| Monday, December 31, 2007 |
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| Anthony Hopkins |
SpotlightHappy 70th birthday to award-winning actor Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins has played presidents and kings, serial killers and servants; he was Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Zorro in The Mask of Zorro, Daniel Webster in The Devil and Daniel Webster and Hrothgar in Beowulf. But it was his chilling portrayal of Hannibal Lecter that brought him his greatest fame. With a little over 16 minutes of screen time, his performance in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), is the shortest ever to win a Best Actor Oscar.
Quote"I was lousy in school... A moron. I was antisocial and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student... I didn't know what I was doing there. That's why I became an actor."
Word of the daydilettante
Someone who is interested in the fine arts as a spectator, not as a serious practitioner. Dilettante is most often used to mean a dabbler, someone with a broad but shallow attachment to any field.
Usage: "Thoughtless, dilettante or purblind wordlings sometimes ask us 'What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?' To this I answer 'If we left off fighting, you would soon find out.'" — Winston Churchill
The Fine Arts Dictionary brings us terms relating to topics like music, art and architecture — both classical and contemporary — from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.
Today's History
- light bulb: was first publicly demonstrated by Thomas Edison, in Menlo Park, New Jersey (1879)
- Times Square: the Waterford crystal ball was dropped for the first time (1907)
- WWII: President Harry S. Truman officially proclaimed the end of hostilities (1946)
- farthing: British coin in use since the 13th century ceased to be legal tender; it was worth a quarter of a penny (1960)
Today's Birthdays
- Jacques Cartier (1491-1557): explorer who camped in what is now Quebec City and inadvertently named the entire country of Canada
- Henri Matisse (1869-1954): French painter and leading Fauvist who became famous when 3 of his paintings were bought by Gertrude Stein
- Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005): Holocaust survivor whose life's goal was to bring Nazis to justice
- Ben Kingsley (64): Oscar-winning actor, Gandhi
- John Denver (1943-1997): folk-pop singer of "Take Me Home, Country Roads"
- Gong Li (42): Chinese actress, Farewell, My Concubine, Memoirs of a Geisha
