song was re-released on 25 August 2003 following the success of \"Big Sur\", it reached number 17 on the Irish Singles Chart and number 33 on the UK Singles Chart.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2002 debut singles\n2002 songs\nThe Thrills songs\nVirgin Records singles"
]
|
[
"Stirling Moss",
"Popular culture"
]
| C_82e2b9fa33714068bc722fe9c3394c42_0 | What is Moss conection to popular culture? | 1 | What is Moss conection to popular culture? | Stirling Moss | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On June 12 the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver. For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car which stars Peter Kay, a role he took on, having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, as he saw the TV show as a way of introducing motorsport to the next generation. He is one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. Moss is also a supporter of the UK Independence Party. CANNOTANSWER | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. | Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020) was a British Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.
Early life
Moss was born in London, son of Alfred Moss, a dentist of Bray, Berkshire, and Aileen (née Craufurd). His grandfather was Jewish, from a family that changed their surname from Moses to Moss. He was brought up at Long White Cloud house on the south bank of the River Thames. His father was an amateur racing driver who had come 16th in the 1924 Indianapolis 500. Aileen Moss had also been involved in motorsport, entering prewar hillclimbs at the wheel of a Singer Nine. Stirling was a gifted horse rider as was his younger sister, Pat Moss, who became a successful rally driver in her own right and also married Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson.
Moss was educated at several independent schools: Shrewsbury House School in Surbiton, Clewer Manor Junior School, and the linked senior school, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, located at Hertford Heath, near Hertford. He disliked school and did not attain a good academic performance. At Haileybury, he was subjected to antisemitic bullying because of his Jewish roots. He concealed the bullying from his parents and used it as "motivation to succeed". Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at the age of nine, and drove it on the fields around Long White Cloud. He purchased his own car at age 15 after he obtained a driving licence. After the Second World War, Moss was ruled exempt from doing the mandatory two-year national service for men his age because he had nephritis.
Racing career
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962, winning 212 of the 529 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grands Prix. He competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career. He preferred to race British cars, stating, "Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one". At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing (as was Jack Brabham at Cooper). He remained the English driver with the most Formula One victories until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him after competing in more races.
1948–1954
Moss began his career at the wheel of his father Alfred's 328 BMW, DPX 653. Moss was one of the Cooper Car Company's first customers, using winnings from competing in horse-riding events to pay the deposit on a Cooper 500 racing car in 1948. He then persuaded his father, who opposed his racing and wanted him to be a dentist, to let him buy it. He soon demonstrated his ability with numerous wins at national and international levels, and continued to compete in Formula Three, with Coopers and Kiefts, after he had progressed to more senior categories.
His first major international race victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the wheel of a borrowed Jaguar XK120 in the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland. He went on to win the race six more times, in 1951 (Jaguar C-Type), 1955 (Mercedes-Benz 300SLR), 1958 and 1959 (Aston Martin DBR1), and 1960 and 1961 (Ferrari 250 GT). Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, approached Moss and offered him a Formula Two car to drive at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix before a full
-season in 1952. Moss and his father went to Apulia only to find out that the Ferrari car was to be driven by experienced driver Piero Taruffi and were incensed.
Also a competent rally driver, Moss was one of three people to have won a Coupe d'Or (Gold Cup) for three consecutive penalty-free runs on the Alpine Rally (Coupe des Alpes). He finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with Desmond Scannell and Autocar magazine editor John Cooper as co-drivers.
In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing the Cunningham team's 1.5-liter O.S.C.A. MT4 with American Bill Lloyd.
In 1953 Mercedes-Benz racing boss Alfred Neubauer had spoken to Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, about the possibility of Moss's joining the Mercedes Grand Prix team. Having seen him do well in a relatively uncompetitive car, and wanting to see how he would perform in a better one, Neubauer suggested Moss buy a Maserati for the 1954 season. He bought a Maserati 250F, and although the car's unreliability prevented his scoring high points in the 1954 Drivers' Championship he qualified alongside the Mercedes front runners several times and performed well in the races. He achieved his first Formula One victory when he won the non-Championship Oulton Park International Gold Cup in the Maserati.
In the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he passed both drivers who were regarded as the best in Formula One at the time—Juan Manuel Fangio in a Mercedes and Alberto Ascari in a Ferrari—and took the lead. Ascari retired with engine problems, and Moss led until lap 68 when his engine also failed. Fangio took the victory, and Moss pushed his Maserati to the finish line. Neubauer, already impressed when Moss had tested a Mercedes-Benz W196 at Hockenheim, promptly signed him for 1955.
1955
Moss's first World Championship victory was in the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, a race he was also the first British driver to win. Leading a 1–2–3–4 finish for Mercedes, it was the first time he beat Fangio, his teammate and arch rival, who was also his friend and mentor. It has been suggested that Fangio sportingly allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd. Moss himself asked Fangio repeatedly, and Fangio always replied: "No. You were just better than me that day." The same year, Moss also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the Targa Florio (sharing the drive with Peter Collins) and the Mille Miglia.
Mille Miglia
In 1955 Moss won Italy's thousand-mile Mille Miglia road race, an achievement Doug Nye described as the "most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history." He was paired with motor racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who prepared pace note for Moss, and the two completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. Motor Trend headlined it as "The Most Epic Drive. Ever." Before the race, he had taken a "magic pill" given to him by Fangio, and he has commented that although he did not know what was in it, "Dexedrine and Benzedrine were commonly used in rallies. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews." After the win, he spent the night and the following day driving his girlfriend to Cologne, stopping for breakfast in Munich and lunch in Stuttgart.
1956–1962
Moss won the Nassau Cup at the 1956 and 1957 Bahamas Speed Week. Also in 1957 he won on the longest circuit ever to hold a World Championship Grand Prix, the Pescara Circuit, where he again demonstrated his mastery of long-distance racing. The event lasted three hours and Moss beat Fangio, who started from pole position, by a little over 3 minutes.
In 1958, Moss's forward-thinking attitude made waves in the racing world. Moss won the first race of the season in a rear-engined F1 car, which became the common design by 1961. At Monza that year, he raced in the "Eldorado" Maserati in the Race of Two Worlds, the first single-seater car in Europe to be sponsored by a non-racing brand—the Eldorado Ice Cream Company. This was the first case in Europe of contemporary sponsorship, with the ice cream maker's colors replacing the ones assigned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).
Moss's sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula One World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty after the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss defended him. Hawthorn was accused of reversing on the track after spinning and stalling his car on an uphill section. Moss had shouted advice to Hawthorn to steer downhill, against traffic, to bump-start the car. Moss's quick thinking, and his defence of Hawthorn before the stewards, preserved Hawthorn's 6 points for finishing second behind Moss. Hawthorn went on to beat Moss for the championship title by one point, even though he had won only one race that year to Moss's four. Moss's loss in the championship could also be attributed to an error in communication between his pit crew and the driver at one race. A point was given for the fastest lap in each race, and the crew signaled "HAWT REC" meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap. Moss read this as "HAWT REG" and thought Hawthorn was making regular laps, so did not try to set a fast lap. The crew was supposed to signal the time of the lap, so Moss would know what he had to beat.
Moss was as gifted in sports cars as in Grand Prix cars. To his victories in the Tourist Trophy, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Mille Miglia he added three consecutive wins (1958–1960) in the 1000 km Nürburgring, the first two in an Aston Martin (in which he did most of the driving), and the third in a Tipo 61 "birdcage" Maserati, co-driving with the American Dan Gurney. The pair lost time when an oil hose blew off, but despite the wet-weather, they made up the time and took first place.
In the 1960 Formula One season, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus 18. Seriously injured in an accident at the Burnenville curve during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he missed the next three races but recovered sufficiently to win the final one of the season, the United States Grand Prix at Riverside, California.
For the 1961 Formula One season, run under new 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari fielded the "sharknose" Ferrari 156 with an all-new V6 engine. Moss's Climax-engined Lotus was comparatively underpowered, but he won the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, beating the Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill, and went on to win the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.
In 1962, he crashed his Lotus heavily during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood held on Monday 23 April. The accident put him in a coma for a month, and for six months the left side of his body was partially paralysed. He recovered, but retired from professional racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the following year, when he lapped a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt he had not regained his previously instinctive command of the car. He had been runner-up in the Drivers' Championship four years in succession, from 1955 to 1958, and third in each of the next three years.
Speed records
1950
At the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a steeply banked oval track near Paris, Moss and Leslie Johnson took turns at the wheel of the latter's Jaguar XK120 to average for 24 hours, including stops for fuel and tyres. Changing drivers every three hours, they covered a total of . It was the first time a production car had averaged over for 24 hours.
1952
Revisiting Montlhéry, Moss was one of a four-driver team, led by Johnson, who drove a factory-owned Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for 7 days and nights at the French track. Moss, Johnson, Bert Hadley and Jack Fairman averaged to take four World records and five International Class C records, and covered a total of .
1957
In August Moss broke five International Class F records in the purpose-built MG EX181 at Bonneville Salt Flats. The streamlined, supercharged car's speed for the flying kilometer was 245.64 mph, which was the average of two runs in opposite directions.
Broadcasting career
Away from driving, in 1962 he acted as a colour commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR races. He eventually left ABC in 1980. Moss narrated the official 1988 Formula One season review along with Tony Jardine.
Moss also narrated the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car, which stars Peter Kay.
Return to racing
Although ostensibly retired from racing since 1962, Moss did make a number of one-off appearances in professional motorsport events in the following two decades. He also competed in the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally in a Mercedes-Benz, but retired from the event in the Algerian Sahara. The Holden Torana he shared with Jack Brabham in the 1976 Bathurst 1000 was hit from behind on the grid and eventually retired with engine failure. Moss, at the wheel of the Torana when the V8 engine let go, was criticised by other drivers for staying on the racing line for over ⅔ of the 6.172 km long circuit while returning to the pits as the car was dropping large amounts of oil onto the road. He also shared a Volkswagen Golf GTI with Denny Hulme in the 1979 Benson & Hedges 500 at Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand.
In 1980 he made a comeback to regular competition, in the British Saloon Car Championship with the works-backed GTi Engineering Audi team. For the 1980 season Moss was the team's number two driver to team co-owner Richard Lloyd. For the 1981 season Moss stayed with Audi, as the team moved to Tom Walkinshaw Racing management, driving alongside Martin Brundle.
Throughout his retirement he raced in events for historic cars, driving on behalf of and at the invitation of others, as well as campaigning his own OSCA FS 372 and other vehicles. In 2004, as part of its promotion for the new SLR, Mercedes-Benz reunited Moss with the 300 SLR "No. 722" in which he won the Mille Miglia nearly 50 years earlier. One reporter who rode with Moss that day noted that the 75-year-old driver was "so good . . . that even old and crippled [he was] still better than nearly everyone else". On 9 June 2011 during qualifying for the Le Mans Legends race, Moss announced on Radio Le Mans that he had finally retired from racing, saying that he had scared himself that afternoon. He was 81.
Post racing career
Lister Cars announced the building for sale of the Lister Knobbly Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London in June 2016. The car is built to the exact specification of the 1958 model, is the only magnesium-bodied car in the world, and is the only car that was ever endorsed by Moss. Brian Lister invited Moss to drive for Lister on three separate occasions, at Goodwood in 1954, Silverstone in 1958 and at Sebring in 1959, and to celebrate these races, 10 special edition lightweight Lister Knobbly cars are being built. The company announced that the cars will be available for both road and race use, and Moss would personally be handing over each car.
Honours
In 1990, Moss was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In the New Year Honours 2000 List, Moss was made a Knight Bachelor for services to motor racing. On 21 March 2000, he was knighted by Prince Charles, standing in for the Queen, who was on an official visit to Australia.
He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy.
In 2006, Moss was awarded the FIA gold medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to motorsport.
In December 2008, McLaren-Mercedes unveiled their final model of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The model was named in honour of Moss, hence, Mercedes McLaren SLR Stirling Moss, which has a top speed of with wind deflectors instead of a windscreen.
In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modelling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Moss was ranked the 29th best Formula One driver of all time.
Following Moss's death the Kinrara Trophy race at the Goodwood Revival meeting was renamed in his honour. It is a race for GT cars that competed before 1963.
Biographies
In 1957, Moss published an autobiography called In the Track Of Speed, first published by Muller, London.
In 1963, motorsport author and commentator Ken Purdy published a biographical book entitled All But My Life about Moss (first published by William Kimber & Co, London), based on material gathered through interviews with Moss.
In 2015, when he was aged 85, Moss published a second autobiography, entitled My Racing Life, written with motor sports writer Simon Taylor. In 2016, Philip Porter published the first volume of Stirling Moss - The Definitive Biography covering the period from birth up to the end of 1955, one of Moss's greatest years.
Popular culture
During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On 12 June the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver.
For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. Moss was the subject of a cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye that said he was interested in cars, women and sex, in that order. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. Although there were complaints to the magazine about the cartoons, Moss rang Private Eye to ask if he could use it as a Christmas card.
He was one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. In 2004, Moss was a supporter of the UK Independence Party.
Moss was a Mercedes-Benz Brand Ambassador, having kept a close relationship with the brand, and remained an enthusiast and collector of the brand, which includes the Mercedes-Benz W113, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss among others.
Personal life and death
Moss was married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson; an heir to the Canadian brewer Molson. They were married in 1957 and separated three years later. His second wife was the American public relations executive Elaine Barbarino. They were married in 1964 and divorced in 1968. Their daughter Allison was born in 1967. His third wife was Susie Paine, the daughter of an old friend. They were married from 1980 until his death in 2020. Their son Elliot was born in 1980.
In April 1960, Moss was found guilty of dangerous driving. He was fined £50 and banned from driving for one year after an incident near Chetwynd, Shropshire, when he was test-driving a Mini.
Moss's 80th birthday, on 17 September 2009, fell on the eve of the Goodwood Revival and Lord March celebrated with an 80-car parade on each of the three days. Moss drove a different car each day: a Mercedes-Benz W196 (an open-wheel variant), the Lotus 18 in which he had won the 1961 Monaco GP, and an Aston Martin DBR1.
On 7 March 2010, Moss broke both ankles and four bones in a foot, and also chipped four vertebrae and suffered skin lesions, when he plunged down a lift shaft at his home. In December 2016, he was admitted to hospital in Singapore with a serious chest infection. As a result of this illness and a subsequent lengthy recovery period, Moss announced his retirement from public life in January 2018.
Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, on 12 April 2020, aged 90, after a long illness.
Racing record
Career highlights
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Indicates shared drive with Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling.
* Indicates shared drive with Cesare Perdisa.
‡ Indicates shared drive with Tony Brooks.
[a] After Moss retired from the race he took over the car of Trintignant. Both drivers did not receive any points for their shared drive.
Non-championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
(Races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete 24 Hours of Le Mans results
Complete 12 Hours of Sebring results
Complete 12 Hours of Reims results
Complete Mille Miglia results
Complete Rallye de Monte Carlo results
Complete Bathurst 1000 results
Complete British Saloon Car Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap.)
† Events with 2 races staged for the different classes.
References
External links
Sir Stirling Moss – Official Web Site
Stirling Moss in the 24 hours of Le Mans
Grand Prix History – Hall of Fame, Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss profile at The 500 Owners Association
BBC Face to Face interview with Stirling Moss and John Freeman, broadcast 12 June 1960
1929 births
2020 deaths
12 Hours of Sebring drivers
24 Hours of Le Mans drivers
BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners
Bonneville 200 MPH Club members
BRDC Gold Star winners
Brighton Speed Trials people
British Racing Partnership Formula One drivers
British Touring Car Championship drivers
Connaught Formula One drivers
Cooper Formula One drivers
English Formula One drivers
English people of Jewish descent
English racing drivers
ERA Formula One drivers
Formula One race winners
Formula One team owners
Hersham and Walton Motors Formula One drivers
International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees
Knights Bachelor
Maserati Formula One drivers
Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
People from West Kensington
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Rob Walker Racing Team Formula One drivers
Sportspeople from London
Segrave Trophy recipients
Vanwall Formula One drivers
World Sportscar Championship drivers | true | [
"A moss bioreactor is a photobioreactor used for the cultivation and propagation of mosses. It is usually used in molecular farming for the production of recombinant protein using transgenic moss. In environmental science moss bioreactors are used to multiply peat mosses e.g. by the Mossclone consortium to monitor air pollution.\n\nMoss is a very frugal photoautotrophic organism that has been kept in vitro for research purposes since the beginning of the 20th century.\n\nThe first moss bioreactors for the model organism Physcomitrella patens were developed in the 1990s to comply with the safety standards regarding the handling of genetically modified organisms and to gain sufficient biomass for experimental purposes.\n\nFunctional principle \nThe moss bioreactor is used to cultivate moss in a suspension culture in agitated, and aerated liquid medium. The culture is kept under lighting with temperature and pH value held constant. The culture medium—often a minimal medium—contains all nutrients and minerals needed for growth of the moss.\n\nTo ensure a maximum growth rate, the moss is kept at the protonema stage by continuous mechanical disruption, e.g. by using rotating blades. Once the density of the culture has reached a certain threshold, the lack of nutrients and the increasing concentration of phytohormones in the medium triggers the differentiation of the protonema to the adult gametophyte. At this point the culture has to be diluted with fresh medium if it is intended for further use.\n\nAccording to the intended yield, this basic principle can be adapted to various types and sizes of bioreactors. The cultivation chamber can, for example, consist of a column, a tube, or exchangeable plastic bags.\n\nProduction of biopharmaceuticals \nVarious biopharmaceuticals have already been produced using moss bioreactors. Ideally, the recombinant protein can be directly purified from the culture medium. One example for this production method is factor H: this molecule is part of the human complement system. Defects in the corresponding gene are associated with human diseases such as severe kidney and retinal disorders. Biologically active recombinant factor H was produced in a moss bioreactor for the first time in 2011. The enzyme alpha-galactosidase now is allowed to be produced in moss bioreactors by the German Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices. It will be tested as enzyme replacement therapy in the treatment of Fabry's disease. The clinical trial phase 1 was completed in 2017.\n\nSee also \nAlgae bioreactor\nBioreactor\nMolecular farming\nPhotobioreactor\nPhyscomitrella patens\n\nReferences \n\nBiotechnology\nBioreactors",
"This Time – The First Four Years is the first official greatest hits album by British new wave group Culture Club, released by Virgin Records on 6 April 1987. Its release came one year after the band had split up.\n\nOverview\nThe compilation exclusively includes, in its vinyl edition, Culture Club's most successful hits. The one track which was never available in single format is \"Black Money\" (originally on the band's second album, Colour by Numbers), which was intended to be released to promote this collection, but never actually came out. The album includes a wide selection of tracks taken from all their albums (including more than half the tracks from the Colour by Numbers album), as well as the group's contribution to the Electric Dreams film soundtrack; \"Love Is Love\". For many countries, it was the first time that their hit \"Time (Clock of the Heart)\" was included on an album.\n\nTwo additional tracks are featured on the CD and cassette version: the remix of \"I'll Tumble 4 Ya\" and a medley segueing the remixes of \"It's a Miracle\" and \"Miss Me Blind\".\n\nThe bulk of these tracks would be re-issued on numerous compilations for years after.\n\nTrack listing\n \"Karma Chameleon\" - 4:01 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss/Pickett) from Colour by Numbers\n \"Church of the Poison Mind\" - 3:31 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from Colour by Numbers\n \"Miss Me Blind\" - 4:29 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from Colour by Numbers\n \"Time (Clock of the Heart)\" - 3:43 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from Kissing to Be Clever (US Edition)\n \"It's a Miracle\" - 3:25 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss/Pickett) from Colour by Numbers\n \"Black Money\" - 5:19 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from Colour by Numbers\n \"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me\" - 4:24 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from ''Kissing to Be Clever\n \"Move Away\" - 4:10 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss/Pickett) from From Luxury to Heartache\n \"I'll Tumble 4 Ya\" - 2:35 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from Kissing to Be Clever\n \"Love Is Love\" - 3:52 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from Electric Dreams\n \"The War Song\" - 3:59 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from Waking Up with the House on Fire\n \"Victims\" - 4:55 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) from Colour by Numbers\n \"I'll Tumble 4 Ya\" (U.S. 12\" Remix) - 4:40 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss) [CD/MC bonus track] from Kissing to Be Clever\n \"It's a Miracle/Miss Me Blind\" (U.S. 12\" Remix) - 9:12 (O'Dowd/Hay/Craig/Moss/Pickett) [CD/MC bonus track] from Colour by Numbers\n\nPersonnel\n\nBand/musicians\nBoy George: lead vocals and lyrics\nRoy Hay: guitars, keyboards, sitar, synth guitar\nMikey Craig: bass\nJon Moss: drums and percussion\nHelen Terry: female lead and background vocals\n for the other musicians, see Culture Club's first four albums\n\nStaff/production\nSteve Levine: production, except track 8 \nArif Mardin, Lew Hahn: production on track 8\nAssorted iMaGes: album cover\nDavid Levine, Jamie Morgan, Mark LeBon, Kate Garner, Stevie Hughes: photography\nMitaka: booklet Japanese translation\n for the other members of staff and production, see Culture Club's first four albums\n\nRelease details\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n AllMusic review\n FnacMusic.com where it is possible to listen to short samples of all tracks on the collection \n Amazon.com Use the \"Search\" box for infos on Culture Club's albums and collections\n Artist Direct Use \"Search\" box for infos on Culture Club's albums and collections\n Rate Your Music Use search box for infos on Culture Club's albums and collections\n\n1987 compilation albums\nCulture Club albums\nAlbums produced by Steve Levine\nVirgin Records compilation albums\nEpic Records compilation albums"
]
|
[
"Stirling Moss",
"Popular culture",
"What is Moss conection to popular culture?",
"During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances."
]
| C_82e2b9fa33714068bc722fe9c3394c42_0 | Why was he recognised? | 2 | Why was Stirling Moss recognised? | Stirling Moss | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On June 12 the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver. For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car which stars Peter Kay, a role he took on, having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, as he saw the TV show as a way of introducing motorsport to the next generation. He is one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. Moss is also a supporter of the UK Independence Party. CANNOTANSWER | many media appearances. | Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020) was a British Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.
Early life
Moss was born in London, son of Alfred Moss, a dentist of Bray, Berkshire, and Aileen (née Craufurd). His grandfather was Jewish, from a family that changed their surname from Moses to Moss. He was brought up at Long White Cloud house on the south bank of the River Thames. His father was an amateur racing driver who had come 16th in the 1924 Indianapolis 500. Aileen Moss had also been involved in motorsport, entering prewar hillclimbs at the wheel of a Singer Nine. Stirling was a gifted horse rider as was his younger sister, Pat Moss, who became a successful rally driver in her own right and also married Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson.
Moss was educated at several independent schools: Shrewsbury House School in Surbiton, Clewer Manor Junior School, and the linked senior school, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, located at Hertford Heath, near Hertford. He disliked school and did not attain a good academic performance. At Haileybury, he was subjected to antisemitic bullying because of his Jewish roots. He concealed the bullying from his parents and used it as "motivation to succeed". Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at the age of nine, and drove it on the fields around Long White Cloud. He purchased his own car at age 15 after he obtained a driving licence. After the Second World War, Moss was ruled exempt from doing the mandatory two-year national service for men his age because he had nephritis.
Racing career
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962, winning 212 of the 529 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grands Prix. He competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career. He preferred to race British cars, stating, "Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one". At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing (as was Jack Brabham at Cooper). He remained the English driver with the most Formula One victories until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him after competing in more races.
1948–1954
Moss began his career at the wheel of his father Alfred's 328 BMW, DPX 653. Moss was one of the Cooper Car Company's first customers, using winnings from competing in horse-riding events to pay the deposit on a Cooper 500 racing car in 1948. He then persuaded his father, who opposed his racing and wanted him to be a dentist, to let him buy it. He soon demonstrated his ability with numerous wins at national and international levels, and continued to compete in Formula Three, with Coopers and Kiefts, after he had progressed to more senior categories.
His first major international race victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the wheel of a borrowed Jaguar XK120 in the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland. He went on to win the race six more times, in 1951 (Jaguar C-Type), 1955 (Mercedes-Benz 300SLR), 1958 and 1959 (Aston Martin DBR1), and 1960 and 1961 (Ferrari 250 GT). Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, approached Moss and offered him a Formula Two car to drive at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix before a full
-season in 1952. Moss and his father went to Apulia only to find out that the Ferrari car was to be driven by experienced driver Piero Taruffi and were incensed.
Also a competent rally driver, Moss was one of three people to have won a Coupe d'Or (Gold Cup) for three consecutive penalty-free runs on the Alpine Rally (Coupe des Alpes). He finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with Desmond Scannell and Autocar magazine editor John Cooper as co-drivers.
In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing the Cunningham team's 1.5-liter O.S.C.A. MT4 with American Bill Lloyd.
In 1953 Mercedes-Benz racing boss Alfred Neubauer had spoken to Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, about the possibility of Moss's joining the Mercedes Grand Prix team. Having seen him do well in a relatively uncompetitive car, and wanting to see how he would perform in a better one, Neubauer suggested Moss buy a Maserati for the 1954 season. He bought a Maserati 250F, and although the car's unreliability prevented his scoring high points in the 1954 Drivers' Championship he qualified alongside the Mercedes front runners several times and performed well in the races. He achieved his first Formula One victory when he won the non-Championship Oulton Park International Gold Cup in the Maserati.
In the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he passed both drivers who were regarded as the best in Formula One at the time—Juan Manuel Fangio in a Mercedes and Alberto Ascari in a Ferrari—and took the lead. Ascari retired with engine problems, and Moss led until lap 68 when his engine also failed. Fangio took the victory, and Moss pushed his Maserati to the finish line. Neubauer, already impressed when Moss had tested a Mercedes-Benz W196 at Hockenheim, promptly signed him for 1955.
1955
Moss's first World Championship victory was in the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, a race he was also the first British driver to win. Leading a 1–2–3–4 finish for Mercedes, it was the first time he beat Fangio, his teammate and arch rival, who was also his friend and mentor. It has been suggested that Fangio sportingly allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd. Moss himself asked Fangio repeatedly, and Fangio always replied: "No. You were just better than me that day." The same year, Moss also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the Targa Florio (sharing the drive with Peter Collins) and the Mille Miglia.
Mille Miglia
In 1955 Moss won Italy's thousand-mile Mille Miglia road race, an achievement Doug Nye described as the "most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history." He was paired with motor racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who prepared pace note for Moss, and the two completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. Motor Trend headlined it as "The Most Epic Drive. Ever." Before the race, he had taken a "magic pill" given to him by Fangio, and he has commented that although he did not know what was in it, "Dexedrine and Benzedrine were commonly used in rallies. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews." After the win, he spent the night and the following day driving his girlfriend to Cologne, stopping for breakfast in Munich and lunch in Stuttgart.
1956–1962
Moss won the Nassau Cup at the 1956 and 1957 Bahamas Speed Week. Also in 1957 he won on the longest circuit ever to hold a World Championship Grand Prix, the Pescara Circuit, where he again demonstrated his mastery of long-distance racing. The event lasted three hours and Moss beat Fangio, who started from pole position, by a little over 3 minutes.
In 1958, Moss's forward-thinking attitude made waves in the racing world. Moss won the first race of the season in a rear-engined F1 car, which became the common design by 1961. At Monza that year, he raced in the "Eldorado" Maserati in the Race of Two Worlds, the first single-seater car in Europe to be sponsored by a non-racing brand—the Eldorado Ice Cream Company. This was the first case in Europe of contemporary sponsorship, with the ice cream maker's colors replacing the ones assigned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).
Moss's sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula One World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty after the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss defended him. Hawthorn was accused of reversing on the track after spinning and stalling his car on an uphill section. Moss had shouted advice to Hawthorn to steer downhill, against traffic, to bump-start the car. Moss's quick thinking, and his defence of Hawthorn before the stewards, preserved Hawthorn's 6 points for finishing second behind Moss. Hawthorn went on to beat Moss for the championship title by one point, even though he had won only one race that year to Moss's four. Moss's loss in the championship could also be attributed to an error in communication between his pit crew and the driver at one race. A point was given for the fastest lap in each race, and the crew signaled "HAWT REC" meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap. Moss read this as "HAWT REG" and thought Hawthorn was making regular laps, so did not try to set a fast lap. The crew was supposed to signal the time of the lap, so Moss would know what he had to beat.
Moss was as gifted in sports cars as in Grand Prix cars. To his victories in the Tourist Trophy, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Mille Miglia he added three consecutive wins (1958–1960) in the 1000 km Nürburgring, the first two in an Aston Martin (in which he did most of the driving), and the third in a Tipo 61 "birdcage" Maserati, co-driving with the American Dan Gurney. The pair lost time when an oil hose blew off, but despite the wet-weather, they made up the time and took first place.
In the 1960 Formula One season, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus 18. Seriously injured in an accident at the Burnenville curve during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he missed the next three races but recovered sufficiently to win the final one of the season, the United States Grand Prix at Riverside, California.
For the 1961 Formula One season, run under new 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari fielded the "sharknose" Ferrari 156 with an all-new V6 engine. Moss's Climax-engined Lotus was comparatively underpowered, but he won the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, beating the Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill, and went on to win the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.
In 1962, he crashed his Lotus heavily during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood held on Monday 23 April. The accident put him in a coma for a month, and for six months the left side of his body was partially paralysed. He recovered, but retired from professional racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the following year, when he lapped a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt he had not regained his previously instinctive command of the car. He had been runner-up in the Drivers' Championship four years in succession, from 1955 to 1958, and third in each of the next three years.
Speed records
1950
At the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a steeply banked oval track near Paris, Moss and Leslie Johnson took turns at the wheel of the latter's Jaguar XK120 to average for 24 hours, including stops for fuel and tyres. Changing drivers every three hours, they covered a total of . It was the first time a production car had averaged over for 24 hours.
1952
Revisiting Montlhéry, Moss was one of a four-driver team, led by Johnson, who drove a factory-owned Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for 7 days and nights at the French track. Moss, Johnson, Bert Hadley and Jack Fairman averaged to take four World records and five International Class C records, and covered a total of .
1957
In August Moss broke five International Class F records in the purpose-built MG EX181 at Bonneville Salt Flats. The streamlined, supercharged car's speed for the flying kilometer was 245.64 mph, which was the average of two runs in opposite directions.
Broadcasting career
Away from driving, in 1962 he acted as a colour commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR races. He eventually left ABC in 1980. Moss narrated the official 1988 Formula One season review along with Tony Jardine.
Moss also narrated the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car, which stars Peter Kay.
Return to racing
Although ostensibly retired from racing since 1962, Moss did make a number of one-off appearances in professional motorsport events in the following two decades. He also competed in the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally in a Mercedes-Benz, but retired from the event in the Algerian Sahara. The Holden Torana he shared with Jack Brabham in the 1976 Bathurst 1000 was hit from behind on the grid and eventually retired with engine failure. Moss, at the wheel of the Torana when the V8 engine let go, was criticised by other drivers for staying on the racing line for over ⅔ of the 6.172 km long circuit while returning to the pits as the car was dropping large amounts of oil onto the road. He also shared a Volkswagen Golf GTI with Denny Hulme in the 1979 Benson & Hedges 500 at Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand.
In 1980 he made a comeback to regular competition, in the British Saloon Car Championship with the works-backed GTi Engineering Audi team. For the 1980 season Moss was the team's number two driver to team co-owner Richard Lloyd. For the 1981 season Moss stayed with Audi, as the team moved to Tom Walkinshaw Racing management, driving alongside Martin Brundle.
Throughout his retirement he raced in events for historic cars, driving on behalf of and at the invitation of others, as well as campaigning his own OSCA FS 372 and other vehicles. In 2004, as part of its promotion for the new SLR, Mercedes-Benz reunited Moss with the 300 SLR "No. 722" in which he won the Mille Miglia nearly 50 years earlier. One reporter who rode with Moss that day noted that the 75-year-old driver was "so good . . . that even old and crippled [he was] still better than nearly everyone else". On 9 June 2011 during qualifying for the Le Mans Legends race, Moss announced on Radio Le Mans that he had finally retired from racing, saying that he had scared himself that afternoon. He was 81.
Post racing career
Lister Cars announced the building for sale of the Lister Knobbly Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London in June 2016. The car is built to the exact specification of the 1958 model, is the only magnesium-bodied car in the world, and is the only car that was ever endorsed by Moss. Brian Lister invited Moss to drive for Lister on three separate occasions, at Goodwood in 1954, Silverstone in 1958 and at Sebring in 1959, and to celebrate these races, 10 special edition lightweight Lister Knobbly cars are being built. The company announced that the cars will be available for both road and race use, and Moss would personally be handing over each car.
Honours
In 1990, Moss was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In the New Year Honours 2000 List, Moss was made a Knight Bachelor for services to motor racing. On 21 March 2000, he was knighted by Prince Charles, standing in for the Queen, who was on an official visit to Australia.
He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy.
In 2006, Moss was awarded the FIA gold medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to motorsport.
In December 2008, McLaren-Mercedes unveiled their final model of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The model was named in honour of Moss, hence, Mercedes McLaren SLR Stirling Moss, which has a top speed of with wind deflectors instead of a windscreen.
In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modelling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Moss was ranked the 29th best Formula One driver of all time.
Following Moss's death the Kinrara Trophy race at the Goodwood Revival meeting was renamed in his honour. It is a race for GT cars that competed before 1963.
Biographies
In 1957, Moss published an autobiography called In the Track Of Speed, first published by Muller, London.
In 1963, motorsport author and commentator Ken Purdy published a biographical book entitled All But My Life about Moss (first published by William Kimber & Co, London), based on material gathered through interviews with Moss.
In 2015, when he was aged 85, Moss published a second autobiography, entitled My Racing Life, written with motor sports writer Simon Taylor. In 2016, Philip Porter published the first volume of Stirling Moss - The Definitive Biography covering the period from birth up to the end of 1955, one of Moss's greatest years.
Popular culture
During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On 12 June the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver.
For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. Moss was the subject of a cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye that said he was interested in cars, women and sex, in that order. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. Although there were complaints to the magazine about the cartoons, Moss rang Private Eye to ask if he could use it as a Christmas card.
He was one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. In 2004, Moss was a supporter of the UK Independence Party.
Moss was a Mercedes-Benz Brand Ambassador, having kept a close relationship with the brand, and remained an enthusiast and collector of the brand, which includes the Mercedes-Benz W113, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss among others.
Personal life and death
Moss was married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson; an heir to the Canadian brewer Molson. They were married in 1957 and separated three years later. His second wife was the American public relations executive Elaine Barbarino. They were married in 1964 and divorced in 1968. Their daughter Allison was born in 1967. His third wife was Susie Paine, the daughter of an old friend. They were married from 1980 until his death in 2020. Their son Elliot was born in 1980.
In April 1960, Moss was found guilty of dangerous driving. He was fined £50 and banned from driving for one year after an incident near Chetwynd, Shropshire, when he was test-driving a Mini.
Moss's 80th birthday, on 17 September 2009, fell on the eve of the Goodwood Revival and Lord March celebrated with an 80-car parade on each of the three days. Moss drove a different car each day: a Mercedes-Benz W196 (an open-wheel variant), the Lotus 18 in which he had won the 1961 Monaco GP, and an Aston Martin DBR1.
On 7 March 2010, Moss broke both ankles and four bones in a foot, and also chipped four vertebrae and suffered skin lesions, when he plunged down a lift shaft at his home. In December 2016, he was admitted to hospital in Singapore with a serious chest infection. As a result of this illness and a subsequent lengthy recovery period, Moss announced his retirement from public life in January 2018.
Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, on 12 April 2020, aged 90, after a long illness.
Racing record
Career highlights
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Indicates shared drive with Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling.
* Indicates shared drive with Cesare Perdisa.
‡ Indicates shared drive with Tony Brooks.
[a] After Moss retired from the race he took over the car of Trintignant. Both drivers did not receive any points for their shared drive.
Non-championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
(Races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete 24 Hours of Le Mans results
Complete 12 Hours of Sebring results
Complete 12 Hours of Reims results
Complete Mille Miglia results
Complete Rallye de Monte Carlo results
Complete Bathurst 1000 results
Complete British Saloon Car Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap.)
† Events with 2 races staged for the different classes.
References
External links
Sir Stirling Moss – Official Web Site
Stirling Moss in the 24 hours of Le Mans
Grand Prix History – Hall of Fame, Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss profile at The 500 Owners Association
BBC Face to Face interview with Stirling Moss and John Freeman, broadcast 12 June 1960
1929 births
2020 deaths
12 Hours of Sebring drivers
24 Hours of Le Mans drivers
BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners
Bonneville 200 MPH Club members
BRDC Gold Star winners
Brighton Speed Trials people
British Racing Partnership Formula One drivers
British Touring Car Championship drivers
Connaught Formula One drivers
Cooper Formula One drivers
English Formula One drivers
English people of Jewish descent
English racing drivers
ERA Formula One drivers
Formula One race winners
Formula One team owners
Hersham and Walton Motors Formula One drivers
International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees
Knights Bachelor
Maserati Formula One drivers
Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
People from West Kensington
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Rob Walker Racing Team Formula One drivers
Sportspeople from London
Segrave Trophy recipients
Vanwall Formula One drivers
World Sportscar Championship drivers | true | [
"Khiḍr Khān Surak (, ) was the governor of Bengal from 1539 to 1541 CE.\n\nHistory\nWhen Sher Shah Suri ascended to the throne of Delhi in 1539, he appointed Khan to govern the province of Bengal.\n\nIn 1541, Sher Shah Suri, who recognised the importance of the Bengal province for the development of the Sur Empire, was informed of a number of Khan's treacherous acts. He was informed of Khan's marriage to a daughter of Ghiyasuddin Mahmud Shah, who was the late Sultan of the Bengal Sultanate's former Hussain Shahi dynasty that Suri defeated in 1538. It is thought that Khan married the late Sultan's daughter as a method to claim independence and be known as the rightful sovereign heir of the Hussain Shahi dynasty. Suri set off for Bengal to deal with Khan. Upon reaching him, Suri questioned Khan on why he married the princess without his consent and why he was sat on the Tawqi (raised platform) as the independent Sultans of Bengal used to do. As a result of Khan's treachery, Suri swiftly dismissed him as governor and imprisoned him. Suri then divided Bengal into numerous administrative units each governed by a Muqta and then appointed Qazi Fazilat of Agra as the Chief of all of the Muqtas of Bengal.\n\nSee also\nList of rulers of Bengal\nHistory of Bengal\nHistory of Bangladesh\nHistory of India\n\nReferences\n\nHistory of Bengal\nHistory of Bangladesh\n16th-century Indian Muslims",
"The Clock Strikes Twelve is a collection of stories by author H. Russell Wakefield. It was released in 1946 and was the first collection of the author's stories to be published by Arkham House. It was published in an edition of 4,040 copies.\n\nContents\n\nThe Clock Strikes Twelve contains the following tales:\n\n \"Why I Write Ghost Stories\"\n \"Into Outer Darkness\"\n \"The Alley\"\n \"Jay Walkers\"\n \"Ingredient X\"\n \"“I Recognised the Voice”\"\n \"Farewell Performance\"\n \"Not Quite Cricket\"\n \"In Collaboration\"\n \"A Stitch in Time\"\n \"Lucky's Grove\"\n \"Red Feathers\"\n \"Happy Ending?\"\n \"The First Sheaf\"\n \"Masrur\"\n \"A Fishing Story\"\n \"Used Car\"\n \"Death of a Poacher\"\n \"Knock! Knock! Who's There?\"\n\nReferences\n\n1946 short story collections\nSingle-writer horror short story collections\nFantasy short story collections\nShort stories by H. Russell Wakefield\nArkham House books"
]
|
[
"Stirling Moss",
"Popular culture",
"What is Moss conection to popular culture?",
"During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances.",
"Why was he recognised?",
"many media appearances."
]
| C_82e2b9fa33714068bc722fe9c3394c42_0 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 3 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article besides Stirling Moss being recognised for many media appearances? | Stirling Moss | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On June 12 the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver. For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car which stars Peter Kay, a role he took on, having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, as he saw the TV show as a way of introducing motorsport to the next generation. He is one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. Moss is also a supporter of the UK Independence Party. CANNOTANSWER | As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. | Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020) was a British Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.
Early life
Moss was born in London, son of Alfred Moss, a dentist of Bray, Berkshire, and Aileen (née Craufurd). His grandfather was Jewish, from a family that changed their surname from Moses to Moss. He was brought up at Long White Cloud house on the south bank of the River Thames. His father was an amateur racing driver who had come 16th in the 1924 Indianapolis 500. Aileen Moss had also been involved in motorsport, entering prewar hillclimbs at the wheel of a Singer Nine. Stirling was a gifted horse rider as was his younger sister, Pat Moss, who became a successful rally driver in her own right and also married Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson.
Moss was educated at several independent schools: Shrewsbury House School in Surbiton, Clewer Manor Junior School, and the linked senior school, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, located at Hertford Heath, near Hertford. He disliked school and did not attain a good academic performance. At Haileybury, he was subjected to antisemitic bullying because of his Jewish roots. He concealed the bullying from his parents and used it as "motivation to succeed". Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at the age of nine, and drove it on the fields around Long White Cloud. He purchased his own car at age 15 after he obtained a driving licence. After the Second World War, Moss was ruled exempt from doing the mandatory two-year national service for men his age because he had nephritis.
Racing career
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962, winning 212 of the 529 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grands Prix. He competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career. He preferred to race British cars, stating, "Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one". At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing (as was Jack Brabham at Cooper). He remained the English driver with the most Formula One victories until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him after competing in more races.
1948–1954
Moss began his career at the wheel of his father Alfred's 328 BMW, DPX 653. Moss was one of the Cooper Car Company's first customers, using winnings from competing in horse-riding events to pay the deposit on a Cooper 500 racing car in 1948. He then persuaded his father, who opposed his racing and wanted him to be a dentist, to let him buy it. He soon demonstrated his ability with numerous wins at national and international levels, and continued to compete in Formula Three, with Coopers and Kiefts, after he had progressed to more senior categories.
His first major international race victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the wheel of a borrowed Jaguar XK120 in the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland. He went on to win the race six more times, in 1951 (Jaguar C-Type), 1955 (Mercedes-Benz 300SLR), 1958 and 1959 (Aston Martin DBR1), and 1960 and 1961 (Ferrari 250 GT). Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, approached Moss and offered him a Formula Two car to drive at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix before a full
-season in 1952. Moss and his father went to Apulia only to find out that the Ferrari car was to be driven by experienced driver Piero Taruffi and were incensed.
Also a competent rally driver, Moss was one of three people to have won a Coupe d'Or (Gold Cup) for three consecutive penalty-free runs on the Alpine Rally (Coupe des Alpes). He finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with Desmond Scannell and Autocar magazine editor John Cooper as co-drivers.
In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing the Cunningham team's 1.5-liter O.S.C.A. MT4 with American Bill Lloyd.
In 1953 Mercedes-Benz racing boss Alfred Neubauer had spoken to Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, about the possibility of Moss's joining the Mercedes Grand Prix team. Having seen him do well in a relatively uncompetitive car, and wanting to see how he would perform in a better one, Neubauer suggested Moss buy a Maserati for the 1954 season. He bought a Maserati 250F, and although the car's unreliability prevented his scoring high points in the 1954 Drivers' Championship he qualified alongside the Mercedes front runners several times and performed well in the races. He achieved his first Formula One victory when he won the non-Championship Oulton Park International Gold Cup in the Maserati.
In the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he passed both drivers who were regarded as the best in Formula One at the time—Juan Manuel Fangio in a Mercedes and Alberto Ascari in a Ferrari—and took the lead. Ascari retired with engine problems, and Moss led until lap 68 when his engine also failed. Fangio took the victory, and Moss pushed his Maserati to the finish line. Neubauer, already impressed when Moss had tested a Mercedes-Benz W196 at Hockenheim, promptly signed him for 1955.
1955
Moss's first World Championship victory was in the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, a race he was also the first British driver to win. Leading a 1–2–3–4 finish for Mercedes, it was the first time he beat Fangio, his teammate and arch rival, who was also his friend and mentor. It has been suggested that Fangio sportingly allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd. Moss himself asked Fangio repeatedly, and Fangio always replied: "No. You were just better than me that day." The same year, Moss also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the Targa Florio (sharing the drive with Peter Collins) and the Mille Miglia.
Mille Miglia
In 1955 Moss won Italy's thousand-mile Mille Miglia road race, an achievement Doug Nye described as the "most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history." He was paired with motor racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who prepared pace note for Moss, and the two completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. Motor Trend headlined it as "The Most Epic Drive. Ever." Before the race, he had taken a "magic pill" given to him by Fangio, and he has commented that although he did not know what was in it, "Dexedrine and Benzedrine were commonly used in rallies. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews." After the win, he spent the night and the following day driving his girlfriend to Cologne, stopping for breakfast in Munich and lunch in Stuttgart.
1956–1962
Moss won the Nassau Cup at the 1956 and 1957 Bahamas Speed Week. Also in 1957 he won on the longest circuit ever to hold a World Championship Grand Prix, the Pescara Circuit, where he again demonstrated his mastery of long-distance racing. The event lasted three hours and Moss beat Fangio, who started from pole position, by a little over 3 minutes.
In 1958, Moss's forward-thinking attitude made waves in the racing world. Moss won the first race of the season in a rear-engined F1 car, which became the common design by 1961. At Monza that year, he raced in the "Eldorado" Maserati in the Race of Two Worlds, the first single-seater car in Europe to be sponsored by a non-racing brand—the Eldorado Ice Cream Company. This was the first case in Europe of contemporary sponsorship, with the ice cream maker's colors replacing the ones assigned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).
Moss's sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula One World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty after the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss defended him. Hawthorn was accused of reversing on the track after spinning and stalling his car on an uphill section. Moss had shouted advice to Hawthorn to steer downhill, against traffic, to bump-start the car. Moss's quick thinking, and his defence of Hawthorn before the stewards, preserved Hawthorn's 6 points for finishing second behind Moss. Hawthorn went on to beat Moss for the championship title by one point, even though he had won only one race that year to Moss's four. Moss's loss in the championship could also be attributed to an error in communication between his pit crew and the driver at one race. A point was given for the fastest lap in each race, and the crew signaled "HAWT REC" meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap. Moss read this as "HAWT REG" and thought Hawthorn was making regular laps, so did not try to set a fast lap. The crew was supposed to signal the time of the lap, so Moss would know what he had to beat.
Moss was as gifted in sports cars as in Grand Prix cars. To his victories in the Tourist Trophy, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Mille Miglia he added three consecutive wins (1958–1960) in the 1000 km Nürburgring, the first two in an Aston Martin (in which he did most of the driving), and the third in a Tipo 61 "birdcage" Maserati, co-driving with the American Dan Gurney. The pair lost time when an oil hose blew off, but despite the wet-weather, they made up the time and took first place.
In the 1960 Formula One season, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus 18. Seriously injured in an accident at the Burnenville curve during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he missed the next three races but recovered sufficiently to win the final one of the season, the United States Grand Prix at Riverside, California.
For the 1961 Formula One season, run under new 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari fielded the "sharknose" Ferrari 156 with an all-new V6 engine. Moss's Climax-engined Lotus was comparatively underpowered, but he won the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, beating the Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill, and went on to win the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.
In 1962, he crashed his Lotus heavily during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood held on Monday 23 April. The accident put him in a coma for a month, and for six months the left side of his body was partially paralysed. He recovered, but retired from professional racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the following year, when he lapped a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt he had not regained his previously instinctive command of the car. He had been runner-up in the Drivers' Championship four years in succession, from 1955 to 1958, and third in each of the next three years.
Speed records
1950
At the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a steeply banked oval track near Paris, Moss and Leslie Johnson took turns at the wheel of the latter's Jaguar XK120 to average for 24 hours, including stops for fuel and tyres. Changing drivers every three hours, they covered a total of . It was the first time a production car had averaged over for 24 hours.
1952
Revisiting Montlhéry, Moss was one of a four-driver team, led by Johnson, who drove a factory-owned Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for 7 days and nights at the French track. Moss, Johnson, Bert Hadley and Jack Fairman averaged to take four World records and five International Class C records, and covered a total of .
1957
In August Moss broke five International Class F records in the purpose-built MG EX181 at Bonneville Salt Flats. The streamlined, supercharged car's speed for the flying kilometer was 245.64 mph, which was the average of two runs in opposite directions.
Broadcasting career
Away from driving, in 1962 he acted as a colour commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR races. He eventually left ABC in 1980. Moss narrated the official 1988 Formula One season review along with Tony Jardine.
Moss also narrated the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car, which stars Peter Kay.
Return to racing
Although ostensibly retired from racing since 1962, Moss did make a number of one-off appearances in professional motorsport events in the following two decades. He also competed in the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally in a Mercedes-Benz, but retired from the event in the Algerian Sahara. The Holden Torana he shared with Jack Brabham in the 1976 Bathurst 1000 was hit from behind on the grid and eventually retired with engine failure. Moss, at the wheel of the Torana when the V8 engine let go, was criticised by other drivers for staying on the racing line for over ⅔ of the 6.172 km long circuit while returning to the pits as the car was dropping large amounts of oil onto the road. He also shared a Volkswagen Golf GTI with Denny Hulme in the 1979 Benson & Hedges 500 at Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand.
In 1980 he made a comeback to regular competition, in the British Saloon Car Championship with the works-backed GTi Engineering Audi team. For the 1980 season Moss was the team's number two driver to team co-owner Richard Lloyd. For the 1981 season Moss stayed with Audi, as the team moved to Tom Walkinshaw Racing management, driving alongside Martin Brundle.
Throughout his retirement he raced in events for historic cars, driving on behalf of and at the invitation of others, as well as campaigning his own OSCA FS 372 and other vehicles. In 2004, as part of its promotion for the new SLR, Mercedes-Benz reunited Moss with the 300 SLR "No. 722" in which he won the Mille Miglia nearly 50 years earlier. One reporter who rode with Moss that day noted that the 75-year-old driver was "so good . . . that even old and crippled [he was] still better than nearly everyone else". On 9 June 2011 during qualifying for the Le Mans Legends race, Moss announced on Radio Le Mans that he had finally retired from racing, saying that he had scared himself that afternoon. He was 81.
Post racing career
Lister Cars announced the building for sale of the Lister Knobbly Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London in June 2016. The car is built to the exact specification of the 1958 model, is the only magnesium-bodied car in the world, and is the only car that was ever endorsed by Moss. Brian Lister invited Moss to drive for Lister on three separate occasions, at Goodwood in 1954, Silverstone in 1958 and at Sebring in 1959, and to celebrate these races, 10 special edition lightweight Lister Knobbly cars are being built. The company announced that the cars will be available for both road and race use, and Moss would personally be handing over each car.
Honours
In 1990, Moss was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In the New Year Honours 2000 List, Moss was made a Knight Bachelor for services to motor racing. On 21 March 2000, he was knighted by Prince Charles, standing in for the Queen, who was on an official visit to Australia.
He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy.
In 2006, Moss was awarded the FIA gold medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to motorsport.
In December 2008, McLaren-Mercedes unveiled their final model of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The model was named in honour of Moss, hence, Mercedes McLaren SLR Stirling Moss, which has a top speed of with wind deflectors instead of a windscreen.
In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modelling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Moss was ranked the 29th best Formula One driver of all time.
Following Moss's death the Kinrara Trophy race at the Goodwood Revival meeting was renamed in his honour. It is a race for GT cars that competed before 1963.
Biographies
In 1957, Moss published an autobiography called In the Track Of Speed, first published by Muller, London.
In 1963, motorsport author and commentator Ken Purdy published a biographical book entitled All But My Life about Moss (first published by William Kimber & Co, London), based on material gathered through interviews with Moss.
In 2015, when he was aged 85, Moss published a second autobiography, entitled My Racing Life, written with motor sports writer Simon Taylor. In 2016, Philip Porter published the first volume of Stirling Moss - The Definitive Biography covering the period from birth up to the end of 1955, one of Moss's greatest years.
Popular culture
During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On 12 June the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver.
For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. Moss was the subject of a cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye that said he was interested in cars, women and sex, in that order. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. Although there were complaints to the magazine about the cartoons, Moss rang Private Eye to ask if he could use it as a Christmas card.
He was one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. In 2004, Moss was a supporter of the UK Independence Party.
Moss was a Mercedes-Benz Brand Ambassador, having kept a close relationship with the brand, and remained an enthusiast and collector of the brand, which includes the Mercedes-Benz W113, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss among others.
Personal life and death
Moss was married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson; an heir to the Canadian brewer Molson. They were married in 1957 and separated three years later. His second wife was the American public relations executive Elaine Barbarino. They were married in 1964 and divorced in 1968. Their daughter Allison was born in 1967. His third wife was Susie Paine, the daughter of an old friend. They were married from 1980 until his death in 2020. Their son Elliot was born in 1980.
In April 1960, Moss was found guilty of dangerous driving. He was fined £50 and banned from driving for one year after an incident near Chetwynd, Shropshire, when he was test-driving a Mini.
Moss's 80th birthday, on 17 September 2009, fell on the eve of the Goodwood Revival and Lord March celebrated with an 80-car parade on each of the three days. Moss drove a different car each day: a Mercedes-Benz W196 (an open-wheel variant), the Lotus 18 in which he had won the 1961 Monaco GP, and an Aston Martin DBR1.
On 7 March 2010, Moss broke both ankles and four bones in a foot, and also chipped four vertebrae and suffered skin lesions, when he plunged down a lift shaft at his home. In December 2016, he was admitted to hospital in Singapore with a serious chest infection. As a result of this illness and a subsequent lengthy recovery period, Moss announced his retirement from public life in January 2018.
Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, on 12 April 2020, aged 90, after a long illness.
Racing record
Career highlights
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Indicates shared drive with Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling.
* Indicates shared drive with Cesare Perdisa.
‡ Indicates shared drive with Tony Brooks.
[a] After Moss retired from the race he took over the car of Trintignant. Both drivers did not receive any points for their shared drive.
Non-championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
(Races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete 24 Hours of Le Mans results
Complete 12 Hours of Sebring results
Complete 12 Hours of Reims results
Complete Mille Miglia results
Complete Rallye de Monte Carlo results
Complete Bathurst 1000 results
Complete British Saloon Car Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap.)
† Events with 2 races staged for the different classes.
References
External links
Sir Stirling Moss – Official Web Site
Stirling Moss in the 24 hours of Le Mans
Grand Prix History – Hall of Fame, Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss profile at The 500 Owners Association
BBC Face to Face interview with Stirling Moss and John Freeman, broadcast 12 June 1960
1929 births
2020 deaths
12 Hours of Sebring drivers
24 Hours of Le Mans drivers
BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners
Bonneville 200 MPH Club members
BRDC Gold Star winners
Brighton Speed Trials people
British Racing Partnership Formula One drivers
British Touring Car Championship drivers
Connaught Formula One drivers
Cooper Formula One drivers
English Formula One drivers
English people of Jewish descent
English racing drivers
ERA Formula One drivers
Formula One race winners
Formula One team owners
Hersham and Walton Motors Formula One drivers
International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees
Knights Bachelor
Maserati Formula One drivers
Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
People from West Kensington
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Rob Walker Racing Team Formula One drivers
Sportspeople from London
Segrave Trophy recipients
Vanwall Formula One drivers
World Sportscar Championship drivers | false | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
]
|
[
"Stirling Moss",
"Popular culture",
"What is Moss conection to popular culture?",
"During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances.",
"Why was he recognised?",
"many media appearances.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye."
]
| C_82e2b9fa33714068bc722fe9c3394c42_0 | How did Moss react to this? | 4 | How did Stirling Moss react to being the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye? | Stirling Moss | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On June 12 the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver. For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car which stars Peter Kay, a role he took on, having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, as he saw the TV show as a way of introducing motorsport to the next generation. He is one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. Moss is also a supporter of the UK Independence Party. CANNOTANSWER | According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, | Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020) was a British Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.
Early life
Moss was born in London, son of Alfred Moss, a dentist of Bray, Berkshire, and Aileen (née Craufurd). His grandfather was Jewish, from a family that changed their surname from Moses to Moss. He was brought up at Long White Cloud house on the south bank of the River Thames. His father was an amateur racing driver who had come 16th in the 1924 Indianapolis 500. Aileen Moss had also been involved in motorsport, entering prewar hillclimbs at the wheel of a Singer Nine. Stirling was a gifted horse rider as was his younger sister, Pat Moss, who became a successful rally driver in her own right and also married Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson.
Moss was educated at several independent schools: Shrewsbury House School in Surbiton, Clewer Manor Junior School, and the linked senior school, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, located at Hertford Heath, near Hertford. He disliked school and did not attain a good academic performance. At Haileybury, he was subjected to antisemitic bullying because of his Jewish roots. He concealed the bullying from his parents and used it as "motivation to succeed". Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at the age of nine, and drove it on the fields around Long White Cloud. He purchased his own car at age 15 after he obtained a driving licence. After the Second World War, Moss was ruled exempt from doing the mandatory two-year national service for men his age because he had nephritis.
Racing career
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962, winning 212 of the 529 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grands Prix. He competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career. He preferred to race British cars, stating, "Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one". At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing (as was Jack Brabham at Cooper). He remained the English driver with the most Formula One victories until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him after competing in more races.
1948–1954
Moss began his career at the wheel of his father Alfred's 328 BMW, DPX 653. Moss was one of the Cooper Car Company's first customers, using winnings from competing in horse-riding events to pay the deposit on a Cooper 500 racing car in 1948. He then persuaded his father, who opposed his racing and wanted him to be a dentist, to let him buy it. He soon demonstrated his ability with numerous wins at national and international levels, and continued to compete in Formula Three, with Coopers and Kiefts, after he had progressed to more senior categories.
His first major international race victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the wheel of a borrowed Jaguar XK120 in the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland. He went on to win the race six more times, in 1951 (Jaguar C-Type), 1955 (Mercedes-Benz 300SLR), 1958 and 1959 (Aston Martin DBR1), and 1960 and 1961 (Ferrari 250 GT). Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, approached Moss and offered him a Formula Two car to drive at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix before a full
-season in 1952. Moss and his father went to Apulia only to find out that the Ferrari car was to be driven by experienced driver Piero Taruffi and were incensed.
Also a competent rally driver, Moss was one of three people to have won a Coupe d'Or (Gold Cup) for three consecutive penalty-free runs on the Alpine Rally (Coupe des Alpes). He finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with Desmond Scannell and Autocar magazine editor John Cooper as co-drivers.
In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing the Cunningham team's 1.5-liter O.S.C.A. MT4 with American Bill Lloyd.
In 1953 Mercedes-Benz racing boss Alfred Neubauer had spoken to Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, about the possibility of Moss's joining the Mercedes Grand Prix team. Having seen him do well in a relatively uncompetitive car, and wanting to see how he would perform in a better one, Neubauer suggested Moss buy a Maserati for the 1954 season. He bought a Maserati 250F, and although the car's unreliability prevented his scoring high points in the 1954 Drivers' Championship he qualified alongside the Mercedes front runners several times and performed well in the races. He achieved his first Formula One victory when he won the non-Championship Oulton Park International Gold Cup in the Maserati.
In the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he passed both drivers who were regarded as the best in Formula One at the time—Juan Manuel Fangio in a Mercedes and Alberto Ascari in a Ferrari—and took the lead. Ascari retired with engine problems, and Moss led until lap 68 when his engine also failed. Fangio took the victory, and Moss pushed his Maserati to the finish line. Neubauer, already impressed when Moss had tested a Mercedes-Benz W196 at Hockenheim, promptly signed him for 1955.
1955
Moss's first World Championship victory was in the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, a race he was also the first British driver to win. Leading a 1–2–3–4 finish for Mercedes, it was the first time he beat Fangio, his teammate and arch rival, who was also his friend and mentor. It has been suggested that Fangio sportingly allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd. Moss himself asked Fangio repeatedly, and Fangio always replied: "No. You were just better than me that day." The same year, Moss also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the Targa Florio (sharing the drive with Peter Collins) and the Mille Miglia.
Mille Miglia
In 1955 Moss won Italy's thousand-mile Mille Miglia road race, an achievement Doug Nye described as the "most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history." He was paired with motor racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who prepared pace note for Moss, and the two completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. Motor Trend headlined it as "The Most Epic Drive. Ever." Before the race, he had taken a "magic pill" given to him by Fangio, and he has commented that although he did not know what was in it, "Dexedrine and Benzedrine were commonly used in rallies. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews." After the win, he spent the night and the following day driving his girlfriend to Cologne, stopping for breakfast in Munich and lunch in Stuttgart.
1956–1962
Moss won the Nassau Cup at the 1956 and 1957 Bahamas Speed Week. Also in 1957 he won on the longest circuit ever to hold a World Championship Grand Prix, the Pescara Circuit, where he again demonstrated his mastery of long-distance racing. The event lasted three hours and Moss beat Fangio, who started from pole position, by a little over 3 minutes.
In 1958, Moss's forward-thinking attitude made waves in the racing world. Moss won the first race of the season in a rear-engined F1 car, which became the common design by 1961. At Monza that year, he raced in the "Eldorado" Maserati in the Race of Two Worlds, the first single-seater car in Europe to be sponsored by a non-racing brand—the Eldorado Ice Cream Company. This was the first case in Europe of contemporary sponsorship, with the ice cream maker's colors replacing the ones assigned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).
Moss's sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula One World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty after the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss defended him. Hawthorn was accused of reversing on the track after spinning and stalling his car on an uphill section. Moss had shouted advice to Hawthorn to steer downhill, against traffic, to bump-start the car. Moss's quick thinking, and his defence of Hawthorn before the stewards, preserved Hawthorn's 6 points for finishing second behind Moss. Hawthorn went on to beat Moss for the championship title by one point, even though he had won only one race that year to Moss's four. Moss's loss in the championship could also be attributed to an error in communication between his pit crew and the driver at one race. A point was given for the fastest lap in each race, and the crew signaled "HAWT REC" meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap. Moss read this as "HAWT REG" and thought Hawthorn was making regular laps, so did not try to set a fast lap. The crew was supposed to signal the time of the lap, so Moss would know what he had to beat.
Moss was as gifted in sports cars as in Grand Prix cars. To his victories in the Tourist Trophy, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Mille Miglia he added three consecutive wins (1958–1960) in the 1000 km Nürburgring, the first two in an Aston Martin (in which he did most of the driving), and the third in a Tipo 61 "birdcage" Maserati, co-driving with the American Dan Gurney. The pair lost time when an oil hose blew off, but despite the wet-weather, they made up the time and took first place.
In the 1960 Formula One season, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus 18. Seriously injured in an accident at the Burnenville curve during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he missed the next three races but recovered sufficiently to win the final one of the season, the United States Grand Prix at Riverside, California.
For the 1961 Formula One season, run under new 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari fielded the "sharknose" Ferrari 156 with an all-new V6 engine. Moss's Climax-engined Lotus was comparatively underpowered, but he won the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, beating the Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill, and went on to win the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.
In 1962, he crashed his Lotus heavily during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood held on Monday 23 April. The accident put him in a coma for a month, and for six months the left side of his body was partially paralysed. He recovered, but retired from professional racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the following year, when he lapped a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt he had not regained his previously instinctive command of the car. He had been runner-up in the Drivers' Championship four years in succession, from 1955 to 1958, and third in each of the next three years.
Speed records
1950
At the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a steeply banked oval track near Paris, Moss and Leslie Johnson took turns at the wheel of the latter's Jaguar XK120 to average for 24 hours, including stops for fuel and tyres. Changing drivers every three hours, they covered a total of . It was the first time a production car had averaged over for 24 hours.
1952
Revisiting Montlhéry, Moss was one of a four-driver team, led by Johnson, who drove a factory-owned Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for 7 days and nights at the French track. Moss, Johnson, Bert Hadley and Jack Fairman averaged to take four World records and five International Class C records, and covered a total of .
1957
In August Moss broke five International Class F records in the purpose-built MG EX181 at Bonneville Salt Flats. The streamlined, supercharged car's speed for the flying kilometer was 245.64 mph, which was the average of two runs in opposite directions.
Broadcasting career
Away from driving, in 1962 he acted as a colour commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR races. He eventually left ABC in 1980. Moss narrated the official 1988 Formula One season review along with Tony Jardine.
Moss also narrated the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car, which stars Peter Kay.
Return to racing
Although ostensibly retired from racing since 1962, Moss did make a number of one-off appearances in professional motorsport events in the following two decades. He also competed in the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally in a Mercedes-Benz, but retired from the event in the Algerian Sahara. The Holden Torana he shared with Jack Brabham in the 1976 Bathurst 1000 was hit from behind on the grid and eventually retired with engine failure. Moss, at the wheel of the Torana when the V8 engine let go, was criticised by other drivers for staying on the racing line for over ⅔ of the 6.172 km long circuit while returning to the pits as the car was dropping large amounts of oil onto the road. He also shared a Volkswagen Golf GTI with Denny Hulme in the 1979 Benson & Hedges 500 at Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand.
In 1980 he made a comeback to regular competition, in the British Saloon Car Championship with the works-backed GTi Engineering Audi team. For the 1980 season Moss was the team's number two driver to team co-owner Richard Lloyd. For the 1981 season Moss stayed with Audi, as the team moved to Tom Walkinshaw Racing management, driving alongside Martin Brundle.
Throughout his retirement he raced in events for historic cars, driving on behalf of and at the invitation of others, as well as campaigning his own OSCA FS 372 and other vehicles. In 2004, as part of its promotion for the new SLR, Mercedes-Benz reunited Moss with the 300 SLR "No. 722" in which he won the Mille Miglia nearly 50 years earlier. One reporter who rode with Moss that day noted that the 75-year-old driver was "so good . . . that even old and crippled [he was] still better than nearly everyone else". On 9 June 2011 during qualifying for the Le Mans Legends race, Moss announced on Radio Le Mans that he had finally retired from racing, saying that he had scared himself that afternoon. He was 81.
Post racing career
Lister Cars announced the building for sale of the Lister Knobbly Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London in June 2016. The car is built to the exact specification of the 1958 model, is the only magnesium-bodied car in the world, and is the only car that was ever endorsed by Moss. Brian Lister invited Moss to drive for Lister on three separate occasions, at Goodwood in 1954, Silverstone in 1958 and at Sebring in 1959, and to celebrate these races, 10 special edition lightweight Lister Knobbly cars are being built. The company announced that the cars will be available for both road and race use, and Moss would personally be handing over each car.
Honours
In 1990, Moss was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In the New Year Honours 2000 List, Moss was made a Knight Bachelor for services to motor racing. On 21 March 2000, he was knighted by Prince Charles, standing in for the Queen, who was on an official visit to Australia.
He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy.
In 2006, Moss was awarded the FIA gold medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to motorsport.
In December 2008, McLaren-Mercedes unveiled their final model of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The model was named in honour of Moss, hence, Mercedes McLaren SLR Stirling Moss, which has a top speed of with wind deflectors instead of a windscreen.
In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modelling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Moss was ranked the 29th best Formula One driver of all time.
Following Moss's death the Kinrara Trophy race at the Goodwood Revival meeting was renamed in his honour. It is a race for GT cars that competed before 1963.
Biographies
In 1957, Moss published an autobiography called In the Track Of Speed, first published by Muller, London.
In 1963, motorsport author and commentator Ken Purdy published a biographical book entitled All But My Life about Moss (first published by William Kimber & Co, London), based on material gathered through interviews with Moss.
In 2015, when he was aged 85, Moss published a second autobiography, entitled My Racing Life, written with motor sports writer Simon Taylor. In 2016, Philip Porter published the first volume of Stirling Moss - The Definitive Biography covering the period from birth up to the end of 1955, one of Moss's greatest years.
Popular culture
During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On 12 June the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver.
For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. Moss was the subject of a cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye that said he was interested in cars, women and sex, in that order. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. Although there were complaints to the magazine about the cartoons, Moss rang Private Eye to ask if he could use it as a Christmas card.
He was one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. In 2004, Moss was a supporter of the UK Independence Party.
Moss was a Mercedes-Benz Brand Ambassador, having kept a close relationship with the brand, and remained an enthusiast and collector of the brand, which includes the Mercedes-Benz W113, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss among others.
Personal life and death
Moss was married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson; an heir to the Canadian brewer Molson. They were married in 1957 and separated three years later. His second wife was the American public relations executive Elaine Barbarino. They were married in 1964 and divorced in 1968. Their daughter Allison was born in 1967. His third wife was Susie Paine, the daughter of an old friend. They were married from 1980 until his death in 2020. Their son Elliot was born in 1980.
In April 1960, Moss was found guilty of dangerous driving. He was fined £50 and banned from driving for one year after an incident near Chetwynd, Shropshire, when he was test-driving a Mini.
Moss's 80th birthday, on 17 September 2009, fell on the eve of the Goodwood Revival and Lord March celebrated with an 80-car parade on each of the three days. Moss drove a different car each day: a Mercedes-Benz W196 (an open-wheel variant), the Lotus 18 in which he had won the 1961 Monaco GP, and an Aston Martin DBR1.
On 7 March 2010, Moss broke both ankles and four bones in a foot, and also chipped four vertebrae and suffered skin lesions, when he plunged down a lift shaft at his home. In December 2016, he was admitted to hospital in Singapore with a serious chest infection. As a result of this illness and a subsequent lengthy recovery period, Moss announced his retirement from public life in January 2018.
Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, on 12 April 2020, aged 90, after a long illness.
Racing record
Career highlights
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Indicates shared drive with Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling.
* Indicates shared drive with Cesare Perdisa.
‡ Indicates shared drive with Tony Brooks.
[a] After Moss retired from the race he took over the car of Trintignant. Both drivers did not receive any points for their shared drive.
Non-championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
(Races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete 24 Hours of Le Mans results
Complete 12 Hours of Sebring results
Complete 12 Hours of Reims results
Complete Mille Miglia results
Complete Rallye de Monte Carlo results
Complete Bathurst 1000 results
Complete British Saloon Car Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap.)
† Events with 2 races staged for the different classes.
References
External links
Sir Stirling Moss – Official Web Site
Stirling Moss in the 24 hours of Le Mans
Grand Prix History – Hall of Fame, Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss profile at The 500 Owners Association
BBC Face to Face interview with Stirling Moss and John Freeman, broadcast 12 June 1960
1929 births
2020 deaths
12 Hours of Sebring drivers
24 Hours of Le Mans drivers
BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners
Bonneville 200 MPH Club members
BRDC Gold Star winners
Brighton Speed Trials people
British Racing Partnership Formula One drivers
British Touring Car Championship drivers
Connaught Formula One drivers
Cooper Formula One drivers
English Formula One drivers
English people of Jewish descent
English racing drivers
ERA Formula One drivers
Formula One race winners
Formula One team owners
Hersham and Walton Motors Formula One drivers
International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees
Knights Bachelor
Maserati Formula One drivers
Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
People from West Kensington
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Rob Walker Racing Team Formula One drivers
Sportspeople from London
Segrave Trophy recipients
Vanwall Formula One drivers
World Sportscar Championship drivers | false | [
"\"Tucker's Daughter\" is the debut single by Australian rock singer and guitarist, Ian Moss. It was released in November 1988 almost five years after his group, Cold Chisel, had disbanded for the first time. It is co-written by Moss and Don Walker (also from Cold Chisel). The song was the lead single from Moss' debut studio album, Matchbook (1989).\n\nReception\nAt the ARIA Music Awards of 1990 \"Tucker's Daughter\" was nominated for three awards and won two; Breakthrough Artist – Single and Song of the Year. The song was also nominated for Single of the Year.\n\nIn January 2018, as part of Triple M's \"Ozzest 100\", the 'most Australian' songs of all time, \"Tucker's Daughter\" was ranked number 99.\n\nBackground and lyrics\nThe lyrics of \"Tucker's Daughter\" tell the story of a farm laborer who finds himself the attention of his employer's daughter, but he does not return her affections.\n\nMoss had initially written the music to the song less than a fortnight before recording on his debut album was about to commence. He said, \"I was pretty confident I had a good hit here. I was literally running around the house going 'yahoo!', jumping up and clicking my heels.\"\n\nWalker described in 2005 how Moss had sent him pieces of music including certain phrases that he wanted included in places within the song, \"Ian sent \"Tucker's Daughter\" on a cassette [by] express airmail from Los Angeles where he was, and he had the melody but the only lyric he had was, 'Hey there, motherfucker.' Right through the rest of the song. I couldn't use that, but I recognized that it had a certain percussive force\".\n\nIn September 2007 Moss told a reporter at The Herald Sun newspaper that he was dissatisfied with his entry at Wikipedia: \"About 95 per cent of the stories I read say Don Walker wrote it, but I wrote it too. I wrote the music and the punch line. 'Build me up, tear me down'. I'm not sure how to edit Wikipedia, but I will get on to that and change it.\"\n\nMusic video\nThe start of the video depicts Tucker's daughter, a young woman, played by actress Tasma Walton walking through a field. Several scenes feature Ian Moss singing and playing his guitar inside a barn. Although Moss does not react to the woman's affection in the lyrics; three black and white scenes during the video depict him touching her breasts.\n\nTrack listing\n7\" Single (K690)\nSide A \"Tucker's Daughter\" - 4:35\nSide B \"Islands\" - 4:42\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\n1988 songs\n1988 singles\nARIA Award-winning songs\nSongs written by Don Walker (musician)",
"React is a media franchise used by the Fine Brothers consisting of several online series centering on a group of individuals reacting to viral videos, trends, video games, film trailers, or music videos. The franchise was launched with the YouTube debut of Kids React in October 2010, and then grew to encompass four more series uploaded on the Fine Brothers' primary YouTube channel, a separate YouTube channel with various reaction-related content, as well as a television series titled React to That.\n\nIn 2016, the duo announced React World, a program and channel in which they would license the format of their React shows to creators, which led to widespread negative reception from viewers and fellow content creators, as well as confusion about what their format is. This eventually lead to the Fine Brothers removing all videos related to React World, essentially pulling the plug on the React World program.\n\nYouTube series\n\nKids React\nBenny and Rafi Fine launched a series titled Kids React on October 16, 2010, the first video being \"Kids React to Viral Videos (Double Rainbow, Obama Fail, Twin Rabbits, Snickers Halloween)\". The Kids React series features The Fine Brothers (and one of the staff members since 2016), off-camera, showing kids ages 4–14 (7-13 as of September 2016, 7-11 as of October 2016) several viral videos or popular YouTubers and having the kids react to the videos.\n\nThe most popular Kids React episode to date is “Kids React to Gay Marriage\", with over 40.2 million views as of September 2, 2018. The popularity of Kids React made it possible for the online series to win a special Emmy Award at the 39th Daytime Emmy Awards in 2012. The Emmy Award, that was given in cooperation with AOL, was awarded to the Fine Brothers for \"Best Viral Video Series\". After their Emmy win, the brothers explained, \"Not a lot has changed [after winning the Emmy] other than realizing that there are shows on YouTube like React that can get similar if not better viewership than mainstream entertainment can.\"\n\nVideos and YouTube stars that have been reacted to by the kids include Smosh (who later reacted to the kids' reactions), planking and President Obama addressing the death of Osama bin Laden, among several other topics. Kids React has been compared to Kids Say the Darndest Things. In October 2012, the kids of the show were shown videos of the 2012 U.S. Presidential debates. Kids React won the Streamy Award for Best Non-Fiction or Reality Series in 2013.\n\nTeens React\nDue to the popularity of Kids React, The Fine Brothers spawned a spin-off dubbed Teens React on November 17, 2011 with \"TEENS REACT TO TWILIGHT\". The show has a similar premise to Kids React, however the younger stars are replaced with high school teenagers aged 14-18, some of whom have aged out of the Kids React series. Due to this, the Fine Brothers are able to show more mature and less \"kid-friendly\" videos such as videos on topics like Toddlers & Tiaras, Rick Perry's Strong commercial, Amanda Todd's death, and the 2012 U.S. Presidential debates. Other viral videos and YouTube stars that have been reacted to include Salad Fingers, the Overly Attached Girlfriend, \"Gangnam Style\", The Hunger Games trailer, Shane Dawson, and One Direction, among other topics. Later on, The Fine Brothers launched a series titled Teens React: Gaming consisting videos of teenagers reacting to popular games such as Mario Kart 64, Flappy Bird, Rocket League, and Five Nights at Freddy’s. Teens React launched the career of Lia Marie Johnson, it also featured some \"famous\" 'reactors' as guest stars, including Lisa Cimorelli, Amy Cimorelli, Lucas Cruikshank (who later appears in YouTubers React), Alex Steele, Jake Short, and Maisie Williams.\n\nElders React\nElders React was debuted in 2012 and it included seniors over the age of 55. In 2021, it became a subseries for Adults React.\n\nYouTubers React\nYouTubers React was debuted in 2012 and it included famous YouTubers. On November 2020, it is retitled Creators React due to the success of other social medias and is currently airing its one-off episodes as of June 2021.\n\nAdults React\nOn May 30, 2015, the Fine Brothers announced Adults React, which premiered on July 16 later that year. It consists of people ages 20 to 55, including former stars of Teens React that have aged out of the series. Depending on the video or topic, Adults React will be specific of which type of adults are going to be reacting, such as parents or college kids.\n\nParents React\n\nThe first episode of Parents React premiered on August 6, 2015 with “Parents React to Don’t Stay At School”. This series involves parents reacting to stuff that kids were getting into.\n\nCollege Kids React\nThe first episode of College Kids React premiered on June 23, 2016 with \"College Kids React to The 1975\". This series includes stars who have aged out of Teens React along with new stars, as well as stars that have not yet aged out of Teens React but have begun college. The content of College Kids React is similar to the content found in Teens React but more mature.\n\nOne-off episodes\nIn April 2014, as an April Fools joke, the Fine Brothers teamed up with Friskies and released Cats React, which went viral. In July 2016 they released another part of Cats React.\n\nIn August 2014, they released Celebrities React to Viral Videos, and now re-released yearly.\n\nIn April 2018, in another April Fools joke, they released \"Teens React to Nothing\" where they showed the teenagers on a blank screen. The following year, they released a sequel, \"nothing reacts to teens react to nothing.\", which featured the original video being played in an empty studio.\n\nReact YouTube channel\nAfter creating four individual successful React series on their primary YouTube channel, the Fine Brothers launched a separate YouTube channel in 2014, for reaction-related content, simply dubbed \"React\". With the intent of running programming five days a week, the channel launched with five series: React Gaming (a Let's Play-style series with real youths from their primary React series), Advice (a series featuring real youths respond to questions from viewers), React Remix (musical remixes of past React footage), People Vs. Foods (originally Kids Vs. Food until 2016) (a series featuring Reactors taste-test \"Weird\" or international foods), and Lyric Breakdown (a series in which Reactors break down the meaning of various songs). The channel launched with a teenage-focused playthrough of Goat Simulator.\nFrom September 18th 2020 to May 31st 2021, the React YouTube channel was retitled to \"REPLAY\", following the renaming of the main FBE channel to \"REACT\" in the wake of FBE's distancing from Benny and Rafi Fine as a consequence of the scandal in Summer 2020 that led to many reactors leaving the channel.\nOn June 1st 2021, REPLAY is retitled \"PEOPLE VS FOOD\" and moved all the non-food videos to REACT.\n\nReact to That\nIn early 2014, it was announced that the Fine Brothers made a deal with NCredible Entertainment, a production studio founded by Nick Cannon to develop a television series for Nickelodeon. The series, dubbed React to That, was \"entirely re-envisioned for television,\" as the reactors \"not only watch and respond to viral videos, but pop out of the reaction room and into showdowns where the clips come to life as each reactor is confronted with a challenge based on the video they just watched.\" Following the announcement of the series, Benny Fine explained, \"All these viewers now watching are also pioneering what it is to be a viewer of content. They follow us through all of our different endeavors, all our different series, and now will have the opportunity to follow us to another medium.\" Nickelodeon ordered 13 episodes to be produced, but only 12 were made and aired.\n\nReact World\n\nBackground\nIn July 2015, the Fine Brothers filed for trademark protection on \"React\" with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The trademark was filed for \"Entertainment services, namely, providing an ongoing series of programs and webisodes via the internet in the field of observing and interviewing various groups of people.\" The USPTO approved for a 30-day opposition period which was set to begin on February 2, 2016; if no parties filed an opposition to the Fines' trademark request, it would have proceeded through the process. The brothers had recently filed for and been granted trademark registrations for \"Elders React\" and \"Teens React\" in 2013 as well as \"Kids React\" in 2012.\n\nAnnouncement details\nOn January 26, 2016, the Fines announced that they would be launching React World, a way to grant content creators the license to create their own versions of the React shows. Specifically, the Fine Brothers explained they were going to license the format of their React shows. A Variety report detailed that React World would \"aggregate videos in a channel to launch later this year to promote, support and feature fan-produced programming based on their shows.\" The brothers' company, Fine Brothers Entertainment (FBE) explained they would be working with YouTube and ChannelMeter on the launch of React World. FBE also expressed they would be able to monetize React-style videos uploaded under their license. On monetization, Digital Trends detailed \"Although licenses are free, React World creators must agree to share 20 percent of AdSense revenue and 30 percent of premium brand deals with FBE.\" Additionally, the Fines explained they would provide ongoing production guidance, creative guidelines, format bibles, and other resources, as well as promotional and technical support to those creators who participated with the brothers on React World.\n\nReception\nAlthough YouTube's VP on content partnerships, Kelly Merryman, originally proclaimed \"This is brand-building in the YouTube age — rising media companies building their brands through collaborations with creators around the world,\" the Fine Brothers were met with overwhelmingly negative reception to their React World announcement. BBC News reported that \"critics of the Fine Brothers have expressed concern they may use the trademarks to stifle competition,\" and quoted one YouTuber who detailed \"People don't trust them because a few years ago when Ellen DeGeneres did a similar video—not that similar, it didn't have the same format or branding—they claimed it was their format.\" Viewers and fellow content creators alike condemned the Fines for their announcement, with The Daily Dot reporting, \"Backlash poured in on Reddit and social media, and other YouTubers posted their own reactions and parodies of the enthusiastically corporate React World announcement video.\" The backlash led to a dramatic drop in subscribers, with upwards of 675,000 accounts collectively unsubscribing from the React and Fine Bros Entertainment channels as well as recent videos getting many dislikes in protest as of February 22, 2016. Mashable described that one Reddit post \"ignited a thread of haters, defenders and overall discussion about whether what Fine Brothers Entertainment is doing is fair.\" Ryan Morrison, a gamer, lawyer and Reddit user, declared that he would file a legal challenge to the Fine Brothers' trademark request on \"React\", writing \"These guys didn’t come up with the idea of filming funny reactions from kids. And they certainly don’t own an entire genre of YouTube videos. It wasn’t their idea, and it’s not theirs to own or police.\"\n\nThough there was an overwhelmingly negative response to the React World announcement, other personalities expressed milder opinions; Internet personality Hank Green wrote \"This could actually be a very cool project if it could be divorced from the idea of two very powerful creators attempting to control a very popular YouTube video format. Franchising one of YouTube's biggest shows? Yeah, I’d love to see how that goes.\" New York reporter Jay Hathaway wrote \"The trademark and React World are dead. And that's a shame, because it was an interesting idea that suffered from tone-deaf execution.\"\n\nResponses and discontinuation by the Fine Brothers\nAfter seeing the initial backlash from their announcement, The Fine Brothers posted comments on various social media websites including Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and the comment section of their YouTube announcement video. On Facebook the Fines wrote, \"We do not own the idea or copyright for reaction videos overall, nor did we ever say we did. You don’t need anyone’s permission to make these kinds of videos, and we’re not coming after anyone\", adding \"We are in no way claiming reaction content in general is our intellectual property. This is purely a voluntary program for people wanting direct support from us, and we continue to be so excited to work with all of you who may want to participate\". They additionally tweeted \"We're not saying we hold a copyright on reaction videos overall, no one can. We're licensing our specific shows, like TV has done for years\". The brothers also explained they would \"not be trying to take revenue from other types of reaction videos, and will not be copyright-striking\". However, other YouTubers have reported multiple copyright related video takedowns. The Guardian also reported that unrelated channels featuring diverse groups of people reacting to videos were also removed after takedown requests from the Fine Brothers; the \"Seniors React\" video was noted to be released prior to the Fines launching their Elders React series. The Fines also posted an update video in response to what they described as \"confusion and negative response\" to React World, in which they try to clear up confusion on what their format encompasses, as well as inviting viewers to e-mail them about any further questions.\n\nUltimately, the Fine Brothers removed all React World videos, and posted a statement on Medium, declaring they have filed the paperwork to rescind all their \"React\" trademarks and applications, will discontinue the React World program, and will release all past Content ID claims. In their post, the brothers expressed \"It makes perfect sense for people to distrust our motives here, but we are confident that our actions will speak louder than these words moving forward\". Reaction to this Medium post was negative on Reddit, where users were reported commenting they would not forgive the Fine Brothers.\n\nAccolades\n\nReferences\n\nCitations\n\nSources\n\nFootnotes\n\nSee also \n Reaction video\n\n2010 web series debuts\nFullscreen (company) channels\nFullscreen Media franchises\nYouTube original programming"
]
|
[
"Stirling Moss",
"Popular culture",
"What is Moss conection to popular culture?",
"During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances.",
"Why was he recognised?",
"many media appearances.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye.",
"How did Moss react to this?",
"According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon,"
]
| C_82e2b9fa33714068bc722fe9c3394c42_0 | And was his offer accepted? | 5 | And was Stirling Moss' offer to buy the original of the cartoon accepted? | Stirling Moss | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On June 12 the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver. For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car which stars Peter Kay, a role he took on, having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, as he saw the TV show as a way of introducing motorsport to the next generation. He is one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. Moss is also a supporter of the UK Independence Party. CANNOTANSWER | an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. | Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020) was a British Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.
Early life
Moss was born in London, son of Alfred Moss, a dentist of Bray, Berkshire, and Aileen (née Craufurd). His grandfather was Jewish, from a family that changed their surname from Moses to Moss. He was brought up at Long White Cloud house on the south bank of the River Thames. His father was an amateur racing driver who had come 16th in the 1924 Indianapolis 500. Aileen Moss had also been involved in motorsport, entering prewar hillclimbs at the wheel of a Singer Nine. Stirling was a gifted horse rider as was his younger sister, Pat Moss, who became a successful rally driver in her own right and also married Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson.
Moss was educated at several independent schools: Shrewsbury House School in Surbiton, Clewer Manor Junior School, and the linked senior school, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, located at Hertford Heath, near Hertford. He disliked school and did not attain a good academic performance. At Haileybury, he was subjected to antisemitic bullying because of his Jewish roots. He concealed the bullying from his parents and used it as "motivation to succeed". Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at the age of nine, and drove it on the fields around Long White Cloud. He purchased his own car at age 15 after he obtained a driving licence. After the Second World War, Moss was ruled exempt from doing the mandatory two-year national service for men his age because he had nephritis.
Racing career
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962, winning 212 of the 529 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grands Prix. He competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career. He preferred to race British cars, stating, "Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one". At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing (as was Jack Brabham at Cooper). He remained the English driver with the most Formula One victories until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him after competing in more races.
1948–1954
Moss began his career at the wheel of his father Alfred's 328 BMW, DPX 653. Moss was one of the Cooper Car Company's first customers, using winnings from competing in horse-riding events to pay the deposit on a Cooper 500 racing car in 1948. He then persuaded his father, who opposed his racing and wanted him to be a dentist, to let him buy it. He soon demonstrated his ability with numerous wins at national and international levels, and continued to compete in Formula Three, with Coopers and Kiefts, after he had progressed to more senior categories.
His first major international race victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the wheel of a borrowed Jaguar XK120 in the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland. He went on to win the race six more times, in 1951 (Jaguar C-Type), 1955 (Mercedes-Benz 300SLR), 1958 and 1959 (Aston Martin DBR1), and 1960 and 1961 (Ferrari 250 GT). Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, approached Moss and offered him a Formula Two car to drive at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix before a full
-season in 1952. Moss and his father went to Apulia only to find out that the Ferrari car was to be driven by experienced driver Piero Taruffi and were incensed.
Also a competent rally driver, Moss was one of three people to have won a Coupe d'Or (Gold Cup) for three consecutive penalty-free runs on the Alpine Rally (Coupe des Alpes). He finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with Desmond Scannell and Autocar magazine editor John Cooper as co-drivers.
In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing the Cunningham team's 1.5-liter O.S.C.A. MT4 with American Bill Lloyd.
In 1953 Mercedes-Benz racing boss Alfred Neubauer had spoken to Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, about the possibility of Moss's joining the Mercedes Grand Prix team. Having seen him do well in a relatively uncompetitive car, and wanting to see how he would perform in a better one, Neubauer suggested Moss buy a Maserati for the 1954 season. He bought a Maserati 250F, and although the car's unreliability prevented his scoring high points in the 1954 Drivers' Championship he qualified alongside the Mercedes front runners several times and performed well in the races. He achieved his first Formula One victory when he won the non-Championship Oulton Park International Gold Cup in the Maserati.
In the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he passed both drivers who were regarded as the best in Formula One at the time—Juan Manuel Fangio in a Mercedes and Alberto Ascari in a Ferrari—and took the lead. Ascari retired with engine problems, and Moss led until lap 68 when his engine also failed. Fangio took the victory, and Moss pushed his Maserati to the finish line. Neubauer, already impressed when Moss had tested a Mercedes-Benz W196 at Hockenheim, promptly signed him for 1955.
1955
Moss's first World Championship victory was in the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, a race he was also the first British driver to win. Leading a 1–2–3–4 finish for Mercedes, it was the first time he beat Fangio, his teammate and arch rival, who was also his friend and mentor. It has been suggested that Fangio sportingly allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd. Moss himself asked Fangio repeatedly, and Fangio always replied: "No. You were just better than me that day." The same year, Moss also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the Targa Florio (sharing the drive with Peter Collins) and the Mille Miglia.
Mille Miglia
In 1955 Moss won Italy's thousand-mile Mille Miglia road race, an achievement Doug Nye described as the "most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history." He was paired with motor racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who prepared pace note for Moss, and the two completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. Motor Trend headlined it as "The Most Epic Drive. Ever." Before the race, he had taken a "magic pill" given to him by Fangio, and he has commented that although he did not know what was in it, "Dexedrine and Benzedrine were commonly used in rallies. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews." After the win, he spent the night and the following day driving his girlfriend to Cologne, stopping for breakfast in Munich and lunch in Stuttgart.
1956–1962
Moss won the Nassau Cup at the 1956 and 1957 Bahamas Speed Week. Also in 1957 he won on the longest circuit ever to hold a World Championship Grand Prix, the Pescara Circuit, where he again demonstrated his mastery of long-distance racing. The event lasted three hours and Moss beat Fangio, who started from pole position, by a little over 3 minutes.
In 1958, Moss's forward-thinking attitude made waves in the racing world. Moss won the first race of the season in a rear-engined F1 car, which became the common design by 1961. At Monza that year, he raced in the "Eldorado" Maserati in the Race of Two Worlds, the first single-seater car in Europe to be sponsored by a non-racing brand—the Eldorado Ice Cream Company. This was the first case in Europe of contemporary sponsorship, with the ice cream maker's colors replacing the ones assigned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).
Moss's sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula One World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty after the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss defended him. Hawthorn was accused of reversing on the track after spinning and stalling his car on an uphill section. Moss had shouted advice to Hawthorn to steer downhill, against traffic, to bump-start the car. Moss's quick thinking, and his defence of Hawthorn before the stewards, preserved Hawthorn's 6 points for finishing second behind Moss. Hawthorn went on to beat Moss for the championship title by one point, even though he had won only one race that year to Moss's four. Moss's loss in the championship could also be attributed to an error in communication between his pit crew and the driver at one race. A point was given for the fastest lap in each race, and the crew signaled "HAWT REC" meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap. Moss read this as "HAWT REG" and thought Hawthorn was making regular laps, so did not try to set a fast lap. The crew was supposed to signal the time of the lap, so Moss would know what he had to beat.
Moss was as gifted in sports cars as in Grand Prix cars. To his victories in the Tourist Trophy, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Mille Miglia he added three consecutive wins (1958–1960) in the 1000 km Nürburgring, the first two in an Aston Martin (in which he did most of the driving), and the third in a Tipo 61 "birdcage" Maserati, co-driving with the American Dan Gurney. The pair lost time when an oil hose blew off, but despite the wet-weather, they made up the time and took first place.
In the 1960 Formula One season, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus 18. Seriously injured in an accident at the Burnenville curve during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he missed the next three races but recovered sufficiently to win the final one of the season, the United States Grand Prix at Riverside, California.
For the 1961 Formula One season, run under new 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari fielded the "sharknose" Ferrari 156 with an all-new V6 engine. Moss's Climax-engined Lotus was comparatively underpowered, but he won the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, beating the Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill, and went on to win the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.
In 1962, he crashed his Lotus heavily during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood held on Monday 23 April. The accident put him in a coma for a month, and for six months the left side of his body was partially paralysed. He recovered, but retired from professional racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the following year, when he lapped a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt he had not regained his previously instinctive command of the car. He had been runner-up in the Drivers' Championship four years in succession, from 1955 to 1958, and third in each of the next three years.
Speed records
1950
At the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a steeply banked oval track near Paris, Moss and Leslie Johnson took turns at the wheel of the latter's Jaguar XK120 to average for 24 hours, including stops for fuel and tyres. Changing drivers every three hours, they covered a total of . It was the first time a production car had averaged over for 24 hours.
1952
Revisiting Montlhéry, Moss was one of a four-driver team, led by Johnson, who drove a factory-owned Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for 7 days and nights at the French track. Moss, Johnson, Bert Hadley and Jack Fairman averaged to take four World records and five International Class C records, and covered a total of .
1957
In August Moss broke five International Class F records in the purpose-built MG EX181 at Bonneville Salt Flats. The streamlined, supercharged car's speed for the flying kilometer was 245.64 mph, which was the average of two runs in opposite directions.
Broadcasting career
Away from driving, in 1962 he acted as a colour commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR races. He eventually left ABC in 1980. Moss narrated the official 1988 Formula One season review along with Tony Jardine.
Moss also narrated the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car, which stars Peter Kay.
Return to racing
Although ostensibly retired from racing since 1962, Moss did make a number of one-off appearances in professional motorsport events in the following two decades. He also competed in the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally in a Mercedes-Benz, but retired from the event in the Algerian Sahara. The Holden Torana he shared with Jack Brabham in the 1976 Bathurst 1000 was hit from behind on the grid and eventually retired with engine failure. Moss, at the wheel of the Torana when the V8 engine let go, was criticised by other drivers for staying on the racing line for over ⅔ of the 6.172 km long circuit while returning to the pits as the car was dropping large amounts of oil onto the road. He also shared a Volkswagen Golf GTI with Denny Hulme in the 1979 Benson & Hedges 500 at Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand.
In 1980 he made a comeback to regular competition, in the British Saloon Car Championship with the works-backed GTi Engineering Audi team. For the 1980 season Moss was the team's number two driver to team co-owner Richard Lloyd. For the 1981 season Moss stayed with Audi, as the team moved to Tom Walkinshaw Racing management, driving alongside Martin Brundle.
Throughout his retirement he raced in events for historic cars, driving on behalf of and at the invitation of others, as well as campaigning his own OSCA FS 372 and other vehicles. In 2004, as part of its promotion for the new SLR, Mercedes-Benz reunited Moss with the 300 SLR "No. 722" in which he won the Mille Miglia nearly 50 years earlier. One reporter who rode with Moss that day noted that the 75-year-old driver was "so good . . . that even old and crippled [he was] still better than nearly everyone else". On 9 June 2011 during qualifying for the Le Mans Legends race, Moss announced on Radio Le Mans that he had finally retired from racing, saying that he had scared himself that afternoon. He was 81.
Post racing career
Lister Cars announced the building for sale of the Lister Knobbly Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London in June 2016. The car is built to the exact specification of the 1958 model, is the only magnesium-bodied car in the world, and is the only car that was ever endorsed by Moss. Brian Lister invited Moss to drive for Lister on three separate occasions, at Goodwood in 1954, Silverstone in 1958 and at Sebring in 1959, and to celebrate these races, 10 special edition lightweight Lister Knobbly cars are being built. The company announced that the cars will be available for both road and race use, and Moss would personally be handing over each car.
Honours
In 1990, Moss was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In the New Year Honours 2000 List, Moss was made a Knight Bachelor for services to motor racing. On 21 March 2000, he was knighted by Prince Charles, standing in for the Queen, who was on an official visit to Australia.
He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy.
In 2006, Moss was awarded the FIA gold medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to motorsport.
In December 2008, McLaren-Mercedes unveiled their final model of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The model was named in honour of Moss, hence, Mercedes McLaren SLR Stirling Moss, which has a top speed of with wind deflectors instead of a windscreen.
In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modelling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Moss was ranked the 29th best Formula One driver of all time.
Following Moss's death the Kinrara Trophy race at the Goodwood Revival meeting was renamed in his honour. It is a race for GT cars that competed before 1963.
Biographies
In 1957, Moss published an autobiography called In the Track Of Speed, first published by Muller, London.
In 1963, motorsport author and commentator Ken Purdy published a biographical book entitled All But My Life about Moss (first published by William Kimber & Co, London), based on material gathered through interviews with Moss.
In 2015, when he was aged 85, Moss published a second autobiography, entitled My Racing Life, written with motor sports writer Simon Taylor. In 2016, Philip Porter published the first volume of Stirling Moss - The Definitive Biography covering the period from birth up to the end of 1955, one of Moss's greatest years.
Popular culture
During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On 12 June the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver.
For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. Moss was the subject of a cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye that said he was interested in cars, women and sex, in that order. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. Although there were complaints to the magazine about the cartoons, Moss rang Private Eye to ask if he could use it as a Christmas card.
He was one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. In 2004, Moss was a supporter of the UK Independence Party.
Moss was a Mercedes-Benz Brand Ambassador, having kept a close relationship with the brand, and remained an enthusiast and collector of the brand, which includes the Mercedes-Benz W113, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss among others.
Personal life and death
Moss was married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson; an heir to the Canadian brewer Molson. They were married in 1957 and separated three years later. His second wife was the American public relations executive Elaine Barbarino. They were married in 1964 and divorced in 1968. Their daughter Allison was born in 1967. His third wife was Susie Paine, the daughter of an old friend. They were married from 1980 until his death in 2020. Their son Elliot was born in 1980.
In April 1960, Moss was found guilty of dangerous driving. He was fined £50 and banned from driving for one year after an incident near Chetwynd, Shropshire, when he was test-driving a Mini.
Moss's 80th birthday, on 17 September 2009, fell on the eve of the Goodwood Revival and Lord March celebrated with an 80-car parade on each of the three days. Moss drove a different car each day: a Mercedes-Benz W196 (an open-wheel variant), the Lotus 18 in which he had won the 1961 Monaco GP, and an Aston Martin DBR1.
On 7 March 2010, Moss broke both ankles and four bones in a foot, and also chipped four vertebrae and suffered skin lesions, when he plunged down a lift shaft at his home. In December 2016, he was admitted to hospital in Singapore with a serious chest infection. As a result of this illness and a subsequent lengthy recovery period, Moss announced his retirement from public life in January 2018.
Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, on 12 April 2020, aged 90, after a long illness.
Racing record
Career highlights
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Indicates shared drive with Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling.
* Indicates shared drive with Cesare Perdisa.
‡ Indicates shared drive with Tony Brooks.
[a] After Moss retired from the race he took over the car of Trintignant. Both drivers did not receive any points for their shared drive.
Non-championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
(Races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete 24 Hours of Le Mans results
Complete 12 Hours of Sebring results
Complete 12 Hours of Reims results
Complete Mille Miglia results
Complete Rallye de Monte Carlo results
Complete Bathurst 1000 results
Complete British Saloon Car Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap.)
† Events with 2 races staged for the different classes.
References
External links
Sir Stirling Moss – Official Web Site
Stirling Moss in the 24 hours of Le Mans
Grand Prix History – Hall of Fame, Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss profile at The 500 Owners Association
BBC Face to Face interview with Stirling Moss and John Freeman, broadcast 12 June 1960
1929 births
2020 deaths
12 Hours of Sebring drivers
24 Hours of Le Mans drivers
BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners
Bonneville 200 MPH Club members
BRDC Gold Star winners
Brighton Speed Trials people
British Racing Partnership Formula One drivers
British Touring Car Championship drivers
Connaught Formula One drivers
Cooper Formula One drivers
English Formula One drivers
English people of Jewish descent
English racing drivers
ERA Formula One drivers
Formula One race winners
Formula One team owners
Hersham and Walton Motors Formula One drivers
International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees
Knights Bachelor
Maserati Formula One drivers
Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
People from West Kensington
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Rob Walker Racing Team Formula One drivers
Sportspeople from London
Segrave Trophy recipients
Vanwall Formula One drivers
World Sportscar Championship drivers | false | [
"Romilda or Ramhilde (died 611), was a Duchess consort of Friuli by marriage to Duke Gisulf II of Friuli. She served as regent of Friuli in 611, during the invasion of the Pannonian Avars.\n\nRomilda was reportedly the daughter of Garibald I of Bavaria. She married Gisulf II of Friuli, and became the mother of the sons Tasso, Kakko, Radoald and Grimoald, and the daughters Appa and Geila (or Gaila), married to the King of the Alemanni (uncertain) and the Prince of the Bavarians, probably Garibald II of Bavaria. \n\nIn 611, the Duchy of Friuli was invaded by the Pannonian Avars under their king Cacan. Gisulf II died on the battle field, and the Avars besieged the main capital Friuli, which was defended by Romilda, who had taken command as regent. Romilda famously offered the Avarian king Cacan to surrender the city peacefully, if he accepted her peace offering by a marriage between them. Cacan accepted the offer, and the siege was lifted. However, when Romilda surrendered the city, Friuli was pillaged by Cacan, who broke his word. He reportedly spent one night with Romilda and raped her, after which he allowed her to be raped by his soldiers. After this, he is claimed to have had her executed by impalement. Her children managed to escape. \n\nRomilda has been given a very bad reputation in history because Paul the Deacon, who in his chronicle from the following century claimed that she made the offer of marriage to Cacan out of personal attraction and betrayed her city out of sexual lust. However, to make peace through proposal of a marriage alliance was in fact a common and accepted political peace method of the time.\n\nReferences\n\n7th-century women rulers\n611 deaths\nPeople executed by impalement\n 7th-century executions\nRape",
"Ludovico Balbi (c. 1545 – 1604) was a Venetian singer and composer, and conductor. He was a pupil of Costanzo Porta and a choirmaster at Padua. Among his compositions are masses, motets, canzoni, madrigals, and others. Surviving compositions date as early as 1570.\n\nBiography \nBalbi was born in Venice around 1545. In 1565, he became a student of the great Italian composer Costanzo Porta. From 1570 to 1578, Balbi sang at St. Mark's Cathedral and was appointed maestro di cappella at the monastery S. Maria Glorioso del Frari. In 1582, Balbi declined an offer to be maestro at Milan Cathedral and instead referred one of his underlings, offending some high-ranking officials of the Roman Church. In 1585, Balbi accepted an offer to be maestro of the Cappella Anotoniana in Padua, although he wished to be maestro of Padua Cathedral. After moving to Feltre Cathedral in 1593 and later Treviso Cathedral, he returned to S. Maria Glorioso del Frari until his death in 1604.\n\nReferences\n\n1540s births\n1604 deaths\nRenaissance composers\nItalian classical composers\nItalian male classical composers"
]
|
[
"Stirling Moss",
"Popular culture",
"What is Moss conection to popular culture?",
"During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances.",
"Why was he recognised?",
"many media appearances.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye.",
"How did Moss react to this?",
"According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon,",
"And was his offer accepted?",
"an outcome the book describes as \"depressingly common\" for its satirical cartoons about famous people."
]
| C_82e2b9fa33714068bc722fe9c3394c42_0 | In what other media did Stirling Moss appear? | 6 | In what other media besides the Book The Life and Times of Private Eye did Stirling Moss appear? | Stirling Moss | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On June 12 the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver. For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car which stars Peter Kay, a role he took on, having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, as he saw the TV show as a way of introducing motorsport to the next generation. He is one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. Moss is also a supporter of the UK Independence Party. CANNOTANSWER | Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car | Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020) was a British Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.
Early life
Moss was born in London, son of Alfred Moss, a dentist of Bray, Berkshire, and Aileen (née Craufurd). His grandfather was Jewish, from a family that changed their surname from Moses to Moss. He was brought up at Long White Cloud house on the south bank of the River Thames. His father was an amateur racing driver who had come 16th in the 1924 Indianapolis 500. Aileen Moss had also been involved in motorsport, entering prewar hillclimbs at the wheel of a Singer Nine. Stirling was a gifted horse rider as was his younger sister, Pat Moss, who became a successful rally driver in her own right and also married Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson.
Moss was educated at several independent schools: Shrewsbury House School in Surbiton, Clewer Manor Junior School, and the linked senior school, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, located at Hertford Heath, near Hertford. He disliked school and did not attain a good academic performance. At Haileybury, he was subjected to antisemitic bullying because of his Jewish roots. He concealed the bullying from his parents and used it as "motivation to succeed". Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at the age of nine, and drove it on the fields around Long White Cloud. He purchased his own car at age 15 after he obtained a driving licence. After the Second World War, Moss was ruled exempt from doing the mandatory two-year national service for men his age because he had nephritis.
Racing career
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962, winning 212 of the 529 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grands Prix. He competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career. He preferred to race British cars, stating, "Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one". At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing (as was Jack Brabham at Cooper). He remained the English driver with the most Formula One victories until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him after competing in more races.
1948–1954
Moss began his career at the wheel of his father Alfred's 328 BMW, DPX 653. Moss was one of the Cooper Car Company's first customers, using winnings from competing in horse-riding events to pay the deposit on a Cooper 500 racing car in 1948. He then persuaded his father, who opposed his racing and wanted him to be a dentist, to let him buy it. He soon demonstrated his ability with numerous wins at national and international levels, and continued to compete in Formula Three, with Coopers and Kiefts, after he had progressed to more senior categories.
His first major international race victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the wheel of a borrowed Jaguar XK120 in the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland. He went on to win the race six more times, in 1951 (Jaguar C-Type), 1955 (Mercedes-Benz 300SLR), 1958 and 1959 (Aston Martin DBR1), and 1960 and 1961 (Ferrari 250 GT). Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, approached Moss and offered him a Formula Two car to drive at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix before a full
-season in 1952. Moss and his father went to Apulia only to find out that the Ferrari car was to be driven by experienced driver Piero Taruffi and were incensed.
Also a competent rally driver, Moss was one of three people to have won a Coupe d'Or (Gold Cup) for three consecutive penalty-free runs on the Alpine Rally (Coupe des Alpes). He finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with Desmond Scannell and Autocar magazine editor John Cooper as co-drivers.
In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing the Cunningham team's 1.5-liter O.S.C.A. MT4 with American Bill Lloyd.
In 1953 Mercedes-Benz racing boss Alfred Neubauer had spoken to Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, about the possibility of Moss's joining the Mercedes Grand Prix team. Having seen him do well in a relatively uncompetitive car, and wanting to see how he would perform in a better one, Neubauer suggested Moss buy a Maserati for the 1954 season. He bought a Maserati 250F, and although the car's unreliability prevented his scoring high points in the 1954 Drivers' Championship he qualified alongside the Mercedes front runners several times and performed well in the races. He achieved his first Formula One victory when he won the non-Championship Oulton Park International Gold Cup in the Maserati.
In the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he passed both drivers who were regarded as the best in Formula One at the time—Juan Manuel Fangio in a Mercedes and Alberto Ascari in a Ferrari—and took the lead. Ascari retired with engine problems, and Moss led until lap 68 when his engine also failed. Fangio took the victory, and Moss pushed his Maserati to the finish line. Neubauer, already impressed when Moss had tested a Mercedes-Benz W196 at Hockenheim, promptly signed him for 1955.
1955
Moss's first World Championship victory was in the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, a race he was also the first British driver to win. Leading a 1–2–3–4 finish for Mercedes, it was the first time he beat Fangio, his teammate and arch rival, who was also his friend and mentor. It has been suggested that Fangio sportingly allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd. Moss himself asked Fangio repeatedly, and Fangio always replied: "No. You were just better than me that day." The same year, Moss also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the Targa Florio (sharing the drive with Peter Collins) and the Mille Miglia.
Mille Miglia
In 1955 Moss won Italy's thousand-mile Mille Miglia road race, an achievement Doug Nye described as the "most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history." He was paired with motor racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who prepared pace note for Moss, and the two completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. Motor Trend headlined it as "The Most Epic Drive. Ever." Before the race, he had taken a "magic pill" given to him by Fangio, and he has commented that although he did not know what was in it, "Dexedrine and Benzedrine were commonly used in rallies. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews." After the win, he spent the night and the following day driving his girlfriend to Cologne, stopping for breakfast in Munich and lunch in Stuttgart.
1956–1962
Moss won the Nassau Cup at the 1956 and 1957 Bahamas Speed Week. Also in 1957 he won on the longest circuit ever to hold a World Championship Grand Prix, the Pescara Circuit, where he again demonstrated his mastery of long-distance racing. The event lasted three hours and Moss beat Fangio, who started from pole position, by a little over 3 minutes.
In 1958, Moss's forward-thinking attitude made waves in the racing world. Moss won the first race of the season in a rear-engined F1 car, which became the common design by 1961. At Monza that year, he raced in the "Eldorado" Maserati in the Race of Two Worlds, the first single-seater car in Europe to be sponsored by a non-racing brand—the Eldorado Ice Cream Company. This was the first case in Europe of contemporary sponsorship, with the ice cream maker's colors replacing the ones assigned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).
Moss's sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula One World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty after the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss defended him. Hawthorn was accused of reversing on the track after spinning and stalling his car on an uphill section. Moss had shouted advice to Hawthorn to steer downhill, against traffic, to bump-start the car. Moss's quick thinking, and his defence of Hawthorn before the stewards, preserved Hawthorn's 6 points for finishing second behind Moss. Hawthorn went on to beat Moss for the championship title by one point, even though he had won only one race that year to Moss's four. Moss's loss in the championship could also be attributed to an error in communication between his pit crew and the driver at one race. A point was given for the fastest lap in each race, and the crew signaled "HAWT REC" meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap. Moss read this as "HAWT REG" and thought Hawthorn was making regular laps, so did not try to set a fast lap. The crew was supposed to signal the time of the lap, so Moss would know what he had to beat.
Moss was as gifted in sports cars as in Grand Prix cars. To his victories in the Tourist Trophy, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Mille Miglia he added three consecutive wins (1958–1960) in the 1000 km Nürburgring, the first two in an Aston Martin (in which he did most of the driving), and the third in a Tipo 61 "birdcage" Maserati, co-driving with the American Dan Gurney. The pair lost time when an oil hose blew off, but despite the wet-weather, they made up the time and took first place.
In the 1960 Formula One season, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus 18. Seriously injured in an accident at the Burnenville curve during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he missed the next three races but recovered sufficiently to win the final one of the season, the United States Grand Prix at Riverside, California.
For the 1961 Formula One season, run under new 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari fielded the "sharknose" Ferrari 156 with an all-new V6 engine. Moss's Climax-engined Lotus was comparatively underpowered, but he won the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, beating the Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill, and went on to win the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.
In 1962, he crashed his Lotus heavily during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood held on Monday 23 April. The accident put him in a coma for a month, and for six months the left side of his body was partially paralysed. He recovered, but retired from professional racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the following year, when he lapped a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt he had not regained his previously instinctive command of the car. He had been runner-up in the Drivers' Championship four years in succession, from 1955 to 1958, and third in each of the next three years.
Speed records
1950
At the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a steeply banked oval track near Paris, Moss and Leslie Johnson took turns at the wheel of the latter's Jaguar XK120 to average for 24 hours, including stops for fuel and tyres. Changing drivers every three hours, they covered a total of . It was the first time a production car had averaged over for 24 hours.
1952
Revisiting Montlhéry, Moss was one of a four-driver team, led by Johnson, who drove a factory-owned Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for 7 days and nights at the French track. Moss, Johnson, Bert Hadley and Jack Fairman averaged to take four World records and five International Class C records, and covered a total of .
1957
In August Moss broke five International Class F records in the purpose-built MG EX181 at Bonneville Salt Flats. The streamlined, supercharged car's speed for the flying kilometer was 245.64 mph, which was the average of two runs in opposite directions.
Broadcasting career
Away from driving, in 1962 he acted as a colour commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR races. He eventually left ABC in 1980. Moss narrated the official 1988 Formula One season review along with Tony Jardine.
Moss also narrated the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car, which stars Peter Kay.
Return to racing
Although ostensibly retired from racing since 1962, Moss did make a number of one-off appearances in professional motorsport events in the following two decades. He also competed in the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally in a Mercedes-Benz, but retired from the event in the Algerian Sahara. The Holden Torana he shared with Jack Brabham in the 1976 Bathurst 1000 was hit from behind on the grid and eventually retired with engine failure. Moss, at the wheel of the Torana when the V8 engine let go, was criticised by other drivers for staying on the racing line for over ⅔ of the 6.172 km long circuit while returning to the pits as the car was dropping large amounts of oil onto the road. He also shared a Volkswagen Golf GTI with Denny Hulme in the 1979 Benson & Hedges 500 at Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand.
In 1980 he made a comeback to regular competition, in the British Saloon Car Championship with the works-backed GTi Engineering Audi team. For the 1980 season Moss was the team's number two driver to team co-owner Richard Lloyd. For the 1981 season Moss stayed with Audi, as the team moved to Tom Walkinshaw Racing management, driving alongside Martin Brundle.
Throughout his retirement he raced in events for historic cars, driving on behalf of and at the invitation of others, as well as campaigning his own OSCA FS 372 and other vehicles. In 2004, as part of its promotion for the new SLR, Mercedes-Benz reunited Moss with the 300 SLR "No. 722" in which he won the Mille Miglia nearly 50 years earlier. One reporter who rode with Moss that day noted that the 75-year-old driver was "so good . . . that even old and crippled [he was] still better than nearly everyone else". On 9 June 2011 during qualifying for the Le Mans Legends race, Moss announced on Radio Le Mans that he had finally retired from racing, saying that he had scared himself that afternoon. He was 81.
Post racing career
Lister Cars announced the building for sale of the Lister Knobbly Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London in June 2016. The car is built to the exact specification of the 1958 model, is the only magnesium-bodied car in the world, and is the only car that was ever endorsed by Moss. Brian Lister invited Moss to drive for Lister on three separate occasions, at Goodwood in 1954, Silverstone in 1958 and at Sebring in 1959, and to celebrate these races, 10 special edition lightweight Lister Knobbly cars are being built. The company announced that the cars will be available for both road and race use, and Moss would personally be handing over each car.
Honours
In 1990, Moss was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In the New Year Honours 2000 List, Moss was made a Knight Bachelor for services to motor racing. On 21 March 2000, he was knighted by Prince Charles, standing in for the Queen, who was on an official visit to Australia.
He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy.
In 2006, Moss was awarded the FIA gold medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to motorsport.
In December 2008, McLaren-Mercedes unveiled their final model of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The model was named in honour of Moss, hence, Mercedes McLaren SLR Stirling Moss, which has a top speed of with wind deflectors instead of a windscreen.
In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modelling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Moss was ranked the 29th best Formula One driver of all time.
Following Moss's death the Kinrara Trophy race at the Goodwood Revival meeting was renamed in his honour. It is a race for GT cars that competed before 1963.
Biographies
In 1957, Moss published an autobiography called In the Track Of Speed, first published by Muller, London.
In 1963, motorsport author and commentator Ken Purdy published a biographical book entitled All But My Life about Moss (first published by William Kimber & Co, London), based on material gathered through interviews with Moss.
In 2015, when he was aged 85, Moss published a second autobiography, entitled My Racing Life, written with motor sports writer Simon Taylor. In 2016, Philip Porter published the first volume of Stirling Moss - The Definitive Biography covering the period from birth up to the end of 1955, one of Moss's greatest years.
Popular culture
During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On 12 June the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver.
For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. Moss was the subject of a cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye that said he was interested in cars, women and sex, in that order. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. Although there were complaints to the magazine about the cartoons, Moss rang Private Eye to ask if he could use it as a Christmas card.
He was one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. In 2004, Moss was a supporter of the UK Independence Party.
Moss was a Mercedes-Benz Brand Ambassador, having kept a close relationship with the brand, and remained an enthusiast and collector of the brand, which includes the Mercedes-Benz W113, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss among others.
Personal life and death
Moss was married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson; an heir to the Canadian brewer Molson. They were married in 1957 and separated three years later. His second wife was the American public relations executive Elaine Barbarino. They were married in 1964 and divorced in 1968. Their daughter Allison was born in 1967. His third wife was Susie Paine, the daughter of an old friend. They were married from 1980 until his death in 2020. Their son Elliot was born in 1980.
In April 1960, Moss was found guilty of dangerous driving. He was fined £50 and banned from driving for one year after an incident near Chetwynd, Shropshire, when he was test-driving a Mini.
Moss's 80th birthday, on 17 September 2009, fell on the eve of the Goodwood Revival and Lord March celebrated with an 80-car parade on each of the three days. Moss drove a different car each day: a Mercedes-Benz W196 (an open-wheel variant), the Lotus 18 in which he had won the 1961 Monaco GP, and an Aston Martin DBR1.
On 7 March 2010, Moss broke both ankles and four bones in a foot, and also chipped four vertebrae and suffered skin lesions, when he plunged down a lift shaft at his home. In December 2016, he was admitted to hospital in Singapore with a serious chest infection. As a result of this illness and a subsequent lengthy recovery period, Moss announced his retirement from public life in January 2018.
Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, on 12 April 2020, aged 90, after a long illness.
Racing record
Career highlights
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Indicates shared drive with Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling.
* Indicates shared drive with Cesare Perdisa.
‡ Indicates shared drive with Tony Brooks.
[a] After Moss retired from the race he took over the car of Trintignant. Both drivers did not receive any points for their shared drive.
Non-championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
(Races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete 24 Hours of Le Mans results
Complete 12 Hours of Sebring results
Complete 12 Hours of Reims results
Complete Mille Miglia results
Complete Rallye de Monte Carlo results
Complete Bathurst 1000 results
Complete British Saloon Car Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap.)
† Events with 2 races staged for the different classes.
References
External links
Sir Stirling Moss – Official Web Site
Stirling Moss in the 24 hours of Le Mans
Grand Prix History – Hall of Fame, Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss profile at The 500 Owners Association
BBC Face to Face interview with Stirling Moss and John Freeman, broadcast 12 June 1960
1929 births
2020 deaths
12 Hours of Sebring drivers
24 Hours of Le Mans drivers
BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners
Bonneville 200 MPH Club members
BRDC Gold Star winners
Brighton Speed Trials people
British Racing Partnership Formula One drivers
British Touring Car Championship drivers
Connaught Formula One drivers
Cooper Formula One drivers
English Formula One drivers
English people of Jewish descent
English racing drivers
ERA Formula One drivers
Formula One race winners
Formula One team owners
Hersham and Walton Motors Formula One drivers
International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees
Knights Bachelor
Maserati Formula One drivers
Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
People from West Kensington
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Rob Walker Racing Team Formula One drivers
Sportspeople from London
Segrave Trophy recipients
Vanwall Formula One drivers
World Sportscar Championship drivers | false | [
"Alfred Ethelbert Moss (30 May 1896 – 23 April 1972) was an English dentist and racing driver.\n\nBorn in Kensington, London, Moss was the son of Sarah Jane and Abraham Moses Moss. His father was Jewish, while his mother was a Christian. \n \nMoss became a successful London dentist, and from his mid-twenties he was also an enthusiastic competition driver, beginning his racing career at the Essex Motor Club's Winter Trial in 1921 driving a 1000 cc AV cyclecar. He was disqualified for seeking help after his rear tyres had burst twice. His AV later caught fire in Park Lane, and Moss then acquired a GN cyclecar, with which he enjoyed success in trials and hillclimbs, and which he raced at Brooklands. In 1922, he bought and began to race a Crouch Le Mans sports car which had no front brakes. In the 1924 Indianapolis 500, he placed 14th or 16th (sources differ) in a Fronty Ford.\n\nMoss met his future wife, Aileen Craufurd, at Brooklands. She had been an ambulance driver in the First World War, and also did some racing. They were married at St Marylebone in 1928 and were the parents of the Formula One driver Stirling Moss and the rallying champion Pat Moss.\n\nIn 1957 Moss and his son's manager Ken Gregory established the Formula One team British Racing Partnership with the objective to run cars for Stirling, when not under contract with other firms, along with other up-and-coming drivers.\n\nMoss died aged 75 in Stoke Mandeville, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, on the 10th anniversary of his son being seriously injured in a car racing crash at Goodwood.\n\nIndianapolis 500 results\n\nReferences\n\n1896 births\n1972 deaths\nEnglish people of Jewish descent\nEnglish racing drivers\nIndianapolis 500 drivers\nEnglish dentists\nFormula One team owners\n20th-century dentists",
"The 1958 RAC Tourist Trophy took place on 13 September, on the Goodwood Circuit, (England). It was also the sixth and final round of the F.I.A. World Sports Car Championship. This was the first time the event had taken place, since 1955 following the death of three drivers during the race.\n\nReport\n\nEntry\n\nA grand total 36 racing cars were registered for this event, of which 29 arrived for practice and qualifying. Scuderia Ferrari, did entry one car for the event, 250 TR 58, but were among those who did not arrive, perhaps the disinterest from Maranello was due to the lack of drivers and the fact that their victory at Le Mans had given them the Championship. The event also did not attract the Belgian equipes. The entry was therefore headed by the three works Aston Martins, entered under the name of David Brown Ltd. Their DBR1/300s were from Stirling Moss/Tony Brooks, Carroll Shelby/Stuart Lewis-Evans and Roy Salvadori/Jack Brabham.\n\nQualifying\n\nThe Aston Martin DBR1/300 of Stirling Moss took pole position, averaging a speed of 93.913 mph around the 2.4 mile circuit.\n\nRace\n\nOf the 29 starters, only the three Astons were considered the potential winners, and so it proved as they finished in the first three places, winning the Team Awards in the process. The winning partnership of Moss/Brooks won in a time of 4hr 01:17.0mins., averaging a speed of 88.324 mph. They covered a distance of 355.2 miles. Just 0.4 seconds behind came Salvadori/Brabham, with Shelby/Lewis-Evans the same margin adrift in complete the podium.\n\nOfficial Classification\n\nClass Winners are in Bold text.\n\n Fastest Lap: Stirling Moss, 1:32.6 secs (93.305 mph)\n\nClass Winners\n\nStandings after the race\n\nReferences\n\nGoodwood\nRAC Tourist Trophy\nRAC"
]
|
[
"Stirling Moss",
"Popular culture",
"What is Moss conection to popular culture?",
"During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances.",
"Why was he recognised?",
"many media appearances.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye.",
"How did Moss react to this?",
"According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon,",
"And was his offer accepted?",
"an outcome the book describes as \"depressingly common\" for its satirical cartoons about famous people.",
"In what other media did Stirling Moss appear?",
"Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car"
]
| C_82e2b9fa33714068bc722fe9c3394c42_0 | When did he become the narator of this series? | 7 | When did Stirling Moss become the narator of Roary the Racing Car? | Stirling Moss | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On June 12 the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver. For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car which stars Peter Kay, a role he took on, having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, as he saw the TV show as a way of introducing motorsport to the next generation. He is one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. Moss is also a supporter of the UK Independence Party. CANNOTANSWER | having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, | Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020) was a British Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.
Early life
Moss was born in London, son of Alfred Moss, a dentist of Bray, Berkshire, and Aileen (née Craufurd). His grandfather was Jewish, from a family that changed their surname from Moses to Moss. He was brought up at Long White Cloud house on the south bank of the River Thames. His father was an amateur racing driver who had come 16th in the 1924 Indianapolis 500. Aileen Moss had also been involved in motorsport, entering prewar hillclimbs at the wheel of a Singer Nine. Stirling was a gifted horse rider as was his younger sister, Pat Moss, who became a successful rally driver in her own right and also married Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson.
Moss was educated at several independent schools: Shrewsbury House School in Surbiton, Clewer Manor Junior School, and the linked senior school, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, located at Hertford Heath, near Hertford. He disliked school and did not attain a good academic performance. At Haileybury, he was subjected to antisemitic bullying because of his Jewish roots. He concealed the bullying from his parents and used it as "motivation to succeed". Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at the age of nine, and drove it on the fields around Long White Cloud. He purchased his own car at age 15 after he obtained a driving licence. After the Second World War, Moss was ruled exempt from doing the mandatory two-year national service for men his age because he had nephritis.
Racing career
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962, winning 212 of the 529 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grands Prix. He competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career. He preferred to race British cars, stating, "Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one". At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing (as was Jack Brabham at Cooper). He remained the English driver with the most Formula One victories until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him after competing in more races.
1948–1954
Moss began his career at the wheel of his father Alfred's 328 BMW, DPX 653. Moss was one of the Cooper Car Company's first customers, using winnings from competing in horse-riding events to pay the deposit on a Cooper 500 racing car in 1948. He then persuaded his father, who opposed his racing and wanted him to be a dentist, to let him buy it. He soon demonstrated his ability with numerous wins at national and international levels, and continued to compete in Formula Three, with Coopers and Kiefts, after he had progressed to more senior categories.
His first major international race victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the wheel of a borrowed Jaguar XK120 in the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland. He went on to win the race six more times, in 1951 (Jaguar C-Type), 1955 (Mercedes-Benz 300SLR), 1958 and 1959 (Aston Martin DBR1), and 1960 and 1961 (Ferrari 250 GT). Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, approached Moss and offered him a Formula Two car to drive at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix before a full
-season in 1952. Moss and his father went to Apulia only to find out that the Ferrari car was to be driven by experienced driver Piero Taruffi and were incensed.
Also a competent rally driver, Moss was one of three people to have won a Coupe d'Or (Gold Cup) for three consecutive penalty-free runs on the Alpine Rally (Coupe des Alpes). He finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with Desmond Scannell and Autocar magazine editor John Cooper as co-drivers.
In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing the Cunningham team's 1.5-liter O.S.C.A. MT4 with American Bill Lloyd.
In 1953 Mercedes-Benz racing boss Alfred Neubauer had spoken to Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, about the possibility of Moss's joining the Mercedes Grand Prix team. Having seen him do well in a relatively uncompetitive car, and wanting to see how he would perform in a better one, Neubauer suggested Moss buy a Maserati for the 1954 season. He bought a Maserati 250F, and although the car's unreliability prevented his scoring high points in the 1954 Drivers' Championship he qualified alongside the Mercedes front runners several times and performed well in the races. He achieved his first Formula One victory when he won the non-Championship Oulton Park International Gold Cup in the Maserati.
In the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he passed both drivers who were regarded as the best in Formula One at the time—Juan Manuel Fangio in a Mercedes and Alberto Ascari in a Ferrari—and took the lead. Ascari retired with engine problems, and Moss led until lap 68 when his engine also failed. Fangio took the victory, and Moss pushed his Maserati to the finish line. Neubauer, already impressed when Moss had tested a Mercedes-Benz W196 at Hockenheim, promptly signed him for 1955.
1955
Moss's first World Championship victory was in the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, a race he was also the first British driver to win. Leading a 1–2–3–4 finish for Mercedes, it was the first time he beat Fangio, his teammate and arch rival, who was also his friend and mentor. It has been suggested that Fangio sportingly allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd. Moss himself asked Fangio repeatedly, and Fangio always replied: "No. You were just better than me that day." The same year, Moss also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the Targa Florio (sharing the drive with Peter Collins) and the Mille Miglia.
Mille Miglia
In 1955 Moss won Italy's thousand-mile Mille Miglia road race, an achievement Doug Nye described as the "most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history." He was paired with motor racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who prepared pace note for Moss, and the two completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. Motor Trend headlined it as "The Most Epic Drive. Ever." Before the race, he had taken a "magic pill" given to him by Fangio, and he has commented that although he did not know what was in it, "Dexedrine and Benzedrine were commonly used in rallies. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews." After the win, he spent the night and the following day driving his girlfriend to Cologne, stopping for breakfast in Munich and lunch in Stuttgart.
1956–1962
Moss won the Nassau Cup at the 1956 and 1957 Bahamas Speed Week. Also in 1957 he won on the longest circuit ever to hold a World Championship Grand Prix, the Pescara Circuit, where he again demonstrated his mastery of long-distance racing. The event lasted three hours and Moss beat Fangio, who started from pole position, by a little over 3 minutes.
In 1958, Moss's forward-thinking attitude made waves in the racing world. Moss won the first race of the season in a rear-engined F1 car, which became the common design by 1961. At Monza that year, he raced in the "Eldorado" Maserati in the Race of Two Worlds, the first single-seater car in Europe to be sponsored by a non-racing brand—the Eldorado Ice Cream Company. This was the first case in Europe of contemporary sponsorship, with the ice cream maker's colors replacing the ones assigned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).
Moss's sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula One World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty after the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss defended him. Hawthorn was accused of reversing on the track after spinning and stalling his car on an uphill section. Moss had shouted advice to Hawthorn to steer downhill, against traffic, to bump-start the car. Moss's quick thinking, and his defence of Hawthorn before the stewards, preserved Hawthorn's 6 points for finishing second behind Moss. Hawthorn went on to beat Moss for the championship title by one point, even though he had won only one race that year to Moss's four. Moss's loss in the championship could also be attributed to an error in communication between his pit crew and the driver at one race. A point was given for the fastest lap in each race, and the crew signaled "HAWT REC" meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap. Moss read this as "HAWT REG" and thought Hawthorn was making regular laps, so did not try to set a fast lap. The crew was supposed to signal the time of the lap, so Moss would know what he had to beat.
Moss was as gifted in sports cars as in Grand Prix cars. To his victories in the Tourist Trophy, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Mille Miglia he added three consecutive wins (1958–1960) in the 1000 km Nürburgring, the first two in an Aston Martin (in which he did most of the driving), and the third in a Tipo 61 "birdcage" Maserati, co-driving with the American Dan Gurney. The pair lost time when an oil hose blew off, but despite the wet-weather, they made up the time and took first place.
In the 1960 Formula One season, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus 18. Seriously injured in an accident at the Burnenville curve during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he missed the next three races but recovered sufficiently to win the final one of the season, the United States Grand Prix at Riverside, California.
For the 1961 Formula One season, run under new 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari fielded the "sharknose" Ferrari 156 with an all-new V6 engine. Moss's Climax-engined Lotus was comparatively underpowered, but he won the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, beating the Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill, and went on to win the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.
In 1962, he crashed his Lotus heavily during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood held on Monday 23 April. The accident put him in a coma for a month, and for six months the left side of his body was partially paralysed. He recovered, but retired from professional racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the following year, when he lapped a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt he had not regained his previously instinctive command of the car. He had been runner-up in the Drivers' Championship four years in succession, from 1955 to 1958, and third in each of the next three years.
Speed records
1950
At the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a steeply banked oval track near Paris, Moss and Leslie Johnson took turns at the wheel of the latter's Jaguar XK120 to average for 24 hours, including stops for fuel and tyres. Changing drivers every three hours, they covered a total of . It was the first time a production car had averaged over for 24 hours.
1952
Revisiting Montlhéry, Moss was one of a four-driver team, led by Johnson, who drove a factory-owned Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for 7 days and nights at the French track. Moss, Johnson, Bert Hadley and Jack Fairman averaged to take four World records and five International Class C records, and covered a total of .
1957
In August Moss broke five International Class F records in the purpose-built MG EX181 at Bonneville Salt Flats. The streamlined, supercharged car's speed for the flying kilometer was 245.64 mph, which was the average of two runs in opposite directions.
Broadcasting career
Away from driving, in 1962 he acted as a colour commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR races. He eventually left ABC in 1980. Moss narrated the official 1988 Formula One season review along with Tony Jardine.
Moss also narrated the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car, which stars Peter Kay.
Return to racing
Although ostensibly retired from racing since 1962, Moss did make a number of one-off appearances in professional motorsport events in the following two decades. He also competed in the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally in a Mercedes-Benz, but retired from the event in the Algerian Sahara. The Holden Torana he shared with Jack Brabham in the 1976 Bathurst 1000 was hit from behind on the grid and eventually retired with engine failure. Moss, at the wheel of the Torana when the V8 engine let go, was criticised by other drivers for staying on the racing line for over ⅔ of the 6.172 km long circuit while returning to the pits as the car was dropping large amounts of oil onto the road. He also shared a Volkswagen Golf GTI with Denny Hulme in the 1979 Benson & Hedges 500 at Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand.
In 1980 he made a comeback to regular competition, in the British Saloon Car Championship with the works-backed GTi Engineering Audi team. For the 1980 season Moss was the team's number two driver to team co-owner Richard Lloyd. For the 1981 season Moss stayed with Audi, as the team moved to Tom Walkinshaw Racing management, driving alongside Martin Brundle.
Throughout his retirement he raced in events for historic cars, driving on behalf of and at the invitation of others, as well as campaigning his own OSCA FS 372 and other vehicles. In 2004, as part of its promotion for the new SLR, Mercedes-Benz reunited Moss with the 300 SLR "No. 722" in which he won the Mille Miglia nearly 50 years earlier. One reporter who rode with Moss that day noted that the 75-year-old driver was "so good . . . that even old and crippled [he was] still better than nearly everyone else". On 9 June 2011 during qualifying for the Le Mans Legends race, Moss announced on Radio Le Mans that he had finally retired from racing, saying that he had scared himself that afternoon. He was 81.
Post racing career
Lister Cars announced the building for sale of the Lister Knobbly Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London in June 2016. The car is built to the exact specification of the 1958 model, is the only magnesium-bodied car in the world, and is the only car that was ever endorsed by Moss. Brian Lister invited Moss to drive for Lister on three separate occasions, at Goodwood in 1954, Silverstone in 1958 and at Sebring in 1959, and to celebrate these races, 10 special edition lightweight Lister Knobbly cars are being built. The company announced that the cars will be available for both road and race use, and Moss would personally be handing over each car.
Honours
In 1990, Moss was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In the New Year Honours 2000 List, Moss was made a Knight Bachelor for services to motor racing. On 21 March 2000, he was knighted by Prince Charles, standing in for the Queen, who was on an official visit to Australia.
He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy.
In 2006, Moss was awarded the FIA gold medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to motorsport.
In December 2008, McLaren-Mercedes unveiled their final model of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The model was named in honour of Moss, hence, Mercedes McLaren SLR Stirling Moss, which has a top speed of with wind deflectors instead of a windscreen.
In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modelling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Moss was ranked the 29th best Formula One driver of all time.
Following Moss's death the Kinrara Trophy race at the Goodwood Revival meeting was renamed in his honour. It is a race for GT cars that competed before 1963.
Biographies
In 1957, Moss published an autobiography called In the Track Of Speed, first published by Muller, London.
In 1963, motorsport author and commentator Ken Purdy published a biographical book entitled All But My Life about Moss (first published by William Kimber & Co, London), based on material gathered through interviews with Moss.
In 2015, when he was aged 85, Moss published a second autobiography, entitled My Racing Life, written with motor sports writer Simon Taylor. In 2016, Philip Porter published the first volume of Stirling Moss - The Definitive Biography covering the period from birth up to the end of 1955, one of Moss's greatest years.
Popular culture
During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On 12 June the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver.
For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. Moss was the subject of a cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye that said he was interested in cars, women and sex, in that order. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. Although there were complaints to the magazine about the cartoons, Moss rang Private Eye to ask if he could use it as a Christmas card.
He was one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. In 2004, Moss was a supporter of the UK Independence Party.
Moss was a Mercedes-Benz Brand Ambassador, having kept a close relationship with the brand, and remained an enthusiast and collector of the brand, which includes the Mercedes-Benz W113, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss among others.
Personal life and death
Moss was married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson; an heir to the Canadian brewer Molson. They were married in 1957 and separated three years later. His second wife was the American public relations executive Elaine Barbarino. They were married in 1964 and divorced in 1968. Their daughter Allison was born in 1967. His third wife was Susie Paine, the daughter of an old friend. They were married from 1980 until his death in 2020. Their son Elliot was born in 1980.
In April 1960, Moss was found guilty of dangerous driving. He was fined £50 and banned from driving for one year after an incident near Chetwynd, Shropshire, when he was test-driving a Mini.
Moss's 80th birthday, on 17 September 2009, fell on the eve of the Goodwood Revival and Lord March celebrated with an 80-car parade on each of the three days. Moss drove a different car each day: a Mercedes-Benz W196 (an open-wheel variant), the Lotus 18 in which he had won the 1961 Monaco GP, and an Aston Martin DBR1.
On 7 March 2010, Moss broke both ankles and four bones in a foot, and also chipped four vertebrae and suffered skin lesions, when he plunged down a lift shaft at his home. In December 2016, he was admitted to hospital in Singapore with a serious chest infection. As a result of this illness and a subsequent lengthy recovery period, Moss announced his retirement from public life in January 2018.
Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, on 12 April 2020, aged 90, after a long illness.
Racing record
Career highlights
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Indicates shared drive with Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling.
* Indicates shared drive with Cesare Perdisa.
‡ Indicates shared drive with Tony Brooks.
[a] After Moss retired from the race he took over the car of Trintignant. Both drivers did not receive any points for their shared drive.
Non-championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
(Races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete 24 Hours of Le Mans results
Complete 12 Hours of Sebring results
Complete 12 Hours of Reims results
Complete Mille Miglia results
Complete Rallye de Monte Carlo results
Complete Bathurst 1000 results
Complete British Saloon Car Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap.)
† Events with 2 races staged for the different classes.
References
External links
Sir Stirling Moss – Official Web Site
Stirling Moss in the 24 hours of Le Mans
Grand Prix History – Hall of Fame, Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss profile at The 500 Owners Association
BBC Face to Face interview with Stirling Moss and John Freeman, broadcast 12 June 1960
1929 births
2020 deaths
12 Hours of Sebring drivers
24 Hours of Le Mans drivers
BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners
Bonneville 200 MPH Club members
BRDC Gold Star winners
Brighton Speed Trials people
British Racing Partnership Formula One drivers
British Touring Car Championship drivers
Connaught Formula One drivers
Cooper Formula One drivers
English Formula One drivers
English people of Jewish descent
English racing drivers
ERA Formula One drivers
Formula One race winners
Formula One team owners
Hersham and Walton Motors Formula One drivers
International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees
Knights Bachelor
Maserati Formula One drivers
Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
People from West Kensington
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Rob Walker Racing Team Formula One drivers
Sportspeople from London
Segrave Trophy recipients
Vanwall Formula One drivers
World Sportscar Championship drivers | false | [
"Mikhail Lakhitov (born 1981) is a Russian professional poker player. In June 2011, he became one of the top 20 ranked players in the world. He has one World Series of Poker bracelet and seven career World Series of Poker (WSOP) in the money finishes, all in the time since he started playing in 2010.\n\nPoker career\nHe was introduced to poker while in the military by Kirill Gerasimov. Upon his discharge he tried to become professional. He travelled Europe for much of 2010. He has four European Poker Tour main event in the money finishes. He did not know about the tradition of the World Series of Poker bracelet when he competed in 2010, but when he learned about it he promised his wife he would bring her one.\n\nBy mid-2011, following a handful of WSOP cashes, he was one of the top 20 ranked players in the world.\nIn September 2011 Mikhail Lakhitov signed a sponsorship agreement with the poker room GuruPlay Poker.\n\nWorld Series of Poker\n\nHis first WSOP cash was an 8th-place finish in the 2010 1663-player $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em / Six Handed Event 16 for a prize of $41,645. Note that since it was six-handed this eighth-place finish does not count as a final table. At the 2011 WSOP, he finished in the money with his first final table an 8th-place finish at the 865-player $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em Event 4 for a prize of $84,033. He achieved a 1st-place finish later that year, earning his first bracelet, at the 1734-player $2,500 No-Limit Hold’em Event 36 for a prize of $749,610.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Lakhitov at Hendonmob.com\n Lakhitov at Bluff Magazine\n Lakhitov at Card Player\n Lakhitov at WSOP.com\n\nLiving people\nWorld Series of Poker bracelet winners\nPeople from Cheboksary\nRussian military personnel\nRussian poker players\n1980s births",
"Staz Nair is a British actor and singer. He is known for his roles on the TV series Game of Thrones and Supergirl.\n\nLife and career \nNair is of Indian and Russian descent. He was a part of the band Times Red. The band were contestants in the ninth series of the British music competition television series The X Factor in 2012, advancing to the judges' houses round, during which they did not become a finalist. The band released their debut single, titled \"Just No Good for Me\", in March 2013.\n\nNair joined the fantasy drama television series Game of Thrones beginning in its sixth season as Qhono, a Dothraki army chief. He portrayed the titular Rocky in the television film The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again, which premiered on Fox in October 2016. In 2019, Nair portrayed Dax-Baron, the man who would become the supervillain Doomsday, in the series Krypton. He became a main cast member of the superhero television series Supergirl during its fifth season in 2019, portraying a character created for the series: \"hardened reporter\" William Dey. Nair is set to appear in the fantasy film Rebel Moon, directed by Zack Snyder.\n\nFilmography\n\nFilm\n\nTelevision\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\nLiving people\n21st-century British male actors\n21st-century British singers\nBritish male actors of Indian descent\nBritish male television actors\nBritish people of Russian descent\n1991 births"
]
|
[
"Stirling Moss",
"Popular culture",
"What is Moss conection to popular culture?",
"During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances.",
"Why was he recognised?",
"many media appearances.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye.",
"How did Moss react to this?",
"According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon,",
"And was his offer accepted?",
"an outcome the book describes as \"depressingly common\" for its satirical cartoons about famous people.",
"In what other media did Stirling Moss appear?",
"Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car",
"When did he become the narator of this series?",
"having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder,"
]
| C_82e2b9fa33714068bc722fe9c3394c42_0 | Did he stay on the show or did he continue with other ventures? | 8 | Did Stirling Moss stay on Roary the Racing Car or did Stirling Moss continue with other ventures other than Roary the Racing Car? | Stirling Moss | During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On June 12 the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver. For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. As related in the book The Life and Times of Private Eye, Moss was the subject of a less than respectful cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. According to the book, Moss responded by offering to buy the original of the cartoon, an outcome the book describes as "depressingly common" for its satirical cartoons about famous people. Moss is the narrator of the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car which stars Peter Kay, a role he took on, having been approached by both David Jenkins, who had the original idea, and Keith Chapman, the latter the creator of Bob the Builder, as he saw the TV show as a way of introducing motorsport to the next generation. He is one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. Moss is also a supporter of the UK Independence Party. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020) was a British Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.
Early life
Moss was born in London, son of Alfred Moss, a dentist of Bray, Berkshire, and Aileen (née Craufurd). His grandfather was Jewish, from a family that changed their surname from Moses to Moss. He was brought up at Long White Cloud house on the south bank of the River Thames. His father was an amateur racing driver who had come 16th in the 1924 Indianapolis 500. Aileen Moss had also been involved in motorsport, entering prewar hillclimbs at the wheel of a Singer Nine. Stirling was a gifted horse rider as was his younger sister, Pat Moss, who became a successful rally driver in her own right and also married Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson.
Moss was educated at several independent schools: Shrewsbury House School in Surbiton, Clewer Manor Junior School, and the linked senior school, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, located at Hertford Heath, near Hertford. He disliked school and did not attain a good academic performance. At Haileybury, he was subjected to antisemitic bullying because of his Jewish roots. He concealed the bullying from his parents and used it as "motivation to succeed". Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at the age of nine, and drove it on the fields around Long White Cloud. He purchased his own car at age 15 after he obtained a driving licence. After the Second World War, Moss was ruled exempt from doing the mandatory two-year national service for men his age because he had nephritis.
Racing career
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962, winning 212 of the 529 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grands Prix. He competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career. He preferred to race British cars, stating, "Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one". At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing (as was Jack Brabham at Cooper). He remained the English driver with the most Formula One victories until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him after competing in more races.
1948–1954
Moss began his career at the wheel of his father Alfred's 328 BMW, DPX 653. Moss was one of the Cooper Car Company's first customers, using winnings from competing in horse-riding events to pay the deposit on a Cooper 500 racing car in 1948. He then persuaded his father, who opposed his racing and wanted him to be a dentist, to let him buy it. He soon demonstrated his ability with numerous wins at national and international levels, and continued to compete in Formula Three, with Coopers and Kiefts, after he had progressed to more senior categories.
His first major international race victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the wheel of a borrowed Jaguar XK120 in the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland. He went on to win the race six more times, in 1951 (Jaguar C-Type), 1955 (Mercedes-Benz 300SLR), 1958 and 1959 (Aston Martin DBR1), and 1960 and 1961 (Ferrari 250 GT). Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, approached Moss and offered him a Formula Two car to drive at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix before a full
-season in 1952. Moss and his father went to Apulia only to find out that the Ferrari car was to be driven by experienced driver Piero Taruffi and were incensed.
Also a competent rally driver, Moss was one of three people to have won a Coupe d'Or (Gold Cup) for three consecutive penalty-free runs on the Alpine Rally (Coupe des Alpes). He finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with Desmond Scannell and Autocar magazine editor John Cooper as co-drivers.
In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing the Cunningham team's 1.5-liter O.S.C.A. MT4 with American Bill Lloyd.
In 1953 Mercedes-Benz racing boss Alfred Neubauer had spoken to Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, about the possibility of Moss's joining the Mercedes Grand Prix team. Having seen him do well in a relatively uncompetitive car, and wanting to see how he would perform in a better one, Neubauer suggested Moss buy a Maserati for the 1954 season. He bought a Maserati 250F, and although the car's unreliability prevented his scoring high points in the 1954 Drivers' Championship he qualified alongside the Mercedes front runners several times and performed well in the races. He achieved his first Formula One victory when he won the non-Championship Oulton Park International Gold Cup in the Maserati.
In the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he passed both drivers who were regarded as the best in Formula One at the time—Juan Manuel Fangio in a Mercedes and Alberto Ascari in a Ferrari—and took the lead. Ascari retired with engine problems, and Moss led until lap 68 when his engine also failed. Fangio took the victory, and Moss pushed his Maserati to the finish line. Neubauer, already impressed when Moss had tested a Mercedes-Benz W196 at Hockenheim, promptly signed him for 1955.
1955
Moss's first World Championship victory was in the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, a race he was also the first British driver to win. Leading a 1–2–3–4 finish for Mercedes, it was the first time he beat Fangio, his teammate and arch rival, who was also his friend and mentor. It has been suggested that Fangio sportingly allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd. Moss himself asked Fangio repeatedly, and Fangio always replied: "No. You were just better than me that day." The same year, Moss also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the Targa Florio (sharing the drive with Peter Collins) and the Mille Miglia.
Mille Miglia
In 1955 Moss won Italy's thousand-mile Mille Miglia road race, an achievement Doug Nye described as the "most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history." He was paired with motor racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who prepared pace note for Moss, and the two completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. Motor Trend headlined it as "The Most Epic Drive. Ever." Before the race, he had taken a "magic pill" given to him by Fangio, and he has commented that although he did not know what was in it, "Dexedrine and Benzedrine were commonly used in rallies. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews." After the win, he spent the night and the following day driving his girlfriend to Cologne, stopping for breakfast in Munich and lunch in Stuttgart.
1956–1962
Moss won the Nassau Cup at the 1956 and 1957 Bahamas Speed Week. Also in 1957 he won on the longest circuit ever to hold a World Championship Grand Prix, the Pescara Circuit, where he again demonstrated his mastery of long-distance racing. The event lasted three hours and Moss beat Fangio, who started from pole position, by a little over 3 minutes.
In 1958, Moss's forward-thinking attitude made waves in the racing world. Moss won the first race of the season in a rear-engined F1 car, which became the common design by 1961. At Monza that year, he raced in the "Eldorado" Maserati in the Race of Two Worlds, the first single-seater car in Europe to be sponsored by a non-racing brand—the Eldorado Ice Cream Company. This was the first case in Europe of contemporary sponsorship, with the ice cream maker's colors replacing the ones assigned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).
Moss's sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula One World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty after the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss defended him. Hawthorn was accused of reversing on the track after spinning and stalling his car on an uphill section. Moss had shouted advice to Hawthorn to steer downhill, against traffic, to bump-start the car. Moss's quick thinking, and his defence of Hawthorn before the stewards, preserved Hawthorn's 6 points for finishing second behind Moss. Hawthorn went on to beat Moss for the championship title by one point, even though he had won only one race that year to Moss's four. Moss's loss in the championship could also be attributed to an error in communication between his pit crew and the driver at one race. A point was given for the fastest lap in each race, and the crew signaled "HAWT REC" meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap. Moss read this as "HAWT REG" and thought Hawthorn was making regular laps, so did not try to set a fast lap. The crew was supposed to signal the time of the lap, so Moss would know what he had to beat.
Moss was as gifted in sports cars as in Grand Prix cars. To his victories in the Tourist Trophy, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Mille Miglia he added three consecutive wins (1958–1960) in the 1000 km Nürburgring, the first two in an Aston Martin (in which he did most of the driving), and the third in a Tipo 61 "birdcage" Maserati, co-driving with the American Dan Gurney. The pair lost time when an oil hose blew off, but despite the wet-weather, they made up the time and took first place.
In the 1960 Formula One season, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus 18. Seriously injured in an accident at the Burnenville curve during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he missed the next three races but recovered sufficiently to win the final one of the season, the United States Grand Prix at Riverside, California.
For the 1961 Formula One season, run under new 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari fielded the "sharknose" Ferrari 156 with an all-new V6 engine. Moss's Climax-engined Lotus was comparatively underpowered, but he won the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, beating the Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill, and went on to win the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.
In 1962, he crashed his Lotus heavily during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood held on Monday 23 April. The accident put him in a coma for a month, and for six months the left side of his body was partially paralysed. He recovered, but retired from professional racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the following year, when he lapped a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt he had not regained his previously instinctive command of the car. He had been runner-up in the Drivers' Championship four years in succession, from 1955 to 1958, and third in each of the next three years.
Speed records
1950
At the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a steeply banked oval track near Paris, Moss and Leslie Johnson took turns at the wheel of the latter's Jaguar XK120 to average for 24 hours, including stops for fuel and tyres. Changing drivers every three hours, they covered a total of . It was the first time a production car had averaged over for 24 hours.
1952
Revisiting Montlhéry, Moss was one of a four-driver team, led by Johnson, who drove a factory-owned Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for 7 days and nights at the French track. Moss, Johnson, Bert Hadley and Jack Fairman averaged to take four World records and five International Class C records, and covered a total of .
1957
In August Moss broke five International Class F records in the purpose-built MG EX181 at Bonneville Salt Flats. The streamlined, supercharged car's speed for the flying kilometer was 245.64 mph, which was the average of two runs in opposite directions.
Broadcasting career
Away from driving, in 1962 he acted as a colour commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR races. He eventually left ABC in 1980. Moss narrated the official 1988 Formula One season review along with Tony Jardine.
Moss also narrated the popular children's series Roary the Racing Car, which stars Peter Kay.
Return to racing
Although ostensibly retired from racing since 1962, Moss did make a number of one-off appearances in professional motorsport events in the following two decades. He also competed in the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally in a Mercedes-Benz, but retired from the event in the Algerian Sahara. The Holden Torana he shared with Jack Brabham in the 1976 Bathurst 1000 was hit from behind on the grid and eventually retired with engine failure. Moss, at the wheel of the Torana when the V8 engine let go, was criticised by other drivers for staying on the racing line for over ⅔ of the 6.172 km long circuit while returning to the pits as the car was dropping large amounts of oil onto the road. He also shared a Volkswagen Golf GTI with Denny Hulme in the 1979 Benson & Hedges 500 at Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand.
In 1980 he made a comeback to regular competition, in the British Saloon Car Championship with the works-backed GTi Engineering Audi team. For the 1980 season Moss was the team's number two driver to team co-owner Richard Lloyd. For the 1981 season Moss stayed with Audi, as the team moved to Tom Walkinshaw Racing management, driving alongside Martin Brundle.
Throughout his retirement he raced in events for historic cars, driving on behalf of and at the invitation of others, as well as campaigning his own OSCA FS 372 and other vehicles. In 2004, as part of its promotion for the new SLR, Mercedes-Benz reunited Moss with the 300 SLR "No. 722" in which he won the Mille Miglia nearly 50 years earlier. One reporter who rode with Moss that day noted that the 75-year-old driver was "so good . . . that even old and crippled [he was] still better than nearly everyone else". On 9 June 2011 during qualifying for the Le Mans Legends race, Moss announced on Radio Le Mans that he had finally retired from racing, saying that he had scared himself that afternoon. He was 81.
Post racing career
Lister Cars announced the building for sale of the Lister Knobbly Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London in June 2016. The car is built to the exact specification of the 1958 model, is the only magnesium-bodied car in the world, and is the only car that was ever endorsed by Moss. Brian Lister invited Moss to drive for Lister on three separate occasions, at Goodwood in 1954, Silverstone in 1958 and at Sebring in 1959, and to celebrate these races, 10 special edition lightweight Lister Knobbly cars are being built. The company announced that the cars will be available for both road and race use, and Moss would personally be handing over each car.
Honours
In 1990, Moss was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In the New Year Honours 2000 List, Moss was made a Knight Bachelor for services to motor racing. On 21 March 2000, he was knighted by Prince Charles, standing in for the Queen, who was on an official visit to Australia.
He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy.
In 2006, Moss was awarded the FIA gold medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to motorsport.
In December 2008, McLaren-Mercedes unveiled their final model of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The model was named in honour of Moss, hence, Mercedes McLaren SLR Stirling Moss, which has a top speed of with wind deflectors instead of a windscreen.
In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modelling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Moss was ranked the 29th best Formula One driver of all time.
Following Moss's death the Kinrara Trophy race at the Goodwood Revival meeting was renamed in his honour. It is a race for GT cars that competed before 1963.
Biographies
In 1957, Moss published an autobiography called In the Track Of Speed, first published by Muller, London.
In 1963, motorsport author and commentator Ken Purdy published a biographical book entitled All But My Life about Moss (first published by William Kimber & Co, London), based on material gathered through interviews with Moss.
In 2015, when he was aged 85, Moss published a second autobiography, entitled My Racing Life, written with motor sports writer Simon Taylor. In 2016, Philip Porter published the first volume of Stirling Moss - The Definitive Biography covering the period from birth up to the end of 1955, one of Moss's greatest years.
Popular culture
During his driving career, Moss was one of the most recognised celebrities in Britain, leading to many media appearances. In March 1958, Moss was a guest challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (episode with Anita Ekberg). In 1959 he was the subject of the TV programme This Is Your Life. On 12 June the following year he was interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face; Freeman later said that he had thought before the interview that Moss was a playboy, but in their meeting he showed "cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement. This appealed to me". Moss also appeared as himself in the 1964 film The Beauty Jungle, and was one of several celebrities with cameo appearances in the 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale. He played Evelyn Tremble's (Peter Sellers) driver.
For many years during and after his career, the rhetorical phrase "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was supposedly the standard question all British policemen asked speeding motorists. Moss relates he himself was once stopped for speeding and asked just that; he reports the traffic officer had some difficulty believing him. Moss was the subject of a cartoon biography in the magazine Private Eye that said he was interested in cars, women and sex, in that order. The cartoon, drawn by Willie Rushton, showed him continually crashing, having his driving licence revoked and finally "hosting television programmes on subjects he knows nothing about". It also made reference to the amnesia Moss suffered from as a result of head injuries sustained in the crash at Goodwood in 1962. Although there were complaints to the magazine about the cartoons, Moss rang Private Eye to ask if he could use it as a Christmas card.
He was one of the few drivers of his era to create a brand from his name for licensing purposes, which was launched when his website was revamped in 2009 with improved content. In 2004, Moss was a supporter of the UK Independence Party.
Moss was a Mercedes-Benz Brand Ambassador, having kept a close relationship with the brand, and remained an enthusiast and collector of the brand, which includes the Mercedes-Benz W113, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss among others.
Personal life and death
Moss was married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson; an heir to the Canadian brewer Molson. They were married in 1957 and separated three years later. His second wife was the American public relations executive Elaine Barbarino. They were married in 1964 and divorced in 1968. Their daughter Allison was born in 1967. His third wife was Susie Paine, the daughter of an old friend. They were married from 1980 until his death in 2020. Their son Elliot was born in 1980.
In April 1960, Moss was found guilty of dangerous driving. He was fined £50 and banned from driving for one year after an incident near Chetwynd, Shropshire, when he was test-driving a Mini.
Moss's 80th birthday, on 17 September 2009, fell on the eve of the Goodwood Revival and Lord March celebrated with an 80-car parade on each of the three days. Moss drove a different car each day: a Mercedes-Benz W196 (an open-wheel variant), the Lotus 18 in which he had won the 1961 Monaco GP, and an Aston Martin DBR1.
On 7 March 2010, Moss broke both ankles and four bones in a foot, and also chipped four vertebrae and suffered skin lesions, when he plunged down a lift shaft at his home. In December 2016, he was admitted to hospital in Singapore with a serious chest infection. As a result of this illness and a subsequent lengthy recovery period, Moss announced his retirement from public life in January 2018.
Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, on 12 April 2020, aged 90, after a long illness.
Racing record
Career highlights
Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Indicates shared drive with Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling.
* Indicates shared drive with Cesare Perdisa.
‡ Indicates shared drive with Tony Brooks.
[a] After Moss retired from the race he took over the car of Trintignant. Both drivers did not receive any points for their shared drive.
Non-championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position)
(Races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete 24 Hours of Le Mans results
Complete 12 Hours of Sebring results
Complete 12 Hours of Reims results
Complete Mille Miglia results
Complete Rallye de Monte Carlo results
Complete Bathurst 1000 results
Complete British Saloon Car Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap.)
† Events with 2 races staged for the different classes.
References
External links
Sir Stirling Moss – Official Web Site
Stirling Moss in the 24 hours of Le Mans
Grand Prix History – Hall of Fame, Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss profile at The 500 Owners Association
BBC Face to Face interview with Stirling Moss and John Freeman, broadcast 12 June 1960
1929 births
2020 deaths
12 Hours of Sebring drivers
24 Hours of Le Mans drivers
BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners
Bonneville 200 MPH Club members
BRDC Gold Star winners
Brighton Speed Trials people
British Racing Partnership Formula One drivers
British Touring Car Championship drivers
Connaught Formula One drivers
Cooper Formula One drivers
English Formula One drivers
English people of Jewish descent
English racing drivers
ERA Formula One drivers
Formula One race winners
Formula One team owners
Hersham and Walton Motors Formula One drivers
International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees
Knights Bachelor
Maserati Formula One drivers
Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
People from West Kensington
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Rob Walker Racing Team Formula One drivers
Sportspeople from London
Segrave Trophy recipients
Vanwall Formula One drivers
World Sportscar Championship drivers | false | [
"The Marvel Experience, or The Marvel Experience: The World's First Hyper-Reality Tour, is a mobile interactive attraction featuring Marvel's characters run by Hero Ventures.\n\nHistory\nAs early as 2011, Hero Ventures had approached Marvel Entertainment about a traveling attraction. A seven-figure upfront licensing fee with 15% median royalty (range of 10% to 20%) was agreed upon. Hero Venture then sought out additional funding for the project.\n\nOn August 22, 2013, Marvel Entertainment announced that it was working with Hero Ventures on The Marvel Experience, a traveling production/attraction.\n\nOn January 9, 2014, Hero Ventures unveiled the dome design image. On October 10, tickets went on sale. A preview of the Experience was scheduled for Phoenix from December 12-January 3, 2015, then officially premiering on January 9, 2015, in Dallas.\n\nDue to popular demand at the time, Hero Ventures announced that the stay in San Diego would be extended until March 1, 2015, while heading to Chicago with its opening on April 2. Instead, the show was reworked. The tour went to Philadelphia with plans to go to Chicago, New York, and St. Louis. In July, Hero Ventures announced that the show's summer tour would end early after its three-week run in Philadelphia. While no reason was given for the early end of the tour, refunds were to be issued for prepaid tickets.\n\nTour\n\nEach tour stop lasts from 17 to 24 days. Each location of the attraction is expected to cost $2.5 million which will be offset by ticket, merchandise, and concession sales on a rented 2-acre lot. The attraction is expected to handle a maximum of 10,000 visitors. There will be scheduled entry times for attendees at seven-minute intervals to avoid overcrowding.\n\nDesign\nThe $30 million attraction was designed with a dome complex two football fields in size, \"4D motion ride\", projected animation, motion comics, virtual reality and holographic simulations while including social media. Movie conceptual artist Aaron Sims was the designer on the attraction with Jerry Rees as director and VFX by Rhythm & Hues and Prana Studios. Lexington Design + Fabrication produced the interactive elements. The mobile dome complex is designed to look like a S.H.I.E.L.D. Mobile Command Center. Domes were chosen as to not have to rent existing facilities that take up to 25% of the ticket price. PVC resin, polymer, and other elements are used to construct the domes making them expensive, but should be offset by the saving on facility costs. Absolute Hollywood live event company designed the structures that are six stories tall.\n\nPerformance\nAttendees will interact with several Marvel heroes and SHIELD agents during the two-hour performance in which they fight the forces of Hydra with a final battle against the Red Skull, MODOK, and their Adaptoids.\n\nKevin Smith was revealed in Del Mar, California as the voice of M.O.D.O.K. Producers Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris were involved in producing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.\n\nHero Ventures\n\nHero Ventures, LLC is an entertainment company that produces traveling shows. The company is based in Westwood, Los Angeles.\n\nCompany history\nIn 2009, Rick Licht started working full-time on a yet unnamed venture which was his and Doug Schafer's business idea that they had been discussing over the years. In 2011, Licht was joined by Schaer as chief operating officer and Jason Rosen as chief production officer. Hero Ventures first approached the National Baseball Hall of Fame for a dome show, but was turned down. They then developed a new list of project partners that was topped with Marvel Entertainment, who agreed to a seven figure licensing deal for the movable dome show, which brought on Michael Cohl and Jesse Harris to pay the upfront fee.\n\nHero Ventures (HV) was formed into a Limited liability company on in Los Angeles by Licht, Schaer and Rosen. Before the August 22, 2013 announcement of its first project, The Marvel Experience, the company received \"A\" round investment commitments from Steve Tisch, Roy P. Disney & Shamrock Holdings, Maurice & Paul Marciano, WWE, Vista Equity Partners president Brian Sheth, Ross Hilton Kemper, and Enlight Media to fund that project. This raised funding of $16.5 million allowing them to move into an office in Westwood, Los Angeles and start taking salaries. Additional funding came from advances on royalties from vendors and $10 million from co-production partners with some partners taking profit participation. With the announcement of Marvel Experience, several other IP holders started making inquires about doing similar projects for their properties, but HV held off on additional attractions until its current project was shown a success.\n\nOn October 10, 2014, The Marvel Experience tickets went on sale. In early December 2014, Magic Johnson was announced as an investor and member of its Board of Managers. A preview of the Experience was scheduled for Phoenix from December 12-January 3, 2015, then officially premiering on January 9, 2015, in Dallas.\n\nSee also\nIron Man Experience\nMarvel Universe Live!\nMarvel Super Heroes 4D\nSpider-Man: Turn Off the Dark\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nHero Ventures\n\nWorks based on Marvel Comics\nAmusement rides\nSimulator rides",
"\"Wild Weekend\" is an instrumental written by Phil Todaro and Tom Shannon and performed by The Rockin' Rebels. It reached #8 on the U.S. pop chart and #28 on the U.S. R&B chart in 1963. The song was originally recorded as the theme for Shannon's show on WKBW in Buffalo, New York; the song title is not found in the song's original lyrics (Shannon's show aired on weekdays). and was later reworked and featured on The Rebels 1962 album Wild Weekend.\n\nThe song ranked #22 on Billboard magazine's Top 100 singles of 1963.\n\nOther versions\nBill Justis released a version of the song on his 1963 album Bill Justis Plays 12 Instrumental Smash Hits.\n Disc jockey Joey Reynolds (who had worked with Shannon at WWKB) added lyrics to make this the theme song for his nightly show on WPOP, Hartford, 1963. \nThe Surfaris released a version of the song on their 1963 album Wipe Out.\nKim Fowley released a version of the song on his 1968 album Born to Be Wild.\nAndy Mackay released a version of the song as a single in 1974 in the UK, but it did not chart. It was featured on his album In Search of Eddie Riff.\nJon and the Nightriders released a version of the song on their 1987 album Stampede!\nNRBQ released a version of the song as a single in 1989 with lyrics entitled \"It's a Wild Weekend\", but it did not chart.\nEuphoria's Id released a live version of the song on their 2003 compilation album Mastering the Art of French Kissing.\nThe Ventures released a version of the song on their 2009 compilation album with The Fabulous Wailers entitled Two Car Garage (50 Years of Rock 'N Roll).\nBeaver Brown released a live version of the song on their 2017 album Live at the Bottom Line 1980.\nThe Thunderbirds (Australia) charted with a single in 1961\n\nReferences\n\n1962 songs\n1962 singles\n1974 singles\n1989 singles\nBill Justis songs\nThe Surfaris songs\nThe Ventures songs\nSwan Records singles\nIsland Records singles\nVirgin Records singles\nSurf instrumentals\n1960s instrumentals"
]
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[
"Celtic art",
"Background"
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| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | Where does Celtic art come from? | 1 | Where does Celtic art come from? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | true | [
"The Lugi were a people of ancient Britain, known only from a single mention of them by the geographer Ptolemy c. 150. from his general description and the approximate locations of their neighbors their territory was along the western coast of the Moray Firth. Ptolemy does not provide them with a town or principal place.\n\nEtymology \nThe Pictish name Lugi probably stems from Proto-Celtic *lugos ('crow'). A derivation from the Celtic god Lug has also been proposed.\n\nSee also\nLugii\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography\n\nHistorical Celtic peoples\nPicts\nTribes mentioned by Ptolemy",
"The Basse Yutz Flagons are a pair of Iron Age ceremonial drinking vessels that date from the mid 5th century BCE. Since their discovery in ill-documented circumstances in the 1920s and their subsequent purchase by the British Museum, they have been described as \"great masterpieces\" that \"combine most of the key features of early Celtic Art\". They are in many respects very similar to the Dürrnberg Flagon found in Austria.\n\nDescription\nThe almost identical pair of flagons imitate the shape of contemporary Etruscan flagons and are made of a copper alloy that was skilfully beaten into shape from a single sheet of metal. The base was cast to size and decorated with 120 pieces of red coral and glass and then attached using resin. Resin is also used to coat the inside, which makes the flagon watertight. The cast spout and lid is attached using pins into a cutout made in the copper sheet body. X-rays reveal that the resin and the pins were the only materials used by the artisans to assemble these artefacts; although there is some evidence of solder that dates from the 20th century. The bases were apparently left open until the end of construction and the flagons were only water-tight because of a coating of resin over the whole inside of the vessel. They had evidently been well-used, and the chains currently attaching the stoppers on the lids are later additions that had been made to replace earlier fittings.\n\nThe flagons are richly decorated with glass and coral inlays and a range of animals on the lid. Time has faded the coral but the pieces would have been brightly coloured. The handle is formed as a dog, terminating at the bottom with a human face. The idea of a dog or other animal for a handle comes from Greek and Etruscan culture, as does the motif of two crouching animals lying around the rim, as well as the head at the bottom of the handle. The duck on the spout is a Celtic addition to the scheme. The eyes of the duck and the dogs have been finished by using a complex drill bit and they were drilled by the same person. Both vessels measure just over 40 cm in height. The drinking vessels were found with a pair of Etruscan bronze stamnoi or vessels for wine-mixing that date from the same period (also now in the British Museum).\n\nOther comparable Celtic adaptions of the classical flagon shape have survived. Among them, a late 5th-century example from a chariot-burial at Dürrnberg (now Keltenmuseum in Hallein, Austria) has similar animals to the three dogs, and human heads at the bottom of the handle as well as on the lid. Here the whole body is decorated with raised vertical ribs with an elegant abstracted design suggesting plant-forms at top and bottom. The flagon only uses bronze. Other examples are from Kleinaspergle, Hohenasperg, near Stuttgart, and Borsch.\n\nCircumstances of the find\nThe two flagons and two stamnoi were apparently found in 1927 during the course of railway construction in the town of Basse Yutz, Moselle, eastern France. The excavators had probably discovered the grave of an important Celtic dignitary from the local Iron Age. Unfortunately, little is known of the local circumstances of their discovery, as the grave was dug illicitly without the help of trained archeologists. Within two years of the discovery, all four objects were sold to the British Museum. They were bought for £5,000 which was a substantial sum, especially as many thought they were too sophisticated to be genuine.\n\nArtistic importance\nThe Basse Yutz flagons represent one of the high points of La Tène Celtic art. Very few other objects from that era can compare in terms of aesthetic quality and elegance. The two flagons were featured in the BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects in 2010, where the flagons were put in context. At the time of their manufacture there were no cities in non-Mediterranean Europe, but there were small communities with skilful metal-working facilities. The flagons show also that these communities had trading links with more distant areas of Europe: shapes in the designs of palm leaves indicate cultural links to Egypt, and tin in the alloy would probably have come from Cornwall in England. The basic idea of a flagon in this shape comes from Italy, but these artefacts show that the people we know as \"the Celts\", although illiterate, had a complex and sophisticated culture of their own.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\nGreen, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library, \n\"Megaws\" = Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, Celtic Art: From Its Beginnings to the Book of Kells, 1989 (2001 2nd edn), Thames & Hudson\n\nCeltic art\nPrehistoric objects in the British Museum"
]
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[
"Celtic art",
"Background",
"Where does Celtic art come from?",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts;"
]
| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | What are the influences? | 2 | What are the influences for Celtic art? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | true | [
"In mass communication, the Hierarchy of Influences, formally known as the Hierarchical Influences Model, is an organized theoretical framework introduced by Pamela Shoemaker & Stephen D. Reese. It comprises five levels of influence on media content from the macro to micro levels: social systems, social institutions, media organizations, routine practices, and individuals. This framework was introduced in their book Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content.\n\nFive levels of Hierarchy of Influences \n\nThe framework was proposed in response to what the scholars believed was an over-emphasis on media processes and effects research. The HOI model instead made the content produced by news media the dependent variable in research studies, influenced by factors located within the hierarchical framework. From a media sociology perspective, the framework \"takes into account the multiple forces that simultaneously impinge on media and suggests how influence at one level may interact with that at another.\" Whereas most media effects study treat media content as independent variable to understand how audience use media content and how they are influenced by media content, \"Hierarchy of Influences\" framework treats media content as dependent variable and five levels of influences as potential independent variables.\n\nOverall, the framework provides a way to understand the \"media and their links with culture, other organizations, and institutions.\"\n\nSocial systems \n\nThe macro social systems level is the outer-most ring of the model that represent the influences from social systems as a whole. This level focus on how ideological forces shape and influence media content. For this reason, it is often employed in cross-national comparative media studies.\n\nSocial institutions \n\nSocial institutional level describes influences coming from larger trans-organizational media field. How media organizations combine into larger institutions that become part of larger structured relationships that compete or depend on each other as powerful social institutions.\n\nMedia organizations \n\nMedia organization level is distinguished from routines as this level describes larger organizational and occupational context such as organizational policy, occupational roles, and how the media enterprise itself is structured.\n\nRoutine practices \n\nThe routines level has three sources of routines, which constrain and enable communicators in their work process: audiences, organizations, and suppliers of content. Journalists have developed routines from endless pattern of norms in response to common situations. This level is where Mr. Gates or gatekeeping (communication) theory is also applied in journalists' appearance\n\nIndividuals \n\nThe micro individual level is located at the center of the model. On this level, individual communicator's characteristics, on both personal and professional, influence media content. Individual's innate characteristics such as gender, race, religious and political background influence media content indirectly through shaping personal attitude and values (e.g. ethical values) as well as professional roles and education.\n\nResearch \n\nHierarchy of influences model has been employed as theoretical framework to explain different levels of influences on media content. Researchers have studied professionalism, journalistic roles, cross-national comparative journalistic roles, comparative media studies, and understanding news production to name a few of closely studies areas.\n\nThomas Hanitzsch took a similar approach to hierarchy of influences model in examining different levels of influences on journalists' reporting process in his Worlds of Journalism study. This study conducted interviews in 21 countries focusing on differences in journalism culture, influences and trust in public institutions.\n\nReferences \n\nMass media theories\nMedia studies",
"In electional astrology, an event chart is a horoscope that is cast for the date, time and place of a particular event. Such a chart is interpreted to gain insight into influences surrounding the event and an outlook for possible developments stemming from that event.\n\nFor example, astrologers can erect a chart for a major event, such as a marriage, and interpret it as though the event were a person in its own right. For example, if a chart was cast for the date of one's marriage then the chart would give an indication of what the couple can expect during their married life. If a chart is cast for a national event then one can interpret the chart to determine influences surrounding the event. This is in contrast to a birth chart, which is calculated for the actual time of a person's birth, but the design and interpretation are similar.\n\nReferences\n\nSee also\n Composite chart, a chart that is composed of the planetary midpoints of two or more horoscopes\n\nTechnical factors of Western astrology"
]
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"Celtic art",
"Background",
"Where does Celtic art come from?",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts;",
"What are the influences?",
"Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture"
]
| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | What was the Hallstatt culture? | 3 | What was the Hallstatt culture in regards to Celtic art? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | false | [
"The Basarabi culture was an archaeological culture in Southeastern Europe (mainly in Romania), dated between 8th - 7th centuries BC. It was named after Basarabi, a village in Dolj County, south-western Romania, nowadays an administrative component of the Calafat municipality. It is sometimes grouped with related Bosut culture, into the Bosut-Basarabi complex.\n\nThe Basarabi culture is related to the Hallstatt culture of the Iron Age period that, when normalised, is uniformly spread apart from a reduced number of sites in Muntenia, the central Moldavian Carpathians and Oltenia. \n\nThe Hallstatt A (12-11th BC) and B (10-8th BC) corresponds to the late Bronze Age, Hallstatt C (7th BC) to the early Iron Age, and Hallstatt D (6th BC) to the Iron Age. The Hallstatt culture probably consisted of many different peoples and language groups. The variant known as the Basarabi culture was present over much of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia (Vojvodina), and central Moldavia up to the Dniester River (Nistru in Romanian) around 650 BC. \n\nDuring this period the Greeks founded cities along the Black Sea coast and the first written records describe their encounters with the indigenous people.\n\nArchaeological cultures of Southeastern Europe\nIron Age cultures of Europe\nArchaeological cultures in Bulgaria\nArchaeological cultures in Moldova\nArchaeological cultures in Romania\nArchaeological cultures in Serbia\nArchaeological cultures in Ukraine\nIron Age Serbia\nPrehistoric Bulgaria\nPrehistory of Vojvodina\nAncient history of Romania",
"Hallstatt ( , , ) is a small town in the district of Gmunden, in the Austrian state of Upper Austria. \nSituated between the southwestern shore of Hallstätter See and the steep slopes of the Dachstein massif, the town lies in the Salzkammergut region, on the national road linking Salzburg and Graz.\n\nHallstatt is known for its production of salt, dating back to prehistoric times, and gave its name to the Hallstatt culture, the archaeological culture linked to Proto-Celtic and early Celtic people of the Early Iron Age in Europe, c. 800–450 BC.\n\nHallstatt is at the core of the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape declared as one of the World Heritage Sites in Austria by UNESCO in 1997. It is an area of overtourism.\n\nHistory\n\nIron Age\nIn 1846, Johann Georg Ramsauer (1795–1874) discovered a large prehistoric cemetery at the Salzberg mines near Hallstatt (), which he excavated during the second half of the 19th century. Eventually the excavation would yield 1,045 burials, although no settlement has yet been found. This may be covered by the later village, which has long occupied the entire narrow strip between the steep hillsides and the lake.\n\nSome 1,300 burials have been found, including around 2,000 individuals, with women and children but few infants. Nor is there a \"princely\" burial, as often found near large settlements. Instead, there are a large number of burials varying considerably in the number and richness of the grave goods, but with a high proportion containing goods suggesting a life well above subsistence level. \n\nThe community at Hallstatt exploited the salt mines in the area, which had been worked from time to time since the Neolithic period, from the 8th to 5th centuries BC. The style and decoration of the grave goods found in the cemetery are very distinctive, and artifacts made in this style are widespread in Europe. In the mine workings themselves, the salt has preserved many organic materials such as textiles, wood and leather, and many abandoned artefacts such as shoes, pieces of cloth, and tools including miner's backpacks, have survived in good condition.\n\nFinds at Hallstatt extend from about 1200 BC until around 500 BC, and are divided by archaeologists into four phases:\n\nHallstatt A–B are part of the Bronze Age Urnfield culture. Phase A saw Villanovan influence. In this period, people were cremated and buried in simple graves. In phase B, tumulus (barrow or kurgan) burial becomes common, and cremation predominates. Little is known about this period in which the typical Celtic elements have not yet distinguished themselves from the earlier Villanova-culture. The \"Hallstatt period\" proper is restricted to HaC and HaD (8th to 5th centuries BC), corresponding to the early European Iron Age. Hallstatt lies in the area where the western and eastern zones of the Hallstatt culture meet, which is reflected in the finds from there. Hallstatt D is succeeded by the La Tène culture.\n\nHallstatt C is characterized by the first appearance of iron swords mixed amongst the bronze ones. Inhumation and cremation co-occur.\nFor the final phase, Hallstatt D, daggers, almost to the exclusion of swords, are found in western zone graves ranging from c. 600–500 BC. There are also differences in the pottery and brooches. Burials were mostly inhumations. Halstatt D has been further divided into the sub-phases D1–D3, relating only to the western zone, and mainly based on the form of brooches.\n\nMajor activity at the site appears to have finished about 500 BC, for reasons that are unclear. Many Hallstatt graves were robbed, probably at this time. There was widespread disruption throughout the western Hallstatt zone, and the salt workings had by then become very deep. By then the focus of salt mining had shifted to the nearby Hallein Salt Mine, with graves at Dürrnberg nearby where there are significant finds from the late Hallstatt and early La Tène periods.\n\nMuch of the material from early excavations was dispersed, and is now found in many collections, especially German and Austrian museums, but the Hallstatt Museum in the town has the largest collection.\n\nRomans onwards\nThere are no recorded notable events that took place in Hallstatt during Roman rule or the early Middle Ages. In 1311, the Hallstatt citizens were vested with market rights by Queen dowager Elizabeth, a sign that it had not lost its economic value. Today, apart from production of salt, which since 1595 has been transported 40 kilometres from Hallstatt to Ebensee via a brine pipeline, tourism plays a major factor in the town's economic life.\n\nTourists are told that Hallstatt is the site of \"the world's oldest pipeline\", which was constructed 400 years ago from 13,000 hollowed-out trees. There is so little space for cemeteries that every ten years bones used to be exhumed and removed into an ossuary, to make room for new burials. A collection of elaborately decorated skulls with the deceased's name, profession, date of death inscribed on them is on display at the local chapel.\n\n19th century\n\nUntil the late 19th century, it was only possible to reach Hallstatt by boat or via narrow trails. The land between the lake and mountains was sparse, and the town itself exhausted every free patch of it. Access between houses on the river bank was by boat or over the upper path, a small corridor passing through attics. The first road to Hallstatt was only built in 1890, along the west shore, partially by rock blasting. Nevertheless, this secluded and inhospitable landscape counts as one of the first places of human settlement due to the rich sources of natural salt, which have been mined for thousands of years, originally in the shape of hearts owing to the use of antler picks.\n\nSome of Hallstatt's oldest archaeological finds, such as a shoe-last celt, date back to around 5500 BC. In 1846 Johann Georg Ramsauer discovered a large prehistoric cemetery near the current location of Hallstatt. Ramsauer's work at the Hallstatt cemeteries continued until 1863, unearthing more than 1000 burials. It is to his credit and to the enormous benefit of archaeology that he proceeded to excavate each one with the same slow, methodical care as the first. His methods included measuring and drawing each find. In an age before colour photography, he produced very detailed watercolours of each assemblage before it was removed from the ground.\n\nIn the history of archaeology, Ramsauer's work at Hallstatt helped usher in a new, more systematic way of doing archaeology. In addition, one of the first blacksmith sites was excavated there. Active trade, and thus wealth, allowed for the development of a highly developed culture, which, after findings in the Salzberghochtal, was named the Hallstatt culture. This lasted from approximately 800 to 500 BC.\n\nHalstatt Salt Mine\nThe Hallstatt sale mine is the world's oldest working salt mine. The mine is located within the Upper Permian to Lower Triassic Haselgebirge Formation of the Northern Limestone Alps. The Hallstatt salt mine comprises 21 levels and several smaller shafts ranging from 514 m above sea level (Erbstollen level) to an elevation of around 1267 m (Erzherzog Matthias Schurf level).\n\nTourism\n\nThe problems and opportunities of greatly-increased tourism in Hallstatt were covered by The Washington Post in August 2019. Halstatt's tourism began in the 19th century but greatly increased after it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. It became popular among East Asian tourists in 2006 when it was featured on a South Korean television show. \n\nSocial media images of Hallstatt, captioned \"the most Instagrammable town in the world,\" went viral in Southeast Asia. A replica was planned and then built in China in 2011 in Huizhou, Guangdong province, Hallstatt's twin town. In 2013 it was rumored in China to be the model for the movie Frozens Arendelle village. By 2017 local churches were employing bouncers to prevent services being disrupted by tourists. In 2020 the town had a population of 780, and estimates of 10,000 to nearly 30,000 tourists per day, primarily via bus tours which bring tourists briefly into the town for photo opportunities, then quickly move on. \n\nHallstatt's economy depends on tourism, but according to locals the day-visitors drive away tourists who would stay longer. Hallstatt became the prime example of overtourism in Austria and led to controversies around limiting the number of tourists. The Austrian Public Broadcasting Organization made multiple documentaries about the situation. \n\nThe town in 2020 focused on \"quality\" tourism. From fall 2020 there will be assigned time slots for tour buses to cope with the problem. The arrivals will be limited to 54 per day, which is about half of the current number. Buses with an overnight booking in the town will receive preference.\n\nPolitics\nSeats in the municipal assembly (Gemeinderat) as of 2015 local elections:\n\n Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ): 7\n BFH (Independent): 4\n Austrian People's Party (ÖVP): 2\n\nAlexander Scheutz (SPÖ) has been mayor of Hallstatt since 2009.\n\nInternational relations\n\nTwin towns—sister cities\n\nHallstatt is twinned with:\n\n Huizhou, China\n\nReplica\n\nOn 16 June 2011, plans to build a replica in China were first reported. On 2 June 2012, it was reported that Chinese mining company China Minmetals Corporation built a full-scale replica of the entire town in Huizhou, Guangdong province.\n\nClimate\nHallstatt has an oceanic climate (Cfb) with warm, rainy summers and cold, snowy winters. Precipitation is plentiful year round but is at its highest during the three months of summer.\n\nSee also \nList of World Heritage Sites in Austria\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n Municipal website\n Hallstatt tourism site \n Images of Hallstatt \n Hallstatt Beinhaus Random-Times.com\n ; episode 282 of Terra Mater\n \n\nArchaeological type sites\nCities and towns in Gmunden District\nTourist attractions in Upper Austria\nWorld Heritage Sites in Austria"
]
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[
"Celtic art",
"Background",
"Where does Celtic art come from?",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts;",
"What are the influences?",
"Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture",
"What was the Hallstatt culture?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | What are popular pieces of Celtic Art? | 4 | What are popular pieces of Celtic Art? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | false | [
"Celtic knots (, , , ) are a variety of knots and stylized graphical representations of knots used for decoration, used extensively in the Celtic style of Insular art. These knots are most known for their adaptation for use in the ornamentation of Christian monuments and manuscripts, such as the 8th-century St. Teilo Gospels, the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Most are endless knots, and many are varieties of basket weave knots.\n\nHistory \nThe use of interlace patterns had its origins in the late Roman Empire. Knot patterns first appeared in the third and fourth centuries AD and can be seen in Roman floor mosaics of that time. Interesting developments in the artistic use of interlaced knot patterns are found in Byzantine architecture and book illumination, Coptic art, Celtic art, Islamic art, Kievan Rus'ian book illumination, Ethiopian art, and European architecture and book illumination. \n\nSpirals, step patterns, and key patterns are dominant motifs in Celtic art before the Christian influence on the Celts, which began around 450. These designs found their way into early Christian manuscripts and artwork with the addition of depictions from life, such as animals, plants and even humans. In the beginning, the patterns were intricate interwoven cords, called plaits, which can also be found in other areas of Europe, such as Italy, in the 6th century. A fragment of a Gospel Book, now in the Durham Cathedral library and created in northern Britain in the 7th century, contains the earliest example of true knotted designs in the Celtic manner.\n\nExamples of plait work (a woven, unbroken cord design) predate knotwork designs in several cultures around the world, but the broken and reconnected plait work that is characteristic of true knotwork began in northern Italy and southern Gaul and spread to Ireland by the 7th century. The style is most commonly associated with the Celtic lands, but it was also practiced extensively in England and was exported to Europe by Irish and Northumbrian monastic activities on the continent. J. Romilly Allen has identified \"eight elementary knots which form the basis of nearly all the interlaced patterns in Celtic decorative art\". In modern times, Celtic art is popularly thought of in terms of national identity and therefore specifically Irish, Scottish or Welsh.\n\nThe Celtic knot as a tattoo design became popular in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.\n\nExamples\n\nSee also \n\n Celtic art\n Celtic cross\n Croatian interlace\n Endless knot\n George Bain (artist)\n Islamic interlace patterns\n Khachkars\n Knot garden\n Knot (mathematics)\n Oseberg style\n Triquetra\n Turk's head knot\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\nDraw Your Own Celtic Knotwork Comprehensive list of links to both knotwork tutorials and a knotwork bibliography\n Celtic Interlace - An Overview by Stephen Walker, reproduced with permission from Dalriada Magazine, 2000\n Font with Zoomorphic (animal) ornaments GPL Font and generator project\n Celtic Knot Generator Online Celtic knot designer that uses the Knots typeface.\n http://www.hypknotix.com Celtic knots generated algorithmically.\n\nKnot\nDecorative knots",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.\n\nCeltic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use \"Celtic\" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about \"Celtic art\" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what \"Celtic art\" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.\n\nBoth styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called \"Lord of Glauberg\", were originally common in wood.\n\nAlso covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène \"vegetal\" art on the Art Nouveau movement.\n\nTypically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: \"Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces\".\n\nBackground\nThe ancient peoples now called \"Celts\" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which \"Celtic\" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.\n\nCeltic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.\n\nThe term \"Celt\" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.\nThen in the 18th century the interest in \"primitivism\", which led to the idea of the \"noble savage\", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The \"Irish revival\" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the \"Celtic Revival\".\n\nPre-Celtic periods\nThe earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from \"Hallstatt C\" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on \"Celticization\" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.\n\nIron Age; Early Celtic art\n\nUnlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern \"Celtic nations\", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for \"town\", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.\n\nThe Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as \"Celtic\".\n\nAs Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.\n\nFigures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are \"cult wagons\" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a \"leaf crown\" — two flattish rounded projections, \"resembling a pair of bloated commas\", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.\n\nHuman heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.\n\nThe most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.\n\nIn general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.\n\nHallstatt gallery\n\nLa Tène style\n\nAbout 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is \"a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes\".\n\nThe most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich \"princely\" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.\n\nThe torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.\n\nSeveral phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the \"early\" or \"strict\" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the \"vegetal\", \"Continuous Vegetal\", \"Waldalgesheim style\", or De Navarro II, where ornament is \"typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface\".\n\nAfter about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into \"plastic\" and \"sword\" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a \"Disney style\" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an \"Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC\". De Navarro distinguishes the \"insular\" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.\n\nThe often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other \"foreign\" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.\n\nBy the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.\n\nA form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.\n\nDespite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.\n\nBut in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.\n\nAfter the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a \"hinged brass collar\" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, \"dragonesque\" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.\n\nEarly Middle Ages\n\nPost-Roman Ireland and Britain\nCeltic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.\n\nIn Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.\n\nIn the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.\n\nIn the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the \"high cross\", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.\n\nThe impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.\n\nSome Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.\n\nArt from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.\n\nPicts (Scotland)\nFrom the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.\n\nThe heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.\n\nPictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).\n\nClass II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).\n\nClass III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).\n\nThe following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.\n\nCeltic revival\n\nThe revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The \"plastic style\" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.\n\nThe Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, \"National art all over the world has burst long ago, the \nnarrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation.\" George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. \"Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.\n\nInterlace, which is still seen as a \"Celtic\" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.\n\nBy the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.\n\nJune 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.\n\nCeltic art types and terms\n\nHanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.\nCarpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.\nHigh cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.\nPictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.\nInsular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.\nCeltic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.\n\nSee also\nList of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts\nGundestrup cauldron\nCeltic maze\nCeltic blue\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\nGarrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books\nGreen, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library, \nHarding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books\nHawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR\nJacobsthal, Paul (1935), \"Early Celtic Art\", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR\nJohns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books\nLaing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992 \n\"NMI\": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities \nMegaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art. \n\"Megaws\": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, \"Celtic Art\", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010\nRaftery, Barry, \"La Tène Art\", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)\nSandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)\n\nFurther reading\nBoltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.\nBain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. \"A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme\", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2. \nCeltic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.\nInsular Celtic bronze mirrors\n\"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern\", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.\n\n \nWestern art\nMedieval art\nIndo-European art"
]
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[
"Celtic art",
"Background",
"Where does Celtic art come from?",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts;",
"What are the influences?",
"Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture",
"What was the Hallstatt culture?",
"I don't know.",
"What are popular pieces of Celtic Art?",
"I don't know."
]
| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 5 | In addition to Celtic art being associated with the people known as celts, are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | false | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
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"Celtic art",
"Background",
"Where does Celtic art come from?",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts;",
"What are the influences?",
"Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture",
"What was the Hallstatt culture?",
"I don't know.",
"What are popular pieces of Celtic Art?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"The term \"Celt\" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae)."
]
| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | What does the word mean? | 6 | What does the word "Celt" mean? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | true | [
"That's My Word is a solo album released by rapper, Keak da Sneak. It was released on September 13, 2005 for Rah Records. The single \"Super Hyphy\" made it to No. 40 on the Billboard Rhythmic Top 40 chart.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Super Hyphy\"- 3:26 \n\"What a Relief\"- 3:34 \n\"Oh Girl\"- 3:23 \n\"Touch on Me\"- 4:02 \n\"Somethin' Serious\" (featuring Kitt)- 5:01 \n\"Hyphie\" (featuring Bra Heff)- 3:27 \n\"E-Yes\" (featuring B.A.)- 4:07 \n\"What Does It All Mean\" (featuring Tyquan)- 4:04 \n\"Ak's & SK's\" (featuring Frank Sticks)- 3:26 \n\"Super Hyphy\" (Remix)- 3:44\n\n2005 albums\nKeak da Sneak albums",
"What Does Anything Mean? Basically is the second studio album by English post-punk band the Chameleons. It was recorded in January 1985 and released 20 May 1985 by record label Statik.\n\nOne single was released from the album: \"Singing Rule Britannia (While the Walls Close In)\".\n\nRecording \nWhat Does Anything Mean? Basically was recorded in January 1985 at Highland Studios in Inverness, Scotland.\n\nRelease \nThe album's sole single, \"Singing Rule Britannia (While the Walls Close In)\", was released on 1 August 1985. This song used uncredited Lennon-McCartney lyrics, with the final passage of the song quoting key lyrics of the Beatles song \"She Said, She Said\".\n\nWhat Does Anything Mean? Basically was released 20 May 1985 on record label Statik.\n\nReception \n\nWhat Does Anything Mean? Basically has been generally well received by critics.\n\nIn his retrospective review, Ned Raggett of AllMusic called it \"[a] rarity of sophomore albums, something that at once made the band all the more unique in its sound while avoiding a repetition of earlier work. [...] an astounding record.\" Trouser Press called it \"even better\" than Script of the Bridge, \"with much stronger production underscoring both the band's direct power and the ghostly atmospherics of its icy church keyboards and delay-ridden guitars\".\n\nChris Jenkins, in the book The Rough Guide to Rock, however, called it \"as half-baked as its title\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel \n The Chameleons\n\n Mark Burgess – vocals, bass guitar, strings, production\n Dave Fielding – guitar, ARP String Ensemble, production\n Reg Smithies – guitar, acoustic guitar, album cover illustration, production\n John Lever – drums, production\n\n Technical\n\n Colin Richardson – production\n Ian Caple – engineering\n Martin Kay – sleeve design\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n1985 albums\nThe Chameleons albums\nAlbums produced by Colin Richardson"
]
|
[
"Celtic art",
"Background",
"Where does Celtic art come from?",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts;",
"What are the influences?",
"Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture",
"What was the Hallstatt culture?",
"I don't know.",
"What are popular pieces of Celtic Art?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"The term \"Celt\" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae).",
"What does the word mean?",
"The ancient peoples now called \"Celts\" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic."
]
| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | What time period is this? | 7 | What time period was Celtic art made? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | pre-history through to the modern period, | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | true | [
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[
"Celtic art",
"Background",
"Where does Celtic art come from?",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts;",
"What are the influences?",
"Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture",
"What was the Hallstatt culture?",
"I don't know.",
"What are popular pieces of Celtic Art?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"The term \"Celt\" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae).",
"What does the word mean?",
"The ancient peoples now called \"Celts\" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic.",
"What time period is this?",
"pre-history through to the modern period,"
]
| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | What did you find interesting in this article? | 8 | What did you find interesting in this article about Celtic art? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | false | [
"a TEN Talk (originally 10Talk) is a short presentation on a topic of the speaker's choosing given at a BarCamp type conference. It derives from a TED Talk and originated at the 2012 RefreshCache v4 developer conference (now defunct) in Gilbert, Arizona during the open floor demo time with a description of \"Fast paced 10 minute presentations by the you and the other leaders among us.\" Since the term was still somewhat new at the time, a \"What is a Ten-Talk?\" page was created on the RefreshCache site with the following abbreviated description so potential Ten-Talk presenters would know exactly what was expected of them:\n \n A Ten-Talk is a fast-paced, ten minute POLISHED presentation on an interesting topic that you think will appeal to the Church IT / Web Developer audiences.\n \n Here are some examples of Ten-Talk topics:\n (1) Have you implemented something at your church that has been a radical success or epic failure? We can learn from either of these!\n (2) Do you have an inspirational message that can lead others to action? Even better if you can share how this message inspired you to action and then show us what you did.\n (3) Have you spent time researching and understanding something in the world of ministry software or Church IT? Maybe you are an expert in [redacted]. Present this to the Church IT Network /RefreshCache community and share what you know. Your research may help another church find the solution to a problem they are facing, or save them the trouble of doing all the research you just did by realizing it won't work for them.\n\nIt was later adopted at the national Church IT Round Table conference held in February 2013 in Phoenix, Arizona when the two events began to intermingle and used again in 2014 at the Peoria, Illinois event where it was re-described as \"10Talks (or TEN-Talks) are 10 minute, fast paced talks on a topic. These are perfect sessions for raising awareness about a topic, tool, or idea that you think your peers should know.\"\n\nIts use outside of CITRT conferences is thought to begin with the WLAN professionals summit in February 2014.\n\nReferences\n\nPresentation",
"The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro () is a 1997 crime novel by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi. It is set in Porto, Portugal, and follows a murder investigation after a headless body has been found.\n\nReception\nMichael Pye of The New York Times called the novel \"a vivid book\" and wrote that Tabucchi \"writes with all his senses\". He noted how the book often reflects on subjects in ways conventional crime novels do not, and wrote: \"Much of this works very well, but you should be warned about Tabucchi's tendency to slam the door on the captive reader and start a seminar. ... You may sometimes want to snort with exasperation and send Tabucchi's book skirling across the room. But, then again, when did you last find a novel this interesting?\"\n\nSee also\n 1997 in literature\n Italian literature\n\nReferences\n\n1997 novels\nItalian crime novels\nNovels by Antonio Tabucchi\nNovels set in Portugal\n20th-century Italian novels"
]
|
[
"Celtic art",
"Background",
"Where does Celtic art come from?",
"Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts;",
"What are the influences?",
"Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture",
"What was the Hallstatt culture?",
"I don't know.",
"What are popular pieces of Celtic Art?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"The term \"Celt\" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae).",
"What does the word mean?",
"The ancient peoples now called \"Celts\" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic.",
"What time period is this?",
"pre-history through to the modern period,",
"What did you find interesting in this article?",
"Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in \"primitivism\", which led to the idea of the \"noble savage\", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic"
]
| C_51e88a4ba2c6408fa755defdb572399c_1 | Where else does Celtic art come from? | 9 | Where else does Celtic art come from, aside from the ancient people now called "Celts"? | Celtic art | The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tene culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial. Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Keltoi, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland. Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival". CANNOTANSWER | scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic--and Goidelic--speaking peoples, | Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain and Ireland, which produced the Book of Kells and other masterpieces, and is what "Celtic art" evokes for much of the general public in the English-speaking world, is called Insular art in art history. This is the best-known part, but not the whole of, the Celtic art of the Early Middle Ages, which also includes the Pictish art of Scotland.
Both styles absorbed considerable influences from non-Celtic sources, but retained a preference for geometrical decoration over figurative subjects, which are often extremely stylised when they do appear; narrative scenes only appear under outside influence. Energetic circular forms, triskeles and spirals are characteristic. Much of the surviving material is in precious metal, which no doubt gives a very unrepresentative picture, but apart from Pictish stones and the Insular high crosses, large monumental sculpture, even with decorative carving, is very rare. Possibly the few standing male figures found, like the Warrior of Hirschlanden and the so-called "Lord of Glauberg", were originally common in wood.
Also covered by the term is the visual art of the Celtic Revival (on the whole more notable for literature) from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts, mostly in the British Isles, to express self-identification and nationalism, and became popular well beyond the Celtic nations, and whose style is still current in various popular forms, from Celtic cross funerary monuments to interlace tattoos. Coinciding with the beginnings of a coherent archaeological understanding of the earlier periods, the style self-consciously used motifs closely copied from works of the earlier periods, more often the Insular than the Iron Age. Another influence was that of late La Tène "vegetal" art on the Art Nouveau movement.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, often involving complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures in their knotwork, spirals, key patterns, lettering, zoomorphics, plant forms and human figures. As the archaeologist Catherine Johns put it: "Common to Celtic art over a wide chronological and geographical span is an exquisite sense of balance in the layout and development of patterns. Curvilinear forms are set out so that positive and negative, filled areas and spaces form a harmonious whole. Control and restraint were exercised in the use of surface texturing and relief. Very complex curvilinear patterns were designed to cover precisely the most awkward and irregularly shaped surfaces".
Background
The ancient peoples now called "Celts" spoke a group of languages that had a common origin in the Indo-European language known as Common Celtic or Proto-Celtic. This shared linguistic origin was once widely accepted by scholars to indicate peoples with a common genetic origin in southwest Europe, who had spread their culture by emigration and invasion. Archaeologists identified various cultural traits of these peoples, including styles of art, and traced the culture to the earlier Hallstatt culture and La Tène culture. More recent genetic studies have indicated that various Celtic groups do not all have shared ancestry, and have suggested a diffusion and spread of the culture without necessarily involving significant movement of peoples. The extent to which "Celtic" language, culture and genetics coincided and interacted during prehistoric periods remains very uncertain and controversial.
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages.
The term "Celt" was used in classical times as a synonym for the Gauls (Κελτοι, Celtae). Its English form is modern, attested from 1607. In the late 17th century the work of scholars such as Edward Lhuyd brought academic attention to the historic links between Gaulish and the Brythonic—and Goidelic—speaking peoples, from which point the term was applied not just to continental Celts but those in Britain and Ireland.
Then in the 18th century the interest in "primitivism", which led to the idea of the "noble savage", brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things Celtic and Druidic. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic Revival".
Pre-Celtic periods
The earliest archaeological culture that is conventionally termed Celtic, the Hallstatt culture (from "Hallstatt C" onwards), comes from the early European Iron Age, c. 800–450 BC. Nonetheless, the art of this and later periods reflects considerable continuity, and some long-term correspondences, with earlier art from the same regions, which may reflect the emphasis in recent scholarship on "Celticization" by acculturation among a relatively static population, as opposed to older theories of migrations and invasions. Megalithic art across much of the world uses a similar mysterious vocabulary of circles, spirals and other curved shapes, but it is striking that the most numerous remains in Europe are the large monuments, with many rock drawings left by the Neolithic Boyne Valley culture in Ireland, within a few miles of centres for Early Medieval Insular art some 4,000 years later. Other centres such as Brittany are also in areas that remain defined as Celtic today. Other correspondences are between the gold lunulas and large collars of Bronze Age Ireland and Europe and the torcs of Iron Age Celts, all elaborate ornaments worn round the neck. The trumpet shaped terminations of various types of Bronze Age Irish jewellery are also reminiscent of motifs popular in later Celtic decoration.
Iron Age; Early Celtic art
Unlike the rural culture of Iron Age inhabitants of the modern "Celtic nations", Continental Celtic culture in the Iron Age featured many large fortified settlements, some very large, for which the Roman word for "town", oppidum, is now used. The elites of these societies had considerable wealth, and imported large and expensive, sometimes frankly flashy, objects from neighbouring cultures, some of which have been recovered from graves. The work of the German émigré to Oxford, Paul Jacobsthal, remains the foundation of the study of the art of the period, especially his Early Celtic Art of 1944.
The Halstatt culture produced art with geometric ornament, but marked by patterns of straight lines and rectangles rather than curves; the patterning is often intricate, and fills all the space available, and at least in this respect looks forward to later Celtic styles. Linguists are generally satisfied that the Halstatt culture originated among people speaking Celtic languages, but art historians often avoid describing Halstatt art as "Celtic".
As Halstatt society became increasingly rich and, despite being entirely land-locked in its main zone, linked by trade to other cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, imported objects in radically different styles begin to appear, even including Chinese silks. A famous example is the Greek krater from the Vix Grave in Burgundy, which was made in Magna Graecia (the Greek south of Italy) c. 530 BC, some decades before it was deposited. It is a huge bronze wine-mixing vessel, with a capacity of 1,100 litres. Another huge Greek vessel in the Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is decorated with three recumbent lions lying on the rim, one of which is a replacement by a Celtic artist that makes little attempt to copy the Greek style of the others. Forms characteristic of Hallstatt culture can be found as far from the main Central European area of the culture as Ireland, but mixed with local types and styles.
Figures of animals and humans do appear, especially in works with a religious element. Among the most spectacular objects are "cult wagons" in bronze, which are large wheeled trolleys containing crowded groups of standing figures, sometimes with a large bowl mounted on a shaft at the centre of the platform, probably for offerings to gods; a few examples have been found in graves. The figures are relatively simply modelled, without much success in detailed anatomical naturalism compared to cultures further south, but often achieving an impressive effect. There are also a number of single stone figures, often with a "leaf crown" — two flattish rounded projections, "resembling a pair of bloated commas", rising behind and to the side of the head, probably a sign of divinity.
Human heads alone, without bodies, are far more common, frequently appearing in relief on all sorts of objects. In the La Tène period faces often (along with bird's heads) emerge from decoration that at first looks abstract, or plant-based. Games are played with faces that change when they are viewed from different directions. In figures showing the whole body, the head is often over-large. There is evidence that the human head had a special importance in Celtic religious beliefs.
The most elaborate ensembles of stone sculpture, including reliefs, come from southern France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, close to areas colonized by the Greeks. It is possible that similar groups in wood were widespread. Roquepertuse seems to have been a religious sanctuary, whose stonework includes what are thought to have been niches where the heads or skulls of enemies were placed. These are dated to the 3rd century BC, or sometimes earlier.
In general, the number of high-quality finds is not large, especially when compared to the number of survivals from the contemporary Mediterranean cultures, and there is a very clear division between elite objects and the much plainer goods used by the majority of the people. There are many torcs and swords (the La Tène site produced over 3,000 swords, apparently votive offerings), but the best-known finds, like the Czech head above, the shoe plaques from Hochdorf and the Waterloo Helmet, often have no similar other finds for comparison. Clearly religious content in art is rare, but little is known about the significance that most of the decoration of practical objects had for its makers, and the subject and meaning of the few objects without a practical function is equally unclear.
Hallstatt gallery
La Tène style
About 500 BC the La Tène style, named after a site in Switzerland, appeared rather suddenly, coinciding with some kind of societal upheaval that involved a shift of the major centres in a north-westerly direction. The central area where rich sites are especially found is in northern France and western Germany, but over the next three centuries the style spread very widely, as far as Ireland, Italy and modern Hungary. In some places the Celts were aggressive raiders and invaders, but elsewhere the spread of Celtic material culture may have involved only small movements of people, or none at all. Early La Tène style adapted ornamental motifs from foreign cultures into something distinctly new; the complicated brew of influences including Scythian art and that of the Greeks and Etruscans among others. The occupation by the Persian Achaemenid Empire of Thrace and Macedonia around 500 BC is a factor of uncertain importance. La Tène style is "a highly stylised curvilinear art based mainly on classical vegetable and foliage motifs such as leafy palmette forms, vines, tendrils and lotus flowers together with spirals, S-scrolls, lyre and trumpet shapes".
The most lavish objects, whose imperishable materials tend to mean they are the best preserved other than pottery, do not refute the stereotypical views of the Celts that are found in classical authors, where they are represented as mainly interested in feasting and fighting, as well as ostentatious display. Society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy and military equipment, even if in ceremonial versions, and containers for drink, represent most of the largest and most spectacular finds, other than jewellery. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the rich "princely" burials characteristic of the Hallstatt period greatly reduce, at least partly because of a change from inhumation burials to cremation.
The torc was evidently a key marker of status and very widely worn, in a range of metals no doubt reflecting the wealth and status of the owner. Bracelets and armlets were also common. An exception to the general lack of depictions of the human figure, and of the failure of wooden objects to survive, are certain water sites from which large numbers of small carved figures of body parts or whole human figures have been recovered, which are assumed to be votive offerings representing the location of the ailment of the supplicant. The largest of these, at Source-de-la-Roche, Chamalières, France, produced over 10,000 fragments, mostly now at Clermont-Ferrand.
Several phases of the style are distinguished, under a variety of names, including numeric (De Navarro) and alphabetic series. Generally, there is broad agreement on how to demarcate the phases, but the names used differ, and that they followed each other in chronological sequence is now much less certain. In a version of Jacobsthal's division, the "early" or "strict" phase, De Navarro I, where the imported motifs remain recognisable, is succeeded by the "vegetal", "Continuous Vegetal", "Waldalgesheim style", or De Navarro II, where ornament is "typically dominated by continuously moving tendrils of various types, twisting and turning in restless motion across the surface".
After about 300 BC the style, now De Navarro III, can be divided into "plastic" and "sword" styles, the latter mainly found on scabbards and the former featuring decoration in high relief. One scholar, Vincent Megaw, has defined a "Disney style" of cartoon-like animal heads within the plastic style, and also an "Oppida period art, c 125–c 50 BC". De Navarro distinguishes the "insular" art of the British Isles, up to about 100 BC, as Style IV, followed by a Style V, and the separateness of Insular Celtic styles is widely recognised.
The often spectacular art of the richest earlier Continental Celts, before they were conquered by the Romans, often adopted elements of Roman, Greek and other "foreign" styles (and possibly used imported craftsmen) to decorate objects that were distinctively Celtic. So a torc in the rich Vix Grave terminates in large balls in a way found in many others, but here the ends of the ring are formed as the paws of a lion or similar beast, without making a logical connection to the balls, and on the outside of the ring two tiny winged horses sit on finely worked plaques. The effect is impressive but somewhat incongruous compared to an equally ostentatious British torc from the Snettisham Hoard that is made 400 years later and uses a style that has matured and harmonized the elements making it up. The 1st century BC Gundestrup cauldron, is the largest surviving piece of European Iron Age silver (diameter 69 cm, height 42 cm), but though much of its iconography seems clearly to be Celtic, much of it is not, and its style is much debated; it may well be of Thracian manufacture. To further confuse matters, it was found in a bog in north Denmark. The Agris Helmet in gold leaf over bronze clearly shows the Mediterranean origin of its decorative motifs.
By the 3rd century BC Celts began to produce coinage, imitating Greek and later Roman types, at first fairly closely, but gradually allowing their own taste to take over, so that versions based on sober classical heads sprout huge wavy masses of hair several times larger than their faces, and horses become formed of a series of vigorously curved elements.
A form apparently unique to southern Britain was the mirror with a handle and complex decoration, mostly engraved, on the back of the bronze plate; the front side being highly polished to act as the mirror. Each of the more than 50 mirrors found has a unique design, but the essentially circular shape of the mirror presumably dictated the sophisticated abstract curvilinear motifs that dominate their decoration.
Despite the importance of Ireland for Early Medieval Celtic art, the number of artefacts showing La Tène style found in Ireland is small, though they are often of very high quality. Some aspects of Hallstatt metalwork had appeared in Ireland, such as scabbard chapes, but the La Tène style is not found in Ireland before some point between 350 and 150 BC, and until the latter date is mostly found in modern Northern Ireland, notably in a series of engraved scabbard plates. Thereafter, despite Ireland remaining outside the Roman Empire that engulfed the Continental and British Celtic cultures, Irish art is subject to continuous influence from outside, through trade and probably periodic influxes of refugees from Britain, both before and after the Roman invasion. It remains uncertain whether some of the most notable objects found from the period were made in Ireland or elsewhere, as far away as Germany and Egypt in specific cases.
But in Scotland and the western parts of Britain where the Romans and later the Anglo-Saxons were largely held back, versions of the La Tène style remained in use until it became an important component of the new Insular style that developed to meet the needs of newly Christianized populations. Indeed, in northern England and Scotland most finds post-date the Roman invasion of the south. However, while there are fine Irish finds from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there is little or nothing in La Tène style from the 3rd and 4th centuries, a period of instability in Ireland.
After the Roman conquests, some Celtic elements remained in popular art, especially Ancient Roman pottery, of which Gaul was actually the largest producer, mostly in Italian styles, but also producing work in local taste, including figurines of deities and wares painted with animals and other subjects in highly formalized styles. Roman Britain produced a number of items using Roman forms such as the fibula but with La Tène style ornament, whose dating can be difficult, for example a "hinged brass collar" from around the time of the Roman conquest shows Celtic decoration in a Roman context. Britain also made more use of enamel than most of the Empire, and on larger objects, and its development of champlevé technique was probably important to the later Medieval art of the whole of Europe, of which the energy and freedom derived from Insular decoration was an important element. Enamel decoration on penannular brooches, "dragonesque" brooches, and hanging bowls appears to demonstrate a continuity in Celtic decoration between works like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the flowering of Christian Insular art from the 6th century onwards.
Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Ireland and Britain
Celtic art in the Middle Ages was practiced by the peoples of Ireland and parts of Britain in the 700-year period from the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, to the establishment of Romanesque art in the 12th century. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission the style was influential in the development of art throughout Northern Europe.
In Ireland an unbroken Celtic heritage existed from before and throughout the Roman era of Britain, which had never reached the island, though in fact Irish objects in La Tène style are very rare from the Late Roman period. The 5th to 7th centuries were a continuation of late Iron Age La Tène art, with also many signs of the Roman and Romano-British influences that had gradually penetrated there. With the arrival of Christianity, Irish art was influenced by both Mediterranean and Germanic traditions, the latter through Irish contacts with the Anglo-Saxons, creating what is called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, which had its golden age in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Viking raids severely disrupted monastic life. Late in the period Scandinavian influences were added through the Vikings and mixed Norse-Gael populations, then original Celtic work came to end with the Norman invasion in 1169–1170 and the subsequent introduction of the general European Romanesque style.
In the 7th and 9th centuries Irish Celtic missionaries travelled to Northumbria in Britain and brought with them the Irish tradition of manuscript illumination, which came into contact with Anglo-Saxon metalworking knowledge and motifs. In the monasteries of Northumbria these skills fused and were probably transmitted back to Scotland and Ireland from there, also influencing the Anglo-Saxon art of the rest of England. Some of the metalwork masterpieces created include the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Chalice and the Derrynaflan Chalice. New techniques employed were filigree and chip carving, while new motifs included interlace patterns and animal ornamentation. The Book of Durrow is the earliest complete insular script illuminated Gospel Book and by about 700, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Hiberno-Saxon style was fully developed with detailed carpet pages that seem to glow with a wide palette of colours. The art form reached its peak in the late 8th century with the Book of Kells, the most elaborate Insular manuscript. Anti-classical Insular artistic styles were carried to mission centres on the Continent and had a continuing impact on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic art for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In the 9th and 11th century plain silver became a popular medium in Anglo-Saxon England, probably because of the increased amount in circulation due to Viking trading and raiding, and it was during this time a number of magnificent silver penannular brooches were created in Ireland. Around the same time manuscript production began to decline, and although it has often been blamed on the Vikings, this is debatable given the decline began before the Vikings arrived. Sculpture began to flourish in the form of the "high cross", large stone crosses that held biblical scenes in carved relief. This art form reached its apex in the early 10th century and has left many fine examples such as Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice and the Ahenny High Cross.
The impact of the Vikings on Irish art is not seen until the late 11th century when Irish metal work begins to imitate the Scandinavian Ringerike and Urnes styles, for example the Cross of Cong and Shrine of Manchan. These influences were found not just in the Norse centre of Dublin, but throughout the countryside in stone monuments such as the Dorty Cross at Kilfenora and crosses at the Rock of Cashel.
Some Insular manuscripts may have been produced in Wales, including the 8th century Lichfield Gospels and Hereford Gospels. The late Insular Ricemarch Psalter from the 11th century was certainly written in Wales, and also shows strong Viking influence.
Art from historic Dumnonia, modern Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Brittany on the Atlantic seaboard is now fairly sparsely attested and hence less well known as these areas later became incorporated into England (and France) in the medieval and Early Modern period. However archaeological studies at sites such as Cadbury Castle, Somerset, Tintagel, and more recently at Ipplepen indicate a highly sophisticated largely literate society with strong influence and connections with both the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic Irish, and British in Wales and the 'Old North'. Many crosses, memorials and tombstones such as King Doniert's Stone, the Drustanus stone and the notorious Artognou stone show evidence for a surprisingly cosmopolitan sub-Roman population speaking and writing in both Brittonic and Latin and with at least some knowledge of Ogham indicated by several extant stones in the region. Breton and especially Cornish manuscripts are exceedingly rare survivals but include the Bodmin manumissions demonstrating a regional form of the Insular style.
Picts (Scotland)
From the 5th to the mid-9th centuries, the art of the Picts is primarily known through stone sculpture, and a smaller number of pieces of metalwork, often of very high quality; there are no known illuminated manuscripts. The Picts shared modern Scotland with a zone of Irish cultural influence on the west coast, including Iona, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. After Christianization, Insular styles heavily influenced Pictish art, with interlace prominent in both metalwork and stones.
The heavy silver Whitecleuch Chain has Pictish symbols on its terminals, and appears to be an equivalent to a torc. The symbols are also found on plaques from the Norrie's Law hoard. These are thought to be relatively early pieces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of silver penannular brooches, bowls and other items comes from off the coast of Pictland and is often regarded as mostly of Pictish manufacture, representing the best survival of Late Pictish metalwork, from about 800 AD.
Pictish stones are assigned by scholars to 3 classes. Class I Pictish stones are unshaped standing stones incised with a series of about 35 symbols which include abstract designs (given descriptive names such as crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, 'flower' and so on by researchers); carvings of recognisable animals (bull, eagle, salmon, adder and others), as well as the Pictish Beast, and objects from daily life (a comb, a mirror). The symbols almost always occur in pairs, with in about one-third of cases the addition of the mirror, or mirror and comb, symbol, below the others. This is often taken to symbolise a woman. Apart from one or two outliers, these stones are found exclusively in north-east Scotland from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. Good examples include the Dunnichen and Aberlemno stones (Angus), and the Brandsbutt and Tillytarmont stones (Aberdeenshire).
Class II stones are shaped cross-slabs carved in relief, or in a combination of incision and relief, with a prominent cross on one, or in rare cases two, faces. The crosses are elaborately decorated with interlace, key-pattern or scrollwork, in the Insular style. On the secondary face of the stone, Pictish symbols appear, often themselves elaborately decorated, accompanied by figures of people (notably horsemen), animals both realistic and fantastic, and other scenes. Hunting scenes are common, Biblical motifs less so. The symbols often appear to 'label' one of the human figures. Scenes of battle or combat between men and fantastic beasts may be scenes from Pictish mythology. Good examples include slabs from Dunfallandy and Meigle (Perthshire), Aberlemno (Angus), Nigg, Shandwick and Hilton of Cadboll (Easter Ross).
Class III stones are in the Pictish style, but lack the characteristic symbols. Most are cross-slabs, though there are also recumbent stones with sockets for an inserted cross or small cross-slab (e.g. at Meigle, Perthshire). These stones may date largely to after the Scottish takeover of the Pictish kingdom in the mid 9th century. Examples include the sarcophagus and the large collection of cross-slabs at St Andrews (Fife).
The following museums have important collections of Pictish stones: Meigle (Perthshire), St Vigeans (Angus) and St Andrew's Cathedral (Fife) (all Historic Scotland), the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (which also exhibits almost all the major pieces of surviving Pictish metalwork), the Meffan Institute, Forfar (Angus), Inverness Museum, Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie and Tarbat Discovery Centre, Portmahomack (both Easter Ross) and The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.
Celtic revival
The revival of interest in Celtic visual art came sometime later than the revived interest in Celtic literature. By the 1840s reproduction Celtic brooches and other forms of metalwork were fashionable, initially in Dublin, but later in Edinburgh, London and other countries. Interest was stimulated by the discovery in 1850 of the Tara Brooch, which was seen in London and Paris over the next decades. The late 19th century reintroduction of monumental Celtic crosses for graves and other memorials has arguably been the most enduring aspect of the revival, one that has spread well outside areas and populations with a specific Celtic heritage. Interlace typically features on these and has also been used as a style of architectural decoration, especially in America around 1900, by architects such as Louis Sullivan, and in stained glass and wall stenciling by Thomas A. O'Shaughnessy, both based in Chicago with its large Irish-American population. The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland embraced the Celtic style early on, but began to back away in the 1920s. The governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas Bodkin, writing in The Studio magazine in 1921, drew attention to the decline in Celtic ornament in the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland said, "National art all over the world has burst long ago, the
narrow boundaries within which it is cradled, and grows more cosmopolitan in spirit with each succeeding generation." George Atkinson, writing the foreword to the catalogue of that same exhibit emphasized the society's disapproval of any undue emphasis on Celtic ornament at the expense of good design. "Special pleading on behalf of the national traditional ornament is no longer justifiable.”The style had served the nationalist cause as an emblem of a distinct Irish culture, but soon intellectual fashions abandoned Celtic art as nostalgically looking backwards.
Interlace, which is still seen as a "Celtic" form of decoration—somewhat ignoring its Germanic origins and equally prominent place in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian medieval art—has remained a motif in many forms of popular design, especially in Celtic countries, and above all Ireland, where it remains a national style signature. In recent decades it has been used worldwide in tattoos, and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which makes much use of Insular design.
By the 1980s a new Celtic Revival had begun, which continues to this day. Often this late 20th-century movement is referred to as the Celtic Renaissance. By the 1990s the number of new artists, craftsmen, designers and retailers specializing in Celtic jewelry and crafts was rapidly increasing. The Celtic Renaissance has been an international phenomenon, with participants no longer confined to just the Old-World Celtic countries.
June 9 was designated International Day of Celtic Art in 2017 by a groups of contemporary Celtic artists and enthusiasts. The day is an occasion for exhibits, promotions, workshops and demonstrations.
Celtic art types and terms
Hanging bowl. According to the traditional theory, these were created by Celtic craftsmen during the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of England. They were based on a Roman design, usually made of copper alloy with 3 or 4 suspension loops along the top rim, from which they were designed to be hung, perhaps from roof-beams or within a tripod. Their art-historical interest mainly derives from the round decorated plaques, often with enamel, that most have along their rims. Some of the finest examples are found in the hoard at Sutton Hoo (625) which are enamelled. The knowledge of their manufacture spread to Scotland and Ireland in the 8th century. However, although their styles continue popular Romano-British traditions, the assumption that they were made in Ireland is now questioned.
Carpet page. An illuminated manuscript page decorated entirely in ornamentation. In Hiberno-Saxon tradition this was a standard feature of Gospel books, with one page as an introduction to each Gospel. Usually made in a geometric or interlace pattern, often framing a central cross. The earliest known example is the 7th century Bobbio Orosius.
High cross. A tall stone standing cross, usually of Celtic cross form. Decoration is abstract often with figures in carved relief, especially crucifixions, but in some cases complex multi-scene schemes. Most common in Ireland, but also in Great Britain and near continental mission centres.
Pictish stone. A cross-slab—a rectangular slab of rock with a cross carved in relief on the slab face, with other pictures and shapes carved throughout. Organised into three Classes, based on the period of origin.
Insular art or the Hiberno-Saxon style, from the 6th to 9th centuries. The fusion of pre-Christian Celtic and Anglo-Saxon metalworking styles, applied to the new form of the religious illuminated manuscript, as well as sculpture and secular and church metalwork. Also includes influences from post-classical Europe, and later Viking decorative styles. The peak of the style in manuscripts occurred when Irish Celtic missionaries traveled to Northumbria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Produced some of the most outstanding Celtic art of the Middle Ages in illuminated manuscripts, metalworking and sculpture.
Celtic calendar. The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Gaulish Coligny calendar from the 1st century BC or AD.
See also
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts
Gundestrup cauldron
Celtic maze
Celtic blue
Notes
References
Garrow, Duncan (ed), Rethinking Celtic Art, 2008, Oxbow Books, , 9781842173183, google books
Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library,
Harding, Dennis, William. The archaeology of Celtic art, Routledge, 2007, , , Google books
Hawkes, C.F.C., review of Early Celtic Art by Paul Jacobsthal, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), pp. 191–198, JSTOR
Jacobsthal, Paul (1935), "Early Celtic Art", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 390 (Sep., 1935), pp. 113–127, JSTOR
Johns, Catherine, The Jewellery of Roman Britain: Celtic and Classical Traditions, Routledge, 1996, , , Google books
Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992
"NMI": Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities
Megaw, Ruth and Vincent (2001). Celtic Art.
"Megaws": Megaw, Ruth and Vincent, "Celtic Art", Oxford Art Online, accessed October 7, 2010
Raftery, Barry, "La Tène Art", in Bogucki, Peter I. and Crabtree, Pam. J.: Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.--A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian world, 2004, Charles Scribner's Sons, , . online text (slightly shortened)
Sandars, Nancy K., Prehistoric Art in Europe, Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.)
Further reading
Boltin, Lee, ed.: Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.: From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977, , fully available online.
Bain, George: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction, Lavishly Illustrated with Line Drawings and Photographs: Dover Publishing, New York, 1973, , which is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William MacLellan & Co., Ltd., Glasgow, 1951.
External links
The Celtic art database, hosted by the British Museum. "A comprehensive database of all Celtic art found in Britain to date. This includes excavated finds and finds recently reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme", excel spreadsheet, last updated August 2010. For summaries, see Garrow, chapter 2.
Celtic Art & Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Insular Celtic bronze mirrors
"Bearing the truth about Celtic art: Kunst der Kelten in Bern", Review by Vincent Megaw of 2009 exhibition, Antiquity online.
Western art
Medieval art
Indo-European art | false | [
"The Paemani (also Poemani or Caemani) were small a Belgic-Germanic tribe dwelling in Gallia Belgica during the Iron Age. Their ethnic identity remains uncertain. Caesar described them as part of the Germani Cisrhenani, but a number of scholars have argued that their name may be of Celtic origin. Like other Germani Cisrhenani tribes, it is possible that their old Germanic endonym came to be abandoned after a tribal reorganization, that they received their names from their Celtic neighbours, or else that they were fully or partially assimilated to Celtic culture at the time of the Roman invasion of the region in 57 BC.\n\nName\n\nAttestations \nThe name appears as Caemani in Caesar's accounts (mid-1st c. BC), along with the variant Paemani or Paemanes.\n\nOne of the two variants may be a scribal error. Alternatively, scholar Peter E. Busse has proposed to interpret the forms as Q-Celtic/P-Celtic equivalents: \"that Caesar wrote Q-Celtic Caemanes, with C- rather than expected Qu-, is easily explained either as a mishearing or as the result of learning the name from P-Celtic intermediaries who had no kw in their own language.\n\nEtymology \nThe variant Paemani is possibly of Celtic origin, for it appears closely related to the names Poemaneni (Galatia), Poemana (Gallaecia, Celtic Hispania), and Poemaneni, which all occur in Celtic milieus, but a convincing etymology has not yet been found. The name may possibly be interpreted as 'the herdsmen', by comparison with the Greek poimḗn. It appears to be an archaic formation since it has preserved the initial p-, which has normally been lost in attested Celtic languages.\n\nAlternatively, a Germanic etymology from *haima- ('home') has also been proposed for Caemani, although it cannot explain the spelling Paemanes, and Germanic sound laws rather predict a **Haemanes or **Chaemanes form. \n\nThe hypothesis that the name of the Famenne region may derive from Paemani, following the influence of the Germanic sound shift from p- to f-, is now considered doubtful by most scholars, which, according to Edith Wightman, \"does not prove that they did not inhabit the region\".\n\nGeography \nThe Paemani dwelled in the northern part of the Ardennes and Eifel region, between the Rhône and the Meuse river, near the Caerosi in the south, the Eburones in the north, and the Tungri and Atuatuci in the west.\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography \n\n \n\nEarly Germanic peoples\nTribes of pre-Roman Gaul\nTribes involved in the Gallic Wars\nBelgae",
"The Lugi were a people of ancient Britain, known only from a single mention of them by the geographer Ptolemy c. 150. from his general description and the approximate locations of their neighbors their territory was along the western coast of the Moray Firth. Ptolemy does not provide them with a town or principal place.\n\nEtymology \nThe Pictish name Lugi probably stems from Proto-Celtic *lugos ('crow'). A derivation from the Celtic god Lug has also been proposed.\n\nSee also\nLugii\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography\n\nHistorical Celtic peoples\nPicts\nTribes mentioned by Ptolemy"
]
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