FAMOUS MEN OF ARTS.

Exercise 1. Look through the following short texts, choose one person that is of special interest to you and tell the group about him. You may add any information you have about this person.

1. George Gershwin (1898 –1937) was an American composer. He wrote most of his vocal and theatrical works in collaboration with his elder brother. George Gershwin composed songs both for Broadway and for the classical concert hall. He also wrote popular songs with success. Many of his compositions have been used on television and in numerous films, and many became jazz standards. The jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald recorded many of the Gershwins' songs on her 1959 Gershwin Songbook. The most famous Gershwin’s opera is “Porgy and Bess”. "Summertime" is by far the best-known piece from the work, and countless interpretations of this and other individual numbers have also been recorded and performed. The opera is admired for Gershwin's innovative synthesis of European orchestral techniques with American jazz and folk music idioms. Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a crippled black man living in the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina, and his attempts to rescue Bess from the hands of Crown, her pimp, and Sportin' Life, the drug dealer.

2. Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, (1889 – 1977), better known as Charlie Chaplin, was an English comedic actor. Chaplin became one of the most famous actors as well as a notable filmmaker, composer and musician in the early to mid Hollywood cinema era. He is considered to be one of the finest mimes and clowns ever captured on film. He greatly influenced other performers. Chaplin acted in, directed, scripted, produced, and eventually scored his own films as one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. Chaplin's first dialogue picture, The Great Dictator (1940), was an act of defiance against German dictator Adolf Hitler and Nazism, filmed in the United States. Chaplin played the role of a Hitler-like dictator "Adenoid Hynkel", Dictator of Tomainia, clearly modeled on Hitler. The film also showcased another comedian as "Benzino Napaloni", dictator of Bacteria. The Napaloni character was clearly a jab at Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Fascism.

3. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien /`tɔ:kın/, (1892 – 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the high fantasy classic works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is written in the tradition of the fairy tale. The Lord of the Rings began as a sequel to it but eventually developed into a much larger work. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him Latin very early. He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read a lot of books. He disliked Treasure Island and thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was amusing but disturbing. Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love to the language and philology. He specialized in Ancient Greek philology at university. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist was his affection for the construction of artificial languages.

4. Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (1938 – 1980) was an iconic Russian singer, songwriter, poet, and actor whose career had an immense effect on Russian culture. The talent of Vladimir Vysotsky is often described by the word "bard" (бард), which acquired a special meaning in the Soviet Union. Vysotsky was never enthusiastic about this term, however. He thought of himself mainly as an actor and writer, and once remarked, "I do not belong to what people call bards or minstrels or whatever." Though his work was largely ignored by the official Soviet cultural establishment, he achieved remarkable fame during his lifetime, and to this day influences a lot of Russia's popular musicians and actors who wish to gain the same iconic status.

5. Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla /`α:stə pjə`tsɔlə/ (1921 – 1992) was an Argentine tango composer and bandoneón player. His artistic work revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, including elements from jazz and classical music. An excellent bandoneonist, he regularly performed his own compositions with different ensembles. Ástor Piazzolla spent most of his childhood with his family in New York City, where he fall in love with both jazz and the music of J.S. Bach at an early age. While there, he acquired fluency in four languages: Spanish, English, French, and Italian. In the beginning of his career he often played in night clubs. But due to his talent he became a controversial figure among Argentines both musically and politically. There is an Argentine saying "in Argentina everything may change — except the tango". However, his music gained acceptance in Europe and North America.

6. Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (1904 –1989), was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres. He was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and strange images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often thought to be influenced by Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney and with Alfred Hitchcock. Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an inclination to do unusual things in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes tire those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. Thus criticism in some way led to broad public recognition. Dalí’s art is very symbolic. For instance, the symbol "soft watches" that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot day in August.

7. Peter Greenaway /`grı:nweı /, (born 1942) is an English film director born in Wales. At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. But he soon became interested in European cinema. His most famous and disturbing film is called “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”. It opens with a vulgar scene, when a man is being cruelly humiliated by 'The Thief', Albert Spica. Most of the film is set in an elegant restaurant called Le Hollandais. Spica dines at this restaurant frequently, along with his beautiful wife Georgina and his group of rude associates.. Georgina then fell in love with a customer in the restaurant and the two of them have a dangerous affair there. Eventually, Spica discovers this, and the film draws to its memorable and shocking conclusion, which is the ultimate punishment.