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Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932): was
born Isabella Augusta Persse in Roxborough House,
near Loughrea, Co. Galway. At twenty-eight she
married Sir W. H. Gregory, then a sixty-three
year-old widower, former governor of Ceylon and
Trustee of the National Gallery and MP for Galway,
and who had been responsible for measures which
compounded the misery suffered in the Great Famine
(1846-1851). They settled in London, where the
Gregorys' salon was frequented by Browning, Tennyson,
Millais, Henry James, and others. They summered
at Coole Park, near Gort, Co. Galway, in the barony
of Kiltartan which she would later make famous. |
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Her
husband died in 1892, and shortly afterwards,
her first visit to Inisheer, one of the Aran Islands,
inspired her to learn Irish and the Hiberno-English
dialect of Kiltartan. She met W. B. Yeats in 1896,
and commenced collecting folklore in Kiltartan
region with him. She also established an Irish
class at Coole schoolhouse. She met Douglas Hyde,
the Gaelic scholar and future first President
of Ireland in 1897. With Edward Martyn and Yeats,
she founded the Irish Literary Theatre, 1899-1901,
later the Abbey Theatre Company, of which she
held the patent and which she directed with Yeats
and J.M. Synge from 1904. Her first publication
was Poets and Dreamers (1903), containing translations
of Raftery, folk-tales, and translations of short
plays by Douglas Hyde. She began writing plays
by helping Yeats with the peasant dialogue of
his plays and in effect co-authored his early
plays, including Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Her first
play was Twenty Five (Dublin, The Abbey, 1904).
Altogether she wrote nineteen original plays and
seven translations for the Abbey between 1904-1912.
"It's a good thing to be able to take up
your money in your hand and to think no more of
it when it slips away from you than you would
of a trout that would slip back into the stream."
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Lorraine Hansberry (1930-65): In 1959 she
became the first black woman to have a play produced
on Broadway when A Raisin in the Sun opened to
wide critical acclaim. The play dealt in human
terms with the serious and comic problems of a
black family in modern America. Her next play,
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964) was
less successful. Hansberry died of cancer at 35.
A collection of her writings, To Be Young, Gifted,
and Black, was published in 1969.
"I want to reach a little closer to the world
and see if we can share some illuminations together
about each other." - |
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Frances Harper (1825-1911): Frances Harper
was born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland.
Her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, was
published in 1845. Three years later, she joined
the American Anti-Slavery Society and became a
traveling lecturer for the group. She wrote the
popular poem, Bury Me In a Free Land. In 1892,
Frances was the first African American woman to
publish a novel. It was called Iola Leroy and
was about a rescued black slave and the Reconstructed
South. Most of the earnings from her books went
toward helping free the slaves. Although an extremely
popular writer during her lifetime, Harper was
not acclaimed by literary critics. Harper's communicative
and intentionally popular style was dismissed
as sentimental hackwork by African-American male
critics and her message held in suspicion because
her mixed-race protagonists were not sufficiently
black. |
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In
recent decades, however, black women and feminists
in general have resurrected Harper's legacy. In
1992 African-American Unitarian Universalists
honored her and commemorated the one-hundredth
anniversary of Iola Leroy by installing a new
headstone. Frances died nine years before women
gained the right to vote.
I ask no monument, proud and high, To arrest the
gaze of passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves, Is bury me
not in a land of slaves.
- Bury Me In A Free Land, by
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Edith Head (1898-1981): became chief designer
at Paramount in charge of a costume department
with a staff of hundreds. She was the first woman
to head a design department at a major studio.
From then on, at Paramount and later at Universal
Studios, she became America's best-known and most
successful Hollywood designer. She was noted for
the range of her costume designs, from elegant
simplicity to intricate flamboyance, and she also
gained a reputation for being able to placate
temperamental actors and directors. Head was nominated
for an unprecedented 34 Academy Awards, winning
a record 8.
"I've designed films I've never seen."
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Laura Keene (1820-1873): actress and theatre
manager was born in England and died in Montclair,
New Jersey. She played with Mme Vestris at the
Lyceum, London, emigrated to the United States
in 1852 and became manager (1855) of Laura Keene's
Varieties Theater, New York City. In 1856 she
opened Laura Keene's Theater (later the Olympic)
and successfully produced and acted in many foreign
and American plays until 1863.
Her most famous production was Tom Taylor's Our
American Cousin, which she produced at Ford's
Theater, Washington, D.C., when Lincoln was shot
there in 1865. |
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Her
last undertaking was the publication of a weekly
art journal in New York city, which was issued
for about one year.
"No braver, steadier, abler soldier ever
battled in the ranks of art than Laura Keene."
- Obituary, New York Herald
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Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991):
was one of the most successful figures in American
theater for several decades. In addition to being
an actress, she was also a director, producer,
teacher, and memoirist, as well as a translator
of the works of Ibsen, Chekhov, and others. Born
in London her childhood was divided between time
with her mother in Paris and time with her bon
vivant father in England. In 1915 she and her
mother sailed for New York. By 1920, she had signed
a contract with theater impresarios the Shuberts
and became popular on the theater circuit. Dissatisfied
with the commercial theater of the day, Le Gallienne
sought to develop a repertory company that would
offer quality productions at low prices. |
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In
1926, she opened her Civic Repertory Theater,
for which she not only acted but also produced
and directed plays, especially the works of Chekhov
and Ibsen. It was a great critical success. In
1927 Eva began a relationship with married actress
Josephine Hutchinson. When Hutchinson's husband
initiated divorce proceedings and named Le Gallienne
as a correspondent, the media had a field day.
They referred to Hutchinson as "the shadow
actress." At the time, the term "shadow"
was a euphemism for "lesbian." Five
months later, Le Gallienne daringly produced Alison's
House, a play about Emily Dickinson, who by then
was suspected by a small cognoscenti to have been
a lesbian.
The critics panned the production, but the play
won a Pulitzer Prize. In late 1929, just after
the stock market crashed, Le Gallienne graced
the cover of Time magazine. The accompanying article
reported that The Civic Repertory Theater was
one of the few theaters still playing to full
houses. Despite its large audiences, however,
the Civic's expenses often exceeded its income,
and the company folded in 1935. In 1964, she received
a Tony Award for her production of Chekhov's The
Seagull. At the age of eighty, Le Gallienne was
cast along with Ellen Burstyn in Daniel Petrie's
film Resurrection. Le Gallienne's performance
as Grandma Pearl earned her an Oscar nomination
for Best Supporting Actress. Le Gallienne died
at the age of 92 on June 3, 1992.
"The theater should be an instrument for
giving, not a machinery for getting." - |
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| Lisa
Lopes (1971-2002): Lisa "Left Eye"
Lopes was born in Philadelphia, PA, Lisa Nicole
Lopes, the eldest child of Wanda D. and Ronald
E. Lopes. She began playing the piano when she
was five years old and by the time she was a teenager
she was entering various local talent contests
as a rapper and helping out other acts as a designer
and visual artist. She ran away several times
before leaving home for good at the age of 17.
Lopes eventually relocated to Atlanta, Georgia,
in late 1990. Lopes quickly became known around
the Atlanta performing scene by her nickname,
"Left-Eye," bestowed upon her by singer
Michael Bivins, who was a former member of New
Edition. Noticing that her left eye was a bit
larger than her right one, Bivins told Lopes that
he thought the difference made her beautiful,
and the nickname "Left-Eye" stuck. |
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After less than a year in Georgia, Lopes joined
forces in 1991 with two other Atlanta-area performers,
Crystal Jones and Tionne Watkins, who were looking
for a third member to join their group, 2nd Nature,
as a rap vocalist. The group renamed itself TLC
after signing a management contract in 1991. Watkins
and Lopes decided to oust Jones from the group
and replace her with Atlanta native Rozonda Thomas.
With the new lineup of TLC complete they secured
a recording deal with LaFace Records. TLC became
a multi-platinum and Grammy award winning and
socially conscious musical group. In addition
to rapping and writing songs for the group, Lopes
was also a solo artist, a television host, and
a songwriter for many other artists. She contributed
to albums by Melanie C and Mya, and branched out
on her own with a solo album, Supernova, completed
in 2001.At the time of her death in early 2002,
Lisa had just finished a month-long meditation
fast, and was in the process of setting up an
education center for children, all in Honduras.
"There's a thin line between genius and insanity
- and I always get labeled as being the
crazy one." -
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Dorothy Parker (1893-1967):was born on
August 22, 1893, in West End, New Jersey at the
family's summer home, but her true home was New
York City. Dorothy's childhood was an unhappy
one, marred by many deaths in the family. She
spent her early career as a staff writer for two
Conde Nast publications, Vogue and Vanity Fair.
In 1917 she replaced P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic
for Vanity Fair, making her New York City's first
female drama critic, and certainly one of it's
most famous. Dottie once remarked that a performance
of Katharine Hepburn's "ran the gamut of
emotion from A to B". Also in 1917, Dorothy
married Edwin Pond Parker II, becoming Dorothy
Parker. |
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The marriage did not last, but she would use the
name for the rest of her life. At Vanity Fair,
Parker met her associates with whom she would
form the Algonquin Round Table, the famed New
York literary circle of which she was the reigning
wit. In 1925, she began writing for The New Yorker,
and continued to do some for some thirty years.
During the 1920's, Dorothy won acclaim for humorous
verse and prize-winning stories such as "Big
Blonde". In 1934, she married Broadway actor,
Alan Campbell. The couple became an Oscar-nominated
screenwriting team whose films included A Star
Is Born. They divorced in 1947, remarried in 1950,
separating and reuniting again before Campbell's
death in 1963.
Throughout her career, Parker published bestselling
collections of her work, including Enough Rope
(1926), Sunset Gun (1928), Laments for the Living
(1930), and Death and Taxes (1931). Her last major
work was a drama, The Ladies of the Corridor,
which she wrote in 1953 with Arnaud d'Usseau.
Dorothy Parker died on June 7, 1967, leaving every
penny of her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. She is buried in Baltimore, Maryland at the
headquarters of the NAACP. For her epitaph, she
suggested "Excuse My Dust". In 2005,
her birthplace was designated the first national
literary landmark in the Garden State.
"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a
medley of extemporanea; and love is a thing that
can never go wrong; and I am Marie of Roumania."
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