Diary

The United States

Of America

Выполнила: студентка группы 71-ЛНГ

Никишина Дарья

2021
 Architecture
Realities
Colonial Architecture - the architecture used by the first settlers in North America is
traditionally known as Colonial architecture. This early architecture was as diverse as the settlers
themselves, who included Spanish, English, Scots-Irish, Dutch, German, French and Swedish.

Capitol – the largest building in Washington, D.C., in which the United States Congress meets.
The Capitol dominates the skyline of the city of Washington; only the Washington Monument is
higher.

White House is the mansion of the president of the USA in Washington, D.C., a white building
in America colonial style. It contains reception and dinning rooms, living quarters for the
president, the president’s Oval Office, and offices for the presidential staff.

Balloon-frame construction is a timber frame structure, where the studs run continuously from
the sole plate to the rafter plate. The studs are typically a soft pine dimensional lumber. 

The Washington Monument (1836) – a structure on the Washington Mall, over 500 feet tall,
built in the 19th century in honor of George Washington. In shape it is an obelisk – four-sided
shaft with a pyramid at the top.

Prairie style - a series of residences with low horizontal lines and strongly projecting eaves that
echoed the rhythms of the surrounding landscape

Functionalism is an approach to architecture that adopts the design of a building or other

structure to its future use. Functionalist buildings use steel frames, and glass and concrete, and
simple forms. Louis Sullivan was a notable advocate of functionalism.

Brutalism (from the French "beton brut", meaning raw concrete), a term coined by British
designers Alison and Peter Smithson to describe the geometric concrete structures, often erected
in areas of social decay, by Utopian architects such as Le Corbusier (1887-1965). The basic idea
behind Brutalist architecture was to encourage functional patterns of living, by eliminating all
ornament and other visual distractions.

Art deco (art moderne) – a style of design popular during the 1920s and 30s. It is characterized
by long, thin forms, curving surfaces, and geometric patterning. The practitioners of the style
attempted to describe the sleekness they thought expressive of the machine age. The style
influenced all aspects of art and architecture, as well as the decorative, graphic, and industrial
arts. Works executed in the art deco style range from skyscrapers and ocean liners to toasters and
jewelry.
Deconstructivism – involves the dismantling of architectural elements and the rearrangement of
their constituent parts; most designs in this style contradicts the physical laws and unbuildable.

Georgian architecture – the various styles in the architecture, interior design, and decorative
arts of Britain during the reigns of the first four members of the house of Hanover, between the
accession of George I in 1714 and the death of George IV in 1830. The new generation of
architects, theorists, and wealthy amateurs set out to reform architecture in accordance with the
classical tenets of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. The second important Georgian
architectural style is Neoclassicism.

Neoclassicism – an influential movement that began in 1760s. It arose partly as a reaction

against the sensuous and frivolously decorative Rococo style that had dominated European art
from the 1720s on. But an even more profound stimulus was the new and more scientific interest
in classical antiquity that arose in the 18th century.

International Style – rejection of historical styles and emphasizing establishing as the pure
utilitarian functionalism. International Style architects favored enclosed spatial volumes over
opaque enclosing materials, smooth industrial finishes (especially metals and glass), and open,
nonsymmetrical plans without any dominant axis.

Postmodern architecture – ranges from work that closely resembles the International Style,
with its elimination of traditional ornament, to work that is based on ancient or Renaissance
prototypes

Richardsonian Romanesque – a free and strongly personal interpretation of Romanesque

design by Henry Hobson Richardson – famous American architect.

Second Empire Style – also called Napoleon III, Second Empire Baroque, or Beaux-Arts Style.
It is an architectural style that was dominant internationally during the second half of the 19th
century. The style was solidified into a recognizable compositional and decorative scheme by the
extension designed for the Louvre in Paris.

Painting
Realities
Limners - are the early colonial portraitists, moved from town to town and supplemented their
income through carpentry, sign painting and other crafts. These traveling artists, who made their
own paints and other supplies, had little status or honor. Their names, with very few exceptions,
are unknown. They concerned more with the objects itself than its appearance.
Hudson River School – a large group of American landscape painters of several generations
who worked between 1825 – 1870.

The pre-Civil War American genre paintings - were concerned with portraying a way of life.
But after the war a moodiness appeared in some genre paintings.

Impressionism a movement in painting that originated in France in the late 19th century.
Impressionist painters found many of their subjects in life around them rather than in history,
which was then the accepted source of subject matter. The style of impressionist painting has
served characteristic features. To achieve the appearance of spontaneity, impressionist painters
used broken brushstrokes of bright colors. The colors have an overall luminosity because the
painters avoided blacks and earth colors.

The Ten – the group of American impressionist painters. The group was founded because the
members hoped to draw public attention to their group and thereby to their paintings.

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08
by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually
objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented
and abstracted.

Precisionism - smooth, precise technique used by several American painters in representational

canvases, executed primarily during the 1920s, depicting sharply defined forms.

Realism - the accurate, detailed depiction of nature or of contemporary life. It rejects

imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances.

Abstract Expressionism – was a broad movement in American painting that began in the late
1940s and became a dominant trend in Western painting during the 1950s. Abstract expressionist
paintings depict forms not drawn from the visible world. They emphasize free, spontaneous
emotional expression and they exercise considerable freedom of technique and execution to
attain this goal.

Pop art – is arts movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The images of pop art were taken from mass
culture. Some artists duplicated beer bottles, soup cans, comic strips, road signs and similar
objects in paintings, collages and sculptures. Other incorporated the objects themselves into their
paintings; used materials of modern technology.

Representational art – is art that portrays recognizable objects, continued alongside abstract
expressionism, primarily outside New York City

Minimal art (ABC art, systemic painting) - an art movement that developed in the late 1950s
and early 1960s in the United States. Minimalist paintings typically consist of geometric shapes
or other simple forms, often arranged in a series of modules. Minimalism was conceived largely
in opposition to abstract expressionism. The proponents of minimal art were interested in logical
systems and universal physical principles rather than individual sensations and their expression.
 Painters
Colonial Period
 John Singleton Copley
 Benjamin West

1783 – 1861
 Charles Wilson Peale
 John Trumbull
 Asher Brown Durand
 Thomas Cole
 John James Audubon

Civil War to the 20th Century

Portraiture
 Thomas Eakins
 John Singer Sargent
 Mary Cassatt
 James Abbott Whistler
Genre paintings
 Winslow Homer

Impressionism
 Childe Hassam,
 John Twachtman,
 T. Alden Weir,
 Thomas Dewing,
 Joseph De Camp,
 Frank Benson,
 Willard Leroy Metcaff,
 Edmund Tarbell,
 Robert Reid and E. Simmons

The 20th Century

 Robert Henry
 John Sloan
 Arthur Bowen Davies
 Maurice Prendergast
 George Benjamin Luks
 William James Glackens
 Edward Hopper
Modernism
Cubism
  Arthur Garfield Dove

Precisionism
 Charles Demut,
 Georgia O’Keeffe

Realism
 Grant Wood

Abstract Expressionism
 Jackson Pollock
 Willem de Kooning
 Mark Rothko
 Arshile Gorky
 Robert Motherwell
 Barnett Newman
 Jasper Johns
 Robert Rauschenberg

Pop art
 Andy Warhol
 Roy Lichtenstein
 James Rosenquist

Representational art
 Andrew Wyeth
 Richard Diebenkorn

The Late 20th Century: 1975 – 2000

 Michael Heiser

 Philip Guston
 Richard Estes
 American Sculpture
Realities
Abstract expressionism – movement of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during
the mid-1940s and attained singular prominence in American art in the following decade; also
called action painting and the New York school. It was the first important school in American
painting to declare its independence from European styles and to influence the development of
art abroad

Assemblage – work produced by the incorporation of everyday objects into the composition.
Although artworks composed from a variety of materials are common to many cultures,
assemblage refers to a particular form that developed out of intellectual and artistic movements
at the beginning of the 20th century. The practice began about 1911 -1912 with the Cubist
collages of Pablo Picasso and sculptural assemblages by Futurists

Conceptual art – an art form that developed in the mid-1960s, in which the concept takes
precedence over the actual objects. Conceptual art is based on an inquiry into the nature of art
itself. Many conceptual works were reduced to the documentation of an event or activity through
written instructions, photographs, or video footage

Earth art – the most exciting development in late-20th-century sculpture. Earth artists
incorporated nature into sculptures

Functional sculpture – an amalgamation of different kinds of art. The main idea of all works is
their functionalism – the idea that the most important thing about a sculpture, etc. that it is useful

Installation art – some late-century sculptors transformed interior spaces rather than the out-of-
doors. Sculptors used a variety of materials to create works that the viewer could walk by or
through

Minimal art – chiefly American movement in the visual arts and music originating in New York
City in the late 1960s and characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a literal, objective
approach. It had dominated American avant-garde art through much of the 1950s. The
minimalists, who believed that Action painting was too personal and insubstantial, adopted the
point of view that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself. For that reason they
attempted to rid their works of any extra-visual association.
Neoclassicism – was a widespread and influential movement in painting and the other visual arts
that began in the 1760s, reached its height in the 1780s and ‘90s, and lasted until the 1840s and
‘50s. Neoclassicism arose partly as a reaction against the sensuous and frivolously decorative
Rococo style that had dominated European art from the 1720s on. But an even more profound
stimulus was the new and more scientific interest in classical antiquity.

Pop art – a movement that first emerged in Great Britain at the end of the 1950s as a reaction to
the seriousness of abstract expressionism. British and American pop artists employed a common
imagery found in comic strips, soup cans, and Coke bottles to express formal abstract
relationships. By this means they provided a meeting ground where artist and layman could
come to terms with art. Incorporating techniques of sign painting and commercial art into their
work, as well as commercial literary imagery, pop artists such attempted to fuse elements of
popular and high culture to erase the boundaries between the two.

American Sculptors
William Rush, (born July 4, 1756, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania —died January 17, 1833,
Philadelphia), sculptor and wood-carver who is considered the first significant American
sculptor.
Rush trained with his father, a ship carpenter, to make ornamental ship carvings and figureheads.
During the American Revolution he served as an officer in Philadelphia’s militia and
campaigned with George Washington in the city’s defense. Shortly after the end of the war, he
set up a shop in Philadelphia, and the figureheads he made there were eagerly sought by the
American navy. In 1805, along with Charles Willson Peale and others, he helped found
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and he served for many years as a
member of the Philadelphia city council. Rush was instrumental in building the Pennsylvania
Academy’s collection of plaster casts, which proved influential in his own artistic development.
A number of his wood carvings are preserved in various Philadelphia institutions, among the
most interesting of which are the allegorical figures Comedy and Tragedy (1808), the Water
Nymph and Bittern (1809), a full-length statue of George Washington (1814), and his vigorous
self-portrait . Few, if any, of his ship carvings and figureheads survive.

Horatio Greenough, (born September 6, 1805, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died December 18,

1852, Somerville), Neoclassical sculptor and writer on art. He was the first known American
artist to pursue sculpture as an exclusive career and one of the first to receive a national
commission.
From an early age, Greenough was drawn to the plastic arts, and while still an adolescent he
received instruction from carvers, architects, and sculptors in Boston. Greenough was urged to
study art by his wealthy family and by the painter Washington Allston. After graduating
from Harvard University, he went to Italy for two years, starting in 1825. There he continued his
art studies with a regimen that included visits to museums and galleries and life-drawing lessons
at the French Academy at the Villa Medici. When he became ill he returned to the United States
and, after recuperating, traveled to the nation’s capital to seek portrait commissions. There he
met Robert Gilmor, Jr., a wealthy Baltimore merchant, who would become an important patron
for Greenough. Buoyed by his successes in Washington, D.C., the artist made a second trip to
Italy in 1828, and this time he remained there until a year before his death.

Thomas Crawford, (born March 22, 1814, New York, New York, U.S.—died October 10,
1857, London, England), Neoclassical sculptor best known for his colossal Statue of Freedom,
which was posthumously cast and hoisted atop the dome of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.,
amid great festivities in 1863.
Crawford studied drawing at the National Academy of Design and trained as a stonecutter
in New York City. A few years later, in 1835, he went to Rome, where he received some
instruction from the Danish Neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. He established a studio
there and remained in Rome for the rest of his life. He did, however, maintain ties to the United
States and even enjoyed success with a solo exhibition of his work at the Boston Atheneum in
1844. While abroad he was commissioned in 1854 to design a statue for the U.S. Capitol dome
and major components for the Senate building, including the 80-foot- (24.4-metre-) long
pediment sculpture Progress of Civilization and the pediment sculpture Justice and
History located above the Senate building’s bronze doors, which he also designed. Crawford had
completed his plaster model for the 19.5-foot- (5.9-metre-) tall Statue of Freedom sculpture
when he died suddenly at age 43. The model, which was shipped by boat in five pieces from
Rome to Washington, D.C., was finally cast in bronze in 1862, and, weighing 15,000 pounds
(6,800 kg), was installed in pieces atop the Capitol dome in 1863.
At the time of his death his reputation rivaled that of Hiram Powers and Horatio Greenough as a
leading American sculptor. The novelist F. Marion Crawford was his son.

Hiram Powers, (born June 29, 1805, Woodstock, Vermont, U.S.—died June 27, 1873, Florence,
Italy), American sculptor who worked in the Neoclassical style during the mid-1800s. He is best
remembered for his Greek Slave (1843), a white marble statue of a nude girl in chains.
Powers first studied with Frederick Eckstein about 1828. About 1829 he worked as a general
assistant and artist in a wax museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his ingenious representations of
scenes from Dante’s Inferno met with acclaim. At the end of 1834 Powers went to Washington,
D.C., where he modeled a portrait of Andrew Jackson (1835). The attention he received for this
work led to other portrait commissions from local residents, bringing Powers newfound financial
security. He traveled to Italy in 1835 and in 1837, after residing in Paris for a few months, settled
permanently in Florence, where he befriended the American sculptor Horatio Greenough, whom
he represented in an 1838 marble portrait bust.
Artist Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932), the son of Albany sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, has
enjoyed a revival of interest in the art world over the last several years. It’s now common to see
his paintings in art magazines and at major auctions across the country, bringing record prices
for his oils and watercolors. As an artist who preferred living and working in his home
community of Albany, rather than New York City, Palmer carried forward the creative genius
that emerged in the region generations earlier with the Hudson River School and his father’s own
sculpture. The Albany Institute holds one of the largest public collections of work by Walter
Launt Palmer, including oil and watercolor paintings, pastels, and drawings, as well as letters
and photographs. The exhibition, Walter Launt Palmer: Painting the Moment, presents for the
first time in more than a decade the broad range of Palmer’s work, offering a visual overview of
his life, travels, and artistic interests.

Walter Palmer, known as Wallie among friends and family, grew up in a household and
community well connected with the arts. The portrait painter Charles Loring Elliot gave the
young boy his first set of paints at age twelve, and a few years later the period’s most respected
landscape artist, Frederic Edwin Church, tutored the young man. Palmer began exhibiting his
work in the early 1870s, but it was his travels in Europe with his family in 1873 and 1874 that
exposed him to the great masters and to new trends in art. He met, for example, the younger
American painter John Singer Sargent, who was working in Italy, and remarked in a letter that
“his style is bold & vigorous.” Palmer adopted a similar style for some of his early paintings. In
1876, he returned to Europe again to continue studies with the Parisian painting master Charles-
Émile-Auguste Carolus-Duran.
After his return to Albany in 1877, Palmer began painting his first significant series: building
interiors. Palmer’s interiors are rich in detail and invite close inspection. He lavished attention on
the textiles, ceramics, furniture, and wall decorations that filled well-furnished parlors, libraries,
and hallways. He even painted the dining room at Appledale, the Palmer family home, where he
included one of his sisters seated in a rocking chair beside the fireplace.

Palmer traveled to Europe for a third time in 1881 specifically “to paint some of the fine
‘interiors’ that are entirely lacking in our own country,” as he noted in a letter to the Albany
Argus. There, he did find many fine interiors that became the subject of his canvases, but it was
during this stay in Europe that the city of Venice caught his attention. The pastel colors of
buildings, water, and the moisture-laden atmosphere captivated the artist. Throughout the 1880s
and 1890s Palmer painted numerous oils and watercolors of this Italian city, including the Piazza
San Marco, St. Marks Basilica, and the Grand Canal.

By the mid-1880s Palmer began working on yet a third series: winter scenes. His winter
paintings captivate viewers with their serenity and masterful tonal subtleties. Fir trees and barren
branches droop under the weight of freshly fallen snow and ice glistens on half-frozen streams in
a way that captures the immediacy of the moment. Palmer, in fact, has often been called the
“painter of the American winter.” Most of his winter scenes he painted from memory, and he
continued to paint these popular landscapes until his death in 1932.

The exhibition includes works from all three of Palmer’s major series, and also includes oils and
watercolors from other travels and other interests. A select number of works from private
collections enhance the exhibition and help broaden the artist’s creative life.

Sir Jacob Epstein, (born Nov. 10, 1880, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 21, 1959, London,
Eng.), one of the leading portrait sculptors of the 20th century, whose work, though seldom
innovative, was widely heralded for its perceptive depiction of the sitter’s character and its
modeling technique.
Epstein’s early ambition was to be a painter, and he spent his adolescence sketching the teeming
ghetto life of New York City, showing even then the obsession with human personality that
distinguishes much of his mature work. Faulty eyesight forced him to abandon painting
for sculpture, and, after studying for two years in Paris, he set up a sculpture studio in London in
1905. He soon began to make his way as a portrait sculptor, despite the public scandals caused
by the nudity of his so-called Strand Statues (1907–08; destroyed 1937) and the debauched-
looking angel on his memorial (1912) for the Irish writer Oscar Wilde.
In 1913 Epstein became a founding member of the London Group, a loose association of artists
and writers promoting modern art in England. Over the next two years, he developed a mildly
experimental style that yielded some of his most powerful works, characterized by their extreme
simplification of forms and calm surfaces. Most of these pieces were carved from stone, but the
strongest work of the period, The Rock Drill (1913), was modeled in plaster, and its robotlike
form reflects his short-lived interest in sleek, abstract design.

Gaston Lachaise, (born March 19, 1882, Paris, France—died Oct. 18, 1935, New York, N.Y.,
U.S.), French-born American sculptor known for his massively proportioned female nudes.
Lachaise was the son of a cabinetmaker. At age 13 he entered a craft school, where he was
trained in the decorative arts, and from 1898 to 1904 he studied sculpture at the École des
Beaux-Arts. He began his artistic career as a designer of Art Nouveau decorative objects for the
French jeweler René Lalique. Having fallen in love with an American woman, Lachaise
immigrated to the United States in 1906 and worked in Boston for H.H. Kitson, an academic
sculptor of military monuments. In 1912 Lachaise went to New York City and worked as an
assistant to the sculptor Paul Manship.
Lachaise’s most famous work, Standing Woman (1932), typifies the image that Lachaise worked
and reworked: a voluptuous female nude with sinuous, tapered limbs. Lachaise was also known
as a brilliant portraitist. He executed busts of famous artists and literary celebrities, such as John
Marin, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings. In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City held a retrospective exhibition of Lachaise’s work, the first at that institution for any
American sculptor.

Paul Manship, (born December 25, 1885, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.—died January 31,
1966, New York, New York), American sculptor whose subjects and modern generalized style
were largely inspired by classical sculpture. He is particularly well known for his large public
commissions.
Trained in the United States, Manship received a scholarship in 1909 to study at the American
Academy in Rome. He traveled extensively through Italy and Greece and discovered a deep
appreciation for archaicGreek statues and for Assyrian, Egyptian, and Minoan art. These ancient
sources would influence his work for the remainder of his career. After three years abroad he
settled in New York City and developed a style that rejected the Beaux Arts naturalism that was
then fashionable.
Manship’s arresting linear compositions—distinctive for their simplified modeling and
rhythmical patterns—made an immediate impact within the sculpture community in New York.
He exhibited widely and received numerous commissions for his early compositions, including
the popular Indian and Pronghorn Antelope (1914). Among his other large decorative works—
mostly in bronze—are Dancer and Gazelles (1916), of which there are versions in several
museums, and Prometheus (1934), a fountain sculpture at Rockefeller Center in New York. He
executed many portraits in marble; most striking are Pauline Frances—Three Weeks Old (1914)
and John D. Rockefeller (1918). Manship’s depictions of animals remain popular; particularly
famous is the Paul J. Rainey Memorial Gateway (1934) at the Bronx Zoo in New York.

Isamu Noguchi, (born November 17, 1904, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died December 30,
1988, New York, New York), American sculptor and designer, one of the strongest advocates of
the expressive power of organic abstract shapes in 20th-century American sculpture.
Noguchi spent his early years in Japan, and, after studying in New York City with Onorio
Ruotolo in 1923, he won a Guggenheim fellowship and became Constantin Brancusi’s assistant
for two years (1927–29) in Paris. There he met Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder and
became an enthusiast of abstract sculpture. He was also influenced by the Surrealist works
of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Noguchi’s first exhibition was in New York City in 1929.
Much of his work, such as his Bird C(MU) (1952–58), consists of elegantly abstracted, rounded
forms in highly polished stone. Such works as Euripides (1966) employ massive blocks of stone,
brutally gouged and hammered. To his terra-cotta and stone sculptures Noguchi brought some of
the spirit and mystery of early art, principally Japanese earthenware, which he studied under the
Japanese potter Uno Jinmatsu on his first trip to Japan made in 1930–31.
Noguchi, who had premedical training at Columbia University, sensed the interrelatedness of
bone and rock forms, the comparative anatomy of existence, as seen in his Kouros (1945). On
another trip to Japan, in 1949, Noguchi experienced a turning point in his aesthetic development:
he discovered “oneness with stone.” The importance to him of a closeness to nature was apparent
in his roofless studio.
Recognizing the appropriateness of sculptural shapes for architecture, he created a work in
low relief(1938) for the Associated Press Building in New York City and designed Chassis
Fountain for the FordPavilion at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. He also made many
important contributions toward the aesthetic reshaping of physical environment. His garden for
the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris
(completed 1958), his playground designs (all unrealized except the Noguchi Playscape,
Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, completed 1976), his furniture designs (e.g., the glass-topped table
designed for Herman Miller, 1944–45), and his fountain for the Philip A. Hart Civic Center
Plaza in Detroit (completed 1979), among many other large-scale projects, won international
praise. Noguchi also designed sculptural gardens for the John Hancock Insurance Company
Building in New Orleans (completed 1962), the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza in New York City
(completed 1964), and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (completed 1965) and stage sets for
dance productions by Martha Graham, Erick Hawkins, George Balanchine, and Merce
Cunningham. His career was celebrated with the first major retrospective of his work in 1968,
held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Sol LeWitt, (born September 9, 1928, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died April 8, 2007, New

York, New York), American artist whose work provides a link
between Minimalism and conceptual art.
LeWitt was the son of Russian immigrants. He attended Syracuse University (B.F.A., 1949) and,
following military service in Japan and Korea, moved in 1953 to New York City. There he
worked as a graphic designer for the architect I.M. Pei in 1955 and 1956. Following a brief
period of working in an Abstract Expressionist style in the 1950s, LeWitt in the early 1960s
began to pursue an essentialist approach to art that was less emotional yet still rich in
complexity. He started to work serially, concentrating on sculptures of various gridlike axial
arrangements of modular white aluminum, wood, or metal cubes.

Judy Chicago, original name Judith Sylvia Cohen, (born July 20, 1939, Chicago, Ill., U.S.),
American feminist artist whose complex and focused installations created some of the
visual context of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and beyond.
Reared in Chicago, Cohen attended the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A., 1962). Her
change of name in the 1960s served both as a gesture to her birthplace and eventually to indicate
her burgeoning interest in the cultural implications of patriarchal practices. In 1973 she helped
found Womanhouse, a feminist art gallery in Los Angeles. Her early professional exhibitions
included sculptures and abstract paintings, but it was an installation, The Dinner Party (1974–
79), that made her reputation. It became an instant touchstone for the growing feminist
movement in the United States.
A large mixed-media installation composed of ceramics, embroidery, weaving, and text, The
Dinner Partypresents a large triangular banquet table placed on 999 handmade tiles that name
significant women. The table displays elaborate, unique place settings for 39 notable women,
including Sacagawea, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Working collaboratively
with dozens of assistants and volunteers, Chicago intended to illustrate the often overlooked
breadth of women’s history and to privilege mediums, such as needlework and pottery, long
associated with women and undervalued in the art world.

American Theatre
Actors and actresses
Laura Keene, original name Mary Moss, (born c. 1826, London, Eng.—died Nov. 4,
1873, Montclair, N.J., U.S.), actress and the first notable female theatre manager in the United
States.
Mary Moss, as her name is believed to have been originally, grew up in obscurity. She turned to
the stage to support herself and made her London debut in The Lady of Lyons in October 1851
under the name Laura Keene. The next year she joined the theatrical company of Madame
Vestris, with whom she soon gained a wide reputation in comedies and extravaganzas. In 1852
Keene traveled to New York City to appear with James W. Wallack’s company. Her American
debut was a great success, but she soon left Wallack to appear under her own management at the
Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland (1853), and in 1854 in San Francisco. After an
unsuccessful Australian tour with Edwin Booth she returned to San Francisco, where she reigned
supreme in the theatre and tried her hand also at management and production with the staging of
a number of popular and tastefully conceived extravaganzas.

Louisa Lane Drew, née Louisa Lane, (born Jan. 10, 1820, London, Eng.—died Aug. 31, 1897,
Larchmont, N.Y., U.S.), noted American actress and manager of Mrs. John Drew’s Arch Street
Theatre company in Philadelphia, which was one of the finest in American theatre history.
During the early years of the resident company, Drew appeared with it regularly in the roles she
was best known for—Lady Teazle, Peg Woffington, Lydia Languish, and most memorably Mrs.
Malaprop. She also often played “breeches” roles—e.g., Romeo, Mark Antony, and other male
Shakespearean roles. No one was more knowledgeable than she about the traditional repertory
and stage business, and her exacting standards were legendary. In 1880 she played Mrs.
Malaprop in Joseph Jefferson’s touring production of The Rivals. In 1892 she gave up
management of her theatre and moved to New York. She made a few appearances after that,
including Jefferson’s all-star revival of The Rivals, with Julia Marlowe and others, in 1896, and
then settled in Larchmont, New York. Her Autobiographical Sketch of Mrs. John Drew was
published posthumously in 1899.

Edwin Booth, in full Edwin Thomas Booth, (born November 13, 1833, near Belair, Maryland,
U.S.—died June 7, 1893, New York, New York), renowned tragedian of the 19th-century
American stage, best remembered as one of the greatest performers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He
was a member of a famous acting family; his brother was John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of
President Abraham Lincoln.
At 13 years of age Edwin became companion and chaperon to his eccentric father, the
actor Junius Brutus Booth (born in London, 1796), who in 1821 had moved to the United States,
where he achieved popularity second only to that of the American actor Edwin Forrest.
Traveling with his father, whom he endeavoured to keep sane and sober, Edwin absorbed the
rudiments of acting in the bombastic style then fashionable. He made his stage debut at the
Boston Museum on September 10, 1849, in the part of Tressel to his father’s Richard III in
an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Two years later in New York City, when his father refused
to act one night, Edwin replaced him as Richard III, giving an imitative but creditable
performance.

Augustin Daly, in full John Augustin Daly, (born July 20, 1838, Plymouth, North Carolina, U.S.
—died June 7, 1899, Paris, France), American playwright and theatrical manager whose
companies were major features of the New York and London stage.
Although Daly’s childhood was spent in amateur performances of the Romantic blank-
verse drama of the period, it was as a writer of more realistic melodramas that he enjoyed his
greatest influence. Beginning in 1859, he was dramatic critic for several New York
newspapers. Leah the Forsaken, adapted from a German play in 1862, was Daly’s first success as
a playwright. His first important original play, Under the Gaslight (1867), was popular for years.
In 1869 he formed his own company, and he later developed such outstanding actresses as Fanny
Davenport and Maude Adams. Daly’s best play, Horizon(1871), drew heavily upon the western-
type characters of Bret Harte and gave important impetus to the development of a drama based
on American themes and characters rather than European models. Divorce (1871), another of his
better plays, ran for 200 performances. After opening Daly’s Theatre in New York City in 1879,
with a company headed by John Drew and Ada Rehan, he confined himself to adaptations and
management and in 1893 opened Daly’s Theatre in London.

Joseph Jefferson, (born February 20, 1829, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died April 23,

1905, Palm Beach, Florida), American actor who was best known for his portrayals of the
character Rip Van Winkle.
As the third actor of this name in a family of actors and managers, Jefferson completely eclipsed
his forebears. He made his stage debut at the age of three in August von Kotzebue’s Pizarro, and,
after years of struggle as a traveling actor and manager, Jefferson achieved his first important
success in Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin (1858), a play that was the turning point in his
career. Other plays acted by Jefferson in those years included Dion
Boucicault’s Octoroon (1859). His Bob Acres in The Rivals by Richard Sheridan, although very
successful, was more Jefferson’s creation than the author’s.
In 1859 Jefferson made a stage adaptation of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, which was
only moderately successful. While in England in 1865 he commissioned Boucicault to write
another version, and this, along with minor improvements incorporated over the years, was the
final one. As Rip, Jefferson delighted London audiences for 170 consecutive nights, and he
brought the play to America in 1866. After 1865 he created no new roles, as his public never
tired of the delightful and sensitive characterization of Rip. He did, however, revive earlier plays
in which he had appeared. Through the last third of the 19th century Jefferson remained at a peak
of popularity.
The friend of many leading figures in politics, art, and literature, Jefferson brought dignity to the
stage. He was awarded the lifetime honour of the presidency of the Players’ club,
succeeding Edwin Booth and preceding John Drew. His first wife was the actress Margaret
Clements Lockyer, and his second was Sarah Warren, niece of the actor William Warren.
Jefferson’s Autobiography (1890) is written with spirit and humour, and its judgments with
regard to the art of the actor and the playwright place it beside Colley Cibber’s Apology.

James A. Herne, original name James Ahern, (born February 1, 1839, Troy, New York, U.S.—
died June 2, 1901, New York City), American playwright who helped bridge the gap between
19th-century melodramaand the 20th-century drama of ideas.
After several years as a traveling actor, Herne scored an impressive success with his first
play, Hearts of Oak (1879), written with the young David Belasco. Subsequent dramas, Drifting
Apart (1885), The Minute Men (1886), and Margaret Fleming (1890), did not achieve the same
popularity. Margaret Fleming, a drama of marital infidelity, has been judged his major
achievement. Herne’s most popular play, Shore Acres, was first presented in 1892. Herne was
especially strong in character delineation.

James O’Neill, (born November 15, 1849, Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, Ireland—died August 10,

1920, New London, Connecticut, U.S.), Irish-born American actor, now chiefly remembered for
his most famous role, the Count of Monte Cristo, and as the father of playwright Eugene O’Neill.
James O’Neill made his stage debut as a supernumerary in a Cincinnati, Ohio, production of The
Colleen Bawn (1867). In 1871 he moved to Chicago, playing leading roles in McVicker’s
company and then in Hooley’s opposite many of the day’s great stars. He later performed with
stock companies in New York City and San Francisco, and he was considered one of the most
promising young actors of his time.
In 1879 he was selected to play Christ in a San Francisco production of The Passion Play by
Salmi Morse. The role, which caused local authorities to arrest him under ordinances forbidding
impersonation of the Deity, drew nationwide attention. In 1882 O’Neill opened as Edmond
Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristoin a stage version by Charles Fechter. His opening-night
performance was ill-received by the press, but public enthusiasm was immediate, and the role
eventually earned for O’Neill nearly $1,000,000 for more than 6,000 performances throughout
the United States over a 30-year period. Dantes was not O’Neill’s sole success, however; he was
well received in a variety of Shakespearean roles, including that of Hamlet. He played Othello
to Edwin Booth’s Iago and MacDuff to Booth’s Macbeth. O’Neill also excelled as Pierre
Frochard in The Two Orphans, D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, and Jean Renard in A
Celebrated Case. In his later career O’Neill attempted other roles, both modern and classical, but
his public preferred to see him in The Count of Monte Cristo. An acerbic portrait of O’Neill in
decline is presented in his son’s semiautobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night in the
character of James Tyrone.

Richard Mansfield, (born May 24, 1854 or 1857, Berlin, Prussia [Germany]—died August 30,

1907, New London, Connecticut, U.S.), one of the last of the great Romantic actors in the United
States.
Mansfield was born while his mother was on a concert tour, and until 1872, when they arrived
for the first time in New York City, she continued tours of England and the Continent. In the
United States young Mansfield turned alternately to singing, painting, and acting. Dissatisfied
with his lack of accomplishment, he returned to England in 1877 and during the next six years
achieved moderate success as a singer of light opera, principally of Gilbert and Sullivan, in the
provinces. In the United States again, in 1882, he turned to the spoken drama and attracted
considerable attention. Through the next 20 years he continued to build his reputation as an
exciting, though frequently unpredictable, star. His chief roles were Jekyll and Hyde
(1887), Richard III (1889), Beau Brummell (1890), Shylock (1893), and Cyrano (1898). In 1894
Mansfield produced Arms and the Man in New York, the first production of a play by George
Bernard Shaw in America. In 1906 his production of Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt was a
success in its Chicago opening, but, after moving it to New York City, Mansfield collapsed,
physically exhausted.

Steele MacKaye, (born June 6, 1842, Buffalo—died February 25, 1894, Timpas, Colo., U.S.),
U.S. playwright, actor, theatre manager, and inventor who has been called the closest
approximation to a Renaissance man produced by the United States in the 19th century.
In his youth he studied painting with Hunt, Inness, and Troyon. A pupil of Delsarte and Régnier,
he was the first American to act Hamlet in London (1873). At Harvard, Cornell, and elsewhere
he lectured on the philosophy of aesthetics. In New York City he founded the St. James,
Madison Square, and Lyceum theatres.

David Belasco, (born July 25, 1853, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.—died May 14, 1931, New York,
N.Y.), American theatrical producer and playwright whose important innovations in the
techniques and standards of staging and design were in contrast to the quality of the plays he
produced.
As a child actor, Belasco appeared with Charles Kean in Richard III and later played in stock
companies touring the mining camps. During this period he served also as secretary to the
playwright Dion Boucicault. From 1873 to 1879 he worked in several San Francisco theatres as
actor, manager, and playadapter and in the latter year toured in Hearts of Oak, which he cowrote
with James A. Herne.
Belasco moved to New York City in 1880, becoming associated there with the Frohmans as
manager of the Madison Square Theatre and later of the Lyceum. In 1890 he leased a theatre and
became an independent producer. Feeling the pressure of the monopolistic Theatrical Syndicate,
he built his own theatre in 1906.
Belasco was the first American producer whose name, regardless of star actor or play, attracted
patrons to the theatre. He chose unknown actors and elevated them to stardom. He also preferred
playwrights whose success depended upon his collaboration. He gained a reputation for minute
attention to detail, sensational realism, lavish settings, astonishing mechanical effects, and
experiments in lighting. He maintained a large permanent staff that worked constantly to perfect
surprising effects. This work led to the virtual elimination of footlights and to the first lensed
spotlights.

Robert Edmond Jones, (born Dec. 12, 1887, Milton, N.H., U.S.—died Nov. 26, 1954, Milton),
U.S. theatrical and motion-picture designer whose imaginative simplification of sets initiated the
20th-century American revolution against realism in stage design.
Graduating from Harvard University (1910), Jones began designing scenery for
the theatre in New York City in 1911. His settings for The Man Who Married a Dumb
Wife (1915), a version by the French satirist Anatole France of an old French folk drama,
employed an austere, gray-and-black, poster-like street facade and brilliant costumes. Jones
achieved unencumbered, fluid stage arrangements in which it was possible (as it had been on the
Shakespearean stage) to change scenes with a minimal shifting of props and backgrounds.
Associated with Kenneth Macgowan as a director of the Greenwich Village Playhouse after
1925, Jones published, with Macgowan, Continental Stagecraft (1922) and by himself, The
Dramatic Imagination (1941). He designed sets for play by Eugene O’Neill from 1921 through
1946. He began designing sets for colour motion pictures in 1933.

Helen Hayes, original name Helen Hayes Brown, (born Oct. 10, 1900, Washington, D.C., U.S.—
died March 17, 1993, Nyack, New York), American actress who was widely considered to be the
“First Lady of the American Theatre.” Except for occasional appearances in such films as My
Son John (1952) and Anastasia (1956), Hayes remained essentially a stage performer until 1971,
when her chronic asthmatic bronchitis triggered an allergic reaction to stage dust. The previous
year, she had won a second Academy Award for her portrayal of an elderly stowaway in the
movie Airport (1970), which precipitated a succession of similarly eccentricmovie roles. Active
until the mid-1980s, she divided her time between film and television work, and in 1973 she
costarred with Mildred Natwick in the weekly TV series The Snoop Sisters. She ended
her actingcareer as Agatha Christie’s elderly sleuth Miss Marple in three well-received television
movies during the early 1980s. Hayes published four autobiographies: A Gift of Joy (1965), On
Reflection (1968), Twice Over Lightly (1972, with Anita Loos), and My Life in Three
Acts (1991). Her daughter Mary MacArthur also pursued a stage career before her death from
polio in 1949, and her son James MacArthur was a successful film and TV actor, known mostly
for his role on the television series Hawaii Five-O. Showered with awards and citations for her
acting and humanitarian activities, Hayes received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986
and held the distinction of having two Broadway theatres named in her honour.
.
Katharine Cornell, (born Feb. 16, 1893, Berlin, Ger.—died June 9, 1974, Vineyard
Haven, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., U.S.), one of the most celebrated American stage actresses
from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Celebrated for their excellence, her later productions included Thornton
Wilder’s Lucrece (1932), Sidney Howard’s Alien Corn (1933), William Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet (1934), Maxwell Anderson’s The Wingless Victory (1936), and Anton Chekhov’s The
Three Sisters (1942). During World War II she entertained troops in Europe with The Barretts of
Wimpole Street and in 1943 appeared in a movie, Stage Door Canteen. She returned to
Broadway in 1946 with Antigone and a revival of Candida and followed with such others as
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1947), Maugham’s The Constant Wife (1951), and Jerome
Kilty’s Dear Liar (1960). She also appeared on television in productions of The Barretts of
Wimpole Street (1956) and There Shall Be No Night (1957).
During her 30 years of stardom Cornell was often called the first lady of the American theatre.
Following the death of her husband in 1961 she retired from the stage. Her autobiography, I
Wanted To Be an Actress, was published in 1939.

Theatres
Black theatre, in the United States, dramatic movement encompassing plays written by, for, and
about African Americans.
The minstrel shows of the early 19th century are believed by some to be the roots of black
theatre, but they initially were written by whites, acted by whites in blackface, and performed for
white audiences. After the American Civil War, blacks began to perform in minstrel shows (then
called “Ethiopian minstrelsy”), and by the turn of the 20th century they were producing black
musicals, many of which were written, produced, and acted entirely by blacks. The first known
play by an American black was James Brown’s King Shotaway (1823). William Wells
Brown’s The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), was the first black play published, but the
first real success of a black dramatist was Angelina W. Grimké’s Rachel (1916).
Black theatre flourished during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. Experimental
groups and black theatre companies emerged in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
Among these was the Ethiopian Art Theatre, which established Paul Robeson as America’s
foremost black actor. Garland Anderson’s play Appearances (1925) was the first play of black
authorship to be produced on Broadway, but black theatre did not create a Broadway hit
until Langston Hughes’s Mulatto (1935) won wide acclaim. In that same year the Federal
Theatre Project was founded, providing a training ground for blacks. In the late 1930s,
black community theatres began to appear, revealing talents such as those of Ossie
Davis and Ruby Dee. By 1940 black theatre was firmly grounded in the American Negro Theater
and the Negro Playwrights’ Company.
After World War II black theatre grew more progressive, more radical, and more militant,
reflecting the ideals of black revolution and seeking to establish a mythology and symbolism
apart from white culture. Councils were organized to abolish the use of racial stereotypes in
theatre and to integrate black playwrights into the mainstream of American dramaturgy. Lorraine
Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and other successful black plays of the 1950s portrayed
the difficulty of blacks maintaining an identity in a society that degraded them.
The 1960s saw the emergence of a new black theatre, angrier and more defiant than its
predecessors, with Amiri Baraka (originally LeRoi Jones) as its strongest proponent. Baraka’s
plays, including the award-winning Dutchman (1964), depicted whites’ exploitation of blacks.
He established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem in 1965 and inspired playwright Ed
Bullins and others seeking to create a strong “black aesthetic” in American theatre. During the
1980s and ’90s August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and George Wolfe were among the most
important creators of black theatre.

Off-Broadway, in the theatre of the United States, small professional productions that have
served since the mid-20th century as New York City’s alternative to the commercially oriented
theatres of Broadway.
Off-Broadway plays, usually produced on low budgets in small theatres, have tended to be freer
in style and more imaginative than those on Broadway, where high production costs often oblige
producers to rely on commercially safe attractions to the neglect of the more serious or
experimental drama. The lower costs are permitted in part by more lenient union regulations
governing minimum wages and number of personnel. The designations Broadway and Off-
Broadway refer not so much to the location of the theatre as to its size and the scale of
production; most Broadway theatres are not located on Broadway itself but on the side
streets adjacent to it. Some Off-Broadway theatres also are within the Broadway theatre district,
although most are remote from midtown Manhattan. Off-Broadway theatres enjoyed a surge of
growth in quality and importance after 1952, with the success of the director José Quintero’s
productions at the Circle in the Square theatre in Greenwich Village. In two decades of
remarkable vitality, Off-Broadway introduced many important theatrical talents, such as the
director Joseph Papp, whose later productions included free performances of Shakespeare
in Central Park and who formed the Public Theatre, a multitheatre complex dedicated to
experimental works. The works of such prizewinning American playwrights as Edward
Albee, Charles Gordone, Paul Zindel, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and John Guare were first
produced off Broadway, along with the unconventional works of European avant-garde
dramatists such as Eugène Ionesco, Ugo Betti, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Harold
Pinter and revivals of Bertolt Brecht and Eugene O’Neill. The small theatres also trained many
noted performers and experts in lighting, costume, and set design.
Like Broadway, Off-Broadway theatres began to suffer from soaring costs; this stimulated the
emergence in the early 1960s of still less expensive and more daring productions, quickly labeled
Off-Off-Broadway. The most successful of these have included such groups as The Negro
Ensemble Company, La Mama Experimental Theatre Company, the Open Theatre, Manhattan
Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Roundabout.

Little theatre, movement in U.S. theatre to free dramatic forms and methods of production from
the limitations of the large commercial theatres by establishing small experimental centres
of drama.
The movement was initiated at the beginning of the 20th century by young dramatists, stage
designers, and actors who were influenced by the vital European theatre of the late 19th century;
they were especially impressed by the revolutionary theories of the German director Max
Reinhardt, the designing concepts of Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig, and the staging
experiments at such theatres as the Théâtre-Libre of Paris, the Freie Bühne in Berlin, and
the Moscow Art Theatre. Community playhouses such as the Toy Theatre in Boston (1912), the
Little Theatre in Chicago (1912), and the Little Theatre, New York City (1912) were centres of
the experimental activity. Some groups owned or leased their own theatres; a few, such as the
Washington Square Players (1915), the predecessor of the Theatre Guild (1918), became
important commercial producers. By encouraging freedom of expression, staging the works of
talented young writers, and choosing plays solely on the basis of artistic merit, the little theatres
provided a valuable early opportunity for such playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, George S.
Kaufman, Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, and Robert E. Sherwood.
Comparable theatres were also established in Canada around the same time. The Arts and Letters
Club (1908), the Hart House Theatre at the University of Toronto (1919), and the Play Workshop
(1934) are all notable examples. As in the United States, many of the playwrights who got their
start in these theatres—including Herman Voaden, Merrill Denison, and W.A. Tremayne—went
on to anchor early professional theatres.

American Negro Theatre (ANT), African American theatre company that was active in

the Harlemdistrict of New York City from 1940 to 1951. It provided professional training and
critical exposure to African American actors, actresses, and playwrights by creating and
producing plays concerning diverseaspects of African American life.
The American Negro Theatre (ANT) was established by two African Americans, the playwright
Abram Hill and the actor Frederick O’Neal. Initially, the ANT held its performances in the
basements of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and the 135th Street library. In 1945, however, it
moved to a larger space at an Elks lodge on West 126th Street, which was renamed the American
Negro Theatre Playhouse.

Soon after its founding, the ANT won attention and praise for its first major production, a
staging of Hill’s On Striver’s Row. Between 1940 and 1949 the ANT produced a total of 19
plays, 12 of which were based on original scripts.
The company’s 1944 production of Anna Lucasta, by the white American playwright Philip
Yordan, was a hit and was transferred to Broadway, where it had a successful run. That
unexpected breakthrough had mixed results for the ANT, however. Some members were
unhappy with the amount of royalties the company received from the Broadway production, and
actors who had not been chosen to stay with the show on Broadway were bitter. Furthermore, the
pressure to repeat the success of Anna Lucasta led the company to concentrate on plays by
established white playwrights instead of showcasing the work of African American writers.
Three additional shows originally produced at the ANT went to Broadway, but none was a hit or
even a commercial success. Although the ANT had more success with a weekly radio series it
also produced, dissension among the group’s members and the erosion of community support led
to the company’s decline, and it ceased operation in 1951.
Well-known actors and actresses who worked with the ANT, in some cases starting their
theatrical careers there, included Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Alvin
Childress, Alice Childress, Hilda Haynes, Earl Hyman, and Clarice Taylor.

Yale Repertory Theatre at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut was founded by Robert B
rustein, dean of theYale School of Drama in 1966, with the goal of facilitating a meaningful coll
aboration between theatre professionalsand talented students. In the process it has become one of 
the first distinguished regional theatres.
As head of "the Rep" from 1966 to 1979, Brustein brought professional actors to Yale each year 
to form a repertorycompany, and nurtured notable new authors including August Wilson and Ath
ol Fugard. The more successful workswere regularly transferred to commercial theaters.
The dean of the Yale School of Drama is the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, with 
Lloyd Richardsserving in this capacity 1979-1991, Stan Wojewodski, Jr., 1991-2002, and James 
Bundy since 2002.
Of the ninety world premieres the Rep has produced, four have won Pulitzer Prizes; ten producti
ons have receivedTony Awards after being transferred to Broadway, and the Yale Repertory The
atre was given a Tony for OutstandingRegional Theatre in 1991.
In 2002, the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre received the Governor's Arts Aw
ard from GovernorJohn Rowland for artistic achievement and contribution to the arts in the state 
of Connecticut.

Theatre Guild, a theatrical society founded in New York City in 1918 for the production of high-
quality, noncommercial American and foreign plays. The guild, founded by Lawrence Langner
(1890–1962), departed from the usual theatre practice in that its board of directors shared the
responsibility for choice of plays, management, and production. The first two seasons, which
included plays by Jacinto Benavente, St. John Ervine, John Masefield, and August Strindberg,
demonstrated the artistic soundness of the plan.
Following the world premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House in 1920, the guild
became Shaw’s American agent, producing 15 of his plays, including world premieres of Back
to Methuselah and Saint Joan. Eugene O’Neill’s long association with the guild began with its
production of Marco Millions in 1928. Other American authors whose works were produced by
the guild included Sidney Howard, William Saroyan, Maxwell Anderson, and Robert Sherwood
—all Pulitzer Prize winners.
Many distinguished actors appeared in Theatre Guild productions, including Helen
Hayes in Caesar and Cleopatra and Alla Nazimova in Mourning Becomes Electra. Lynn
Fontanne and Alfred Lunt first acted as a team there in Ferenc Molnár’s Guardsman and went on
to act together in many other notable guild productions, such as Arms and the Man and The
Taming of the Shrew.
The Theatre Guild contributed significantly to American musical theatre by producing George
Gershwinand DuBose Heyward’s Porgy and Bess and by bringing Richard Rodgers and Oscar
Hammerstein IItogether for such collaborations as Oklahoma!
The “Theatre Guild of the Air” (1945–63) had a distinguished record of radio and television play
productions, and the guild’s subscription series enabled audiences in 23 cities from coast to coast
to see its major attractions and those of other managers.

Repertory theatre, system of play production in which a resident acting company keeps a

repertory of plays that are always ready for performance, often presenting a different one each
night of the week, supplemented by the preparation and rehearsal of new plays. Repertory in its
true form has existed in state-supported theatres in France, Germany, and elsewhere; but, as it is
rather expensive and difficult to maintain, most modern repertory companies use a modification
of the system, usually presenting fewer and longer-running plays, alternately or successively, in
one season. Repertory theatre has proved effective in supporting both commercially successful
and experimental drama. It has served as a showcase for the early work of playwrights such
as Eugene O’Neill and John Millington Synge and as a training ground for young actors. It is a
popular format for summer festivals as well as national theatres.
In Great Britain the name repertory theatre came to designate an important movement, begun in
the early 1900s, to make quality theatre available throughout the country. Repertory companies
were established in such cities as Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool, producing new plays
every week or two (called “weekly rep”). Although they maintained permanent companies, these
were not at first true repertory theatres because they presented a series of short, continuous runs
rather than keeping a ready repertory of plays. They began receiving government aid in 1946 and
by the 1960s had developed “true rep” much like the state-supported theatre of other European
countries. Major English companies using the repertory system include the Royal Shakespeare
Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and London and the National Theatre Company. Attempts to
establish repertory theatres in the United States have met with less success.

American Ballet Theatre, formerly (1939–57) Ballet Theatre, ballet company based in New York

City and having an affiliated school. It was founded in 1939 by Lucia Chase and Richard
Pleasant and presented its first performance on January 11, 1940. Chase was director,
with Oliver Smith, from 1945 to 1980. The dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was artistic director
from 1980 to 1989. Smith and Jane Hermann held the post from 1990 to 1992, when Kevin
McKenzie became artistic director.
Works were created for the company by such choreographers as Antony Tudor, Agnes de
Mille, Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, Eliot Feld, Twyla Tharp, Glen Tetley, and Mikhail
Baryshnikov; Michel Fokinerevived many of his masterpieces for the company and
created Bluebeard (1941) and Russian Soldier(1942). Such dancers as Alicia Alonso,
Baryshnikov, Erik Bruhn, Misty Copeland, Anton Dolin, André Eglevsky, Cynthia
Gregory, Rosella Hightower, Nora Kaye, John Kriza, Hugh Laing, Natalia Makarova, Alicia
Markova, Ivan Nagy, Janet Reed, Violette Verdy, and Igor Youskevitch were members of the
company.
Best plays of all time
1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
2. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
3. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
4. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
5. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
6. Angels in America by Tony Kushner
7. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
8. Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
9. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
10. The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco
11. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

Film
Hollywood is a “world of American dream”, which is situated in Los Angeles (California). It is
considered to be a centre of American film art, that is why there are a lot of film-studios there.

Dream Works was born in October of 1994, the brainchild of a creative trio of industry giants:
director Steven Spielberg*, former Disney wunderkind Jeffrey Katzenberg, and record industry
wiz David Geffen. The first movie issued by the young studio, “The Peacemaker” (Nicole
Kidman*) was not a big hit. But they quickly followed up with “Mouse Hunt”, “Amistad”
(Morgan Freeman*), “Small Soldiers”, “Paulie” and “Deep Impact” (Morgan Freeman*).
But they didn’t have their first blockbuster hit until they released “Saving Private Ryan” (Tom
Hanks*) in 1998, critically acclaimed as the most realistic war movie ever made.
Subsequent films have included the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1999, “American Beauty”
(Kevin Spacey), “Forces of Nature” (Sandra Bullock*), “What Lies Beneath” (Harrison Ford*),
“Gladiator” (Russell Crowe*).
Meanwhile, their animation department turned out their first major animated film, “Prince of
Egypt”. But the animation department really hit it big in 2001, when they released the
spectacularly popular “Shrek”.
On TV, Dream Works has turned out such weekly shows as “Spin City”, “Freaks and Geeks”.
The company also runs Dream Works Records and Dream Works Games. Yet they still don’t
have an actual studio.

Walt Disney Studios is home of the greatest fantasy and animated films ever made. Starting
with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937 (the first full length animated movie), the list
of Disney hits reads like a “Who’s Who” of classic animated films: “Pinocchio” (1940),
“Dumbo” (1941), “Cinderella” (1950), “Alice in Wonderland” (1951), “Sleeping Beauty”
(1959), “101 Dalmatians” (1961), “Jungle Book” (1967).
And that’s in addition to Disney’s live action adventures (“Treasure Island”, “Swiss Family
Robinson”), his live action comedies (“The Love Bug”, “The Absent-Minded Professor”), and
such TV hits as “Davy Crockett”, “Zorro” and “The Mickey Mouse Club”.
Walt Disney still holds the Guinness World Record for the most Academy Awards won by any
individual-walking away with 31 Oscars. And Disney was the first major movie studio to make
programs directly for television.
The studio went through some lean times following Walt’s death in 1966, but in recent years,
Disney animation has undergone a glorious renaissance. The studio’s most recent releases
include “Signs”, “Pearl Harbor”, “The Princess Diaries”, “Spy Kids”, “The Talented Mr.
Ripley”, “Shakespeare in Love”, “Enemy of the State”, “Armageddon”, “Beloved”, “Evita”,
“Phenomenon”, “The English Patient” and others.
Disney had the largest market share of any studio in 1998, its movies grossing $ 1.11 billion.
Also the studio is currently the second largest provider of prime time TV programming, behind
only Warner Bros. In 1995, the Walt Disney Company bought out ABC, the television network
which first televised “The Wonderful World of Disney”.

XX Century Fox. Founded in 1913 by William Fox, the studio had begun producing the famous
Movietone Newsreels even before they moved to their current location.
In 1935 Fox merged with Twentieth Century Pictures and the company became 20th Century
Fox.
In the years since, 20th Century Fox Studios has produced such memorable films as: “Rebecca”
(1940), “State Fair” (1945), “Cleopatra” (1963), “Hello Dolly” (1969), “Romancing the Stone”
(1984), “Cocoon” (1985), “Die Hard” (1988) and “Home Alone” (1990).
Prior to release of “Titanic”, the studio’s biggest hit was 1977’s “Star Wars”, which still ranks as
the fourth highest renting movie of all time.
In fact, 20th Century Fox has always had good luck with movie sequels: “Planet of the Apes”,
“The Omen”, “Alien”.
The names of the actors and actresses who have worked on the Fox lot are equally impressive:
Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monro*, Gene Hackman, Bruce Willis*, Barbara Streisand* and others.
20th Century Fox’s epic “All About Eve” was nominated for more Academy Awards (14) than
any other motion picture in the history of Hollywood. “Cleopatra” was the most expensive film
ever made at its time.
Recent releases from Fox included “Unfaithful”, “X-Men”, “The X Files”, “Independence Day”,
“Home Alone 3”, “French Kiss”, “True Lies”, “Nell”, adding star names to the Fox roster such
as Tom Cruise*, Sandra Bullock*, Arnold Schwarzenegger*, Eddie Murphy*, Keanu Reeves*,
Tom Hanks*, Robin Williams.

Warner Brothers, one of Hollywood’s most famous studios, was founded in 1923 by four
actual brothers: Jack, Sam, Harry and Albert Warner.
Warner Bros Studios managed to produce some of the most memorable movies in the history of
Hollywood: “The Jazz Singer” (1927), “Casablanca” (1942), “Deliverance” (1972), “Body Heat”
(1981), “Batman”.
The early stars at Warner Bros included Ingrid Bergman*, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Henry
Fonda.
Where M-G-M went in for bright, colorful musicals, Warner Bros preferred black and white
realistic dramas. Only in late 1950’s Warner Bros finally favored full color.
In later years, Warner Bros brought us Marlon Brando* in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, Paul
Newman * in “Hud” (1963), Clint Eastwood in “Dirty Harry”, Dustin Hoffman* in “All the
President’s Men”.
In 2001, the studio broke all records with the opening of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”,
based on the popular book about a boy wizard. With a $ 967 million take, it turned out to be the
second highest-grossing movie of all time, behind only “Titanic”.
Other recent Warner Bros releases included “Lord of the Rings”, “Blade II”, The Time
Machine”, “The Perfect Storm”, “The Matrix”, “The Green Mile”, “Interview with the
Vampire”, “City of Angels”, “Devil’s Advocate”, “Heat”, “The Client”, “The Pelican Brief” and
“Unforgiven” – adding big names such as Mel Gibson*, Robert De Niro*, Kim Besinger*,
Nicolas Cage*, Al Pacino*, Sylvester Stallone*, Demi Moore*, Kevin Costner, Julia Roberts*.
Warner Bros is one of the major motion picture studios that offers a guided tour of their studios,
including their venerable back lot.

Sony Pictures Studio (Columbia / Tristar Pictures). In 1990 the grand old M-G-M studio in
Culver City, was finally purchased by Sony Entertainment of Japan. The historic studio is now
home to both Columbia Pictures and Tristar Pictures, which are both divisions of Sony.
2002 was a great year for Sony, producing two giant box office hits: “Spider Man” and “Men in
Black II”. Their hits in the past few years have included: “Cruel Intentions”, “Godzilla”, “The
Mask of Zorro”, “Analyze This”, “Urban Legend”, “First Knight”, “Legends of the Fall”, “In the
Line of Fire”.
In 1997, Sony Pictures had another spectacularly successful year, smashing the all time domestic
gross record of $ 1.202 billion in a single year: “Men in Black”, “My Best Friend’s Wedding”,
“Anaconda”, “I Know What You Did Last Summer”.
In the last few years, Sony’s films have featured stars such as Tom Cruise*, Julia Roberts*, Jack
Nickolson, Harrison Ford*, Demi Moore*, Brad Pitt*, John Travolta*, Antony Hopkins*, Sharon
Stone*.
Sony Pictures Studios has just recently added a two-hour guided walking tour of the studio.

Paramount Studios. Most of the major motion picture studios have fled Hollywood for sports
like Burbank or Culver City. There is only one big name movie studio still actually located in
Hollywood: the huge Paramount Studios. It also happens to be the longest continually operating
studio in Hollywood. Paramount Studios began in 1913.
The list of landmark motion pictures filmed by Paramount Pictures itself reads like a virtual
history of Hollywood, beginning with classic silent films such as “The Sheik” (1921), and
including the first movie to ever win an Academy Award for Best Picture, 1927’s “Wings”.
Alfred Hitchcock shot some of his best films for Paramount: “Psycho” (1960), “Rear Window”
(1954) and “Vertigo” (1958).
In later years, Paramount had major hits with “Heaven Can Wait” (1978), “Reds” (1981), “Fatal
Attraction” (1987), “Coming to America” and “The Accused” (1988). The studio has also had
good luck with sequels: “Star Trek”, “Indiana Jones”, “Beverly Hills Cop”, “Naked Gun”, “48
Hours”, “Charmed”.
Recent releases include: “Tomb Raider”, “Vanilla Sky”, “We Were Soldiers”, “The Talented Mr.
Ripley”, “Snake Eyes”, “Titanic” (co-produced with Fox), “Forest Gump”, “Braveheart”,
“Ghost”.
Paramount is a huge, sprawling studio, covering an area almost as big as Disneyland. At peak
season, the studio employees over 5.000 people.
Seen from the outside, the studio has one notable landmark: wrought iron entry gate. It’s almost
as famous as Paramount’s well known logo (of a snow capped mountain with a halo of stars).

Metro Goldwyn Mayer. The studios were born in 1915 as Triangle Pictures. The studio became
Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1924. M-G-M was the most powerful studio in Hollywood, renown for
the glossy bright, Technicolor style of its films, complete with lavish wardrobes, high priced
sets, and an unbeatable stable of superstars: Clark Gable*, Frank Sinatra, Greta Garbo*, Jimmy
Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, Paul Newman*, Katharine Hepburn*.
In 1939 alone, M-G-M gave us two of the most beloved films in the history of Hollywood:
“Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz”. According to the Guinness Book of Records,
“Gone with the Wind” is still the highest-grossing box office success in the history of movies.
In other years, M-G-M gave such classics as “The Philadelphia Story” (1940), “Father of the
Bride” (1950), “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).
Where did the studio get its name? “Metro” was an early film company which belonged to
showman Marcus Loew; “Goldwyn” came from producer Samuel Goldwyn; and “Mayer” was
none other than producer Louis B. Mayer.
M-G-M is not M-G-M any more. The company was bought out by corporate raider Kirk
Kerkorian, who auctioned off the studio’s prized possessions. Finally, in 1990 the grand old
studio was purchased by Sony Entertainment of Japan.

Sunset – Gower Studios (formerly Columbia Pictures Studios).

Built in 1921, this large Hollywood movie studio was originally the historic Columbia Pictures
Studios.
Columbia Pictures was founded in 1920 by Harry and Jack Cohn. Its gems included “Born
Yesterday” (1950), “From Here to Eternity” (1953), “Picnic” (1955), “Fail Safe” (1964) and
others.
Unlike M-G-M, which was a star’s studio, Columbia borrowed most of its stars from other
studios. When M-G-M wanted to punish their actors, they used to loan their stars to Columbia.
In 1972, Columbia left its Hollywood studios at Sunset and Gower. In their new Burbank
location, Columbia made “Taxi Driver” (1976), “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), “The China
Syndrome” (1979), “The Blue Lagoon” (1980), “Tootsie” (1982).
Eventually, Columbia was bought by Sony Entertainment of Japan.
The activity of all these film studios is appreciated by American film awards, which are famous
all over the world: Academy Awards (Oscar) and Golden Globe.
Academy Awards – any of the Oscar film awards represented every March in Los Angeles by
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Awards were first presented in 1929 by
Douglas Fairbances. Winners receive small statue and the most important ones are for Best Actor
(Actress) and Best Picture. Walt Disney has won the most Oscars (32) and the films winning the
most (11) have been “Ben-Hun” in 1959 and “Titanic” in 1998.
Golden Globe – the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awards the Golden Globe to honor
achievements in film and television during a year. For motion pictures awards in the following
categories: Picture (Drama, Musical, Comedy), Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor or Actress,
Director, Screenplay, Original Score, Original Song, Foreign Film.

Movies, genres, actors, directors.

Silent (mute) films: films with no sound, especially a black-and-white film made before 1927
and starring people such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Rudolph Valentino. People’s
movements in them appear sudden and not at all smooth. A few words appeared on the screen to
help people follow the story and a piano was usually played in the cinema when they were
shown.
Charlie Chaplin (1889 – 1977) – the first screen comedian, director, writer, composer. His films:
“The Little Tramp” (1915), “The Immigrant” (1917), “Easy Street” (1917), “A Woman of Paris”
(1923), “The Gold Rush” (1925), “The Great Dictator” (1940), “Limelight” (1952), “A King in
New York” (1957), “The Countess from Hong Kong” (1967).
Valentino Rudolph (1895 – 1926) – “Four Horsemen in the Apocalypse” (1921), “The Sheikh”
(1921), “Blood and Sand” (1922).
The Marx Brothers, Chico (1891 – 1961), Harpo (1893 – 1964), Croucho (1895 – 1977) –
comedians, famous for their absurd verbal and visual humour: “Monkey Business” (1931),
“Duck Soup” (1933), “A Night at the Opera” (1935), “Go West” (1940).

Sound (talky) films:

Action Films: There are no action films without violence, and in which no one dies, and this
distinguishes action films from highly physical comedies and “caper” films. Action films are
also distinct from other films with an emphasis on death and violence, including disaster films:
“Airport”, “Earthquake”, “The Poseidon Adventure”, in which the narrative is driven by nature
or the elements run amuck. The action film is also distinct from the war and combat genres, since
the violence that erupts tends to occur in ostensibly safe places (home, theatre, department store,
planes, trains, cars and buses).
Actors working in the genre:
Nicolas Cage: “The Cotton Club”, “Snake Eyes”, “The Rock”.
Russel Crowe: “The Sum of Us” (1994), “Virtuosity” (1995), “L.A. Confidential” (1997),
“Gladiator” (2000), “A Beautiful Mind” (2001).
Harrison Ford (1942 - …): “Ironside” (1967), “American Graffiti” (1973), “Star Wars” (1977),
“Witness” (1985), “Indiana Jones”, “The Fugitive” (1993).
Mel Gibson (1956 - …): “Mad Max” (1979), “Leathal Weapon”, “Forever Young” (1992),
“Braveheart”, “The Patriot”, “Ransom”, “Payback”.
Tom Hanks: “Turner and Hooch” (1989), “Nothing in Common” (1986), “Dragnet” (1987),
“Apollo 13”, “Volunteers” (1985).
Keanu Reeves: “Speed” (1994), “The Matrix” (1999).
Arnold Schwarzenegger: “The Terminator” (1984), “Commando” (1985), “Terminator 2:
Judgment Day” (1991), “Predator”.
Steven Seagal: “Above the Law” (1988), “Hard to Kill”, “Marked for Death” (1990), “Out for
Justice” (1991).
Sylvester Stallone: “Rocky” (1976), “First Blood” (1982), “Rambo II, III”, “Staying Alive”,
“Cobra” (1984), “The Specialist” (1994).
Bruce Willis: “The Verdict” (1982), “Death Becomes Her” (1992), “Striking Distance” (1993),
“The Fifth Element” (1997), “Die Hard” (1988), “Whole Nine Yards” (2000).

Westerns: The western is a uniquely American movie genre. The western’s visual potential was
immediately apparent: gun duels between cowboys, shootouts between heroes and bandits,
attacks by Indians warriors, and chases between opponents on horseback.
Actors working in the genre:
Clint Eastwood: “Dirty Harry” (1972), “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More”
(1965), “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), “The Rookie” (1990), “The Unforgiven”
(1992).
Paul Newman: “Butch Cassidy and the Sundancekid” (1969), “The Verdict” (1982), “The Color
of Money” (1986), “Hud”, “Message in a Bottle” (1999).
John Wayne (1907 – 1979): “Shadow of the Eagle”, “The Three Musketeers”, “Stagecoach”
(1939), “The Long Voyage Home” (1940), “Red River” (1948), “Rio Grande” (1950),
“Eldorado” (1966), “McQ” (1974).

Comedy: In the first years of American cinema, comedies appeared only occasionally among the
numerous dramas and action films. By the late 1920s, nearly one third of all films released were
short comedies.
Actors working in the genre:
Charlie Chaplin.
Woody Allen: “Annie Hall” (1977), “Manhattan” (1979), “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986).
Jim Carrey: “The Duck Factory” (1984), “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1985), “Earth Girls Are
Easy” (1989), “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” (1994), “The Mask” (1994), “Batman Forever”
(1995).
Eddie Murphy (1962 - …): “48 Hours” (!982), “Trading Places” (1983), “Beverly Hills Cop”
(1984, 1987), “Another 48 Hours” (1989), “Boomerang” (1992).
Barbara Streisand (1942 - …): “Hello Dolly!” (1969), “A star is Born” (1976), “The Mirror Has
Two Faces” (1996).

Thrillers: The thriller is one of the most en daringly popular of movie genres and one that has
changed surprisingly little since its heyday of the 1930s. The genre was shaped most definitely
by Alfred Hitchcock*.
From the early 1930s, most thrillers reflected the prevailing politics – and the popularly
perceived threats. Thriller tells an exciting story about murder or crime.
Actors working in the genre:
Morgan Freeman: “Street Smart” (1987), “Brubaker” (1980), “Eyewitness” (1981), “Teachers”
(1984), “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994), “Outbreak” (1995), “Seven” (1995).
Anthony Hopkins: “Lion in Winter” (1968), “84 Charing Cross Road” (1987), “Desperate
Hours” (1990), “Silence of the Lambs” (1991), “Freejack” (1992).
Sharon Stone (1959 - …): “Deadly Blessing” (1981), “Action Jackson” (1988), “The Sound of
Music” (1965).

Musicals: As soon as movies learned to talk, they began to sing. Musical – a film uses singing
and dancing to tell a story. By 1929, the first “all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing” musical was
released.
The 1960 marked the last decade of successful adaptations of Broadway musicals. Rock
musicals in the 1970s showed more vigor and originality. The 1990s saw little life in the
musical.
Actors working in the genre:
Elvis Presley (1935 – 1977): “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Don’t Be Cruel”, “Love Me Tender”, “Hound
Dog”, “Teddy Bear”, “Jailhouse Rock”.
Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993): “Roman Holiday” (1953), “Sabrina” (1954), “Love in the
Afternoon” (1957), “Funny Face” (1957), “My Fair Lady” (1964), “Until Dark” (1967), “Robin
and Marian” (1976).

Tragedy (drama): The essential elements of screen tragedy – which manifests itself most
obviously in the so-called “women’s picture” are a loyal and loving heroine, or an admirable
hero, or both. They must face the events in their lives with dignity and grace.
Actors working in the genre:
Marlon Brando (1924 - …): “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1957), “The Godfather” (1972), “Last
Tango in Paris” (1972), “Apocalypse Now” (1979).
Vivien Leigh (1913 – 1967): “Dark Journey” (1937), “Gone with the Wind” (1939), “Waterloo
Bridge” (1940), “Caesar and Cleopatra” (1946), “Anna Karenina” (1948), “The Deep Blue Sea”
(1955).
Marilyn Monro (1926 – 1962): “Niagara” (1953), “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), “Bus
Stop” (1956), “The Misfits” (1961).
Elizabeth Taylor (1932 - …): “There’s One Bom Every Minute”, “Jane Eyre”, “National
Velvet”, “Cleopatra”.
Jngrid Bergman: “Casablanca” (1942), “Gaslight” (1944), “Anastasia” (1956), “Murder on the
Orient Express” (1975).
Robert De Niro (1945 - …): “The Godfather” (1972), “Taxi Driver” (1976), “The Deer Hunter”
(1978).
Michael Douglas (1944 - …): “Romancing the Stone” (1984), “Black Rain” (1989), “Basic
Instinct” (1992), “Falling Down” (1993), “Disclosure” (1994).
Dustin Hoffman (1937 - …): “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), “All the President’s Men” (1976),
“Rain Man” (1988), “Outbreak” (1995).
Alfred Pacino (1940 - …): “The Godfather” (1972, 1974), “Cruising” (1980), “Scent of a
Woman” (1962).
Nicole Kidman: “Bush Christmas” (1983), “Vietnam” (1986), “Days of Thunder” (1990), “Far
and Away” (1992), “My Life” (1993).
Tom Cruise: “Endless Love” (1981), “Top Gun” (1986), “The Color Of Money” (1986), “Born
on the Forth of July” (1989).
Demi Moore: “Young Doctors in Love” (1982”, “No Small Affair” (1984), “The Seventh Sign”
(1988).
Julia Roberts: “Mystic Pizza” (1988), “Pretty Woman” (1990), “Runaway Bride” (1999).

Famous Film Directors. Shooting a film is impossible without a talented and skilled director.
The names of American film directors are well-known all over the world/
D.W. Griffith (1875 – 1948). One of the pioneers of contemporary film making. He became a
producer and, later, a director of New York’s Biograph Studio. He directed every Biograph
release through the end of 1909 and later directed all of the major films.
Griffith single-handedly elevated American film – which had previously stood in the shadow of
its European cousins (Italian Film maker) and forced Americans who had thought of movies as
light entertainment to perceive movies as serous creations, worthy of respect equal to the greatest
stage dramas and capable of creating drama that the stage couldn’t hope to match.
Films: “Birth of a Nation” (1915), “Intolerance” (1916), “True Heart Susie” (1925), “Broken
Blossoms” (1919), “America” (1924), “Abraham Lincoln” (1930).
Alfred Hitchcock (1899 – 1980). He was the most well-known director to the general public, by
virtue of both his many thrillers and his appearances on television in his own series. Probably
more than any other film maker, his name evokes instant expectations on the part of audiences –
they know to expect at least two or three great chills, some striking black comedy, and an
eccentric characterization or two in every one of the director’s movies.
Films: “Blackmail” (1929), “Murder” (1930), “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934), “The
Lady Vanishes” (1938), “Rebecca” (1940 – multi-Oscar winning), “Saboteur” (1942), “Strangers
on a Train” (1951), “Vertigo” (1958), “Psycho” (1960), “Birds” (1963), “Family Plot” (1976 –
his last film).
Walt Disney (1901 – 1966). He has become a 20th-century icon of America. In 1921 Disney
created his own animation studio. In 1927, Disney with artist Ub Iwerks created their first
popular character, Oswald Rabbit. Disney’s next character was the beloved Mickey Mouse,
whom he starred in two silent films, “Plane Crazy” and “Gallopin’ Gaucho”. During the 1930s,
many of Disney’s other beloved characters began to appear, including Minnie Mouse, Pluto<
Goofy and Donald Duck. As his characters developed, so did use of technology. By the mid’30s,
he was using three-strip Technicolor, a process that he had exclusive use of for three years. In
1934, Disney began working on his first feature-length animated film “Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs”. During his heyday, Disney was awarded 29 Oscars for his films, and by the
1960s he had become the King of American entertainment.
Stanley Kramer (1913 – 2001). For two decades, from the end of the 1940s until the end of the
1960s, Stanley Kramer was one of the best-known independent producers in Hollywood. He
began his work in M-G-M and then worked in the story department at Columbia Pictures.
Robert Altman (1925 - …). His debut as a director of a feature film came in Kansas City in 1955
with the teenage gang drama “The Delinquents”. From 1956 to 1964, Robert Altman worked for
several TV companies. In 1963, he founded his own production company Lion’s Gate.
Films: “Nashville” (1975 – Oscar for Best Film and Best Director), “Streamers” (1983), “Fool
for Love” (1985), “Short Cuts” (1994), “Gosford Park” (2001).
Robert Altman also works as producer. He has produced films such as: “The Late Snow” (1977),
“Rich Kids” (1979), “Afterglow” (1997), “Trixie” (2000).
Francis Ford Coppola (1939). One of the most acclaimed directors of the 1970s, Francis Ford
Coppola spearheaded a renaissance in American film making, heralding a golden age which he
defined through masterpieces ranging from “The Conversation” (1974) to “Apocalypse Now”
(1979) to his crowning achievement, “The Godfather” (1972). When he was just 31, Coppola
won his first Academy Award for his work on the screen play of 1970s “Patron”.
Films: “The Godfather”, “The Great Gatsby” (1974), “Apocalypse Now”, “Peggy Sue Got
Married” (1986), “Gardens of Stone” (1987).
James Cameron (1954 - …). He is a director, writer, producer, editor. In 1980, his work on the
short film led to a position at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures on “Battle Beyond the Stars”.
Other films which brought him a success: “The Terminator” (1984), “”Rambo: First Blood. Part
II”, “Aliens” (1986).
In 1988 – 1989, Cameron wrote and directed his next project, the underwater epic “The Abyss”.
It won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects and grossed $ 110 million world-wide.
His “Terminator II: Judgment Day” received six Academy Award nominations of which it won
four; Best Makeup, Sound, Visual Effects and Sound Effects Editing.
Also James Cameron wrote, produced and directed “Titanic” (1997).

Individual reports
Architecture
Architect
Eamonn Kevin Roche  (June 14, 1922 – March 1, 2019) was an Irish-born American Pritzker
Prize-winning architect. He has been responsible for the design/master planning for over 200
built projects in both the U.S. and abroad. These projects include eight museums, 38 corporate
headquarters, seven research facilities, performing arts centers, theaters, and campus buildings
for six universities. In 1967 he created the master plan for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
henceforth designed all of the new wings and installation of many collections including the
recently reopened American and Islamic wings.
Born in Dublin and a graduate from University College, Roche went to the United States to study
with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the U.S., he became
the principal designer for Eero Saarinen, and opened his own architectural firm in 1967.
Among other awards, Roche received the Pritzker in 1982, the Gold Medal Award from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990, and the AIA Gold Medal in 1993.
Born in Dublin, but raised in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Roche attended Rockwell College and
graduated from University College Dublin in 1945. He then worked with Michael Scott from
1945-46. From summer to fall of 1946 he worked with Maxwell Fry in London. In 1947 he
applied for graduate studies at Harvard, Yale, and the Illinois Institute of Technology and was
accepted at all three institutions, and left Ireland in 1948 to study under Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Roche (right) with Eero Saarinen in the 1950s
In 1949, he worked at the planning office for the United Nations Headquarters building in New
York City. In 1950, he joined the firm of Eero Saarinen and Associates. His future partner, John
Dinkeloo (1918-1991), joined the firm in 1951 and this was also where Roche met his wife Jane.
In 1954, he became the Principal Design Associate to Saarinen and assisted him on all projects
from that time until Saarinen's death in September 1961.
In 1966, Roche and Dinkeloo formed Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates and completed
Saarinen's projects. They completed 12 major unfinished Saarinen builds, including some of
Saarinen's best-known work: the Gateway Arch, the expressionistic TWA Flight Centerat JFK
International Airport in New York City, Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC,
the strictly modern John Deere Headquarters in Moline, Illinois, and the CBS
Headquartersbuilding in New York City.
Following this, Roche and Dinkeloo's first major commission was the Oakland Museum of
California, a complex for the art, natural history, and cultural history of California with a design
featuring interrelated terraces and roof gardens.The city was planning a monumental building to
house natural history, technology and art, and Roche provided a unique concept: a building that
is a series of low-level concrete structures covering a four block area, on three levels, the terrace
of each level forming the roof of the one below, i.e. a museum (in three sections) with a park on
its roof. This kind of innovative solution went on to become Roche's trademark.
This project was followed by the equally highly acclaimed Ford Foundation building in New
York City, considered the first large-scale architectural building in the USA to devote a
substantial portion of its space to horticultural pursuits. Its famous atrium was designed with the
notion of having urban green-space accessible to all and is an early example of the application
of environmental psychology in architecture. The building was recognized in 1968
by Architectural Record as "a new kind of urban space".
The acclaim that greeted the Oakland Museum and Ford Foundation earned Kevin Roche John
Dinkeloo and Associates a ranking at the top of their profession. Shortly afterwards they began a
40-year association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for whom they did
extensive remodelling and built many extensions to house new galleries including the one
containing the Egyptian Temple of Dendur. Other high-profile commissions for the firm came
from clients as varied as Wesleyan University, the United Nations, Cummins Engines, Union
Carbide, The United States Post Office and the Knights of Columbus.
In 1982, Kevin Roche became one of the first recipients of the Pritzker Prize, generally regarded
as architecture’s equivalent to the Nobel prize. Following this accolade Roche’s practice went
global, receiving commissions for buildings in Paris, Madrid, Singapore and Tokyo. He
completed his first and only Irish project The Convention Centre Dublin in 2010.
Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates has designed numerous corporate headquarters,
office buildings, banks, museums, art centers, and even part of the Bronx Zoo. Roche served as a
trustee of the American Academy in Rome, president of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, a member of the National Academy of Design, and a member of the U.S. Commission of
Fine Arts.
Roche died on March 1, 2019 at his home in Guilford, Connecticut, aged 96
The work of Kevin Roche has been the subject of special exhibitions at the Museum of Modern
Art, the Architectural Association of Ireland in Dublin, and the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters. A 2012 exhibition Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment opened at
the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut and has been viewed at The
Museum of the City of New York and at the Building Museum in Washington, and
the University of Toronto.
In addition to the Pritzker Prize, Roche was the recipient of numerous honours and awards
including the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal Award, the American Academy of
Arts and Letters Gold Medal Award for Architecture, and the French Academie
d'Architecture Grand Gold Medal.

Building

The United States Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel, completed in 1962, is the distinguishing
feature of the Cadet Area at the United States Air Force Academy north of Colorado Springs. It
was designed by Walter Netsch of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill of Chicago. Construction was
accomplished by Robert E. McKee, Inc., of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Originally controversial in
its design, the Cadet Chapel has become a classic and highly regarded example
of modernist architecture. The Cadet Chapel was awarded the American Institute of Architects'
National Twenty-five Year Award in 1996 and, as part of the Cadet Area, was named a
U.S. National Historic Landmark in 2004.

The most striking aspect of the Chapel is its row of seventeen spires. The original design called
for twenty-one spires, but this number was reduced due to budget issues. The structure is a
tubular steel frame of 100 identical tetrahedrons, each 75 feet (23 m) long, weighing five tons,
and enclosed with aluminum panels. The panels were fabricated in Missouri and shipped by rail
to the site. The tetrahedrons are spaced a foot apart, creating gaps in the framework that are filled
with 1-inch-thick (25 mm) colored glass. The tetrahedrons comprising the spires are filled by
triangular aluminum panels, while the tetrahedrons between the spires are filled with a mosaic of
colored glass in aluminum frame.
The Cadet Chapel itself is 150 feet (46 m) high, 280 feet (85 m) long, and 84 feet (26 m) wide.
The front façade, on the south, has a wide granite stairway with steel railings capped by
aluminum handrails leading up one story to a landing. At the landing is a band of gold anodized
aluminum doors, and gold anodized aluminum sheets apparently covering original windows.
The shell of the chapel and surrounding grounds cost $3.5 million to build. Various furnishings,
pipe organs, liturgical fittings and adornments of the chapel were presented as gifts from various
individuals and organizations. In 1959, a designated Easter offering was also taken at Air Force
bases around the world to help complete the interior.

Worship areas
The Cadet Chapel was designed specifically to house three distinct worship areas under a single
roof. Inspired by chapels at Sainte-Chapelle in France and the Basilica of San Francesco
d'Assisi in Italy, architect Walter Netsch stacked the spaces on two main levels.[5] The Protestant
nave is located on the upper level, while the Catholic and Jewish chapels and a Buddhist room
are located beneath it. Beneath this level is a larger room used for Islamic services and two
meeting rooms. Each chapel has its own entrance, and services may be held simultaneously
without interfering with one another.
Protestant chapel
The Protestant Chapel is located on the main floor, and is designed to seat 1,200 individuals.
The nave measures 64 by 168 feet (51 m), reaching up to 94 feet (29 m) at the highest peak. The
center aisle terminates at the chancel.
The building's tetrahedrons form the walls and the pinnacled ceiling of the Protestant
Chapel. Stained glass windows provide ribbons of color between the tetrahedrons, and progress
from darker to lighter as they reach the altar. The chancel is set off by a crescent-shaped,
varicolored reredos with semi-precious stones from Colorado and pietra santa marble from Italy
covering its 1,260-square-foot (117 m2) area. The focal point of the chancel is a 46-foot (14 m)
high aluminum cross suspended above it. The pews are made of American walnut and African
mahogany, the ends being sculpted to resemble World War I airplane propellers. The backs of
the pews are capped by a strip of aluminum similar to the trailing edge of a fighter aircraft wing.
Above the narthex, in the rear, is a choir balcony and organ, designed by Walter Holtkamp of the
Holtkamp Organ Company, and built by M. P. Moller of Hagerstown, Maryland. The organ has
83 ranks and 67 stops controlling 4,334 pipes. Harold E. Wagoner designed the liturgical
furnishings for both the Protestant and Catholic chapels.
Catholic Chapel
The Catholic Chapel is located below the Protestant Chapel, and seats approximately 500 people.
The nave is 56 feet (17 m) wide, 113 feet (34 m) long and 19 feet (5.8 m) high. The focal point
of the Catholic Chapel is the reredos, an abstract glass mosaic mural designed by Lumen Martin
Winter and composed of varying shades of blue, turquoise, rose and gray tessera to form a
portrayal of the firmament. Superimposed on the mural and depicting the Annunciation are two
10-foot (3.0 m) tall marble figures, the Virgin Mary on the left, and the Archangel Gabriel on the
right. Above and between these two figures is a marble dove.
In front of the reredos is the altar, a gift from Cardinal Francis Spellman, who dedicated the
Catholic Chapel on September 22, 1963. The altar is Italian white marble mounted on a marble
cone-shaped pedestal above which is a six-foot sculptured nickel-silver crucifix. Along the side
walls of the chapel are the 14 Stations of the Cross, also designed by Lumen Martin Winter, and
carved from four-inch (102 mm) thick slabs of marble. The figures are done in Carrara marble,
from the same quarries where Michelangelo drew his stone. The classical pipe organ, in the 100-
seat choir loft, was designed by Walter Holtkamp and built by M. P. Moller Co. It features 36
ranks and 29 stops controlling its 1,950 pipes
Jewish chapel
The Jewish Chapel is also on the lower level. Seating 100, it is circular, with a diameter of 42
feet (13 m) and a height of 19 feet (5.8 m). It is enclosed by a vertical grill with inserts of clear
glass opening to the foyer. The circular form and transparent walls were used to suggest a tent-
like structure. The floor is paved with Jerusalem brownstone, donated by the Israeli Defense
Forces.
The walls of the foyer are purple stained glass panels alternating with green and blue stained
accent windows. The circular walls of the synagogue are panels of translucent glass separated by
stanchions of Israeli cypress. The paintings, done by Shlomo Katz in 1985 and 1986, depict a
Biblical story. They are divided into three groups; brotherhood, flight (in honor of the Air Force)
and justice.
The focal point of the Jewish Chapel is the Aron Kodesh, which shelters the Scrolls of the Torah,
to the right of which hangs the Ner Tamid. In the foyer of the chapel is a display cabinet with a
Torah Scroll that was saved from the Nazis during World War II. It was found in Poland in 1989
in an abandoned warehouse and donated to the Jewish Chapel in April 1990. This
"Holocaust Torah" is dedicated to the memory of all of those who fought against the Nazis.
Muslim Chapel
The Muslim Chapel is located on the lower level. It welcomes Muslims of all denominations.
The mihrab is made of wood filled with the Quranand other Muslim books. Surrounded
by Middle Eastern wooden art on its walls and the floor is blue and yellow with Middle Eastern
designs.
Buddhist Chapel
The Buddhist Chapel is a freestanding hall within the Cadet Chapel, donated in 2007. It
measures 300 square feet and welcomes Buddhists of all denominations. The altar has
a Burmese statue of the Buddha and near the entry is a figure of Avalokiteśvara.
Falcon Circle
The Falcon Circle is the newest of the Cadet Chapel's worship areas, dedicated in 2011. It was
established through a request from followers of Earth-Centered Spirituality, an umbrella of
traditions that includes Wicca, Paganism and Druidism. It is open to use by all religious
communities to worship in a manner respectful of other faiths.
All-faiths rooms
The All-Faiths Rooms are worship areas for smaller religious groups. They are purposely devoid
of religious symbolism so that they may be used by a variety of faiths. Distinguishing faith-
specific accoutrements are available for each group to use during their worship services.

Painting
Painter
An American painter and printmaker, Mary Cassatt was an impressionist painter, who depicted
the lives of women, especially the special bond between mother and child. She traveled
extensively as a child, and was probably exposed to the works of the great masters at the World’s
fair in Paris in 1855. Other artist’s, such as Degas and Pissarro, would later become her mentors
and fellow painters. She began studying art seriously at the age of 15, at a time when only
around twenty percent of all arts students were female. Unlike many of the other female students,
she was determined to make art her career, rather than just a social skill. She was disappointed at
her art education in the United States, and moved to Paris to study art under private tutors in
Paris. Her mother and family friends traveled with her to France, acting as chaperones. 

She continued her art education in France, and her first work was accepted into the Paris Salon in
1868. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, however, she returned to the United
States to live with her family. Her father, who did not approve of her chosen vocation as an
artist, paid for her living expenses, but refused to pay for her art supplies. During her stay in the
United States, Cassatt was miserable. She exhibited some paintings but found no buyers, and
upset at the lack of art to study, she quit painting and almost gave up the craft. After a trip to
Chicago, her work was noticed by the Archbishop of Pittsburgh, who commissioned from her a
copy of two of Correggio’s paintings in Italy. He offered to pay for her travel expenses and she
immediately left the United States. 

In Europe, Cassatt’s paintings were better received, increasing her prospects, and exhibited in the
Salon of 1872, selling a painting. She exhibited every year at the Paris Salon until 1877, when all
her works were rejected. Distraught at her rejection, she turned to the Impressionists, who
welcomed her with welcome arms. 
Deciding early in her career that marriage was not an option, Cassatt never married, and spent
much of her time with her sister Lydia, until her death in 1882, which left Mary unable to work
for a short time. As her career progressed, her critical reputation grew, and she was often touted,
along with Degas, as the one of the best exhibitors at the Impressionist Salon. She was awarded
the French Legion of Honor in 1906. 

In her later life, she was diagnosed with rheumatism, neuralgia, diabetes, and cataracts, although
her spirit was never crushed. She continued to fight for the cause of women’s suffrage after she
went almost blind in 1914. She died twelve years later. He works have since been printed on
United States postage stamps and her works have sold for as much as $2.9 million at auction. 

Painting
The Letter (1890-91. In April 1890, Cassatt attended an
exhibition of Japanese colored woodcuts at the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts in Paris. Following this event, she decided to create a series
of ten prints showing the life of a modern-day woman. The
completed series included scenes of women performing their
toilettes, washing their children, having tea, and so on; this
example shows a woman sealing a letter she has just written at
her desk. The composition balances patterns (the wallpaper, the
woman's dress) against solid areas of color (the vertical back of
the desk, the paper of the letter and envelope) and brings the
viewer close to the room's shallow space, where forced
perspective is evident in the oddly skewed writing panel of the
desk. These stylistic choices were influenced by traditional
Japanese printmaking, yet the woman's garments and the other
objects are all contemporary details of Cassatt's world.

Drypoint and aquatint on paper - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Sculpture
Sculptor
Tony Smith was a Minimalist artist and architect best known for his large-scale
modular sculptures. Smith’s Die (1962), is a black box with dimensions determined
by the size of the human body with arms and legs outstretched, suggesting
something which is neither a monument nor an object. “I think the volume of my
work has much to do with a response to contemporary life generally,” he once
explained. “I don’t think it relates much to the art scene, although certain things
just happen and may seem somewhat alike. I have always admired very simple, very
authoritative, very enduring things.” Born Anthony Peter Smith on September 23,
1912 in South Orange, NJ, he developed tuberculosis as a child and lived in a
separate house in his parents’ backyard to protect his immune system. Briefly
studying at Fordham University, then Georgetown University, Smith returned to
New Jersey in 1932. During the Great Depression, he attended the Art Students
League of New York, studying under  George Grosz and Vaclav Vytacil, while
running a bookstore in his hometown. Smith went on to apprentice under  Frank
Lloyd Wright, during the construction of Wright’s Armstrong House in Odgen
Dunes, IN. It was in the mid-1950s, while living in New York, that the architect
turned his attention back to sculpture. Over the following decades, Smith received
several teaching appointments across the country, producing works based on his
experiences. He died on December 26, 1980 in New York, NY, and is survived by
his daughter the artist Kiki Smith. Today, his works are held in the collections of
the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and
the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.

Sculpture
Smoke is a large-scale sculpture conceived
by American artist Tony Smith in 1967 that was
fabricated posthumously in 2005 for the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) where it
was installed in 2008. This two-tier sculptures
standing 24 foot tall is made of aluminum and
painted black. Smoke is unique in that it is Smith’s
only large-scale work specifically intended for an
interior space. The first iteration of the sculpture
was a painted plywood version installed in the
atrium of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C.
in 1967. This version, measuring 45 feet long, 33
feet wide, and 22 feet high, was based on Smith's
small-scale cardboard model, and was built and
painted by three to seven workmen over the course of two months, at a cost of
$6,000. LACMA’s painted aluminum version was installed in 2008 and the first in an edition of
three; second in the edition is in a private collection.
Art historian Joan Pachner described the artwork as one that does not have a single focal point or
axis: "it looks like a complicated jungle gym. Interior views are dominated by the linear scaffold
and the implied infinite expanse of the design."
The sculpture has been on permanent view in the Ahmanson Building Room at LACMA since
2008.
Smoke was acquired by LACMA in 2010 through a gift from the Belldegrun Family in honor of
Rebecka Belldegrun's birthday
 Theatre
The Majestic Theatre is a Broadway theatre located at 245 West 44th Street in Midtown
Manhattan. It is one of the largest Broadway theatres with 1,681 seats, and traditionally has been
used as a venue for major musical theatre productions. Among the notable shows that have
premiered at the Majestic are Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The Music Man (1957),
Camelot (1960), A Little Night Music (1973), and The Wiz (1975). It was also the second home
of 42nd Street and the third home of 1776. The theatre has housed The Phantom of the Opera
since it opened on January 26, 1988. With a record-breaking over 13,300 performances to date, it
is currently the longest-running production in Broadway history.
History
Designed by architect Herbert J. Krapp, the
present-day Majestic was constructed by the
Chanin Brothers as part of an entertainment
complex including the Theatre Masque, the
Royale Theatre, and Lincoln Hotel (now the
Row NYC Hotel, and previously the Milford
Plaza). It opened on March 28, 1927 with the
musical Rufus LeMaire's Affairs. The theater
was designed in a Spanish style, with Adam
style detailing within the auditorium, a large
single balcony, and steep stadium seating in
the orchestra section, all under an expansive
plaster dome. A large staircase leads patrons
up to the orchestra level one story above the
expansive street frontage. On the Spanish terracotta and stone facade, ornate loggia mask the fire
escapes from the auditorium, mirroring the neighboring St. James Theatre across 44th Street.
With 1,681 seats, the Majestic is one of the largest of the Broadway theaters, and has been home
to primarily large musicals in its ninety year history. The venue hosted the 50th Tony Awards in
1996, on the set of Phantom.
The Majestic was purchased by the Shubert brothers during the Great Depression and currently
is owned and operated by the Shubert Organization. Both the interior and exterior were
designated New York City landmarks in 1987, just prior to the theater's current long-running
tenant, The Phantom of the Opera. For Phantom, the theater's stage was expanded and modified
extensively to fit the show's complex scenic elements, the Shuberts spending more than $1
million to accommodate the show after considering the Martin Beck and Mark Hellinger theaters
with the show's producer Cameron Mackintosh, and moving long-running tenant 42nd Street was
moved across the street to the St. James. Much of the theater's large, ornate proscenium arch has
been obscured and painted black since Phantom's installation in 1987. A long alleyway connects
the theater backstage to the surrounding Golden, Jacobs and Broadhurst theaters.
Productions are listed by the year they commenced performances:
1927: The Letter; Rang Tang; Rio Rita
1931: Simple Simon; The Student Prince
1933: Pardon My English
1936: On Your Toes
1937: Babes in Arms
1941: Hellzapoppin
1942: Porgy and Bess
1945: Carousel
1947: Call Me Mister; Allegro
1949: South Pacific
1953: Me and Juliet
1954: By the Beautiful Sea; Fanny
1956: Happy Hunting
1957: Meredith Willson's The Music Man
1960: Camelot
1963: Tovarich; Hot Spot; Jennie
1964: Anyone Can Whistle; A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; Golden Boy
1966: Funny Girl; Breakfast at Tiffany's
1967: Marat/Sade; Fiddler on the Roof
1970: Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen
1972: Sugar
1973: A Little Night Music (moved from Shubert)
1974: Mack & Mabel
1975: The Wiz
1977: The Act
1978: First Monday in October; Ballroom
1979: I Remember Mama; The Most Happy Fella; Bette! Divine Madness
1980: Grease; Blackstone! The Magnificent Musical Magic Show; Brigadoon
1981: 42nd Street (moved from Winter Garden)
1988—present: The Phantom of the Opera
 Studio

Twentieth Century Fox (or 20th Century Fox) was among the first and the last major Hollywood
studios to coalesce, initially emerging in the mid-teens as the Fox Film Corporation but not
taking on its ultimate configuration until a 1935 merger with 20th Century Pictures, an upstart
independent production company run by the inimitable Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–1979). Although
the Fox Film Corporation had been an important industry force, not until the 20th Century
merger and the installation of Zanuck as production chief did the studio finally come into its
own. Arguably the top production executive of the studio era, Zanuck possessed a unique
combination of filmmaking and management skills, as well as keen commercial instincts.
Through some three decades under Zanuck, Fox's output struck an effective balance of
lightweight entertainment and powerful drama—The Mark of Zorro and The Grapes of Wrath in
the same year (1940), for instance, both of which Zanuck himself produced. Zanuck also enabled
20th Century Fox to sustain Hollywood's traditional mode of production and marketing strategies
far longer than the other studios—well into the 1960s, in fact, when a few big hits like The
Sound of Music (1965) were offset by too many costly flops, bringing an end to Zanuck's
regime. Fox quickly adapted to the changing industry, enjoying a massive surge with the release
of Star Wars (1977) and its first two sequels, which fashioned the consummate New Hollywood
movie franchise and carried Fox into the 1980s.

The studio underwent another historic transition in the mid-1980s with the installation of Barry
Diller (b. 1942) as president in 1984, and the ensuing purchase of the studio by Rupert
Murdoch's (b. 1931) global media giant, News Corporation. While Diller had the commercial
and creative instincts that Fox had been lacking since Zanuck's departure, Murdoch brought
massive resources and an even broader vision. Together they created a new breed of media
conglomerate and fundamentally recast the studio, beginning with the launch of Fox
Broadcasting in 1985–1986. The tremendous success of the movie-television "synergy" at Fox
changed the landscape of American media, auguring the later studio-network amalgams of
Disney-ABC, Paramount-CBS, and NBC-Universal. Moreover, the current alignment of News
Corp., with its multiple conduits to media consumers, and Fox Filmed Entertainment, the parent
company of 20th Century Fox, has reformulated vertical integration for the cable and digital
delivery era. So although the Fox of the early twenty-first century is a far cry from the movie
studio(s) that generated it, many obvious affinities and connections persist. There is an affinity,
too, between Murdoch, who controlled News Corp. as of 2005, and William Fox (1879–1952),
whose equally boundless vision and reckless expansionism laid the groundwork for Murdoch's
vast media empire.

THE FOX FILM CORPORATION AND TWENTIETH CENTURY PICTURES

Twentieth Century Fox began as a chain of penny arcades and nickelodeons operated in the early
1900s by William Fox, a young Jewish immigrant (born in Tulchva, Hungary, in 1879) with
enormous entrepreneurial drive and vision. Like other industry pioneers, most notably
Universal's Carl Laemmle (1867–1939), Fox moved into production and distribution to ensure a
flow of product for his growing theater chain and soon came into conflict with the Motion
Picture Patents Company, also known as the Edison Trust. Fox was one of the Trust's most
aggressive combatants, challenging its hegemony in the courts and in the marketplace. Fox,
Laemmle, and the other so-called independents prevailed, and soon they were creating a
vertically integrated oligopoly of their own. In 1915 Fox, already a leading exhibitor, formally
created the Fox Film Company via the merger of his established production and distribution

DARRYL F. ZANUCK
Among Hollywood's pioneering producers and studio heads, Darryl Zanuck was unique for his
longevity at the helm of the studio he co-founded, 20th Century Fox, as well as for his intense
involvement in the filmmaking process. Along with Irving Thalberg and David Selznick, Zanuck
was one of Hollywood's first-generation boy wonders, supervising production at a major studio
(Warner Bros.) while still in his twenties. But Zanuck alone among top Hollywood executives
rose through the creative ranks (as a writer at Warner), and he alone not only approved and
supervised all A-class production on his lot but was also actively engaged in production. In some
three decades atop Fox, it was not uncommon for Zanuck to take a script home and rewrite it
over a weekend or to substantially rework a screenplay. Zanuck closely supervised post-
production, often writing and even directing retakes or added scenes (including sequences in
both The Grapes of Wrath, 1940, and My Darling Clementine, 1946). Zanuck took well-deserved
producer credit on scores of 20th Century Fox films, including many of its top hits and now-
canonized classics.
Zanuck was the most dynamic and colorful of the early studio heads. Diminutive, hyper
aggressive, and supremely confident, he was a bantam battler and a control freak, a polo-field
assailant and casting-couch predator. He was also a rare Midwestern WASP with creative talent
within a generation of studio bosses dominated by first- and second-generation eastern European
Jews with retail trade experience. Zanuck learned the business, of course, and he remained an
astute student of cinema both as a commercial industry and an art form—one of those rare
Hollywood executives able, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous phrase, "to keep the whole equation
of pictures in their heads."
Zanuck helped create several important movie cycles, notably the gangster films and historical
biopics of the 1930s and the social problem dramas of the 1940s, and he proved equally adept at
producing Fox's dual output of entertaining "hokum" (his term) and "serious" pictures. He was
the only top studio executive to join the military and to see active duty (as a colonel in the Signal
Corps) during World War II, and his pet wartime project was the biopic Wilson (1944), which
dramatized Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations to implicitly proclaim Zanuck's own support
of the nascent United Nations. His postwar commitment to social problem dramas drew fire from
the House Un-American Activities Committee as "un-American," and although he sustained that
production cycle, Zanuck also joined the other studio bosses in capitulating to the blacklist.
Zanuck was an inveterate risk taker throughout his career. Examples are Fox's gamble on
CinemaScope and Zanuck's subsequent venture into independent production in the 1950s and his
blockbuster-scale productions after returning to Fox in the 1960s.

Actress
Julia Fiona Roberts (born October 28, 1967)
is an American actress and producer. She has
won three Golden Globe Awards, from eight
nominations, and has been nominated for four
Academy Awards for her film acting, winning
the Academy Award for Best Actress for her
performance in Erin Brockovich (2000).

She established herself as a leading lady in

Hollywood after headlining the romantic
comedy film Pretty Woman (1990), which
grossed $464 million worldwide. With 24 of
her leading actress films earning at least $100
million at the box office, Roberts is
considered one of the most bankable actresses
in Hollywood. Her films have brought in box
office receipts of over $3.8 billion globally.

Her most successful films include Mystic

Pizza (1988), Steel Magnolias (1989), Pretty
Woman (1990), Sleeping with the Enemy
(1991), The Pelican Brief (1993), My Best
Friend's Wedding (1997), Notting Hill (1999),
Runaway Bride (1999), Erin Brockovich (2000), Ocean's Eleven (2001), Ocean's Twelve (2004),
Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Valentine's Day (2010), Eat Pray Love (2010), Money Monster
(2016), and Wonder (2017). Roberts was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for her performance in the HBO
television film The Normal Heart (2014). In 2018, she starred in the Prime Video psychological
thriller series Homecoming.

Roberts was the highest-paid actress in the world throughout most of the 1990s and in the first
half of the 2000s. Her fee for 1990's Pretty Woman was $300,000; in 2003, she was paid an
unprecedented $25 million for her role in Mona Lisa Smile (2003). As of 2020, Roberts's net
worth was estimated to be $250 million. People magazine has named her the most beautiful
woman in the world a record five times.
 Film
Pretty Woman is a 1990 American romantic comedy film
directed by Garry Marshall, from a screenplay by J. F.
Lawton. The film stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, and
features Héctor Elizondo, Ralph Bellamy (in his final
performance), Laura San Giacomo, and Jason Alexander in
supporting roles. The film's story centers on down-on-her-luck
Hollywood sex worker Vivian Ward, who is hired by Edward
Lewis, a wealthy businessman, to be his escort for several
business and social functions, and their developing
relationship over the course of her week-long stay with him.
The film's title Pretty Woman is based on "Oh, Pretty
Woman", written and sung by Roy Orbison. It is the first film
on-screen collaboration between Gere and Roberts; their
second film, Runaway Bride, was released in 1999.
Originally intended to be a dark cautionary tale about class
and prostitution in Los Angeles, the film was re-conceived as
a romantic comedy with a large budget. It was widely
successful at the box office and was the third-highest-grossing
film of 1990. The film saw the highest number of ticket sales
in the US ever for a romantic comedy, with Box Office Mojo
listing it as the number-one romantic comedy by the highest
estimated domestic tickets sold at 42,176,400, slightly ahead
of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) at 41,419,500 tickets. The film received mixed reviews,
though Roberts received a Golden Globe Award and a nomination for the Academy Award for
Best Actress for her performance. In addition, screenwriter J. F. Lawton was nominated for a
Writers Guild Award and a BAFTA Award.

Development
The film was initially conceived as a dark drama about prostitution in Los Angeles in the 1980s.
The relationship between Vivian and Edward also originally involved controversial themes,
including Vivian being addicted to drugs; part of the deal was that she had to stay off cocaine for
a week. Edward eventually throws her out of his car and drives off. The original script by J.F.
Lawton, called 3000, ended with Vivian and her prostitute friend on the bus to Disneyland.
Producer Laura Ziskin considered these elements detrimental to a sympathetic portrayal of
Vivian, and they were removed or assigned to Kit. The deleted scenes have been found, and
some were included on the DVD released for the film's 15th anniversary. In one, Vivian tells
Edward, "I could just pop ya good and be on my way", indicating her lack of interest in "pillow
talk". In another, she is confronted by a drug dealer, Carlos, then rescued by Edward when the
limo driver Darryl gets his gun out.
Though inspired by such films as Wall Street and The Last Detail, the film bears a resemblance
to Pygmalion myths: particularly George Bernard Shaw's play of the same name, which also
formed the basis for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady. It was Walt Disney Studios then-
president Jeffrey Katzenberg who insisted the film be re-written as a modern-day fairy tale and
love story, as opposed to the original dark drama. It was pitched to Touchstone Pictures and re-
written as a romantic comedy. The title 3000 was changed because Disney executives thought it
sounded like a title for a science fiction film.
The film is one of two movies that triggered a resurgence of romantic comedy in Hollywood, the
other being When Harry Met Sally.... Following this film's success, Roberts became the romantic
comedy queen of the 1990s.
Casting
Casting of the film was a rather lengthy process. Marshall had initially considered Christopher
Reeve, Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Kline, and Denzel Washington for the role of Edward, and Al
Pacino and Burt Reynolds turned it down. Pacino went as far as doing a casting reading with
Roberts before rejecting the part. Gere initially refused but when he met with Roberts, she
persuaded him and he eventually agreed to play Lewis. He reportedly started off much more
active in his role; but Garry Marshall took him aside and said "No, no, no, Richard. In this
movie, one of you moves and one of you does not. Guess which one you are?" Julia Roberts was
not the first choice for the role of Vivian, and was not wanted by Disney. Many other actresses
were considered. Marshall originally envisioned Karen Allen for the role; when she declined,
auditions went to many better-known actresses of the time including Molly Ringwald, who
turned it down because she felt uncomfortable playing a prostitute.[citation needed] Winona
Ryder auditioned, but was turned down because Marshall felt she was "too young". Jennifer
Connelly was also dismissed for the same reason. Emily Lloyd turned it down as it conflicted
with her shooting for the film Mermaids.
Meg Ryan, who was a top choice of Marshall's, turned it down as well. According to a note
written by Marshall, Mary Steenburgen was also among the first choices. Diane Lane came very
close to being cast (the script was much darker at the time); they had gone as far as costume
fittings, but due to scheduling conflicts she could not accept. Michelle Pfeiffer turned the role
down, saying she did not like the script's "tone." Daryl Hannah was also considered, but believed
the role was "degrading to women". Valeria Golino declined, doubting it would work with her
thick Italian accent.[citation needed] And Jennifer Jason Leigh had auditioned. When all the
other actresses turned down the role, 21-year-old Julia Roberts, a relative unknown, with only
the sleeper hit Mystic Pizza (1988) and the yet-to-be-released Steel Magnolias (1989), for which
she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, to her credit, won the
role of Vivian. Her performance made her a star. J.F. Lawton, writer of the original screenplay,
has suggested that the film was ultimately given a happy ending because of the chemistry of
Gere and Roberts.
Veteran actor Ralph Bellamy, who plays James Morse, appears in his final acting performance
before his death in 1991. Jason Alexander, who had also recently been cast for his role as the
bumbling George Costanza in Seinfeld, was cast as Philip Stuckey. A VHS copy of Pretty
Woman would appear in Seinfeld's apartment in later seasons of Seinfeld as a homage to
Alexander's participation in the film.
Filming
The film's budget was substantial, at $14 million, so producers could shoot in many locations.
Most filming took place in Los Angeles, California, specifically in Beverly Hills, and inside
soundstages at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. The escargot restaurant the "Voltaire" was shot
at the restaurant "Rex," now called "Cicada". Scenes set in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel lobby
were shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Filming commenced on July 24, 1989, but
was immediately plagued by problems. These included Ferrari and Porsche declining the product
placement opportunity for the car Edward drove, neither firm wishing to be associated with
prostitutes. Lotus Cars saw the placement value, and supplied a Silver 1989.5 Esprit SE (which
was later sold).
Shooting was a generally pleasant, easy-going experience, as the budget was broad and the
shooting schedule was not tight. While shooting the scene where Vivian is lying down on the
floor of Edward's penthouse, watching reruns of I Love Lucy, Garry Marshall had to tickle
Roberts' feet (out of camera range) to get her to laugh. The scene in which Gere playfully snaps
the lid of a jewelry case on her fingers was improvised, and her surprised laugh was genuine.
The red dress Vivian wears to the opera has been listed among the most unforgettable dresses of
all time.
During the scene in which Roberts sang to a Prince Song in the bathtub, slid down and
submerged her head under the bubbles; she emerged to find the crew had left except for the
cameraman, who captured the moment on film. In the love scene, she was so stressed that a vein
became noticeable on her forehead and had to be massaged by Marshall and Gere. She also
developed a case of hives, and calamine lotion was used to soothe her skin until filming
resumed. The filming was completed on November 30.