Curated playlist
2003 deaths
- Katharine HepburnKatharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, a record no one else has matched. She wore trousers before women commonly did. She refused autographs, shunned the publicity machine, and once wrestled a camera from a…
- Elia KazanElia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, to Cappadocian Greek parents whose surname derived from the Turkish word for "pot maker". His family arrived in the United States on the 8th of July,…
- Ian MacDonaldIan MacCormick entered the world on the 3rd of October 1948 in London. He attended Dulwich College before moving to King's College, Cambridge. His studies there shifted from English to archaeology and anthropology within a single year. He…
- Johnny CashJohnny Cash began his concerts the same way for decades, walking to the microphone and saying four words: "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." The man who said them was born J. R. Cash on the 26th of February 1932, the son of poor cotton farmers in…
- Helmut RahnHelmut Rahn had six minutes left, and a nation's fragile self-belief riding on his boots. It was the final of the 1954 FIFA World Cup, West Germany against Hungary, and the score stood at 2-2. Rahn received the ball just outside the…
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark…
- Franco ModiglianiFranco Modigliani was born on the 18th of June 1918 in Rome, into a Jewish family headed by a pediatrician father. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2003, still teaching at MIT in the final months of his life, aged 85. Between those…
- Annemarie SchimmelAnnemarie Schimmel was born in Erfurt, Germany, on the 7th of April 1922, the daughter of a postal worker named Paul and his wife Anna. She later described her father as, in her own words, a wonderful playmate, full of fun. By 17 she had…
- Geoffrey KirkGeoffrey Stephen Kirk was born in December 1921 in Nottingham, and by the end of his life he had produced one of the most ambitious commentaries on Homer ever attempted. The six volumes of his Iliad commentary took shape across the better…
- Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan shined shoes at Pennsylvania Station as a boy during the Great Depression, in the same building he would later spend decades fighting to restore as a United States Senator. That arc, from the floors of Hell's…