Curated playlist
Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
- Bob DylanAt a 1966 Manchester concert, Bob Dylan told his band to play loud after a heckler called him Judas.
- David BowieDavid Bowie died two days after releasing his final album. He planned Blackstar as a parting gift while privately dying.
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot compared an evening sky to a patient on a surgical table.
- Quentin TarantinoQuentin Tarantino turned down Speed and Men in Black to write Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam.
- Stanley KubrickAfter copycat crimes and death threats, Stanley Kubrick pulled A Clockwork Orange from release in the United Kingdom.
- Meryl StreepDino De Laurentiis insulted Meryl Streep in Italian, not knowing she spoke it. She answered him in Italian too.
- Michael CaineMichael Caine took his stage name from a cinema sign he saw while phoning from a Leicester Square telephone box.
- Clint EastwoodPresident Reagan quoted Clint Eastwood's line "Go ahead, make my day" to Congress.
- Audrey HepburnAudrey Hepburn gave underground concerts to raise money for the Dutch resistance. She was a teenager in occupied Arnhem.
- Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev refused to declare a state of emergency during the August 1991 coup.
- Iggy PopIggy Pop, born James Newell Osterberg Jr., built a reputation on rolling around in broken glass while a crowd watched. Admirers eventually called him the "Godfather of Punk". His first band sold few records, yet its songs outlasted much of…
- BonoBono, the lead singer of U2, took his name from the sign of a hearing aid shop in Dublin. The shop was called Bonavox, and it stood just off O'Connell Street, the city's principal thoroughfare. The word comes from the Latin for good voice.…
- Jane FondaJane Fonda sat on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun during a 1972 visit to Hanoi, and a photograph of that moment outraged a large number of Americans. It earned her a nickname that has followed her for decades: Hanoi Jane. For many…
- Paul NewmanAt the 1995 24 Hours of Daytona, Paul Newman was 70 years and eight days old, and his team won its class. That made him the oldest driver to date on a winning team in a major sanctioned race. Newman was best known as a film star, and he…
- Patti SmithPatti Smith, the American singer, songwriter, poet and author, lost her place in the middle of a song at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. The date was the 10th of December 2016. She was standing in for Bob Dylan, winner of the…
- Ringo StarrRingo Starr's first drum was a cotton bobbin used to tap the cabinets by his hospital bed.
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
- Eldar RyazanovEldar Ryazanov first refused to direct a comedy. He wanted to make serious films, but Carnival Night was a hit.
- Dmitri ShostakovichStalin walked out of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera in 1936, and the next day Pravda attacked it.
- Sean ConnerySir Sean Connery was the first actor to play James Bond in the cinema, and the role followed him for the rest of his life. In 2009, he described a taxi ride during the Edinburgh Film Festival. The driver was amazed that Connery could name…
- Edison DenisovEdison Denisov trained as a mathematician before he wrote a note of music. Shostakovich gave him composition lessons.
- Quincy JonesQuincy Jones taped a sign to the entrance of a recording studio in 1985, and it read "Check Your Ego at the Door." Behind that door waited most of the major American recording artists of the day. Jones needed every one of them to work as…