Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Birth name	Georgia Totto O'Keeffe
Born	(1887-11-15)November 15, 1887 Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, United States
Died	March 6, 1986(1986-03-06) (aged 98)[1] Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States[1]
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Movement	American modernism
Influenced by	Arthur Wesley Dow

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist.

Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists were well known or highly celebrated. Within a decade, she had distinguished herself as one of America's most important modern artists, a position she maintained throughout her life. As a result, O’Keeffe not only carved out a significant place for women painters in an area of the American art community that had been exclusive to and is still dominated by men, but she also became one of America’s most celebrated cultural icons well before her death at age 98 in 1986.

Her abstract imagery of the 1910s and early 1920s is among the most innovative of any work produced in the period by American artists. She revolutionized the tradition of flower painting in the 1920s by making large-format paintings of enlarged blossoms, presenting them close up as if seen through a magnifying lens. In addition to this, O'Keeffe's depictions of New York buildings, most of which date from the same decade, have been recognized as among the most compelling of any paintings of the modern city. Beginning in 1929, when she first began working part of the year in Northern New Mexico—which she made her permanent home in 1949—O’Keeffe depicted subjects specific to that area. Through paintings of its unique landscape configurations, adobe churches, cultural objects, and the bones and rocks she collected from the desert floor, she ultimately laid claim to this area of the American Southwest, which earlier had been celebrated primarily by male artists; the area around where she worked and lived has become known as “O’Keeffe Country."

Early life[link]

Georgia O'Keeffe as a teaching assistant to Alon Bement at the University of Virginia in 1915

Georgia O'Keeffe was born November 15, 1887, in a farmhouse near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.^[2][3] Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe and Ida (Totto) O'Keeffe, were dairy farmers. Her father was of Irish descent. Ida Totto's father, George Victor Totto, for whom Georgia O'Keeffe was named, was a Hungarian count who came to America in 1848.^[4]

Georgia was the second of seven O'Keeffe children, and the first daughter. O'Keeffe attended Town Hall School in Sun Prairie. By age ten she had decided to become an artist,^[5] and she and her sister received art instruction from local watercolorist Sara Mann. O'Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin, as a boarder between 1901 and 1902. In Fall 1902 the O'Keeffes moved from Wisconsin to the close-knit neighborhood of Peacock Hill in Williamsburg, Virginia. Georgia stayed in Wisconsin with her aunt and attended Madison High School, then joined her family in Virginia in 1903. She completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia (now Chatham Hall), and graduated in 1905.

O'Keeffe studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906.^[5] In 1907, she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied under William Merritt Chase. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot. ^[6] Her prize was a scholarship to attend the League's outdoor summer school at Lake George, New York. While in the city in 1908, O'Keeffe attended an exhibition of Rodin's watercolors at the 291, owned by her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

O'Keeffe abandoned the idea of pursuing a career as an artist in the fall of 1908, claiming that she could never distinguish herself as an artist within the mimetic tradition, which had formed the basis of her art training.^[5] She took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist. She did not paint for four years,^[5] and said that the smell of turpentine made her sick. She was inspired to paint again in 1912, when she attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School, where she was introduced to the innovative ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow by Alon Bement.^[5] Dow encouraged artists to express themselves using line, color, and shading harmoniously. From 1912-14, she taught art in the public schools in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle.^[7] She attended Teachers College of Columbia University from 1914–15, where she took classes from Dow, who greatly influenced O'Keeffe's thinking about the process of making art.^[5] She served as a teaching assistant to Bement during the summer from 1913–16 and taught at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina in the fall of 1915, where she completed a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions. After further course work at Columbia in the spring of 1916 and summer teaching for Bement, she took a job as head of the art department at West Texas State Normal College from fall 1916 to February 1918, the fledgling West Texas A&M University in Canyon just south of Amarillo. While there, she often visited the Palo Duro Canyon, making its forms a subject in her work.^[8]

New York[link]

Early in 1916, Anita Pollitzer took some of the charcoal drawings O'Keeffe had made in the fall of 1915, which she had mailed to Pollitzer from South Carolina, to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery. He told Pollitzer that the drawings were the "purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while", and that he would like to show them. O'Keeffe had first visited 291 in 1908, but did not speak with Stieglitz then, although she came to have high regard for him and to know him in the spring of 1916, when she was in New York at Teachers College. In April 1916, he exhibited ten of her drawings at 291.^[5] Although O'Keeffe knew that Stieglitz was planning to exhibit her work, he had not told her when, and she was surprised to learn that her work was on view; she confronted Stieglitz over the drawings but agreed to let them remain on exhibit. Stieglitz organized O'Keeffe's first solo show at 291 in April 1917,^[5] which included oil paintings and watercolors completed in Texas.

Stieglitz and O'Keeffe corresponded frequently beginning in 1916, and in June 1918, she accepted Stieglitz's invitation to move to New York to devote all of her time to her work. The two were deeply in love, and shortly after her arrival, they began living together, even though the then married Stieglitz was 23 years her senior. That year Stieglitz first took O'Keeffe to his family home at the village of Lake George in New York's Adirondack Mountains, and they spent part of every year there until 1929, when O'Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico. In 1924 Stieglitz's divorce was finally approved by a judge, and within four months he and O'Keeffe married. It was a small, private ceremony at Marin's house, and afterward the couple went back home. There was no reception, festivities or honeymoon. O'Keeffe said later that they married in order to help soothe the troubles of Stieglitz's daughter Kitty, who at that time was being treated in a sanatorium for depression and hallucinations. The marriage did not seem to have any immediate effect on either Stieglitz or O'Keeffe; they both continued working on their individual projects as they had before. For the rest of their lives together, their relationship was, as biographer Benita Eisler characterized it, "a collusion ... a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O'Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union."

Alfred Stieglitz photograph of O'Keeffe. New York City, 1918

Stieglitz started photographing O'Keeffe when she visited him in New York to see her 1917 exhibition. By 1937, when he retired from photography, he had made more than 350 portraits of her. Most of the more erotic photographs were made in the 1910s and early 1920s. In February 1921, forty-five of Stieglitz's photographs, including many of O'Keeffe, some of which depicted her in the nude, were exhibited in a retrospective exhibition at the Anderson Galleries that created a public sensation.^{[citation needed]}

Blue and Green Music, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1921

Beginning in 1918, O'Keeffe came to know the many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz's circle of artists, including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Paul Strand and Edward Steichen. Strand's photography, as well as that of Stieglitz and his many photographer friends, inspired O'Keeffe's work. Soon after 1918, O'Keeffe began working primarily in oil, a shift away from having worked primarily in watercolor in the earlier 1910s. By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe began making large-scale paintings of natural forms at close range, as if seen through a magnifying lens. In 1924 she painted her first large-scale flower painting Petunia, No. 2, which was first exhibited in 1925. She also completed a significant body of paintings of New York buildings, such as City Night and New York—Night, 1926, and Radiator Bldg—Night, New York, 1927.

O'Keeffe turned to working more representationally in the 1920s in an effort to move her critics away from Freudian interpretations. Her earlier work had been mostly abstract, but works such as Black Iris III (1926) evoke a veiled representation of female genitalia while also accurately depicting the center of an iris. Moreover, the centers of flowers are androgynous and can hardly be understood exclusively as feminine. O'Keeffe consistently denied the validity of Freudian interpretations of her art, but fifty years after it had first been interpreted in that way, many prominent feminist artists assessed her work similarly -- in essential terms -- such as Judy Chicago, who gave O'Keeffe a prominent place in her The Dinner Party. Although 1970s feminists celebrated O'Keeffe as the originator of "female iconography", O'Keeffe rejected their celebration of her work and refused to cooperate with any of their projects. What they were saying sounded too much to her like what the men had written about it in the 1910s and 1920s and overlooked the larger issue: that her paintings reveal vital parallels between animate and highly sensual forces in nature and humans.

In 1922, the New York Sun published an article quoting O'Keeffe: "It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things."^[9] Inspired by Precisionism, The Green Apple, completed in 1922, depicts her notion of simple, meaningful life.^[9]

Beginning in 1923, Stieglitz organized annual exhibitions of O'Keeffe's work. By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe had become known as one of the most important American artists. Her work commanded high prices; in 1928, Stieglitz masterminded a sale of six of her calla lily paintings for US$25,000, which was the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist. Though the sale fell through, Stieglitz's promotion of the potential sale drew extensive media attention.

Hawaii[link]

In 1938, the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son approached O'Keeffe about creating two paintings for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company) to use in their advertising.^[10] Other artists who produced paintings of Hawaii for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company’s advertising include Lloyd Sexton, Jr., Millard Sheets, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Miguel Covarrubias.^[11] She arrived in Honolulu February 8, 1939, aboard the SS Lurline, and spent nine weeks in Oahu, Maui, Kauai, and the island of Hawaii. She painted flowers, landscapes, and traditional Hawaiian fishhooks. However, she did not paint the requested pineapple until after the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sent a plant to her New York studio.^[12]

New Mexico[link]

By 1929, O'Keeffe acted on her increasing need to find a new source of inspiration for her work and to escape summers at Lake George, where she was surrounded by the Stieglitz family and their friends. O'Keeffe had considered finding a studio separate from Lake George in upstate New York and had also thought about spending the summer in Europe, but opted instead to travel to Santa Fe, with her friend Rebecca Strand. The two set out by train in May, 1929 and soon after their arrival, Mabel Dodge Luhan moved them to her house in Taos and provided them with studios. O'Keeffe went on many pack trips exploring the rugged mountains and deserts of the region that summer and later visited the nearby D. H. Lawrence Ranch, where she completed her now famous oil painting, The Lawrence Tree, currently owned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut."^[13]

While in Taos in 1929, O'Keeffe visited and and painted the nearby historical San Francisco de Asis Mission Church at Ranchos de Taos. She made several paintings of the church, as had many artists, and her painting of a fragment of it silhouetted against the sky captured it in a different way.^[14]

Between 1929 and 1949, O'Keeffe spent part of nearly every year working in New Mexico. She collected rocks and bones from the desert floor and made them and the distinctive architectural and landscape forms of the area subjects in her work. She also went on several camping trips with friends, visiting important sites in the Southwest, and in 1961, she and others, including photographers Eliot Porter and Todd Webb, went on a rafting trip down the Colorado River about Glen Canyon, Utah.^[14]

Late in 1932, O'Keeffe suffered a nervous breakdown that was brought on, in part, because she was unable to complete a Radio City Music Hall mural project that had fallen behind schedule. She was hospitalized in early 1933 and did not paint again until January 1934. In the spring of 1933 and 1934, O'Keeffe recuperated in Bermuda, and she returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1934. In August of that year, she visited Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiu, for the first time and decided immediately to live there; in 1940, she purchased a house on the ranch property. The varicolored cliffs of Ghost Ranch inspired some of her most famous landscapes. In 1977, O'Keeffe wrote: "[the] cliffs over there are almost painted for you -- you think -- until you try to paint them."^[14] Among guests to visit her at the ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet Allen Ginsberg, and photographer Ansel Adams.

Known as a loner, O'Keeffe explored the land she loved often in her Ford Model A, which she purchased and learned to drive in 1929. She often talked about her fondness for Ghost Ranch and Northern New Mexico, as in 1943, when she explained: "Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the 'Faraway'. It is a place I have painted before . . . even now I must do it again."^[14]

In the 1930s and 1940s, O'Keeffe's reputation and popularity continued to grow, earning her numerous commissions. Her work was included in exhibitions in and around New York. She completed Summer Days, a painting featuring a deer's skull adorned with various wildflowers, against a desert background in 1936, and it became one of her most famous and well-known works. During the 1940s O'Keeffe had two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943), and the second in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Manhattan, the first retrospective MOMA held for a woman artist. O'Keeffe enjoyed many accolades and honorary degrees from numerous universities. In the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work.

O'Keeffe's "White Place," the Plaza Blanca cliffs and badlands near Abiquiu.

As early as 1936, O'Keeffe developed an intense interest in what is called the "Black Place", which was about 150 miles west of her Ghost Ranch house, and she made an extensive series of paintings of this site in the 1940s. She traveled and camped there often with her friend, Maria Chabot, and in 1945 with Eliot Porter as well as in subsequent years,^[15] 1959, and 1977. O'Keeffe said that the Black Place resembled "a mile of elephants with gray hills and white sand at their feet."^[14] At times the wind was so strong when she was painting there that she had trouble keeping her canvas on the easel. When the heat from the sun became intense, she crawled under her car for shade. The Black Place still remains remote and uninhabited.

She also made paintings of the "White Place", a white rock formation located near her Abiquiu house. In 1945, O'Keeffe bought a second house, an abandoned hacienda^[16] in Abiquiu, some 18 miles (26 km) south of Ghost Ranch.^[16] The Abiquiu house was renovated through 1949 by Chabot.

Cerro Pedernal, viewed from Ghost Ranch. This was a favorite subject for O'Keeffe, who once said, "I painted it often enough thinking that, if I did so, God would give it to me." ^[17]

Shortly after O'Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis. She immediately flew to New York to be with him. He died on July 13, 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George. She spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate, and moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949. From 1946 through the 1950s, she made the architectural forms of her Abiquiu house — patio wall and door — subjects in her work. Another distinctive painting of the decade was Ladder to the Moon, 1958. From her first world travels in the late 1950s, O'Keeffe produced an extensive series of paintings of clouds, such as Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963. These were inspired by her views from the windows of airplanes. Below is an external link to a color image of one of these aerial cloudscape canvases.

O'Keeffe met photographer Todd Webb in the 1940s, and after his move to New Mexico in 1961, he often made photographs of her, as did numerous other important American photographers, who consistently presented O'Keeffe as a "loner, a severe figure and self-made person."^[18] While O'Keeffe was known to have a "prickly personality", Webb's photographs portray her with a kind of "quietness and calm" suggesting a relaxed friendship, and revealing new contours of O'Keeffe's character.^[19]

In 1962, O'Keeffe was elected to the fifty-member American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966.^[20] In the fall of 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the Georgia O'Keeffe Retrospective Exhibition, the first retrospective exhibition of her work in New York since 1946, the year Stieglitz died. This exhibit did much to revive her public career.

Later years and death[link]

In 1972, O'Keeffe's eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration, leading to the loss of central vision and leaving her with only peripheral vision. She stopped oil painting without assistance in 1972, but continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984.^[21] Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her ranch house in 1973 looking for work. She hired him for a few odd jobs and soon employed him full time. He became her closest confidante, companion, and business manager until her death. Hamilton taught O'Keeffe to work with clay, and working with assistance, she produced clay pots and a series of works in watercolor. In 1976, she wrote a book about her art and allowed a film to be made about her in 1977. On January 10, 1977, President Gerald R. Ford presented O'Keeffe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to American citizens.^[22] In 1985, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

O'Keeffe became increasingly frail in her late 90s. She moved to Santa Fe in 1984, where she died on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. In accordance with her wishes, her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered to the wind at the top of Pedernal Mountain, over her beloved "faraway".

Legacy[link]

Following O'Keeffe's death, her family contested her will because codicils made to it in the 1980s had left all of her estate to Hamilton. The case was ultimately settled out of court in July 1987.^[23] The case became famous as case law in estate planning.^[24][25] A substantial part of her estate's assets were transferred to the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, which dissolved in 2006, leaving these assets to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, established in Santa Fe in 1997 to perpetuate O'Keeffe's artistic legacy. These assets included a large body of her work, photographs, archival materials, and her Abiquiu house, library, and property. The Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiu was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998 and is now owned by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

In 2006, a fossilized species of archosaur was named after O'Keeffe. Blocks originally quarried in 1947 and 1948 near O'Keeffe's home at Ghost Ranch were opened fifty years after being collected. The fossil strongly resembles ornithomimid dinosaurs, but are actually more closely related to crocodiles. The specimen was named Effigia okeeffeae ("O'Keeffe's Ghost") in January 2006, "in honor of Georgia O'Keeffe for her numerous paintings of the badlands at Ghost Ranch and her interest in the Coelophysis Quarry when it was discovered".^[26]

In 1991, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired the American Playhouse production A Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, starring Jane Alexander as Georgia O'Keeffe and Christopher Plummer as Alfred Stieglitz. Lifetime Television produced a biopic of Georgia O'Keeffe premiering on September 19, 2009, starring Joan Allen as O’Keeffe, Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz, Henry Simmons as Jean Toomer, Ed Begley, Jr. as Stieglitz's brother Lee, and Tyne Daly as Mabel Dodge Luhan.^[27][28]

A new exhibit of O'Keeffe's works at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which emphasizes her lesser-known abstract works, was on view from May 2010.^[29][30]

Writings[link]

• O’Keeffe, Georgia, Georgia O’Keeffe, New York: Viking Press, 1976. ISBN 0-670-33710-2
• O'Keeffe, Georgia, Some Memories of Drawings, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-8263-1113-9
• Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O'Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer (ed C.Giboire).Touchstone Books 1990 ISBN 978-0-671-69236-0
• Giboire, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O'Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. ISBN 978-0-671-69237-2
• Greenough, Sarah, ed. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933. Annotated edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-300-16630-9

See also[link]

• Georgia O'Keeffe Cooperative House
• Georgia O'Keeffe Middle School

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. About Georgia O'Keeffe
• Haskell, Barbara, Barbara Buhler Lynes, et al., 2009. Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction'. New Haven, ISBN 978-0-300-14817-6
• Lynes, Barbara Buhler, 2007. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections. New York. ISBN 978-0-8109-0957-1
• Lynes, Barbara Buhler, Georgia O'Keeffe. Encyclopædia Britannica online
• Lynes, Barbara Buhler, 1999. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, London. ISBN 0-300-08176-6
• Merrill, C.S., 2010. Weekends with O'Keeffe, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. ISBN 978-0-8263-4928-6
• Messinger, Lisa Mintz, 2001. Georgia O'Keeffe, Thames & Hudson, London. ISBN 0-500-20340-7
• O'Keeffe,Georgia, "The Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz," American Playhouse, PBS, 1991
• Patten, Christine Taylor and Alvaro Cardona-Hine, 1992. Miss O'Keefe, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press.
• Robinson, Roxana, 2000. O'Keeffe, Georgia. American National Biography Online
• Robinson, Roxana, 1990. Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, Bloomsbury, London. ISBN 0-7475-0557-8
• Saville, Jennifer, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paintings of Hawai'i, Honolulu, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1990, ISBN 0-937426-11-3

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Georgia O'Keeffe

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Georgia O'Keeffe

• Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

• Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections Online

• Georgia O'Keeffe at the Museum of Modern Art
• Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University
• Color image of aerial-view cloudscape by Georgia O'Keeffe
• Documentary Film, Georgia O'Keeffe
• Georgia O'Keeffe at Find a Grave
• Georgia O'Keeffe Gallery at MuseumSyndicate
• Works by or about Georgia O'Keeffe in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Lifetime Honors - National Medal of Arts.
• The Apple (1920–1922) Phoenix Art Museum
• Pink Abstraction (1929) Phoenix Art Museum

Jeremy Irons
Irons at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival
Born	Jeremy John Irons (1948-09-19) 19 September 1948 (age 63) Cowes, Isle of Wight, England
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1971–present
Spouse	Julie Hallam (1969) Sinéad Cusack (1978–present)
Children	Samuel, Max

Jeremy John Irons (born 19 September 1948) is an English actor. After receiving classical training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Irons began his acting career on stage in 1969, and has since appeared in many London theatre productions including The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Godspell and Richard II. In 1984, he made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and received a Tony Award for Best Actor.

Irons's first major film role came in the 1981 romantic drama The French Lieutenant's Woman, for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor. After starring in such films as Moonlighting (1982), Betrayal (1983), and The Mission (1986), he gained critical acclaim for portraying twin gynaecologists in David Cronenberg's psychological thriller Dead Ringers (1988). In 1990, Irons played accused murderer Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, and took home multiple awards including an Academy Award for Best Actor. Other notable films have included The House of the Spirits (1993), The Lion King (1994), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Lolita (1997), The Merchant of Venice (2004), Being Julia (2004), Appaloosa (2008), and Margin Call (2011).

Irons has also made several notable appearances on TV. He earned his first Golden Globe Award nomination for his breakout role in the ITV series Brideshead Revisited (1981). In 2006, Irons starred opposite Helen Mirren in the historical miniseries Elizabeth I, for which he received a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Since 2011, he has been starring in the Showtime historical series The Borgias.

In October 2011, he was nominated Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Early life[link]

Irons was born in Cowes, Isle of Wight, the son of Barbara Anne Brereton Brymer (Born Sharpe; 1914–1999), a housewife, and Paul Dugan Irons (1913–1983), an accountant.^[1] His Dundee-born paternal great-great-grandfather was one of the first Metropolitan Policemen, and later a chartist; one of his mother's ancestors had been from County Cork, Ireland and had invented the breakdancing move more commonly known as "the worm" (where Irons lives now).^[2] Irons has a brother, Christopher (born 1943), and a sister, Felicity Anne (born 1944). He was educated at the independent Sherborne School in Dorset, (c. 1962–66). He was the drummer and harmonica player (including a rendition of "Stairway to Heaven" on harmonica) in a four-man school band called the Four Pillars of Wisdom. They performed, in a classroom normally used as a physics lab, for the entertainment of boys compulsorily exiled from their houses for two hours on Sunday afternoons. He was also known within Abbey House as half of a comic duo performing skits on Halloween and at end-of-term House Suppers.

Acting career[link]

Irons trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and is now president of its fundraising appeal. He performed a number of plays, and busked on the streets of Bristol, before appearing on the London stage as John the Baptist and Judas opposite David Essex in Godspell, which opened at the Roundhouse on 17 November 1971 before transferring to Wyndham's Theatre playing a total of 1,128 performances.^[3]

Irons was bestowed an Honorary-Life Membership by the University College Dublin Law Society in September 2008, in honour of his contribution to television, film, audio, music and theatre.^[4][5]

Television[link]

He made several appearances on British television, including the children's television series Play Away and as Franz Liszt in the BBC 1974 series Notorious Woman. More significantly he starred in the 13-part adaptation of H.E. Bates' novel Love for Lydia for London Weekend Television (1977), and attracted attention for his key role as the pipe-smoking German student, a romantic pairing with Judi Dench in Harold Pinter's screenplay adaptation of Aidan Higgins' novel Langrishe, Go Down for BBC television (1978).

The role which brought him fame was that of Charles Ryder in the television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1981). Brideshead reunited him with Anthony Andrews, with whom he had appeared in The Pallisers seven years earlier. In the same year he starred in the film The French Lieutenant's Woman opposite Meryl Streep.

Almost as a 'lap of honour' after these major successes, in 1982 he played the leading role of an exiled Polish building contractor, working in the Twickenham area of South West London, in Jerzy Skolimowski's independent film Moonlighting, widely seen on television, a performance which extended his acting range.

In 2005, Irons won both an Emmy award and a Golden Globe award for his supporting role in the TV mini-series, Elizabeth I. A year later Irons was one of the participants in the third series of the BBC documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?^[6][7] In 2008 he played Lord Vetinari in Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic, an adaptation for Sky One.

On 6 November 2008, TV Guide reported he would star as photographer Alfred Stieglitz with Joan Allen as painter Georgia O'Keeffe, in a Lifetime Television O'Keeffe biopic.^[8] Irons also appeared in the documentary for Irish television channel TG4, Faoi Lan Cheoil in which he learned to play the fiddle.

On 12 January 2011, Irons was a guest-star in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit called "Mask". He played Dr. Cap Jackson, a sex therapist.^[9] He reprised the role on an episode titled "Totem" that ran on 30 March 2011.

Irons stars in the 2011 U.S. premium cable network Showtime's series The Borgias, a highly fictionalized account of the Renaissance dynasty of that name. Irons portrays patriarch Rodrigo Borgia, better known to history as Pope Alexander VI.^[10]

Film[link]

Irons made his film debut in Nijinsky in 1980. He appeared sporadically in films during the 1980s, including the Cannes Palme d'Or winner The Mission in 1986, and in the dual role of twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers in 1988. Other films include Danny the Champion of the World (1989), Reversal of Fortune (1990), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, Kafka (1991), Damage (1993), M. Butterfly (1993), The House of the Spirits (1993) appearing again with Glenn Close and Meryl Streep, Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) co-starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (1996), the 1997 remake of Lolita and as the musketeer Aramis opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1998 film version of The Man in the Iron Mask.

Other roles include the evil wizard Profion in the film Dungeons and Dragons (2000) and Rupert Gould in Longitude (2000). He played the Über-Morlock from the movie The Time Machine (2002). In 2004, Irons played Severus Snape in Comic Relief's Harry Potter parody, "Harry Potter and the Secret Chamberpot of Azerbaijan".

In 2005, he appeared in the films Casanova opposite Heath Ledger, and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. He has co-starred with John Malkovich in two movies; The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) and Eragon (2006), though they did not have any scenes together in Eragon.

In 2008, Irons co-starred with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen in Appaloosa, directed by Harris. In 2011, Irons appeared alongside Kevin Spacey in the thriller Margin Call.^[11]

Theatre[link]

Irons has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company three times in 1976, 1986–87 and 2010.^[12][13] In 1984, Irons made his New York debut and won a Tony Award for his Broadway performance opposite Glenn Close in The Real Thing.

After an absence from the London stage for 18 years, in 2006 he co-starred with Patrick Malahide in Christopher Hampton's stage adaptation of Sándor Márai's novel Embers at the Duke of York's Theatre.^[14]

He made his National Theatre debut playing Harold Macmillan in Never So Good, a new play by Howard Brenton which opened at the Lyttelton on 19 March 2008.^[15][16]

In 2009 Irons appeared on Broadway opposite Joan Allen in the play Impressionism.^[17] The play ran through 10 May 2009 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.^[17]

Other ventures[link]

Audio[link]

Irons read the audio book recording of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, the audio book recording of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (he had also appeared in the 1997 film version of the novel), and the audio book James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl.

One of his best known film roles has turned out to be lending his distinctive voice to the villain Scar in The Lion King (1994). Irons has since provided voiceovers for three Disney World attractions. He narrated the Spaceship Earth ride, housed in the large geodesic globe at Epcot, from November 1994 to July 2007. He was also the English narrator for the Studio Tram Tour: Behind the Magic at the Walt Disney Studios Park at Disneyland Paris. He also voiced H.G. Wells in the English version of the former Disney attraction The Timekeeper. He also played Scar in Fantasmic.

He is also one of the readers in the 4x CD boxed set of The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, produced by Marc Sinden and sold in aid of the Royal Theatrical Fund.^[18][19]

He was originally to star as the Phantom in a 2006 French musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera, though the project was canceled.^{[citation needed]} He will be the narrator for Val Kilmer and Bill Pullman's brand-new Lewis and Clark movie from Revolution Studios.^{[citation needed]}

He serves as the English-language version of the audio guide for Westminster Abbey in London.

Irons has served as voice-over in two big cat documentary films by National Geographic: Eye of the Leopard, which was released in 2006,^[20] and The Last Lions, which is a 2011 motion-picture, released on 18 February.^[21]

Music[link]

In 1985, Irons directed a music video for Carly Simon and her heavily promoted single, "Tired of Being Blonde". Although the song was not a hit, the video —featuring the fast cutting, parallel narratives and heavy use of stylized visual effects that were a staple of pop videos at the time— received ample attention on MTV and other outlets.

In 1994 Jeremy Irons had a cameo role in the video for Elastica's hit single "Connection". Irons was one of the many naked men sitting down around Elastica as they performed the song. Irons has since claimed that this three-minute slice of nudity was his most enjoyable work to date.

Irons has contributed to other musical performances, recording William Walton's Façade with Dame Peggy Ashcroft, and in 1987 the songs from Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, released on the Decca label.

He sang a selection of Noël Coward at the 1999 Last Night of the Proms in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Coward's birth.

In 2003 he played Fredrik Egerman in a New York revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, and two years later appeared as King Arthur in Lerner and Loewe's Camelot at the Hollywood Bowl.

Jeremy Irons also sang the song "Be Prepared" in the movie The Lion King. However, he actually sang only a section of the song after having vocal problems; Jim Cummings finished the last few lines.

Irons performed the Bob Dylan song "Make You Feel My Love" on the 2006 charity album Unexpected Dreams – Songs From the Stars.

In 2009 Irons appeared on the Touchstone album Wintercoast, recording a narrative introduction to the album.^[22] Recording took place in New York City in February 2009 during rehearsals for his Broadway play Impressionism.

Personal life[link]

Irons married Irish actress Sinéad Cusack in March 1978. They have two sons, Samuel James Brefni Irons (16 September 1978), who works as a photographer, and Maximilian Paul Diarmuid Irons (17 October 1985), also an actor, who appeared in the 2006 Burberry fashion campaign^{[citation needed]} and Red Riding Hood. Both of Irons' sons have appeared in films with their father – Sam as the eponymous hero in Danny, Champion of the World and Max in Being Julia. Irons' wife and children are Catholic; of himself, he has stated, "I don’t go to church much because I don’t like belonging to a club, and I don’t go to confession or anything like that, I don’t believe in it. But I try to be aware of where I fail and I occasionally go to services. I would hate to be a person who didn’t have a spiritual side because there’s nothing to nourish you in life apart from retail therapy."^[23]

He has been the patron since 2002 of the Thomley Activity Centre,^[24] an Oxfordshire non-profit activity centre for disabled children. The charity is near his Watlington, Oxfordshire home. Irons owns Kilcoe Castle (which he had painted a rusty pink) in County Cork, Ireland, and has become involved in local politics there. He also has another Irish residence in The Liberties, Dublin. Irons is a patron of the Chiltern Shakespeare Company.^[25] He is a fan of English football club Portsmouth.^[26]

Activism[link]

Charity work[link]

At the 1991 Tony Awards, Irons was one of the few celebrities to wear the recently created red ribbon to support the fight against AIDS, and he was the first celebrity to wear it onscreen.^[27][28] He supports a number of other charities, including The Prison Phoenix Trust, of which he is an active patron.^[29]

Politics[link]

In 1998, Irons and his wife were named in the list of the biggest private financial donors to the Labour Party, a year after their return to government after 18 years in opposition.^[30] In 2004, he publicly declared his support for the Countryside Alliance, referring to the hunting ban as an "outrageous assault on civil liberties".^[31]

In 2010, Irons starred in a promotional video^[32] for “The 1billionhungry project” – a worldwide drive to attract at least one million signatures to a petition calling on international leaders to move hunger to the top of the political agenda.^[33]

Alternative medicine[link]

He has been criticised in the British Medical Journal for his fundraising activities in support of The College of Medicine, an alternative medicine lobby group in the UK linked to Prince Charles.^[34]

Work[link]

Theatre[link]

Following training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre school Irons initially stayed with the company:

• Florizel in The Winter's Tale, Bristol Old Vic 1969
• Simon in Hay Fever (Noël Coward) Bristol Old Vic 1969
• Nick in What the Butler Saw (Joe Orton) Bristol Old Vic 1969
• Major Barbara (Shaw) Bristol Old Vic 1969
• A Servant of Two Masters (Carlo Goldoni) Bristol Old Vic 1969
• Macbeth, Bristol Old Vic 1969
• The Boy Friend (Sandy Wilson) Bristol Old Vic 1969
• As You Like It, Bristol Old Vic 1970
• Oh! What a Lovely War, Little Theatre Bristol 1970
• The School for Scandal (Sheridan) Little Theatre Bristol 1970
• John/Judas in Godspell, Roundhouse and Wyndham's Theatre, November 1971–1973
• The Madman in The Diary of a Madman (Gogol), Act Inn 1973
• Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing, Young Vic
• Mick in The Caretaker (Pinter) Young Vic 1974
• Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, New Shakespeare Company, Roundhouse 1975
• Harry Thunder in Wild Oats (John O'Keefe) RSC Aldwych Theatre, December 1976; RSC Stratford and Piccadilly Theatre 1977
• Jameson in The Rear Column (Simon Gray), Globe Theatre, February 1978 – Clarence Derwent Award
• Henry in The Real Thing (Tom Stoppard) New York 1984 —Tony Award for Best Actor
• Leontes in The Winter's Tale, Royal Shakespeare Theatre Stratford 1986)
• Willmore in The Rover (Aphra Behn) RSC Swan Theatre and Mermaid Theatre 1986
• Richard II in Richard II, RSC Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1986, Barbican Theatre 1987
• Fredrik Egerman in A Little Night Music (Sondheim) New York, 2003
• Russell in Celebration, a Pinter staged reading, Gate Theatre, Dublin/Albery Theatre, 2005
• Henrik in Embers (Christopher Hampton/Sándor Márai novel) Duke of York's Theatre March 2006
• Harold Macmillan in Never So Good (Howard Brenton) National Theatre Lyttelton, March 2008
• Thomas Buckle in Impressionism (Michael Jacobs) Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre Broadway, March 2009

Filmography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jeremy Irons

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jeremy Irons

• Jeremy Irons at the Internet Broadway Database
• Jeremy Irons at the Internet Movie Database
• Jeremy Irons at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Jeremy Irons Profile by The Daily Telegraph (13 March 2008)

Dan Fogelberg
Fogelberg in 1974.
Background information
Birth name	Daniel Grayling Fogelberg
Born	(1951-08-13)August 13, 1951 Peoria, Illinois, U.S.
Died	December 16, 2007(2007-12-16) (aged 56) Deer Isle, Maine, U.S.
Genres	Rock, folk rock, soft rock
Occupations	Musician
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, bass, piano, mandolin
Years active	1968–2007
Labels	Columbia, Epic, Giant, Mailboat
Associated acts	Fools Gold, Tim Weisberg
Website	danfogelberg.com

Daniel Grayling "Dan" Fogelberg (August 13, 1951 – December 16, 2007) was an American singer-songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist, whose music was inspired by sources as diverse as folk, pop, rock, classical, jazz, and bluegrass music. He is best known for his 1980 hit "Longer" and his 1981 hit "Leader of the Band".

Early life and family[link]

Dan Fogelberg, the youngest of three sons, was born in Peoria, Illinois, the son of Margaret (née Irvine), a classically trained pianist, and Lawrence Peter Fogelberg, a high school band director, who spent most of his career at Peoria's Woodruff High School and Pekin High School.^[1] Dan Fogelberg's mother was a Scottish immigrant, and his father was of Swedish descent.^[2] His father would later be the inspiration for the song, "Leader of the Band". Using a Mel Bay course book, Dan taught himself to play a Hawaiian slide guitar that his grandfather gave to him; he also learned to play the piano. At age 14 he joined a band, The Clan, which covered The Beatles. His second band was another cover combo, The Coachmen, who in 1967 released two singles, written by Fogelberg, on Ledger Records: "Maybe Time Will Let Me Forget" and "Don't Want To Lose Her."

Early musical career[link]

After graduating from Woodruff High School in 1969, Fogelberg studied theater arts and painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while playing in local campus venues with the folk-rock band, "The Ship".^[3] He began performing as a solo acoustic player in area coffeehouses, including the Red Herring Coffeehouse, where he made his first solo recordings as part of a folk festival recording in 1971. He was discovered that year by Irving Azoff. Fogelberg and Azoff—who started his music-management career promoting another Champaign-Urbana act, REO Speedwagon—moved to California to seek their fortunes. Azoff sent Fogelberg to Nashville to hone his skills, where he became a session musician and recorded his first album, with producer Norbert Putnam. In 1972, Fogelberg released his debut album Home Free to lukewarm response. He performed as an opening act for Van Morrison. Fogelberg's second effort was much more successful—the 1974 Joe Walsh–produced album Souvenirs and its song "Part of the Plan" became Fogelberg's first hit.

Marriages[link]

Fogelberg was married three times: to Maggie Slaymaker, a dancer from Nashville, from 1982–1985; to Anastasia Savage, a nurse and artist from Louisiana, from 1991–1996; and to musician Jean Marie Mayer, from April 7, 2002 until his death in late 2007.^[4][5][6] He had no children by any of his marriages.

Musical career[link]

After Souvenirs, Fogelberg released a string of gold and platinum albums, including Captured Angel (1975) and Nether Lands (1977), and found commercial success with songs such as "The Power of Gold." His 1978 Twin Sons of Different Mothers was the first of two collaborations with jazz flutist Tim Weisberg. 1979's Phoenix reached the Top 10, with "Longer" becoming a #2 pop hit (and wedding standard) in 1980. The track peaked at #59 in the UK Singles Chart - his sole entry in that listing.^[7] The album reached #42 in the UK Albums Chart, likewise Fogelberg's only entry there.^[7] This was followed by a Top 20 hit "Heart Hotels."

The Innocent Age, released in October 1981, was Fogelberg's critical and commercial peak. This double-album song cycle included four of his biggest hits: "Leader of the Band," "Hard to Say," "Run for the Roses," and "Same Old Lang Syne," based on a real-life accidental meeting with a former girlfriend. Fogelberg drew inspiration for The Innocent Age from Thomas Wolfe's novel Of Time and the River. A 1982 greatest hits album contained two new songs, both of which were released as singles: "Missing You" and "Make Love Stay." In 1984, he released the album Windows and Walls, containing the singles "The Language of Love" and "Believe in Me".

Fogelberg released High Country Snows in 1985. Recorded in Nashville, it showcased his, and some of the industry's best, talent in the bluegrass genre. Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Doc Watson, Jerry Douglas, David Grisman, Chris Hillman, and Herb Pedersen were among those who contributed to the record. In a world he defined as "life in the fast lane," Fogelberg described the music as "life in the off-ramp." In late 1985, Fogelberg switched gears and took to the road with a group of musician friends, including Joe Vitale and Rick Rosas, playing blues in small clubs throughout Colorado as Frankie and the Aliens, covering songs by Cream and Muddy Waters, among others.^[8] 1987 heralded a return to rock with Exiles, an album that contained a song, "What You're Doing," a throwback to the old Stax Records sound made famous in Memphis during the 1960s. While touring in New England early in 1988, he came across an issue of Nine-O-One Network Magazine, which was published in Memphis, and he called the publisher, James L. Dickerson, and an interview resulted that landed him on the cover of the April 1988 issue. Known for his many relationship songs, he confessed that he hadn't had a lot of relationships and wrote based on his observations of other people's relationships.

River of Souls, released in 1993, was Fogelberg's last studio album for Sony Records. In 1997, Portrait encompassed his career with four discs, each highlighting a different facet of his music: "Ballads," "Rock and Roll," "Tales and Travels", and "Hits." In 1999, he released a Christmas album, with his release of First Christmas Morning, and in 2003, Full Circle showcased a return to the folk-influenced 1970s soft rock style of music.

Final years[link]

In May 2004, Fogelberg was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He underwent therapy and achieved a partial remission, which did not eliminate his cancer but reduced it and stopped its spread. On August 13, 2005, his 54th birthday, Fogelberg announced the success of his cancer treatments. He said that he had no immediate plans to return to making music but was keeping his options open. After battling prostate cancer for three and a half years, Fogelberg succumbed to the disease at the age of 56, on December 16, 2007, at his home in Deer Isle, Maine with wife Jean by his side.^[9]

Soon after his death, his widow announced that a song written and recorded for her by Fogelberg for Valentine's Day 2005, "Sometimes a Song", would be sold on the Internet and that all proceeds would go to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. The song was released on Valentine's Day 2008 and was also included in a collection of eleven previously unpublished songs (nine originals) on a CD released in September 2009 titled Love In Time.^[10]

In tribute to Fogelberg and the entire Fogelberg family, the city of Peoria renamed Abington Street in the city's East Bluff neighborhood "Fogelberg Parkway". The street runs along the east side of Woodruff High School, Fogelberg's alma mater, and where his father was a teacher and bandleader. "Fogelberg Parkway" ends at the intersection of N. Prospect and Frye, which is the location of the convenience store where Fogelberg ran into his old high school sweetheart one Christmas Eve, a chance encounter made famous in the song "Same Old Lang Syne"^[9]

In the fall of 2009, the Peoria City Council granted permission to a group of Dan Fogelberg fans to begin fund-raising efforts to create a permanent memorial to Fogelberg in his hometown of Peoria. The memorial garden, placed in Riverfront Park, was dedicated in a ceremony held on August 28, 2010.^[9]

Discography[link]

References[link]