20 stories by "Clay Risen"
His dive bar became famous thanks to Mike Royko’s columns, a baseball curse and a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
She elevated supporting roles in films with insight and improvisational skill, a talent she took to Broadway as well, earning Tony nominations.
With her frenetic energy and 4-foot-10 frame, Ms. Lee seemed destined to play a certain kind of stage character: excitable, endearing and charmingly scheming.
The role, one of his first, made him a household name and a film idol of the anti-establishment 1970s. But it also limited his growth as an actor.
She was a white actress, he was a popular Black entertainer, and their relationship elicited racist reactions in 1960, including from John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign.
Born without the use of his legs, he appeared memorably on television on "Doctor Who" and onstage as, among many other roles, Hamlet.
She often played a particularly British character: a bubbly yet resilient woman facing down the corrosive effects of everyday modern life.
His summer conferences gave budding playwrights a chance to try out new works, many of which went on to success in New York.
Born in Massachusetts, she built a following in Parisian nightclubs before returning to the U.S., where she had a successful career as a torch singer.
More than 30 of his plays were produced on Broadway and off. Many of them dealt with the manners and mores of New York's upper middle class.
After having success as a member of the Sequence, an early female rap group, she re-emerged in the 1990s as a practitioner of sultry, laid-back R&B.
An expert at rescuing distressed companies, he took over the struggling organization in 2000, leading it through a painful restructuring and a lengthy legal battle.
First as a journalist and later as a professor at Yale, she provided the intellectual tools to help actors, directors and audiences understand challenging work.
He created a vibrant space for actors and playwrights that became a seedbed for the emerging Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s.
He was a villain in "Lethal Weapon 2," C.S. Lewis on TV in "Shadowlands" and Falstaff onstage in "Henry IV" " and had a cameo in a Pet Shop Boys video.
Invited by George Balanchine to be the in-house orthopedic surgeon at City Ballet, he laid the groundwork for the field of dance medicine.
In his essays and plays, he provided a framework that linked playwrights like August Wilson to African rituals and mythologies.
He wrote not for white or middle-class audiences, but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works.
She taught Barbra Streisand, Penélope Cruz and countless other performers how to sound like someone else.
She became a muse among the Hollywood avant-garde, appearing in movies, music videos and photographs. She died of Covid-19.
