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Olympia Dukakis
Olympia Dukakis, July 2005
Born	(1931-06-20) June 20, 1931 (age 81) Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1962–present
Spouse	Louis Zorich (1962-present)

Olympia Dukakis (born June 20, 1931) is an American actress. In 1987, she won an Academy Award, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for her performance in Moonstruck. She received another Golden Globe nomination for Sinatra, and Emmy nominations for Lucky Day, More Tales of the City and Joan of Arc.

Personal life[link]

Dukakis was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the daughter of Alexandra (née Christos) and Constantine S. Dukakis. Her parents were Greek immigrants to the United States, her father from Anatolia and her mother from the Peloponnese.^[1][2] She has a brother, Apollo, and is a cousin of Michael Dukakis, a former governor of Massachusetts and the Democratic nominee for president in 1988, for whom she was a delegate from New Jersey at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. She is an alumna of Arlington High School in Arlington, Massachusetts, and was educated at Boston University.

Dukakis has been married to actor Louis Zorich since 1962. They have three children.

Career[link]

Dukakis has held a lengthy career in a diverse range of films, including Steel Magnolias, Mr. Holland's Opus, Jane Austen's Mafia!, The Thing About My Folks, and Moonstruck, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She also played the role of Anna Madrigal in the Tales of the City television mini-series, which garnered her an Emmy Award nomination, and appeared on Search for Tomorrow as Dr. Barbara Moreno, who romanced Stu Bergman. She appears as Dolly Sinatra (Frank's mother) in the mini-series of Frank Sinatra's life (1992). Her Broadway theatre credits include Who's Who in Hell, Social Security, and the one-woman play Rose. Her theater, film, and television work has also won her an Obie Award, a Drama Desk Award, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and a Golden Globe.

Dukakis won a BAFTA Award,and a Golden Globe for Moonstruck and was nominated for the Canadian Academy Award for The Event. She provided the voice of Grandpa's love interest for The Simpsons episode "The Old Man and the Key". In 2003, Dukakis published her national bestselling autobiography Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress. Recent films include 3 Needles, The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines, In the Land of Women, and Away From Her, the 2006 film which cast her alongside Gordon Pinsent as the spouses of two Alzheimers patients.

In 1998, she starred as Charlotte Kiszko in the British TV drama A Life for a Life (ITV), based on the real-life story of Stefan Kiszko, a man wrongfully imprisoned for seventeen years for the murder of a child, Lesley Molseed, after police suppressed evidence of his innocence.

She recently directed the world premiere production of Todd Logan's Botanic Garden at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.^[3]

In the 2008 season of Hartford Stage, Dukakis starred in the revival of Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, opposite Kevin Anderson.

In 2008, Dukakis also co-adapted and starred in the world-premiere of Another Side of the Island, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, at Alpine Theatre Project in Whitefish, Montana.

She starred in and executive-produced the 2009 film Montana Amazon, co-starring Haley Joel Osment.

In 2011, Dukakis guest-starred on Law & Order: SVU. She played the role of Debby Marsh, an attorney.^[4]

Filmography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Olympia Dukakis at the Internet Movie Database
• Olympia Dukakis at the Internet Broadway Database
• Olympia Dukakis at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Olympia Dukakis at the TCM Movie Database

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (March 2011)

Carey Elizabeth Perloff (born February 9, 1959) is an American theater director and playwright. She has been the artistic director of American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco since 1992.

Biography[link]

Perloff was born in Washington, D.C., to Marjorie Perloff, a professor and poetry critic, and Joseph K. Perloff, a professor of medicine and pediatrics and cardiologist. She attended Stanford University, where she received a B.A. Phi Beta Kappa in classics and comparative literature. After graduating from Stanford in 1980, Perloff attended St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, as a Fulbright Fellow and spent two summers directing at the Edinburgh Festival, where she met her husband, attorney Anthony Giles. She makes her home in San Francisco and is the mother of two children, Alexandra (B.A., Harvard University, 2011) and Nicholas.

Professional Career[link]

Perloff worked as an administrator at the International Theater Institute, then as a casting assistant with Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, while launching her directing career off-off Broadway. In 1986 she was named artistic director of the off-Broadway Classic Stage Company (CSC), where she worked until taking the helm of A.C.T.

At CSC, Perloff directed the world premiere of Ezra Pound’s Elektra, the American premiere of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language, and many classic works. Under her leadership, CSC won numerous OBIE Awards, including the 1988 OBIE for artistic excellence. She also served on the faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for seven years. In 1993, Perloff directed the world premiere of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s opera The Cave at the Vienna Festival and Brooklyn Academy of Music. She most recently directed a new Elektra, adapted by Timberlake Wertenbaker, for the Getty Villa in Los Angeles.

American Conservatory Theater[link]

In 1992, Perloff was appointed artistic director of A.C.T., where her first task was to raise $31 million to rebuild the earthquake-damaged Geary Theater (now the American Conservatory Theater), which reopened in January 1996 with Perloff's production of The Tempest, starring David Strathairn. Perloff's tenure at A.C.T. has been marked by the creation of a new core company of actors; revitalization of the acclaimed A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program; receipt of the 1996 Jujamcyn Theaters Award, honoring A.C.T.’s efforts to develop creative talent for the theater; a series of international collaborations, including The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre's multi-media adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit^[1], Robert Wilson and Tom Waits’ The Black Rider, Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling's The Overcoat, and Kneehigh Theatre's Brief Encounter; and the American premieres of plays by Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. Perloff's directorial work for A.C.T. includes: The Tosca Project (co-created with choreographer Val Caniparoli; world premiere), Phèdre, Boleros for the Disenchanted, Rock 'n' Roll, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Government Inspector, After the War (world premiere), Travesties, Happy End, A Christmas Carol (co-adapted with Paul Walsh; world premiere), The Voysey Inheritance (adapted by David Mamet; world premiere), The Real Thing, A Mother, A Doll's House, Waiting for Godot, The Three Sisters, Night and Day, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (world premiere), Celebration (world premiere), The Room, Enrico IV, The Misanthrope, The Invention of Love (American premiere), The Threepenny Opera, Indian Ink (world premiere), Old Times, Mary Stuart, Singer's Boy (world premiere), The Rose Tattoo, The Tempest, Arcadia, Hecuba, Home, Uncle Vanya, Antigone, Bon Appétit, Creditors, Hilda, No for an Answer (world premiere), her own play The Colossus of Rhodes, and Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. She also teaches and directs in the A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program.

Plays[link]

Perloff’s play The Colossus of Rhodes was a Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist. Her play Luminescence Dating premiered in New York at The Ensemble Studio Theatre, was coproduced by A.C.T. and Magic Theatre, and is published by Dramatists Play Service. Her play Waiting for the Flood has received workshops at A.C.T., New York Stage and Film, and Roundabout Theatre Company. Her one-act The Morning After was a finalist for the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Perloff’s latest play, Higher, was developed at New York Stage and Film and was presented at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum in November 2010.

Honors[link]

Perloff is a recipient of France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the National Corporate Theatre Fund’s 2007 Artistic Achievement Award. In 2011 Perloff won the Blanche and Irving Laurie Theater Visions Award for her play HIGHER.

References[link]

• http://www.act-sf.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_staff_popup&bio=CareyPerloff
• http://articles.sfgate.com/2001-05-27/entertainment/17600391_1_artistic-director-american-conservatory-theater-carey-perloff
• http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2002/marapr/features/perloff.html

External links[link]

• www.act-sf.org

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (April 2010)

Louis Zorich (born February 12, 1924) is an American actor. He is well-known for his portrayal of Paul Reiser's father "Burt Buchman" in the NBC series Mad About You. He played the role from 1993 to 1999.

Life and career[link]

Zorich was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Yugoslavian immigrants Anna (née Gledi) and Christ Zorich.^[1] He attended Earle Elementary School^[2] before going on to attend Roosevelt College and Goodman Theater School of Drama in his hometown of Chicago.^[3] Zorich has been married to Academy Award winning actress Olympia Dukakis since 1962. They have three children together.

In 1965, Zorich recorded and released an album on Folkways Records, entitled Moby Dick: Selections Read by Louis Zorich. One of Zorich's first major film roles was the Russian Constable in the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof. He was featured in Popi and For Pete's Sake and played the role of Pete in the 1984 film The Muppets Take Manhattan. In 1986 he played a Swiss businessman in Club Paradise with Robin Williams, and in 1988 appeared as Nikos, the Greek millionaire, part of a group arriving in a yacht party, in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (film) with Steve Martin and Michael Caine.

He also starred in the 1976 Broadway play Herzl.

Zorich currently is on the faculty of HB Studio in New York City.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Louis Zorich at the Internet Movie Database
• Moby Dick Album Details

This article about an American television actor born in the 1920s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams (age 54) photographed by Orland Fernandez in 1965 for the twentieth anniversary of The Glass Menagerie.
Born	Thomas Lanier Williams (1911-03-26)March 26, 1911 Columbus, Mississippi, United States
Died	February 25, 1983(1983-02-25) (aged 71) New York City, New York, United States
Language	English
Nationality	American
Period	1930–1983
Signature

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs. His professional career lasted from the mid 1930s until his death in 1983, and saw the creation of many plays that are regarded as classics of the American stage. Williams adapted much of his best known work for the cinema.

Williams received virtually all of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama, including several New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award for best play for The Rose Tattoo (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In 1980 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter and is today acknowledged as one of the most accomplished playwrights in the history of English speaking theater.

Theater scholar Charlotte Canning, of the University of Texas at Austin where Williams' archives are located, has said, "There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams... He inspired future generations of writers as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."^[1]

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Childhood[link]

Thomas Lanier Williams III was born of English, Welsh and Huguenot descent, in Columbus, Mississippi, the second child of Edwina and Cornelius Coffin (C.C.) Williams.^[2]:11 His grandfather, Walter Dakin, was the local Episcopal priest, and his maternal grandmother, Rose O. Dakin, was a music teacher. His father was a hard-drinking traveling shoe salesman who spent most of his time away from home. His mother, Edwina, was an archetype of the ‘Southern belle’, whose social aspirations tilted toward snobbery and whose behavior could be neurotic and hysterical. Shortly after his birth, his grandfather Dakin was assigned to a parish in Clarksdale, Mississippi and Williams' early childhood was spent in the parsonage there.

His family included an older sister Rose (1909–1996), and a younger brother, Dakin (1919–2008). ‘Tom’, as he was called in his youth, developed a close bond with his sister. Theater scholar Allean Hale notes that, born only sixteen months apart, they were “as inseparable as twins, sometimes referred to as ‘The Couple’.”^[2]:11 Rose and their black nursemaid, Ozzie, were Williams' only companions as a child. Hale speculates that growing up in a female-dominated environment gave Williams empathy for the woman characters he created as a playwright. Shy, fragile and predisposed to emotional disturbances, eventually to the point of mental illness, Rose inspired a host of characters in his fiction.^[3]:x

As a small child Williams suffered an illness (either diphtheria of rheumatic fever) which nearly ended his life and left him weak and virtually confined to his house during a period of recuperation that lasted a year. At least in part as a result of his illness, he was less robust as a child than his father would have wished. Cornelius Williams was a descendant of east Tennessee pioneer stock (hence Williams’ professional name) and a man prone to use his fists. He disdained his son’s effeminacy and his mother Edwina, locked in an unhappy marriage, focused her overbearing attention almost entirely on Tom. Many theorize that Williams found inspiration in his dysfunctional family for much of his writing.^{[citation needed]} The biographer Donald Spoto adds “[Williams] work is a series of variations on the great emotional cycles of his own tortured life” (xviii).

Education[link]

When Williams was eight years old his father was promoted to a job at the home office of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis, Missouri in the Midwest. His mother's continual search for what she considered to be an appropriate address, as well as his father's heavy drinking and loudly violent behavior, caused them to move numerous times around the city. He attended Soldan High School, a setting referred to in his work The Glass Menagerie. Later he studied at University City High School.^[4][5] At age 16, Williams won third prize (five dollars) for an essay published in Smart Set entitled, "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" A year later, his short story "The Vengeance of Nitocris" was published in the magazine Weird Tales. At the age of 17 he first visited Europe.

From 1929 to 1931, he attended the University of Missouri, in Columbia,^[6] where he enrolled in journalism classes. While the university's School of Journalism was regarded one of the world's best^{[by whom?]}, Williams found his classes boring and was distracted by his unrequited love for a girl. He was soon entering his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests, hoping to earn extra income. His first submitted play was Beauty is the Word (1930), followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning (1932).^[7] As recognition for Beauty, a play about rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a contest.^[2]:15

At Mizzou, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not seem to have fit in well with his fraternity brothers. According to Hale, the "brothers found him shy and socially backward, a loner who spent most of his time at the typewriter." After he failed military training in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at the International Shoe Company factory. Although Williams, then 21, hated the monotony of the blue-collar world, the job "forced him out of the pretentious gentility" of his upbringing, which had, according to Hale, "tinged him with [his mother's] snobbery and detachment from reality."^[2]:15 His dislike of the nine-to-five work routine drove him to write even more than before, and he gave himself a goal of writing one story a week, working on Saturday and Sunday, into the night. His mother recalled his intensity:

"Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house. Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes."^[3]:xi

Overworked, unhappy and lacking any further success with his writing, by his twenty-fourth birthday he had suffered a nervous breakdown and left his job. Memories of this period, and a particular factory co-worker, became part of the character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.^[2]:15 By the mid-1930s his father's increasing alcoholism and abusive temper (he had part of his ear bitten off in a poker game fight) finally led Edwina to separate from him although they never divorced.

In 1936 Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis where he wrote the play Me Vashya (1937). In 1938, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Iowa, where he wrote Spring Storm. He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City. Speaking of his early days as a playwright and referring to an early collaborative play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!, produced while he was a part of an amateur summer theater group in Memphis, Tennessee, Williams wrote, "The laughter ... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life."^[8] Around 1939, he adopted "Tennessee Williams" as his professional name. Whether it was from, as he once wrote, "a desire to climb the family tree," or that his fraternity brothers nicknamed him for his thick southern drawl, no one seems to know.

Early influences[link]

Williams' writings include mention of some of the poets and writers he most admired in his early years: Hart Crane, Anton Chekhov (from the age of ten), William Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, August Strindberg, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Emily Dickinson. In later years the list grew to include William Inge, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway; of the latter, he said "[his] great quality, aside from his prose style, is this fearless expression of brute nature."^[3]:xi

Career[link]

In the late 1930s, as the young playwright struggled to have his work accepted, he supported himself with a string of menial jobs (including a notably disastrous stint as caretaker on a chicken ranch outside Los Angeles). In 1939, with the help of his agent, Audrey Wood, he was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition of his play Battle of Angels which was produced in Boston in 1940, but poorly received.

Using the remainder of the Rockefeller funds, Williams moved to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt which was created to put people back to work and helped many artists, musicians and writers survive during the Great Depression. He lived for a time in the French Quarter; first at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré. (The building is now part of The Historic New Orleans Collection).^[9] The Rockefeller grant gained him attention and Williams received a six month contract from the Metro Goldwyn Mayer film studio in Hollywood for six months, earning a pay of $250 weekly.

During the winter of 1944–45, his "memory play" The Glass Menagerie was successfully produced in Chicago garnering good reviews. It moved to New York where it became an instant and enormous hit during its long Broadway run. The play tells the story of a young man, Tom, his disabled sister, Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda, who tries to make a match between Laura and a gentleman caller. Williams' use of his own familial relationships as inspiration for the play is impossible to miss. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams' greatest successes) said of Williams: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life."^[10] The Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the season.

The huge success of his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1947 secured his reputation as a great playwright. Although widely celebrated and increasingly wealthy, he was still restless and insecure in the grip of fears that he would not be able to duplicate his success. During the late 1940s and 1950s Williams began to travel widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. To stimulate his writing he moved often, to various cities including New York, New Orleans, Key West, Rome, Barcelona, and London. Williams wrote, "Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag."^[3]:xv

Williams walking to the service for Dylan Thomas, 1953.

Between 1948 and 1959 seven of his plays were performed on Broadway: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959 he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award. His plays were produced in New York by Herbert Machiz, who was involved from 1953 until 1969 with the art work dealer John Bernard Myers to engage, at that time, little-known young artists to design the stage sets, e.g. Paul Georges, Neil Peter Jampolis and others.^{[11][12][13][14][15]}

His work reached world-wide audiences in the early 1950s when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into motion pictures. Later plays also adapted for the screen included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana and Summer and Smoke.

After the extraordinary successes of the 1940s and 50s, the 1960s and 70s brought personal turmoil and theatrical failures. Although he continued to write every day, the quality of his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption as well as often poor choices of collaborators. Consumed by depression over the death of his partner Merlo, and in and out of treatment facilities under the control of his mother and brother Dakin, Williams spiraled downward. Kingdom of Earth (1967), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1973), The Two Character Play (also called Out Cry, 1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1976), Vieux Carré (1978), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) and others were all box office failures, and the relentlessly negative press notices wore down his spirit. His last play, A House Not Meant To Stand was produced in Chicago in 1982 and, despite largely positive reviews, ran for only 40 performances.

Critics and audiences alike may have failed to acknowledge Williams' new style and novel approach to theater he developed during 1960s and refused to accept daring and different work from the playwright. Williams said, “I’ve been working like a son of a bitch since 1969 to make an artistic comeback…there is no release short of death”(Spoto 335), and “I want to warn you, Elliot, the critics are out to get me. You’ll see how vicious they are. They make comparisons with my earlier work, but I’m writing differently now” (Spoto 331). Leverich explains that Williams to the end was concerned with "the depths and origin of human feelings and motivations, the difference being that he had gone into a deeper, more obscure realm, which, of course, put the poet in him to the fore, and not the playwright who would bring much concern for audience and critical reaction” (xxiii). Most likely the truth is that to the end of his life Williams was as vibrant, creative and experimental a writer as ever, yet he succumbed to the slow torture of his critics.

Personal life[link]

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Williams remained close to his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young adult and later institutionalized following a lobotomy, visiting her at the facilities where she spent most of her adult life and paying for her care.^[16] The devastating effects of Rose's illness may have contributed to his alcoholism and his dependence on various combinations of amphetamines and barbiturates.^[17]

After some early attempts at heterosexual relationships, by the late 1930s Williams had accepted his homosexuality. In New York he joined a gay social circle which included fellow writer and close friend Donald Windham (1920–2010) and his then partner Fred Melton. In the summer of 1940 Williams initiated an affair with Kip Kiernan (1918–1944), a young Canadian dancer he met in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Kiernan left him for a woman and marriage he was distraught, and Kiernan's death four years later at 26 delivered another blow.

On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico, Williams met Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales, a hotel clerk of Mexican heritage. Rodriguez was, by all accounts, loving and loyal but also prone to jealous rages and excessive drinking, so the relationship was a tempestuous one. Nevertheless, in February 1946 Rodriguez left New Mexico to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment and they lived and traveled together until late 1947 when Williams ended the affair. Rodriguez and Williams remained friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s.

Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a teenaged Italian boy to whom he provided financial assistance for several years afterward (a situation which planted the seed of Williams' first novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone). When he returned to New York that fall, he met and fell in love with Frank Phillip Merlo (1922–1963), an occasional actor of Sicilian heritage who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II.

Last will and testament of Tennessee Williams

This one enduring romantic relationship of Williams' life lasted 14 years until infidelities and drug abuse on both sides ended it. Merlo, who became Williams' personal secretary, taking on most of the details of their domestic life, provided a period of happiness and stability as well as a balance to the playwright's frequent bouts with depression^[18] and the fear that, like his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity. Their years together, in an apartment in Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida, were Williams' happiest and most productive. Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and Williams returned to take care of him until his death on September 21, 1963.

As he had feared, in the years following Merlo's death Williams was plunged into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use resulting in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. He submitted to injections by Dr. Max Jacobson – known popularly as Dr. Feelgood – who used increasing amounts of amphetamines to overcome his depression and combined these with prescriptions for the sedative Seconal to relieve his insomnia. Williams appeared several times in interviews in a nearly incoherent state, and his reputation both as a playwright and as a public personality suffered.^{[citation needed]} He was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.

Death[link]

On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead in his suite at the Elysee Hotel in New York at age 71. The medical examiner's report indicated that he choked to death on the cap from a bottle of eye drops he frequently used, further indicating that his use of drugs and alcohol may have contributed to his death by suppressing his gag reflex. Prescription drugs, including barbiturates, were found in the room.

Contrary to his expressed wishes but at his brother Dakin Williams' insistence, Williams was interred in the Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri. Williams had long told his friends he wanted to be buried at sea at approximately the same place as Hart Crane, a poet he considered to be one of his most significant influences.

Williams left his literary rights to The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee in honor of his grandfather, Walter Dakin, an alumnus of the university. The funds support a creative writing program. When his sister Rose died in 1996 after many years in a mental institution, she bequeathed $7 million^[19] from her part of the Williams estate to The University of the South as well.

Posthumous recognition[link]

Williams' Grave, Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri

From February 1 to July 21, 2011, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the home of Williams' archive, exhibited 250 of his personal items. The exhibit, entitled "Becoming Tennessee Williams," included a collection of Williams manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and artwork.^[1]

In late 2009, Williams was inducted into the Poet's Corner at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. Performers who took part in his induction included Vanessa Redgrave, John Guare, Eli Wallach, Sylvia Miles, Gregory Mosher, and Ben Griessmeyer.^[20]

The Tennessee Williams Theater in Key West, Florida, is named for him.

At the time of his death, Williams had been working on a final play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere,^[21] which attempted to reconcile certain forces and facts of his own life, a theme which ran throughout his work, as Elia Kazan had said. As of September 2007, author Gore Vidal was in the process of completing the play, and Peter Bogdanovich was slated to direct its Broadway debut.^[22]

The Williams family home in Columbus, Mississippi, was recently renovated and reopened.^[23]

Williams's literary legacy is represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt.

Williams was honored by the U.S. Postal Service on a stamp in 1994 as part of their literary arts series.

Bibliography[link]

Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Characters in his plays are often seen as representations of his family members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was understood to be modeled on Rose. Some biographers believed that the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is also based on her.

Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was generally seen to represent Williams' mother, Edwina. Characters such as Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer were understood to represent Williams himself. In addition, he used a lobotomy operation as a motif in Suddenly, Last Summer.

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. These two plays were later filmed, with great success, by noted directors Elia Kazan (Streetcar) with whom Williams developed a very close artistic relationship, and Richard Brooks (Cat). Both plays included references to elements of Williams' life such as homosexuality, mental instability, and alcoholism. Although The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was at first considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., chairman of the Board, had seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and thought it worthy of the drama prize. The Board went along with him after considerable discussion.^[24]

Williams wrote The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer when he was 29 and worked on it sporadically throughout his life. A semi-autobiographical depiction of his 1940 romance with Kip Kiernan in Provincetown, Massachusetts, it was produced for the first time on October 1, 2006 in Provincetown by the Shakespeare on the Cape production company, as part of the First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

Other works by Williams include Camino Real and Sweet Bird of Youth.

His last play went through many drafts as he was trying to reconcile what would be the end of his life.^[20] There are many versions of it, but it is referred to as In Masks Outrageous and Austere.

Plays[link]

Apprentice plays

• Candles to the Sun (1936)
• Spring Storm (1937)
• Me Vaysha (1937)
• Fugitive Kind (1937)
• Not About Nightingales (1938)
• I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1941)
• Orpheus Descending (1945)
• You Touched Me (1945)
• Stairs to the Roof (1947)

Major plays

• The Glass Menagerie (1944)
• A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
• Summer and Smoke (1948)
• The Rose Tattoo (1951)
• Camino Real (1953)
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
• Orpheus Descending (1957)
• Suddenly, Last Summer (1958)
• Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
• Period of Adjustment (1960)
• The Night of the Iguana (1961)
• The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1962, rewriting of Summer and Smoke)
• The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)
• The Mutilated (1965)
• The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968, aka Kingdom of Earth)
• In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969)
• Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? (1969)
• Small Craft Warnings (1972)
• The Two-Character Play (1973)
• Out Cry (1973, rewriting of The Two-Character Play)
• The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975)
• This Is (An Entertainment) (1976)
• Vieux Carré (1977)
• A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979)
• Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980)
• The Notebook of Trigorin (1980)
• Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981)
• A House Not Meant to Stand (1982)
• In Masks Outrageous and Austere (1983)

Novels[link]

• The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950, adapted into a film in 1961)
• Moise and the World of Reason (1975)

Screenplays and teleplays[link]

• The Glass Menagerie (1950)
• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
• The Rose Tattoo (1955)
• Baby Doll (1956)
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
• Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
• The Fugitive Kind (1959)
• Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1966)
• Boom! (1968)
• The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (2009; screenplay from 1957)

Short stories[link]

• The Vengeance of Nitocris (1928)
• The Field of Blue Children (1939)
• The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin (1951)
• Hard Candy: A Book of Stories (1954)
• Three Players of a Summer Game and Other Stories (1960)
• The Knightly Quest: a Novella and Four Short Stories (1966)
• One Arm and Other Stories (1967)
  • "One Arm"
  • "The Malediction"
  • "The Poet"
  • "Chronicle of a Demise"
  • "Desire and the Black Masseur"
  • "Portrait of a Girl in Glass"
  • "The Important Thing"
  • "The Angel in the Alcove"
  • "The Field of Blue Children"
  • "The Night of the Iguana"
  • "The Yellow Bird"
• Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: a Book of Stories (1974)
• Tent Worms (1980)
• It Happened the day the Sun Rose, and Other Stories (1981)

One-act plays[link]

Tennessee Williams wrote over 70 one-act plays during his lifetime. The one-acts explored many of the same themes that dominated his longer works. Williams' major collections are published by New Directions in New York City.

• American Blues (1948)
• Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays
• Dragon Country: a book of one-act plays (1970)
• The Traveling Companion and Other Plays
• 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays (1946 and 1953)
  • «Something wild...» (introduction) (1953)
  • 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946 and 1953)
  • The Purification (1946 and 1953)
  • The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (1946 and 1953)
  • The Last of My Solid Gold Watches (1946 and 1953)
  • Portrait of a Madonna (1946 and 1953)
  • Auto-da-Fé (1946 and 1953)
  • Lord Byron's Love Letter (1946 and 1953)
  • The Strangest Kind of Romance (1946 and 1953)
  • The Long Goodbye (1946 and 1953)
  • At Liberty (1946)
  • Moony's Kid Don't Cry (1946)
  • Hello from Bertha (1946 and 1953)
  • This Property Is Condemned (1946 and 1953)
  • Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen... (1953)
  • Something Unspoken (1953)
• The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume VI
• The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume VII

Poetry[link]

• In the Winter of Cities (1956)
• Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977)

Selected works[link]

• Gussow, Mel and Holditch, Kenneth, eds. Tennessee Williams, Plays 1937–1955 (Library of America, 2000) ISBN 978-1-883011-86-4.
  • Spring Storm
  • Not About Nightingales
  • Battle of Angels
  • I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
  • From 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946)
    • 27 Wagons Full of Cotton
    • The Lady of Larkspur Lotion
    • The Last of My Solid Gold Watches
    • Portrait of a Madonna
    • Auto-da-Fé
    • Lord Byron's Love Letter
    • This Property Is Condemned
  • The Glass Menagerie
  • A Streetcar Named Desire
  • Summer and Smoke
  • The Rose Tattoo
  • Camino Real
  • From 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1953)
    • "Something Wild"
    • Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen
    • Something Unspoken
  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Gussow, Mel and Holditch, Kenneth, eds. Tennessee Williams, Plays 1957–1980 (Library of America, 2000) ISBN 978-1-883011-87-1.
  • Orpheus Descending
  • Suddenly, Last Summer
  • Sweet Bird of Youth
  • Period of Adjustment
  • The Night of the Iguana
  • The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
  • The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
  • The Mutilated
  • Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle)
  • Small Craft Warnings
  • Out Cry
  • Vieux Carré
  • A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

Related works[link]

Available through electronic source by Amazon.com, John Uecker directed Willams's play and created and edited In Masks Outrageous and Austere.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

Biography portal

• Lanier family tree
• Virginia Spencer Carr, friend and biographer of Williams
• Tennessee Williams/ New Orleans Literary Festival

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tennessee Williams

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Tennessee Williams

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Tennessee Williams

• Gross, Robert F., ed. Tennessee Williams: A Casebook. Routledge (2002). ISBN 0-8153-3174-6.
• Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (1997). ISBN 0-393-31663-7.
• Saddik, Annette. The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays (London: Associated University Presses, 1999).
• Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Da Capo Press (Reprint, 1997). ISBN 0-306-80805-6.
• Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday (1975). ISBN 0-385-00573-3.
• Williams, Dakin. His Brother's Keeper: The Life and Murder of Tennessee Williams.
• Sewanee, The University of the South
• Jacobus, Lee. "The Bedford Introduction to Drama". (Boston: Bedford, 2009)

External links[link]

• Williams, Tennessee at the Open Directory Project
• The Paris Review Interview
• Tennessee Williams at the Internet Movie Database
• Tennessee Williams at the Internet Broadway Database
• Tennessee Williams at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Tennessee Williams at Find a Grave

Barack Obama
44th President of the United States
Incumbent
Assumed office January 20, 2009
Vice President	Joe Biden
Preceded by	George W. Bush
Personal details
Born	Barack Hussein Obama II[1] (1961-08-04) August 4, 1961 (age 50) Honolulu, Hawaii, United States[1]
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Michelle Robinson (m. 1992)
Children	Malia (b.1998) Sasha (b.2001)
Residence	The White House
Alma mater	Occidental College Columbia University (B.A.) Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Profession	Community organizer Attorney Author Constitutional law professor United States Senator President of the United States
Religion	Christian,[2] former member of United Church of Christ[3][4]
Signature
Website	WhiteHouse.gov

	This article is part of a series on Barack Obama
Background Illinois Senate US Senate Political positions Public image Family 2008 primaries Obama–Biden campaign Transition Inauguration Electoral history Presidency Timeline '09 '10 '11 '12 First 100 days Nobel Peace Prize Re-election campaign

Barack Obama being sworn in as President of the United States.

The Presidency of Barack Obama began at noon EST on January 20, 2009, when he became the 44th President of the United States. Obama was a United States Senator from Illinois at the time of his victory over Arizona Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. Barack Obama is the first African-American president of the United States, as well as the first born in Hawaii.

His policy decisions have addressed a global financial crisis and have included changes in tax policies, legislation to reform the United States health care industry, foreign policy initiatives and the phasing out of detention of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He attended the G-20 London summit and later visited U.S. troops in Iraq. On the tour of various European countries following the G-20 summit, he announced in Prague that he intended to negotiate substantial reduction in the world's nuclear arsenals, en route to their eventual extinction. In October 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Transition period[link]

The presidential transition period began following Obama's election to the presidency on November 4, 2008. The Obama-Biden Transition Project was co-chaired by John Podesta, Valerie Jarrett, and Pete Rouse. During the transition period, Obama announced his nominations for his Cabinet and administration. Shortly after the election on November 4, Obama chose Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois as White House Chief of Staff.^[5]

Cabinet nominations included former Democratic primary opponents Hillary Rodham Clinton for Secretary of State and Bill Richardson for Secretary of Commerce (although the latter withdrew on January 4, 2009). Obama appointed Eric Holder as his Attorney General, the first African-American appointed to that position. He also nominated Timothy F. Geithner to serve as Secretary of the Treasury.^[6] On December 1, Obama announced that he had asked Robert Gates to remain as Secretary of Defense, making Gates the first Defense head to carry over from a president of a different party.^[7] He nominated former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice to the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, which he restored to a Cabinet-level position.^[8]

During his transition, he maintained a website Change.gov, on which he wrote blogs to readers and uploaded video addresses by many of the members of his new cabinet.^[9] He announced strict rules for federal lobbyists, restricting them from financially contributing to his administration and forcing them to stop lobbying while working for him.^[10] The website also allowed individuals to share stories and visions with each other and the transition team in what was called the Citizen's Briefing Book, which was given to Obama shortly after his inauguration.^[11] Most of the information from Change.gov was transferred to the official White House website whitehouse.gov just after Obama's inauguration.^[12]

Inauguration[link]

Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. He officially assumed the presidency at 12:00 noon, EST,^[13] and completed the oath of office at 12:05 PM, EST. He delivered his inaugural address immediately following his oath. After his speech, he went to the President's Room in the House Wing of the Capitol and signed three documents: a commemorative proclamation, a list of Cabinet appointments, and a list of sub-Cabinet appointments, before attending a luncheon with congressional and administration leaders and invited guests.^[14] To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of former President Abraham Lincoln, the same Bible that was used for Lincoln's inauguration was used in Obama's inauguration.^[15]

In administering the oath, Chief Justice John G. Roberts misplaced the word "faithfully" and erroneously replaced the phrase "President of the United States" with "President to the United States" before restating the phrase correctly; since Obama initially repeated the incorrect form, some scholars argued the President should take the oath again.^[16] On January 21, Roberts readministered the oath to Obama in a private ceremony in the White House Map Room, making him the seventh U.S. president to retake the oath; White House Counsel Greg Craig said Obama took the oath from Roberts a second time out of an "abundance of caution".^[17]

First 100 days[link]

Expectations[link]

Obama's 100th day in office was April 29, 2009. In his first post-election interview with 60 Minutes, Obama said that he has been studying Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days,^[18] while adding, "The first hundred days is going to be important, but it's probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference."^[19]

Obama's first 100 days were highly anticipated ever since he became the presumptive nominee.^[20] Several news outlets created web pages dedicated to covering the subject.^[21] Commentators weighed in on challenges and priorities within domestic, foreign, economic, and environmental policy.^{[22][23][24][25]} CNN lists a number of economic issues that "Obama and his team will have to tackle in their first 100 days", foremost among which is passing and implementing a recovery package to deal with the financial crisis.^[24] Clive Stafford Smith, a British human rights lawyer, expressed hopes that the new president will close Guantanamo Bay detention camp in his first 100 days in office.^[23] After aides of the president announced his intention to give a major foreign policy speech in the capital of an Islamic country, there were speculations in Jakarta that he might return to his former home city within the first 100 days.^[26]

The New York Times devoted a five-part series, which was spread out over two weeks, to anticipatory analysis of Obama's first hundred days. Each day, the analysis of a political expert was followed by freely edited blog postings from readers. The writers compared Obama's prospects with the situations of Franklin D. Roosevelt (January 16, Jean Edward Smith),^[27] John F. Kennedy (January 19, Richard Reeves),^[28] Lyndon B. Johnson (January 23, Robert Dallek),^[29] Ronald Reagan (January 27, Lou Cannon),^[30] and Richard Nixon.

Legislation and executive orders[link]

Within minutes of taking the Oath of Office on January 20, Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, issued an order suspending last-minute federal regulations pushed through by outgoing President George W. Bush, planning to review everything still pending.^[31] Due to the economic crisis, the President enacted a pay freeze for Senior White House Staff making more than $100,000 per year,^[32] as well as announcing stricter guidelines regarding lobbyists in an effort to raise the ethical standards of the White House.^[33] He asked for a waiver to his own new rules, however, for the appointments of William Lynn to the position of Deputy Defense Secretary, Jocelyn Frye to the position of director of policy and projects in the Office of the First Lady, and Cecilia Muñoz to the position of director of intergovernmental affairs in the executive office of the president, leading to some criticism of hypocrisy and violation of his pledge for governmental openness.^[34][35]

In his first week in office, Obama signed Executive Order 13492 suspending all the ongoing proceedings of Guantanamo military commission and ordering the detention facility to be shut down within the year.^[36][37][38] He also signed Executive Order 13491 - Ensuring Lawful Interrogations requiring the Army Field Manual to be used as a guide for terror interrogations, banning torture and other coercive techniques, such as waterboarding.^[39] Obama also issued an executive order entitled "Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel", setting stricter limitations on incoming executive branch employees and placing tighter restrictions on lobbying in the White House.^[40] Obama signed two Presidential Memoranda concerning energy independence, ordering the Department of Transportation to establish higher fuel efficiency standards before 2011 models are released and allowing states to raise their emissions standards above the national standard.^[41] He also ended the Mexico City Policy, which banned federal grants to international groups that provide abortion services or counseling.^[42][43]

In his first week he also established a policy of producing a weekly Saturday morning video address available on whitehouse.gov and YouTube,^[44][45][46] much like those released during his transition period.^[47][48] The first address had been viewed by 600,000 YouTube viewers by the next afternoon.^[49]

The first piece of legislation Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 on January 29, which revised the statute of limitations for filing pay discrimination lawsuits. Lilly Ledbetter joined Obama and his wife, Michelle, as he signed the bill, fulfilling his campaign pledge to nullify Ledbetter v. Goodyear.^[50] On February 3, he signed the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIP), expanding health care from 7 million children under the plan to 11 million.^[51]

President Obama signs the ARRA into law on February 17, 2009 in Denver, Colorado. Vice President Joe Biden stands behind him. Obama addresses a joint session of Congress, with Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.	Address Before a Joint Session of Congress (February 24, 2009) The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was a focal point of Barack Obama's February 24, 2009 Address Before a Joint Session of Congress. Address Before a Joint Session of Congress (February 24, 2009) (audio) Audio-only version
Problems listening to these files? See media help.

After much debate, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was passed by both the House and Senate on February 13, 2009. Originally intended to be a bipartisan bill, the passage of the bill was largely along party lines. No Republicans voted for it in the House, and three moderate Republicans voted for it in the Senate (Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania).^[52] The bill combined tax breaks with spending on infrastructure projects, extension of welfare benefits, and education.^[53][54] The final cost of the bill was $787 billion, and almost $1.2 trillion with debt service included.^[55] Obama signed the Act into law on February 17, 2009, in Denver, Colorado.^[56]

On March 9, 2009, Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research,^[57] and in doing so, called into question some of George W. Bush's signing statements. Obama stated that he too would employ signing statements if he deems upon review that a portion of a bill is unconstitutional,^[58][59] and he has issued several signing statements.^[60]

Early in his presidency, Obama signed a law raising the tobacco tax 62 cents on a pack of cigarettes.^[61] The tax is to be "used to finance a major expansion of health insurance for children", and "help some [smokers] to quit and persuade young people not to start".^[61]

In October 2011, Obama instituted the We Can't Wait program, which involved using executive orders, administrative rulemaking, and recess appointments to institute policies without the support of Congress.^[62] The initiative was developed in response to Congress's unwillingness to pass economic legislation proposed by Obama, and conflicts in Congress during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis.^[63]

Approval ratings and opinion[link]

2009[link]

After his transition period, Obama entered office with an approval rating of 82%.^[64] At the end of his first week, 68% of respondents in a Gallup poll approved of how Obama was handling his job, the second highest approval rating for a President shortly after being elected since World War II.^[65] Throughout early February polls showed scattered approval ratings: 62% (CBS News),^[66] 64% (USA Today/Gallup), 66% (Gallup), and 76% in an outlier poll (CNN/Opinion Research).^[67][68] Gallup reported the congressional address in late February boosted his approval from a term-low of 59% to 67%.^[69]

Throughout autumn 2009, Rasmussen estimated Obama's approval as fluctuating between 45% and 52% and his disapproval between 48% and 54%;^[70] as of November 11, Pew Research estimated Obama's approval between 51% and 55% and his disapproval between 33% and 37% since July.^[71]

Handling of the economy[link]

Rasmussen reported in mid-February 2009, that 55% of voters gave Obama good or excellent marks on his handling of the economy.^[72] In early March, a The Wall Street Journal survey of 49 economists gave Obama an average grade of 59 out of 100, with 42% of the respondents surveyed giving the administration's economic policies a grade below 60 percent. In comparison, only 30% of those same economists considered the response of governments around the world to the global recession to have been adequate.^[73] In April, a Gallup poll showed trust in Obama's economic policy with 71% saying they had "a fair amount" or "a great deal" of confidence in Obama's handling of the economy, higher than for Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, or leaders of Congress.^[74] Another Gallup poll in June showed 55% of Americans approved Obama's overall handling of the economy, but 48% and 51% disapproved of his handling of the federal budget deficit and controlling federal spending, respectively.^[75] A CBS News poll taken August 27–31 showed 53% of those polled approved of his handling of the economy.^[76] A Rasmussen poll taken on November 12 found 45% of Americans rating Obama's handling of the economy as poor and 39% rating him as doing a good or excellent job. They found 72% of Democrats rated his handling of the economy as good or excellent, while only 10% of Republicans and 27% of voters not affiliated with either party agreed.^[77]

2010[link]

On March 25, 2010, following his signing of landmark health care reform legislation into law, Obama's polling was revealed by Bloomberg to be 50%, with higher marks for relations with other countries (58%) and his running of the war in Afghanistan (54%). "Obama's approval rating is roughly equal to what Bill Clinton had at this point in his presidency, according to data maintained by Gallup (and) higher than the 45 percent Ronald Reagan recorded in April 1982" and more favorable than Democrats or Republicans office in 2010. They found Obama's approval rating was at 85% among Democrats, compared with 46% among independents and 11% among Republicans.^[78]

Fox News released the results of two polls on April 8–9, 2010. The first showed a drop in Obama's approval rating to 43%, with 48% disapproving. In that poll, Democrats approved of Obama's performance 80–12%, while independents disapproved 49–38%.^[79] The other poll, which concentrated on the economy, showed disapproval of Obama's handling of the economy by a 53–42% margin, with 62% saying they were dissatisfied with the handling of the federal deficit.^[80] According to a Gallup Poll released April 10, 2010, President Obama had a 45% approval rating, with 48% disapproving.^[81] In a poll from Rasmussen Reports, released April 10, 2010, 47% approved of the President's performance, while 53% disapproved.^[82][83]

2011[link]

Obama's approval rating jumped to a high following the death of Osama Bin Laden on May 2, 2011. A GfK poll conducted May 5, 2011 found his approval rating to be 60%. During the debt ceiling debate in August 2011, Obama's approval rating dropped to the low-40s.^[84]

This section requires expansion.

Major legislation[link]

2009[link]

• January 29: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
• February 4: Children's Health Insurance Reauthorization Act
• February 11: DTV Delay Act
• February 17: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
• March 30: Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009
• April 21: Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act
• May 20: Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act
• May 20: Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009
• May 22: Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act of 2009
• June 22: Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act
• August 6: Cash For Clunkers Extension Act
• October 22: Veterans Health Care Budget Reform and Transparency Act
• October 28: Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act
• October 30: Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act
• November 6: Worker, Homeownership, and Business Assistance Act of 2009

2010[link]

• January 27: Emergency Aid to American Survivors of Haiti Earthquake Act
• March 4: Travel Promotion Act
• March 18: Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (HIRE Act)
• March 23: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
• March 30: Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010
• May 5: Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2010
• May 17: Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act
• July 1: Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act
• July 21: Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
• July 22: Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2010
• July 22: Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act of 2010
• August 10: SPEECH Act
• September 27: Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010
• December 9: Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act of 2010
• December 13: Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010
• December 17: Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010
• December 22: Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010

2011[link]

• January 2: James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010 (H.R. 847)
• January 4: Food Safety and Modernization Act, Pub.L. 111-353, H.R. 2751
• August 2: Budget Control Act of 2011
• October 21: United States-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implemention Act
• October 21: United States-Panama Free Trade Agreement Implemention Act
• October 21: United States-South Korea Free Trade Agreement Implemention Act

Personnel[link]

Cabinet appointees[link]

The Obama Cabinet
Office	Name	Term
President	Barack Obama	2009–present
Vice President	Joe Biden	2009–present
Secretary of State	Hillary Clinton	2009–present
Secretary of Treasury	Timothy Geithner	2009–present
Secretary of Defense	Robert Gates*	2006–2011
	Leon Panetta	2011–present
Attorney General	Eric Holder	2009–present
Secretary of the Interior	Ken Salazar	2009–present
Secretary of Agriculture	Tom Vilsack	2009–present
Secretary of Commerce	Gary Locke	2009–2011
	John Bryson	2011–present
Secretary of Labor	Hilda Solis	2009–present
Secretary of Health and Human Services	Kathleen Sebelius	2009–present
Secretary of Education	Arne Duncan	2009–present
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development	Shaun Donovan	2009–present
Secretary of Transportation	Ray LaHood	2009–present
Secretary of Energy	Steven Chu	2009–present
Secretary of Veterans Affairs	Eric Shinseki	2009–present
Secretary of Homeland Security	Janet Napolitano	2009–present
Chief of Staff	Rahm Emanuel	2009–2010
	William Daley	2011–2012
	Jacob Lew	2012–present
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency	Lisa Jackson	2009–present
Director of the Office of Management and Budget	Peter Orszag	2009–2010
	Jacob Lew	2010–2012
	Jeffrey Zients**	2012–present
Ambassador to the United Nations	Susan Rice	2009–present
United States Trade Representative	Ron Kirk	2009–present
*Retained from previous administration **Acting

Twenty-two members of the Obama administration are either in the United States Cabinet (15) or are in positions considered to be Cabinet-level (7). The members of the Cabinet are the heads of the fifteen major departments (State, Defense, Justice, etc.), and the seven cabinet-level positions are the Vice President, White House Chief of Staff, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Trade Representative, Ambassador to the United Nations, and the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.^[85][86] Since Robert Gates was a member of the previous administration, his letter of resignation (a formality at the end of a President's term) was simply not accepted, and he did not need confirmation.^[87] On January 19, 2009, Senate Democratic leaders requested fifteen of the twenty positions to be ratified by unanimous consent,^[88] and seven gained unanimous confirmation by voice vote the next day: Ken Salazar, Steven Chu, Arne Duncan, Peter Orszag, Eric Shinseki, Tom Vilsack, and Janet Napolitano.^[87][89] On January 21, Obama presided over the swearing in of the seven unanimous nominees.^[90] Later that day, the Senate confirmed Hillary Clinton by a 94–2 vote. On January 22, several more confirmations were approved unanimously: Susan E. Rice, Ray LaHood, Lisa P. Jackson, and Shaun Donovan.^[91] On January 26, the Senate confirmed Geithner by a 60–34 margin.^[92][93]

At the conclusion of Obama's first week as President, Hilda Solis, Tom Daschle, Ron Kirk, and Eric Holder had yet to be confirmed, and there had been no second appointment for Secretary of Commerce.^[93] Holder was confirmed by a vote of 75–21 on February 2,^[94] and on February 3, Obama announced Senator Judd Gregg as his second nomination for Secretary of Commerce.^[95] Daschle withdrew later that day amid controversy over his failure to pay income taxes and potential conflicts of interest related to the speaking fees he accepted from health care interests.^[96] Solis was later confirmed by a vote of 80-17 on February 24,^[97] and Ron Kirk was confirmed on March 18 by a 92-5 vote in the Senate.^[98]

Gregg, who was the leading Republican negotiator and author of the TARP program in the Senate, after publication that he had a multi-million dollar investment in the Bank of America, on February 12, withdrew his nomination as Secretary of Commerce, citing "irresolvable conflicts" with President Obama and his staff over how to conduct the 2010 census and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.^[99][100] Former Washington governor Gary Locke was nominated on February 26^[101] as Obama's third choice for Commerce Secretary and confirmed on March 24 by voice vote.^[102]

On March 2, Obama introduced Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius as his second choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services. He also introduced Nancy-Ann DeParle as head of the new White House Office of Health Reform, which he suggested would work closely with the Department of Health and Human Services.^[103][104] At the end of March, Sebelius was the only remaining Cabinet member yet to be confirmed.^[102]

Six high-ranking cabinet nominees in the Obama administration had their confirmations delayed or rejected among reports that they did not pay all of their taxes, including Tom Daschle, Obama's original nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.^[105] Though Geithner was confirmed, and Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, thought Daschle would have been confirmed, Daschle withdrew his nomination on February 3.^[96] Obama had nominated Nancy Killefer for the position of Chief Performance Officer, but Killefer also withdrew on February 3, citing unspecified problems with District of Columbia unemployment tax.^[106] A senior administration official said that Killefer's tax issues dealt with household help.^[106] Hilda Solis, Obama's nominee for Secretary of Labor, faced delayed confirmation hearings due to tax lien concerns pertaining to her husband's auto repair business,^[107] but she was later confirmed on February 24.^[97] While pundits puzzled over U.S. Trade Representative-designate Ron Kirk's failure to be confirmed by March 2009, it was reported on March 2 that Kirk owed over $10,000 in back taxes. Kirk agreed to pay them in exchange for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus's aid in speeding up the confirmation process;^[108] he was later confirmed on March 18.^[98] On March 31, Kathleen Sebelius, Obama's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, revealed in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee that her Certified Public Accountant found errors in her tax returns for years 2005-2007. She, along with her husband, paid more than $7,000 in back taxes, along with $878 in interest.^[109]