text:
1950 in film

The year 1950 in film involved some significant events.

Top-grossing films (U.S.)
The top ten 1950 released films by box office gross in North America are as follows:

Events

 * January 13 – Three weeks after its world premiere at the Paramount and Rivoli theatres in New York City, Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah opens in Los Angeles. The film is a massive commercial success and wins the awards for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design at the 23rd Academy Awards.
 * February 15 – Walt Disney Studios' animated film Cinderella debuts. The film is the most successful the studio has made since Dumbo, and saves the studio from four million dollars in debt.
 * July 19 – Walt Disney Studios' first completely live-action film Treasure Island debuts.

Notable films released in 1950
US unless stated

#

 * 47 morto che parla, starring Totò – (Italy)
 * 711 Ocean Drive, starring Edmond O'Brien and Joanne Dru

A

 * Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello
 * The Admiral Was a Lady, starring Wanda Hendrix and Edmond O'Brien
 * All About Eve, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe, Marilyn Monroe – winner of 6 Oscars
 * Ambush, starring Robert Taylor and Arlene Dahl
 * Annie Get Your Gun, starring Betty Hutton, Howard Keel, Louis Calhern
 * Armored Car Robbery, starring Charles McGraw and William Talman
 * The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston, starring Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Sam Jaffe, James Whitmore, Jean Hagen and Marilyn Monroe
 * The Astonished Heart, starring Celia Johnson and Noël Coward – (GB)
 * At War with the Army, starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

B

 * Babul (Father's House), starring Dilip Kumar and Nargis – (India)
 * Backfire, starring Virginia Mayo and Gordon MacRae
 * The Bandit Queen, starring Barbara Britton and Phillip Reed
 * The Baron of Arizona, starring Vincent Price
 * Beauty and the Devil (La Beauté du diable), directed by René Clair, starring Michel Simon – (France/Italy)
 * Beqasoor, starring Madhubala – (India)
 * The Big Lift, starring Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas
 * Bitter Springs, starring Tommy Trinder and Chips Rafferty – (Australia/GB)
 * The Black Forest Girl, starring Sonja Ziemann and Rudolf Prack – (West Germany)
 * The Black Rose, starring Tyrone Power and Orson Welles – (GB/US)
 * The Blue Lamp, starring Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde – (GB)
 * Born to Be Bad, starring Joan Fontaine and Robert Ryan
 * Born Yesterday, directed by George Cukor, starring Broderick Crawford, Judy Holliday and William Holden
 * The Breaking Point, directed by Michael Curtiz, starring John Garfield and Patricia Neal
 * Bright Leaf, starring Gary Cooper, Lauren Bacall and Patricia Neal
 * Broken Arrow, starring James Stewart and Jeff Chandler

C

 * Café Paradis – (Denmark)
 * Caged, starring Eleanor Parker
 * Caiçara, directed by and starring Adolfo Celi – (Brazil)
 * Captain Carey, U.S.A., starring Alan Ladd and Wanda Hendrix
 * Captain China, starring John Payne and Gail Russell
 * Champagne for Caesar, starring Ronald Colman, Celeste Holm, Vincent Price, Art Linkletter
 * Cheaper by the Dozen, starring Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy
 * Cinderella, a Disney animated film. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson, starring Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Rhoda Williams, James MacDonald, Luis van Rooten, Don Barclay, Mike Douglas, and Lucille Bliss
 * Comanche Territory, starring Maureen O'Hara
 * Convicted, starring Glenn Ford and Broderick Crawford
 * Crisis, starring Cary Grant and Jose Ferrer
 * Cyrano de Bergerac, starring José Ferrer

D

 * D.O.A., starring Edmond O'Brien
 * Dallas, starring Gary Cooper
 * The Damned Don't Cry, starring Joan Crawford
 * Dance Hall, directed by Charles Crichton, starring Diana Dors and Petula Clark – (GB)
 * Darah dan Doa, directed and produced by Usmar Ismail – (Indonesia), first native-produced Indonesian film
 * Dark City, directed by William Dieterle, starring Charlton Heston (in his first studio film), Lizabeth Scott, Viveca Lindfors, Dean Jagger, Mike Mazurki, Ed Begley
 * The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady, starring June Haver and Gordon MacRae
 * Death is a Caress (Døden er et kjærtegn) – (Norway)
 * Deported, starring Jeff Chandler
 * Destination Moon, starring John Archer
 * The Devil Is a Woman (Doña Diabla) – (Mexico)
 * Devil's Doorway, starring Robert Taylor, Louis Calhern, Paula Raymond
 * Dial 1119, starring Marshall Thompson, Virginia Field, William Conrad
 * Dieu a besoin des hommes (God Needs Man), directed by Jean Delannoy – (France)

E

 * The Eagle and the Hawk, starring Rhonda Fleming and John Payne
 * Edge of Doom, starring Farley Granger and Mala Powers
 * Les Enfants Terribles, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville – (France)
 * Escape at Dawn (Akatsuki no dasso) – (Japan)

F

 * The Fall of Berlin (Padeniye Berlina) – (USSR)
 * Fancy Pants, starring Bob Hope and Lucille Ball
 * Father Is a Bachelor, starring William Holden and Colleen Gray
 * Father of the Bride, directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett and Elizabeth Taylor
 * The File on Thelma Jordon, starring Barbara Stanwyck
 * The Fireball, starring Mickey Rooney and Pat O'Brien
 * The Flame and the Arrow, starring Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo
 * The Flowers of St. Francis (Francesco, giullare di Dio), directed by Roberto Rossellini – (Italy)
 * For Heaven's Sake, starring Clifton Webb and Joan Bennett
 * Frenchie, starring Joel McCrea and Shelley Winters
 * The Fuller Brush Girl, starring Lucille Ball and Eddie Albert
 * The Furies, directed by Anthony Mann, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston

G

 * Gabriela, directed by Géza von Cziffra, starring Zarah Leander – (West Germany)
 * Gerald McBoing-Boing
 * The Glass Menagerie, based on the play by Tennessee Williams, starring Jane Wyman, Kirk Douglas, Gertrude Lawrence and Arthur Kennedy
 * Gone to Earth, starring Jennifer Jones – (GB)
 * Guilty of Treason, starring Charles Bickford and Bonita Granville
 * Gun Crazy (aka Deadly is the Female), starring John Dall and Peggy Cummins
 * The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck
 * Gunman in the Streets, starring Simone Signoret – (France)

H

 * The Happiest Days of Your Life, starring Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford – (GB)
 * Harriet Craig, starring Joan Crawford and Wendell Corey
 * Harvey, starring James Stewart and Josephine Hull
 * Highly Dangerous, starring Margaret Lockwood and Dane Clark – (GB)
 * Highway 301, starring Steve Cochran and Virginia Grey
 * The Hollywood Ten, documentary by John Berry
 * House by the River, starring Louis Hayward and Jane Wyatt
 * Hunt the Man Down, starring Gig Young and Carla Balenda

I

 * The Iroquois Trail, starring George Montgomery
 * I Was a Shoplifter, starring Scott Brady and Mona Freeman
 * I'll Get By, starring June Haver, Gloria DeHaven, Steve Allen, Dennis Day
 * In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame

J

 * The Jackie Robinson Story, starring Robinson as himself, with Ruby Dee
 * Jogan, starring Dilip Kumar and Nargis – (India)
 * Johnny One-Eye, starring Pat O'Brien
 * Julius Caesar, starring Charlton Heston
 * Justice is Done (Justice est faite) – (France)

K

 * Key to the City, starring Clark Gable and Loretta Young
 * The Kid (Xi lu xiang), starring 10-year-old Bruce Lee – (Hong Kong)
 * Kill the Umpire, starring William Bendix, William Frawley, Una Merkel
 * The Killer That Stalked New York, starring Evelyn Keyes
 * Kim, starring Errol Flynn
 * King Solomon's Mines, starring Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger
 * Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, starring James Cagney

L

 * A Lady Without Passport, starring Hedy Lamarr and John Hodiak
 * Last Holiday, starring Alec Guinness – (GB)
 * The Lawless, directed by Joseph Losey, starring Macdonald Carey
 * Let's Dance, starring Fred Astaire and Betty Hutton
 * Life (Jeevitham), directed by A. V. Meiyappan, starring Vyjayanthimala in her Telugu film debut – (India)
 * A Life of Her Own, starring Lana Turner and Ray Milland
 * The Life of Wu Xun (Wu Xun zhuan) – (China)
 * Louisa, starring Ronald Reagan
 * Love Happy, starring the Marx Brothers and, in a small role, Marilyn Monroe

M

 * The Magnificent Yankee, starring Louis Calhern
 * The Man Who Cheated Himself, starring Lee J. Cobb and Jane Wyatt
 * The Men, starring Marlon Brando in his film debut, with Teresa Wright, Everett Sloane, Jack Webb and, in a bit part, DeForest Kelley
 * The Miniver Story, starring Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon and John Hodiak
 * Mirror of Holland (Spiegel van Holland) – (Netherlands) winner of Short Film Palme d'Or
 * Mister 880, starring Burt Lancaster and Edmund Gwenn
 * Montana, starring Errol Flynn and Alexis Smith
 * Morning Departure (aka Operation Disaster), starring John Mills and Richard Attenborough – (GB)
 * Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone, starring Marjorie Main and James Whitmore
 * The Mudlark, starring Irene Dunne and Alec Guinness – (GB/US)
 * Mussorgsky – (USSR)
 * My Blue Heaven, starring Betty Grable
 * My Friend Irma Goes West, starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
 * Mystery Street, starring Ricardo Montalbán

N

 * Nancy Goes to Rio, starring Ann Sothern, Jane Powell, Barry Sullivan, Carmen Miranda, Louis Calhern, and Scotty Beckett
 * The Nevadan, starring Randolph Scott and Dorothy Malone
 * Night and the City, directed by Jules Dassin, starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney – (GB)
 * No Man of Her Own, starring Barbara Stanwyck
 * No Peace Under the Olive Tree (Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi), starring Raf Vallone – (Italy)
 * No Way Out, starring Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, Stephen McNally and Sidney Poitier

O

 * Odette, starring Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard – (GB)
 * Los Olvidados, directed by Luis Buñuel – photograph of Gabriel Figueroa – (Mexico)
 * Once a Thief, starring Cesar Romero and Lon Chaney Jr.
 * One Way Street, starring James Mason
 * Orphée, directed by Jean Cocteau, starring Jean Marais – (France)
 * Outrage, directed by Ida Lupino, starring Mala Powers
 * Outside the Wall, starring Richard Basehart and Marilyn Maxwell

P

 * Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan, starring Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Zero Mostel and Barbara Bel Geddes
 * Path of Hope (Il Cammino della speranza), directed by Pietro Germi, starring Raf Vallone – (Italy)
 * Perfect Strangers, starring Ginger Rogers
 * Please Believe Me, starring Deborah Kerr, Peter Lawford and Robert Walker
 * Post Office Box 1001 (Apartado de correos 1001) – (Spain)
 * Prehistoric Women, directed by Gregg C. Tallas
 * Prima comunione (aka Father's Dilemma), starring Aldo Fabrizi – (Italy)

Q

 * Quicksand, starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Lorre

R

 * Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune and Masayuki Mori – (Japan)
 * Riding High, directed by Frank Capra, starring Bing Crosby
 * Right Cross, starring June Allyson and Dick Powell
 * Rio Grande, directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara
 * Rocketship X-M, starring Lloyd Bridges, Hugh O'Brian and Noah Beery Jr.
 * Rocky Mountain, starring Errol Flynn and Patrice Wymore
 * Rogues of Sherwood Forest, starring John Derek
 * La Ronde (The Merry-Go-Round), directed by Max Ophüls, starring Simone Signoret and Anton Walbrook – (France)
 * Room to Let, directed by Godfrey Grayson

S

 * Scandal (Sukyandaru), directed by Akira Kurosawa – (Japan)
 * The Second Face, starring Ella Raines
 * The Secret Fury, starring Claudette Colbert and Robert Ryan
 * September Affair, starring Joan Fontaine and Joseph Cotten
 * Seven Days to Noon, directed by the Boulting Brothers, starring Barry Jones – (GB)
 * Shadow on the Wall, starring Ann Sothern, Zachary Scott, Nancy Davis
 * Side Street, starring Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell
 * Sierra, starring Wanda Hendrix and Audie Murphy
 * The Sleeping City, starring Richard Conte
 * So Long at the Fair, starring Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde – (GB)
 * The Sound of Fury, starring Frank Lovejoy and Lloyd Bridges
 * Stage Fright, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding and Richard Todd – (GB)
 * Stars in My Crown, starring Joel McCrea
 * State Secret, starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Jack Hawkins – (GB)
 * Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni – (Italy)
 * Stromboli, directed by Roberto Rossellini, starring Ingrid Bergman – (Italy/US)
 * Summer Stock, starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, with Phil Silvers
 * Sunday in August (Domenica d'agosto) – (Italy)
 * Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder, starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich Von Stroheim, Nancy Olson

T

 * También de Dolor se Canta (They Also Sing from Sadness), starring Pedro Infante – (Mexico)
 * Tea for Two, starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae
 * Tension, starring Richard Basehart and Audrey Totter
 * This Life of Mine (Wo zhe yi bei zi) – (China)
 * Three Came Home, starring Claudette Colbert
 * Three Little Words, starring Fred Astaire and Red Skelton
 * Three Secrets, starring Eleanor Parker, Patricia Neal, Ruth Roman
 * A Ticket to Tomahawk, starring Anne Baxter and Dan Dailey
 * The Titan: Story of Michelangelo, award-winning documentary by Robert J. Flaherty
 * To Joy (Till glädje), directed by Ingmar Bergman – (Sweden)
 * To Please a Lady, starring Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck
 * The Toast of New Orleans, starring Kathryn Grayson and Mario Lanza
 * Tomorrow Is Too Late (Domani è troppo tardi), starring Pier Angeli and Vittorio De Sica – (Italy)
 * The Trap (Past), directed by Martin Frič – (Czechoslovakia)
 * Treasure Island, starring Robert Newton – (GB/US)
 * Trio, starring Nigel Patrick, Wilfred Hyde-White, Jean Simmons – (GB)
 * Tripoli, starring Maureen O'Hara and John Payne
 * Two Flags West, starring Joseph Cotten and Linda Darnell
 * Two Weeks with Love, starring Jane Powell and Ricardo Montalbán

U

 * El último caballo (The Last Horse) – (Spain)
 * The Underworld Story, starring Dan Duryea
 * Union Station, starring William Holden
 * Until We Meet Again (Mata au hi made) – (Japan)

V

 * Variety Lights (Luci del varietà), directed by Federico Fellini – (Italy)
 * Vendetta, starring Faith Domergue (filmed in 1946 but not released until 1950 due to delays from Howard Hughes)
 * Virtue for Sale, directed by Mahmoud Zulfikar, starring Mahmoud Zulfikar, Faten Hamama – (Egypt)

W

 * Wabash Avenue, starring Betty Grable (a remake of Grable's 1943 film Coney Island)
 * Wagon Master, directed by John Ford, starring Ben Johnson, Joanne Dru and Ward Bond
 * Watch the Birdie, starring Red Skelton, Arlene Dahl and Ann Miller
 * The West Point Story, starring James Cagney and Doris Day
 * When Willie Comes Marching Home, starring Dan Dailey
 * Where Danger Lives, starring Robert Mitchum and Faith Domergue in her film debut
 * Where the Sidewalk Ends, directed by Otto Preminger, starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney
 * Winchester '73, starring James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Stephen McNally, Dan Duryea, and with early appearances by Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis
 * The Woman in Question, directed by Anthony Asquith, starring Jean Kent and Dirk Bogarde – (GB)
 * Woman in Hiding, starring Ida Lupino, Howard Duff and Stephen McNally
 * Woman on the Run, starring Ann Sheridan and Dennis O'Keefe
 * The Wooden Horse, starring Leo Genn and Anthony Steel – (GB)

Y

 * The Yellow Cab Man, starring Red Skelton and Gloria DeHaven
 * The Young and the Damned (Los Olvidados), directed by Luis Buñuel – (Mexico)
 * Young Man with a Horn, directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day

Z

 * Zhukovsky – (USSR)

Serials

 * Atom Man vs. Superman, starring Kirk Alyn, Noel Neill and Lyle Talbot
 * Cody of the Pony Express
 * Desperadoes of the West, starring Tom Keene
 * Flying Disc Man from Mars, starring Walter Reed and Lois Collier
 * The Invisible Monster, starring Richard Webb and Aline Towne
 * The_Mystery_of_the_Snakeskin_Belt
 * Pirates of the High Seas, starring Buster Crabbe

Short film series

 * Mickey Mouse (1928–1952)
 * Looney Tunes (1930–1969)
 * Merrie Melodies (1931–1969)
 * Popeye (1933–1957)
 * The Three Stooges (1934–1959)
 * Donald Duck (1936–1956)
 * Pluto (1937–1951)
 * Goofy (1939–1953)
 * Tom and Jerry (1940–1958)
 * Bugs Bunny (1940–1962)
 * The Fox and the Crow (1941–1950)
 * Mighty Mouse (1942–1955)
 * Chip and Dale (1943–1956)
 * Yosemite Sam (1945–1963)
 * Noveltoons (1943–1967)

Births

 * January 1 – Gerard McSorley, Irish actor
 * January 6 - Richard Norton, Australian martial artist, actor and stunt performer
 * January 7 – Erin Gray, American model and actress
 * January 9 - David Johansen, American singer-songwriter and actor
 * January 22 – Pamela Salem, British actress (d. 2024)
 * January 23 – Richard Dean Anderson, American actor
 * January 24 – Daniel Auteuil, French actor
 * January 27 - Alex Norton, Scottish actor
 * January 30
 * Randy Brooks, American actor
 * Trinidad Silva, American comedian and character actor (d. 1988)
 * January 31 - Robert Grubb, Australian actor
 * February 3 - Morgan Fairchild, American actress
 * February 5 – Jonathan Freeman, American actor, voice actor, singer and puppeteer
 * February 12 – Michael Ironside, Canadian actor
 * February 16 - R. D. Call, American actor (d. 2020)
 * February 17 – Prunella Gee, English actress
 * February 18
 * John Hughes, American director, producer and screenwriter (d. 2009)
 * Cybill Shepherd, American actress
 * February 19 - Johan Leysen, Belgian actor (d. 2023)
 * February 21 – Larry Drake, American actor and comedian (d. 2016)
 * February 22 – Julie Walters, English actress
 * February 23 – Mary Pat Gleason, American actress (d. 2020)
 * February 25 – Neil Jordan, Irish director
 * February 26 - Don Shanks, American actor and stuntman
 * March 2 – Matthew Laurance, American actor and comedian
 * March 3 – Laura Ziskin, American producer (d. 2011)
 * March 11 – Jerry Zucker, American director and producer
 * March 13 – William H. Macy, American actor
 * March 18 – Brad Dourif, American actor
 * March 20
 * William Hurt, American actor (d. 2022)
 * Tom Towles, American character actor (d. 2015)
 * March 23 – Corinne Cléry, French actress
 * March 26
 * Martin Short, Canadian comedian and actor
 * Alan Silvestri, American film composer and conductor
 * March 29 – Barry Pearl, American actor
 * March 30 – Robbie Coltrane, Scottish actor (d. 2022)
 * April 4 – Christine Lahti, American actress
 * April 11 - Bill Irwin, American actor, clown and comedian
 * April 12 – David Cassidy, American actor and singer-songwriter (d. 2017)
 * April 13
 * Ron Perlman, American actor
 * William Sadler, American actor
 * April 15 – Josiane Balasko, French actress, writer and director
 * April 16 – David Graf, American actor (d. 2001)
 * April 22 – Thierry Zéno, Belgian director (d. 2017)
 * April 23 - Henry Goodman, British actor
 * April 28 – Jay Leno, American comedian, actor, writer, producer and late-night television host
 * April 29 – Phillip Noyce, Australian director
 * May 1 – John Diehl, American character actor
 * May 7 - Randall "Tex" Cobb, American actor and martial artist
 * May 8 – Robert Mugge, American director and producer
 * May 9 – Marcheline Bertrand, American actress (d. 2007)
 * May 12 – Gabriel Byrne, Irish actor
 * May 13 – Joe Johnston, American director, writer and visual effects artist
 * May 15 – Nicholas Hammond, American-born Australian actor and writer
 * May 18
 * Gerry Mendicino, Canadian actor
 * Nick Wyman, American actor
 * May 22 – Peter Wildman, Canadian actor
 * June 1 – John M. Jackson, American film and television actor
 * June 5 – Daniel von Bargen, American character actor (d. 2015)
 * June 6 – Chantal Akerman, Belgian-born director (d. 2015)
 * June 8 – Kathy Baker, American actress
 * June 13 – Belinda Bauer, Australian actress
 * June 14 - Jeremy Sinden, English actor (d. 1996)
 * June 17 – Lee Tamahori, New Zealand filmmaker
 * June 19 – Daria Nicolodi, Italian actress and screenwriter (d. 2020)
 * June 24 – Nancy Allen, American actress
 * June 25 – Thomas Jefferson Byrd, American actor (d. 2020)
 * June 26 – Michael Paul Chan, American actor
 * July 6 - Geraldine James, English actress
 * July 17 – Barbara Rosenblat, British actress
 * July 20 – Tantoo Cardinal, Canadian actress
 * July 24 - Johnny Lee Davenport, American actor (d. 2020)
 * July 27 - Nigel Plaskitt, English actor and producer
 * July 28 - Lani Minella, American voice actress, voice director and producer
 * July 29 – Mike Starr, American character actor
 * August 2 - Kathryn Harrold, American retired actress
 * August 3 - John Landis, American filmmaker and actor
 * August 5 – Holly Palance, American actress
 * August 6 – Dorian Harewood, American actor
 * August 10 - Rémy Girard, Canadian actor
 * August 11
 * Elya Baskin, Latvian-American character actor
 * Adam LeFevre, American character actor
 * August 12 – Jim Beaver, American actor
 * August 13 – Jane Carr, English actress
 * August 14 – Peter Guinness, English actor
 * August 15 - Tess Harper, American actress
 * August 16 - Marshall Manesh, Iranian-American actor
 * August 20 – Skip O'Brien, American actor (d. 2011)
 * August 27 – Charles Fleischer, American stand-up comedian, actor, writer and musician
 * September 2 - Rosanna DeSoto, American actress
 * September 7 – Julie Kavner, American film and television actress, voice actress and comedian
 * September 11 – Amy Madigan, American actress
 * September 12 – Bruce Mahler, American actor, producer and writer
 * September 14 – Howard Deutch, American director
 * September 19 - Rudy Ramos, American actor and musician
 * September 21 – Bill Murray, American actor and comedian
 * September 24
 * Harriet Walter, British actress
 * Kristina Wayborn, Swedish actress
 * September 27 - Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Japanese-born American actor, producer and martial artist
 * September 28 – John Sayles, American director and screenwriter
 * September 30 – Vondie Curtis-Hall, American actor, screenwriter and director
 * October 1 – Randy Quaid, American actor
 * October 2 – Ian McNeice, English actor
 * October 4 – Alan Rosenberg, American actor
 * October 5 – Jeff Conaway, American actor and singer (d. 2011)
 * October 10 - Jerry Tondo, Japanese-American actor
 * October 17 – Howard Rollins, American actor (d. 1996)
 * October 18 – Om Puri, Indian actor (d. 2017)
 * October 31 – John Candy, Canadian comedian and actor (d. 1994)
 * November 13 – Jules Sylvester, British wild animal trainer, actor and television presenter
 * November 16 – David Leisure, American actor
 * November 18 – Eric Pierpoint, American actor
 * November 28 – Ed Harris, American actor
 * December 2 - Dennis Christopher, American actor
 * December 4 – Obba Babatundé, American actor
 * December 10 – Gregg Berger, American voice actor
 * December 12 – Duane Chase, American actor
 * December 13
 * Lindsey Ginter, American actor
 * Wendie Malick, American-Canadian actress
 * December 16 - Peter Van Norden, American actor
 * December 21
 * Jane How, English actress
 * Jeffrey Katzenberg, American filmmaker and animator
 * December 22 – Jeris Lee Poindexter, American actor, comedian and musician
 * December 29 - Jon Polito, American character actor (d. 2016)

Deaths

 * January 2 – Emil Jannings, 65, Swiss-born German actor, The Blue Angel, The Last Laugh
 * January 12 – John M. Stahl, 63, American film director and producer, Leave Her to Heaven, Imitation of Life
 * January 22
 * Alan Hale Sr., 57, American actor, director, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Santa Fe Trail
 * Corinne Luchaire, 28, French actress, Prison Without Bars, Conflict
 * March 10 – Marguerite De La Motte, 47, American actress, The Mark of Zorro, The Iron Mask
 * March 18 – Edgar Rice Burroughs, 74, American writer, creator of Tarzan
 * March 25 – Frank Buck, 66, American actor and animal expert, Bring 'Em Back Alive, Africa Screams
 * April 7 – Walter Huston, 67, American Academy Award-winning actor, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Dodsworth
 * April 26 – Hobart Cavanaugh, 63, American actor, I Cover the Waterfront, A Letter to Three Wives
 * May 1 – Ernst Laemmle, 49, German director and screenwriter, The Phantom of the Opera, The Palm Beach Story
 * June 22 – Jane Cowl, 66, American actress, No Man of Her Own, Payment on Demand
 * July 17 – Antonie Nedošinská, 65, Czech actress, Falešná kočička aneb Když si žena umíní, Capek's Tales
 * September 13 – Sara Allgood, 69, Irish actress, How Green Was My Valley, The Lodger
 * October 23 – Al Jolson, 64, Lithuanian-born American actor, singer, entertainer, The Jazz Singer, Rhapsody in Blue, The Singing Fool
 * October 29 – Maurice Costello, 73, American actor, Du Barry Was a Lady, Tin Pan Alley
 * December 4 – James Kevin McGuinness, 56, Irish-American producer and screenwriter, Madame X, Rio Grande
 * December 28 – William Garwood, 66, American silent-film actor and director, The Cowboy Millionaire, Proxy Husband

Film debuts

 * Rico Alaniz – The Capture
 * Parley Baer – Comanche Territory
 * John Drew Barrymore – The Sundowners
 * James Best – One Way Street
 * Lyle Bettger – No Man of Her Own
 * Marlon Brando – The Men
 * Carol Channing – Paid in Full
 * Robert Cornthwaite – Union Station
 * Richard Crenna – Let's Dance
 * Royal Dano – Undercover Girl
 * Ossie Davis – No Way Out
 * James Fox – The Miniver Story
 * Peter Hansen – Branded
 * Stacy Harris – Appointment with Danger
 * Tippi Hedren – The Petty Girl
 * Jeffrey Hunter – Julius Caesar
 * Tab Hunter – The Lawless
 * Mike Kellin – So Young So Bad
 * Piper Laurie – Louisa
 * Sophia Loren – Totò Tarzan
 * Gina Mascetti – Variety Lights
 * Emile Meyer – Panic in the Streets
 * Vera Miles – When Willie Comes Marching Home
 * Rita Moreno – So Young, So Bad
 * Jack Palance – Panic in the Streets
 * Peter Sellers – The Black Rose
 * Cyril Shaps – Cairo Road
 * Bud Spencer – That Ghost of My Husband
 * Michael Trubshawe – They Were Not Divided
 * Franca Valeri – Variety Lights
 * Robert Wagner – The Happy Years
 * Jack Warden – The Asphalt Jungle
 * Robert Webber – Highway 301
 * Joseph Wiseman – With These Hands
 * Sheb Wooley – Rocky Mountain

title: 1950 in film


text:
Cushion

A cushion is a soft bag of some ornamental material, usually stuffed with wool, hair, feathers, polyester staple fiber, non-woven material, cotton, or even paper torn into fragments. It may be used for sitting or kneeling upon, or to soften the hardness or angularity of a chair or couch. Decorative cushions often have a patterned cover material, and are used as decoration for furniture.

A cushion is also referred to as a bolster, hassock, headrest, a tush, and a sham.

Cushions and rugs can be used temporarily outside to soften a hard ground. They can be placed on sunloungers and used to prevent annoyances from moist grass and biting insects. Some dialects of English use this word to refer to throw pillows as well.

The cushion is a very ancient article of furniture; the inventories of the contents of palaces and great houses in the early Middle Ages constantly made mention of them. Cushions were then often of great size, covered with leather, and firm enough to serve as a seat, but the steady tendency of all furniture has been to grow smaller with time. Today, the cushion is considered an upholstery item.

Etymology
The word cushion comes from Middle English cushin, from Anglo-French cussin, quissin, from Vulgar Latin *coxinus, and from Latin coxa, hip. The first known use of the word cushion was in the 14th century. Cushions are known for being comfortable and soft.

Materials
There are so many different types of materials available for cushions. Some of them are:

 * 1) Cotton: Cotton cushions are popular for their breathability and comfort. They offer a soft and natural feel, making them ideal for both indoor and outdoor use. Cotton cushions are easy to maintain and often come in a wide range of colors and patterns to suit various décor styles.
 * 2) Velvet: Velvet cushions exude luxury and elegance with their plush texture and rich appearance. They add a touch of sophistication to any space and are favored for their smoothness and sheen. Velvet cushions are great for adding warmth and a tactile element to sofas, chairs, and beds.
 * 3) Polyester: Polyester cushions are known for their durability and resilience. They are highly resistant to wrinkles, shrinking, and fading, making them suitable for high-traffic areas and outdoor use. Polyester cushions are available in a variety of textures and colors, offering a practical choice for modern living.
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license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Cushion


text:
Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Earl Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.

Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.

Early life and education
Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, the son of Irene (née Super) and Earl T. Franzen. His father, raised in Minnesota, was the son of an immigrant from Sweden; his mother's ancestry was Eastern European. Franzen grew up in an affluent neighborhood, on 83 Webster Woods Drive in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated with high honors from Swarthmore College, receiving a degree in German in 1981. As part of his undergraduate education, he studied abroad in Germany during the 1979–80 academic year with Wayne State University's Junior Year in Munich program. While there, he met Michael A. Martone, on whom he would later base the character Walter Berglund in Freedom. He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship at Freie Universität Berlin in Berlin in 1981–82; he speaks fluent German. Franzen was married in 1982 and moved with his wife to Somerville, Massachusetts to pursue a career as a novelist. While writing his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, he worked as a research assistant at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, coauthoring several dozen papers. In September 1987, a month after he and his wife moved to New York City, Franzen sold The Twenty-Seventh City to Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Early novels
The Twenty-Seventh City, published in 1988, is set in Franzen's hometown, St. Louis, and deals with the city's fall from grace, St. Louis having been the "fourth city" in the 1870s. This sprawling novel was warmly received and established Franzen as an author to watch. In a conversation with novelist Donald Antrim for Bomb Magazine, Franzen described The Twenty-Seventh City as "a conversation with the literary figures of my parents' generation[,] the great sixties and seventies Postmoderns", adding in a later interview "I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer."

Strong Motion (1992) focuses mainly on a dysfunctional family, the Hollands, and uses seismic events on the American East Coast as a metaphor for the quakes that occur in family life (as Franzen put it, "I imagined static lives being disrupted from without—literally shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer and get people shouting angry moral truths at each other." ). A 'systems novel', the key 'systems' of Strong Motion according to Franzen are "... the systems of science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making sense in the world." The novel was not a financial success at the time of its publication. Franzen subsequently defended the novel in his 2010 Paris Review interview, remarking "I think they [critics and readers] may be overlooking Strong Motion a little bit."

Franzen taught a fiction-writing seminar at Swarthmore in the spring of 1992 and 1994: "On that first day of class, Franzen wrote two words on the blackboard: 'truth' and 'beauty,' and told his students that these were the goals of fiction. Haslett describes Franzen's classroom manner as 'serious.' 'He meant what he said and didn't suffer fools gladly.' But this seriousness was leavened by a 'great relish for words and writing,' adds Kathleen Lawton-Trask '96, a 1994 workshop student who is now a writer and high school English teacher. 'People who teach fiction workshops aren't always starry-eyed about writing, but he was. He read our stories so closely that he often started class with a rundown of words that were not used quite correctly in stories from that week's workshop. (I still remember him explaining to us the difference between cement and concrete.) At the same time, he was eminently supportive and sympathetic; I don't remember those corrections ever feeling condescending.'"

For the 1992 class, Franzen invited David Foster Wallace to be a guest judge of the workshop pieces.

The Corrections
Franzen's The Corrections, a novel of social criticism, garnered considerable critical acclaim in the United States, winning both the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The novel was also a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (won by Richard Russo for Empire Falls).

In September 2001, The Corrections was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club. Franzen initially participated in the selection, sitting down for a lengthy interview with Oprah and appearing in B-roll footage in his hometown of St. Louis (described in an essay in How To Be Alone titled "Meet Me In St. Louis"). In October 2001, however, The Oregonian printed an article in which Franzen expressed unease with the selection. In an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, he expressed his worry that the Oprah logo on the cover dissuaded men from reading the book:

"I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say 'If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.' Those are male readers speaking. I see this as my book, my creation."

Soon afterward, Franzen's invitation to appear on Oprah's show was rescinded. Winfrey announced, "Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. We have decided to skip the dinner and we're moving on to the next book."

These events gained Franzen and his novel widespread media attention. The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction. At the National Book Award ceremony, Franzen said "I'd also like to thank Oprah Winfrey for her enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of The Corrections."

Following the success of The Corrections and the publication of The Discomfort Zone and How to Be Alone, Franzen began work on his next novel. In the interim, he published two short stories in The New Yorker: "Breakup Stories", published November 8, 2004, concerned the disintegration of four relationships; and "Two's Company", published May 23, 2005, concerned a couple who write for TV, then split up.

In 2011, it was announced that Franzen would write a multi-part television adaptation of The Corrections in collaboration with The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach for HBO. HBO has since passed on Corrections, citing "difficulty" in "adapting the book's challenging narrative, which moves through time and cuts forwards and back": that would be "difficult to sustain in a series and challenging for viewers to follow, hampering the potential show's accessibility."

In September 2019, The Corrections was voted sixteenth in a list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century so far by writers and critics of the Guardian newspaper.

Freedom
On June 8, 2009, Franzen published an excerpt from Freedom, his novel in progress, in The New Yorker. The excerpt, titled "Good Neighbors", concerned the trials and tribulations of a couple in St. Paul, Minnesota. On May 31, 2010, a second excerpt — titled "Agreeable" — was published, also in The New Yorker.

On October 16, 2009, Franzen made an appearance alongside David Bezmozgis at the New Yorker Festival at the Cedar Lake Theatre, reading a portion of his forthcoming novel. Sam Allard, writing for North By Northwestern about the event, said that the "...material from his new (reportedly massive) novel" was "as buoyant and compelling as ever" and "marked by his familiar undercurrent of tragedy". Franzen read "an extended clip from the second chapter."

On September 9, 2010, Franzen appeared on Fresh Air to discuss Freedom in the wake of its release. Franzen has drawn what he describes as a "feminist critique" for the attention that male authors receive over female authors—a critique he supports. Franzen also discussed his friendship with David Foster Wallace and the impact of Wallace's suicide on his writing process.

Freedom was the subject of a highly unusual "recall" in the United Kingdom starting in early October 2010. An earlier draft of the manuscript, to which Franzen had made over 200 changes, had been published by mistake. The publisher, HarperCollins, initiated an exchange program, but thousands of books had been distributed by that time.

While promoting the book, Franzen became the first American author to appear on the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King in 2000. Franzen appeared alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". He discussed the implications of the Time coverage, and the reasoning behind the title of Freedom in an interview in Manchester, England, in October 2010.

On September 17, 2010, Oprah Winfrey announced that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom would be an Oprah book club selection, the first of the last season of The Oprah Winfrey Show. On December 6, 2010, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote Freedom where they discussed that book and the controversy over his reservations about her picking The Corrections and what that would entail.

Franzen has stated the writing of Freedom was influenced by the death of his close friend and fellow novelist David Foster Wallace.

Purity
In an interview with Portland Monthly on December 18, 2012, Franzen revealed that he currently had "a four-page, single-spaced proposal" for a fifth novel he was currently working on, although he went on to suggest that while he had a proposal there was no guarantee that what was proposed would make the final cut, saying of similar proposals for previous novels, "I look at the old proposals now, and I see the one part of them that actually got made into a book, and I think, 'How come I couldn't see that? What is all this other stuff?'". Franzen also hinted that the new novel would probably also be long, adding "I've let go of any illusion that I'm a writer of 150-page novels. I need room to let things turn around over time and see them from the whole lives of other characters, not just the single character. For better or worse, one point of view never seems to do it for me." In October 2014, during a discussion at Colgate University, Franzen read a "self-contained first-person narrative" that is part of a novel that he hoped will be out in the summer of 2015.

On November 17, 2014, The New York Times Artsbeat Blog reported that the novel, titled Purity, would be out in September. Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, described Purity as a multigenerational American epic that spans decades and continents. The story centers on a young woman named Purity Tyler, or Pip, who doesn't know who her father is and sets out to uncover his identity. The narrative stretches from contemporary America to South America to East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and hinges on the mystery of Pip's family history and her relationship with a charismatic hacker and whistleblower.

In 2016, Daily Variety reported that the novel was in the process of being adapted into a 20-hour limited series for Showtime by Todd Field who would share writing duties with Franzen and the playwright Sir David Hare. It would star Daniel Craig as Andreas Wolf and be executive produced by Field, Franzen, Craig, Hare & Scott Rudin.

However, in a February 2018 interview with The Times London, Hare said that, given the budget for Field's adaptation (170 million), he doubted it would ever be made, but added "It was one of the richest and most interesting six weeks of my life, sitting in a room with Todd Field, Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Craig bashing out the story. They're extremely interesting people."

Purity was a relative commercial disappointment compared to Franzen's two previous novels, selling only 255,476 copies, compared to 1.15 million copies of Freedom and 1.6 million copies of The Corrections.

A Key to All Mythologies
On November 13, 2020, Franzen's publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced the publication of Franzen's new novel, Crossroads, the first volume in a trilogy titled A Key to All Mythologies.

Crossroads was published October 5, 2021.

The novel received mostly favorable reviews, with a cumulative "Positive" rating at the review aggregator website Book Marks, based on 48 book reviews from mainstream literary critics. Bookforum called it Franzen's "finest novel yet," his "greatest and most perfect novel," and Dwight Garner of the New York Times said it was "warmer than anything he's yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect." According to the Times Literary Supplement:"Crossroads is largely free from the vices to which Franzen's previous work has been addicted: the self-conscious topicality; the show-off sophistication; the formal heavy-handedness. It retains many of his familiar virtues: the robust characterization; the escalating comedy; the virtuosic command of narrative rhythm."Critics especially praised the character of Marion, whom Garner called "one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction."

The novel is about a pastor, his wife, and four children. It's split into two sections called 'Advent' and 'Easter.' Writing for The Nation, Rumaan Alam says "in Crossroads, every plotline leads to God."

Other works
In 1996, while still working on The Corrections, Franzen published a literary manifesto in Harper's Magazine entitled Perchance to Dream. Referencing manifestos written by Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe, among others, Franzen grappled with the novelist's role in an advanced media culture which seemed to no longer need the novel. In the end, Franzen rejects the goal of writing a great social novel about issues and ideas, in favor of focusing on the internal lives of characters and their emotions. Given the huge success of The Corrections, this essay offers a prescient look into Franzen's goals as both a literary and commercially minded author.

In 2002, Franzen published a critique of the novels of William Gaddis, entitled "Mr. Difficult", in The New Yorker. He begins by recounting how some readers felt The Corrections was spoiled by being too high-brow in parts, and summarizes his own views of reading difficult fiction. He proposes a "Status model", whereby the point of fiction is to be Art, and also a "Contract model", whereby the point of fiction is to be Entertainment, and finds that he subscribes to both models. He praises The Recognitions, admits that he only got halfway through J R, and explains why he does not like the rest of Gaddis's novels.

In 2004 Franzen published "The Discomfort Zone", a personal essay about his childhood and family life in Missouri and his love of Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, in The New Yorker. Susan Orlean selected it for the subsequent volume of The Best American Essays.

Since The Corrections Franzen has published How to Be Alone (2002), a collection of essays including "Perchance To Dream", and The Discomfort Zone (2006), a memoir. How To Be Alone is essentially an apologia for reading, articulating Franzen's uncomfortable relationship with the place of fiction in contemporary society. It also probes the influence of his childhood and adolescence on his creative life, which is then further explored in The Discomfort Zone.

In September 2007, Franzen's translation of Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen) was published. In his introduction, Franzen describes the Broadway musical version as "insipid" and "overpraised." In an interview with New York magazine, Franzen stated that he had in fact made the translation for Swarthmore College's theater department for $50 in 1986 and that it had sat in a drawer for 20 years since. After the Broadway show stirred up so much interest, Franzen said he was inspired to publish it because "I knew it was a good translation, better than anything else out there."

Franzen published a social commentary on cell phones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space, "I Just Called To Say I Love You" (2008), in the September/October 2008 issue of MIT Technology Review.

In 2012 he published Farther Away, a collection of essays dealing with such topics as his love of birds, his friendship with David Foster Wallace, and his thoughts on technology.

In 2013, Franzen published The Kraus Project. It consists of three major essays by the "Perennially ... impossible to translate" Austrian "playwright, poet, social commentator and satirical genius" Karl Kraus – ""Heine and the Consequences" a takedown of the beloved German poet, "Nestroy and Posterity" which established that playwright's reputation in Austria to this day, and "Afterword to Heine and the Consequences"". The essays are accompanied by "Franzen's [own] plentiful, trenchant yet off-beat annotations" taking on "... Kraus' mantle-commenting on what Kraus would say (and what Franzen's opinion is) about Macs and PCs; decrying Twitter's claim of credit for the Arab Spring; and unfurling how media conglomerates influence politics in their quest for profits."

Franzen published his third essay collection, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, in November 2018. According to advance press for the book, the collection "gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, [and] Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes—both human and literary—that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative, and necessary."

In September 2019, Franzen published an essay on climate change in The New Yorker entitled "What If We Stopped Pretending?", which generated controversy among scientists and online pundits because of its alleged pessimism. The term doomerism became popular amid the response to the piece. A Sierra Club interview with Franzen, from January 2019 further explores Franzen's feelings about climate change and action.

In an interview with Transatlantica conducted in March 2018, Franzen mentioned that he had just started work on a new novel, having recently sold it to publishers on the basis of a three-page proposal. Later that year in a profile piece for The New York Times Magazine in June 2018, Franzen confirmed that he was currently at work on the early stages of his sixth novel, which he speculated could be his last. "So, I may be wrong ... But somehow this new one really does feel like my last.". Subsequently, in an interview reproduced on The Millions website in April 2020, Franzen mentioned that he was "almost done" with writing this sixth novel. Crossroads: A Novel was published on October 5, 2021.

Philosophy of writing
During a lecture on autobiography and fiction, Franzen discussed four perennial questions often asked of him by audiences, all of which annoy or bother him in some way. They are:

 * Who are your influences?
 * What time of day do you work, and what do you write on?
 * I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters "take over" and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?
 * Is your fiction autobiographical?

In the lecture he said of the third question in particular "This one always raises my blood pressure" and quoted Nabokov in response.

In February 2010, Franzen (along with writers such as Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, and Anne Enright) was asked by The Guardian to contribute what he believed were ten serious rules to abide by for aspiring writers.

Personal life
In his early twenties, Franzen was married to fellow writer Valerie Cornell. They lived in New York City and were married for fourteen years. His marriage and divorce are mentioned in some of his essays in the collection Farther Away.

Franzen lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his "spouse-equivalent", writer Kathy Chetkovich.

As first reported in his essay "My Bird Problem," Franzen is well known as a serious birdwatcher. He appeared on CBS Sunday Morning in March 2018 to discuss his love of birds and birdwatching. Franzen served for nine years on the board of the American Bird Conservancy. A feature-length documentary based on Franzen's reported essay "Emptying the Skies" was released in 2013.

Franzen is a longtime fan of the punk-rock collective The Mekons; he appeared in the 2014 documentary Revenge of the Mekons to discuss the group's importance to him.

In 2010, at an event at the Serpentine Pavilion in London celebrating the launch of Freedom, Franzen's glasses were stolen from his face by a gate-crasher, who jokingly attempted to ransom them for $100,000 before being apprehended by police elsewhere in Hyde Park.

Awards and honors

 * 1981 Fulbright Scholarship to Germany
 * 1988 Whiting Award
 * 1996 Guggenheim Fellowship
 * 2000 Berlin Prize (American Academy in Berlin)
 * 2001 National Book Award (Fiction) for The Corrections
 * 2001 Salon Book Award (Fiction) for The Corrections
 * 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner (Fiction) for The Corrections
 * 2010 Salon Book Award (Fiction) for Freedom
 * 2010 Galaxy National Book Awards, International Author of the Year, Freedom
 * 2011 Heartland Prize for Freedom
 * 2011 John Gardner Award (Fiction) for Freedom
 * 2012 Carlos Fuentes Medal (Inaugural award)
 * 2013 Welt-Literaturpreis
 * 2015 Budapest Grand Prize
 * 2015 Euronatur Award for outstanding commitment to nature conservation in Europe
 * 2017 Frank Schirrmacher Preis
 * 2022 Thomas Mann Prize

Honors and other recognition
 * 1996 Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists
 * 2001 The New York Times Best Books of the Year for The Corrections
 * 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (for The Corrections)
 * 2001 Oprah's Book Club Selection (for The Corrections)
 * 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist (Fiction)
 * 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist
 * 2003 International Dublin Literary Award (short list)
 * 2009 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor American Academy in Berlin
 * 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (for Freedom)
 * 2010 The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010 list (for Freedom)
 * 2010 The New York Times Best Books of the Year (for Freedom)
 * 2010 Oprah's Book Club selection (for Freedom)
 * 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) finalist (for Freedom)
 * 2010 Elected to the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin
 * 2011 Named one of Time Magazine's Time 100
 * 2012 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
 * 2012 Elected to the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
 * 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) shortlist for The Kraus Project
 * In January 2011, The Observer named him as one of "20 activists, filmmakers, writers, politicians and celebrities who will be setting the global environmental agenda in the coming year".
 * On May 21, 2011, Franzen delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College to the class of 2011.
 * On June 16, 2012, Franzen delivered the commencement address at Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz
 * The first international academic symposium solely dedicated to Franzen's work took place at Glasgow University, UK, March 22, 2013. Another one, "Jonathan Franzen: Identity and Crisis of the American Novel", was scheduled to take place at the University of Córdoba, Spain, April 18–19, 2013.

Non-fiction

 * Essays.
 * Memoir.
 * Essays.
 * Guest editor.
 * Essays.
 * Guest editor.
 * Essays.
 * Essays.

Translations

 * Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind 2007
 * The Kraus Project (essays by Karl Kraus translated and annotated by Franzen) 2013

Critical studies and reviews of Franzen's work
———————
 * Crossroads
 * Crossroads
 * Notes

Television appearances

 * In 1996, Franzen appeared on Charlie Rose with friend and fellow author David Foster Wallace and author Mark Leyner to debate "The Future of American Fiction."
 * In 2001, Franzen appeared on Charlie Rose, on November 21, 2001 to discuss The Corrections; and again on December 27 after winning the National Book Award for The Corrections.
 * In 2002, Franzen appeared on Charlie Rose (October 30, 2002 ) to discuss his essay collection How to Be Alone.
 * In 2006, Franzen guest starred alongside Michael Chabon, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal in The Simpsons episode "Moe'N'a Lisa", which first aired November 19, 2006. In the episode, he is depicted fighting over literary influences with Chabon.
 * In 2010, Franzen appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in support of her selection of Freedom for Oprah's Book Club. Several viewers noted the brevity of Franzen's appearance on the show, although a thirty-minute "After the Show" Q&A was later made available online.
 * In 2015, Franzen appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and CBS This Morning to promote the release of Purity.
 * In 2016, Franzen appeared on Jeopardy! as part of the show's Power Players Week, where journalists and intellectuals compete on the show with winnings donated to the player's charity of choice—Franzen played for the American Bird Conservancy. Franzen also appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
 * In 2018, Franzen appeared on CBS This Morning – Saturday to discuss his love of birds and birdwatching.

title: Jonathan Franzen


text:
Locked-room mystery

The "locked-room" or "impossible crime" mystery is a type of crime seen in crime and detective fiction. The crime in question, typically murder ("locked-room murder"), is committed in circumstances under which it appeared impossible for the perpetrator to enter the crime scene, commit the crime, and leave undetected. The crime in question typically involves a situation whereby an intruder could not have left; for example the original literal "locked room": a murder victim found in a windowless room locked from the inside at the time of discovery. Following other conventions of classic detective fiction, the reader is normally presented with the puzzle and all of the clues, and is encouraged to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed in a dramatic climax.

The prima facie impression from a locked room crime is that the perpetrator is a dangerous, supernatural entity capable of defying the laws of nature by walking through walls or vanishing into thin air. The need for a rational explanation for the crime is what drives the protagonist to look beyond these appearances and solve the puzzle.

Early locked-room mysteries: 1830s—1930s
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is generally considered the first locked-room mystery. However, Robert Adey credits Sheridan Le Fanu for "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" (1838), which was published three years before Poe's "Rue Morgue".

Other early locked-room mysteries include Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1892); "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892) and "The Adventure of the Empty House" (1903), two Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle; "The Problem of Cell 13" (1905) by Jacques Futrelle, featuring "The Thinking Machine" Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen; and Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room), written in 1907 by French journalist and author Gaston Leroux. G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, beginning in 1911, often featured locked-room mysteries.

Golden Age: 1920s—1950s
In the 1920s and 1930s, many authors wrote locked-room mysteries, such as S. S. Van Dine in The Canary Murder Case (1927), Ellery Queen in The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934), and Freeman Wills Crofts in such novels as Sudden Death and The End of Andrew Harrison (1938).

Pulp magazines in the 1930s often contained impossible crime tales, dubbed weird menace, in which a series of supernatural or science-fiction type events is eventually explained rationally. Notable practitioners of the period were Fredric Brown, Paul Chadwick and, to a certain extent, Cornell Woolrich, although these writers tended to rarely use the Private Eye protagonists that many associate with pulp fiction. Quite a few comic book impossible crimes seem to draw on the "weird menace" tradition of the pulps. However, celebrated writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Clayton Rawson, and Sax Rohmer have also had their works adapted to comic book form. In 1934, Dashiell Hammett created the comic strip Secret Agent X9, illustrated by Alex Raymond, which contained a locked-room episode. One American comic book series that made good use of locked-room mysteries is Mike W. Barr's Maze Agency.

John Dickson Carr, who also wrote as Carter Dickson, was known as "master of the locked-room mystery". His 1935 novel The Hollow Man (US title: The Three Coffins) was in 1981 voted the best locked-room mystery novel of all time by 17 authors and reviewers, although Carr himself names Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room as his favorite. (Leroux's novel was named third in that same poll; Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) was named second. ) Three other Carr/Dickson novels were in the top ten of the 1981 list: The Crooked Hinge (1938), The Judas Window (1938), and The Peacock Feather Murders (1937).

In French, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Gaston Boca, Marcel Lanteaume, Pierre Véry, Noel Vindry, and the Belgian Stanislas-André Steeman were other important "impossible crime" writers, Vindry being the most prolific with 16 novels. Edgar Faure, who later to become Prime Minister of France, also wrote in the genre, but was a not particularly successful.

During the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, English-speaking writers dominated the genre, but after the 1940s there was a general waning of English-language output. French authors continued writing into the 1950s and early 1960s, notably Martin Meroy and Boileau-Narcejac, who joined forces to write several locked-room novels. They also co-authored the psychological thrillers which brought them international fame, two of which were adapted for the screen as Vertigo (1954 novel; 1958 film) and Diabolique (1955 film). The most prolific writer during the period immediately following the Golden Age was Japanese: Akimitsu Takagi wrote almost 30 locked-room mysteries, starting in 1949 and continuing to his death in 1995. A number have been translated into English. In Robert van Gulik's mystery novel The Chinese Maze Murders (1951), one of the cases solved by Judge Dee is an example of the locked-room subgenre.

Late twentieth century: 1970s—present
The genre continued into the 1970s and beyond. Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective novels feature locked-room puzzles. The most prolific creator of impossible crimes is Edward D. Hoch, whose short stories feature a detective, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, whose main role is as a country physician. The majority of Hoch stories feature impossible crimes; one appeared in EQMM every month from May 1973 through January 2008. Hoch's protagonist is a gifted amateur detective who uses pure brainpower to solve his cases.

The French writer Paul Halter, who wrote over 30 novels, almost exclusively in the locked-room genre, has been described as the natural successor to John Dickson Carr. Although strongly influenced by Carr and Agatha Christie, he has a unique writing style featuring original plots and puzzles. A collection of ten of his short stories, entitled The Night of the Wolf, has been translated into English. The Japanese writer Soji Shimada has been writing impossible crime stories since 1981. The first, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981), and the second, Murder in the Crooked House (1982), are the only ones to have been translated into English. The themes of the Japanese novels are far more grisly and violent than those of the more genteel Anglo-Saxons. Dismemberment is a preferred murder method. Despite the gore, most norms of the classic detective fiction novel are strictly followed.

Umberto Eco, in his 2000 novel Baudolino, takes the locked-room theme into medieval times. The book's plot suggests that Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I had not drowned in a river, as history records, but died mysteriously at night while a guest at the castle of a sinister Armenian noble. The book features various suspects, each of whom had a clever means of killing the Emperor without entering the room where he slept – all these means having been available in medieval times.

The locked-room genre also appears in children's detective fiction, although the crime committed is usually less severe than murder. One notable author is Enid Blyton, who wrote several juvenile detective series, often featuring seemingly impossible crimes that her young amateur detectives set out to solve. The Hardy Boys novel While the Clock Ticked was (originally) about a locked and isolated room where a man seeks privacy, but receives mysterious threatening messages there. The messages are delivered by a mechanical device lowered into the room through a chimney. King Ottokar's Sceptre (1938–1939) is the only Tintin adventure that is a locked-room mystery. No homicide is involved; rather the crime is the disappearance of the royal sceptre, which is bound to have disastrous consequences for the king.

The British TV series Jonathan Creek has a particular 'speciality' for locked-room-murder style mysteries. The eponymous protagonist, Jonathan Creek, designs magic tricks for stage magicians, and is often called on to solve cases where the most important element of the mystery is clearly how the crime was committed, such as a man who allegedly shot himself in a sealed bunker when he had crippling arthritis in his hands, how a woman was shot in a sealed room with no gun and without the window being opened or broken, how a dead body could have vanished from a locked room when the only door was in full view of someone else, etc.

In the 21st century, examples of popular detective series novels that include locked-room type puzzles are The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) by Stieg Larssen, Bloodhounds (2004) by Peter Lovesey, and In the Morning I'll Be Gone (2014) by Adrian McKinty, while Locked-room puzzles are a major plot point and discussed at length in the visual novels Umineko When They Cry and Danganronpa.

Real-life examples

 * Professional bridge player and writer Joseph Bowne Elwell was shot in 1920 while inside his locked Manhattan home. The case inspired the 1926 mystery novel The Benson Murder Case.
 * According to a report in The New York Times, March 10 and 11, 1929, Isidore Fink, of 4 East 132nd Street, New York City, was in his Fifth Avenue laundry on the night of March 9, 1929, with the windows closed and door of the room bolted. A neighbor heard screams and the sound of blows, but not shots, and called the police, who were unable to get in. A young boy was lifted through the transom and was able to unbolt the door. The police found Fink dead with two bullet wounds in his chest and one in his left wrist. No money had been taken, and no weapon was found at the scene. It was theorised that the murderer may have climbed the outside of the building and fired through the transom, but a powder burn on Fink's wrist indicated that he had been shot at close range. Interviewed some years later, Police Commissioner Mulrooney called the Fink murder an "insoluble mystery".
 * On May 16, 1937, Laetitia Toureaux was found stabbed to death in an otherwise empty first-class compartment of the Paris Métro. The subway train had left the terminus, Porte de Charenton, at 6:27 p.m. and had arrived at the next station, Porte Dorée, at 6:28 p.m. Witnesses did not see anyone else enter or leave the compartment where Mlle. Toureaux's body was found. The murderer had one minute and twenty seconds at their disposal. Neither the murderer nor the method of their escape was ever discovered.
 * In 2010, the uninjured dead body of Gareth Williams, an employee of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), was found in a bag that had been zipped up and padlocked from the outside, with a key inside. There was no forensic evidence of anyone else's involvement. Two escapologists investigated whether he could somehow have locked himself inside the bag. After 400 unsuccessful attempts one of them would still not completely rule out the possibility.

title: Locked-room mystery


text:
Linda McCartney

Linda Louise, Lady McCartney ( Eastman; September 24, 1941 – April 17, 1998) was an American photographer and musician. She was the keyboardist and harmony vocalist in the band Wings that also featured her husband, Paul McCartney of the Beatles.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Linda began a career as a photographer, landing with Town & Country, where she soon gained assignments to photograph various musicians and entertainers. By the late 1960s, she was a regular fixture at the Fillmore East, a New York concert venue, where she became the unofficial house photographer capturing numerous performances at the legendary club, and was the first woman to have a photograph on the cover of the influential music magazine Rolling Stone. Her photographs were displayed in galleries and museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, and were collected in several books.

Linda had been learning to play keyboards from her husband, and after the 1970 breakup of the Beatles, Paul and Linda recorded the album Ram together, and they formed the band Wings in 1971. She continued to play alongside Paul following Wings' breakup in 1981 up until The New World Tour in 1993.

She was an animal rights activist and wrote and published several vegetarian cookbooks. She founded the vegetarian Linda McCartney Foods company with her husband. In 1995, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died from the disease three years later at the age of 56.

Early years
Linda McCartney was born Linda Louise Eastman in Manhattan, New York, on September 24, 1941. She had one older brother named John, and two younger sisters named Laura and Louise Jr. Her mother, Louise Sara Eastman (née Lindner), was from a German-Jewish family. Her maternal grandfather was Max J. Lindner, founder of the Lindner Company clothing store in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father, Lee Eastman, was born Leopold Vail Epstein and was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His sister Rose Frisch became a noted scientist who worked on women's fertility and population studies. Her father practiced entertainment law in New York and counted among his famous clients Harold Arlen, Tommy Dorsey, Willem de Kooning, Jack Lawrence, and Mark Rothko. At Eastman's request, Lawrence wrote the song "Linda" when she was one year old. It was recorded by Buddy Clark in 1947 and went to No. 2 on the Billboard Best Sellers chart, and was recorded again in 1963 by duo Jan and Dean.

Eastman graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1959. She then attended Vermont College in Montpelier, Vermont, where she received an Associate of Arts in 1961. Her brother John, who studied law like their father, later became the attorney and manager of her husband Paul McCartney. She preferred nature and animals while growing up and enjoyed going horseback riding as a child. After graduating from Vermont College, she attended the University of Arizona and majored in fine arts while taking up nature photography as a hobby. While she was studying there, her mother was killed in the 1962 crash of American Airlines Flight 1 in Jamaica Bay, New York. She then left the University of Arizona without graduating, and married Joseph Melville See Jr. (in June 1962). Their daughter Heather was born in December 1962. They divorced in 1965, and Linda resumed using her maiden name.

Photography
Linda became a receptionist and editorial assistant for Town & Country magazine. In 1965, she became romantically involved with photographer David Dalton. She studied how he worked during photo shoots, how he set up shots and managed lighting and composition. When she began her own shoots, such as with music groups, he said he was "astonished" at how easily she could take control of unruly or uncooperative musicians. He said that shooting rock groups was "a bloody pain in the neck. But with the lovely Linda, all this changed ... Now their eyes were pinned on her."

Dalton was also impressed by the intelligence of Eastman's daughter. "Linda and I would get high and Heather would say the most amazing things ... I'd think, 'This is André Breton at six years old! He added that he found Linda's relationship with Heather a "very charming aspect of her life with this wonderful child".

When the magazine received an invitation to photograph the Rolling Stones during a record promotion party on a yacht, Eastman immediately volunteered to represent the publication. The photo shoot marked a turning point in her life:

"I was the only photographer they allowed on the yacht. I just kept clicking away with the camera, and they enjoyed it and I enjoyed it, and suddenly I found that taking pictures was a great way to live and a great way to work."

Eastman's father wanted her to undertake formal training with a professional photographer. "Well, I never had the patience for that", she said. "I had to trust my feelings." But she had studied the photography of horses at college in Arizona under Hazel Larsen Archer and became an avid nature hobbyist, using a Leica camera. A few months after her Rolling Stones shoot, she was allowed backstage at Shea Stadium, where the Beatles performed.

Eastman had gained some experience in celebrity photography and became an unofficial house photographer at Bill Graham's Fillmore East concert hall. Among the artists she photographed there were Todd Rundgren, Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton, Simon & Garfunkel, the Who, the Doors, the Animals, John Lennon, and Neil Young. Her photo of Young, taken in 1967, was used on the cover of Sugar Mountain – Live at Canterbury House 1968 in 2008.

She photographed Clapton for Rolling Stone magazine and became the first woman to have a photograph on the cover (May 11, 1968). After she married McCartney, her photo of the two of them appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone on January 31, 1974, making her the only person to appear on the magazine's cover who was also the photographer. Her photographs were later exhibited in more than 50 galleries internationally, and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A collection of photographs from that time, Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era, was published in 1992. She also took the photograph for the cover of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson's single "The Girl Is Mine".

Music
After the Beatles broke up in 1970, Paul taught Linda to play keyboards and recorded an album with her, Ram, as a duo. The couple formed the band Wings. They garnered several Grammy Awards, becoming one of the most successful British bands of the 1970s, but had to endure jibes about Linda's singing.

In 1977 the reggae-inspired single "Seaside Woman" was released by an obscure band called Suzy and the Red Stripes on Epic Records in the United States. Suzy and the Red Stripes were Wings, with Linda (who wrote the song) on lead vocals. The song, recorded by Wings in 1972, was written in response to allegations from Paul's publisher that Linda's co-writing credits were inauthentic and that she was not a real songwriter. In 1971 Northern Songs and Maclen Music filed a lawsuit alleging that Paul McCartney had violated an exclusive rights agreement by collaborating with Linda on the song "Another Day", which had the effect of transferring a 50% share of the publishing royalties to his own McCartney Music company. The lawsuit was "amicably settled", according to an ATV spokesman, in June 1972.

The McCartneys shared an Oscar nomination for the song "Live and Let Die"; they were photographed together at the event in April 1974. Linda's album Wide Prairie, which included "Seaside Woman", was released posthumously in 1998. Along with eight other British composers, Paul contributed to the choral album A Garland for Linda, and he dedicated his classical album Ecce Cor Meum (1999) to Linda.

Vegetarian cookbooks and company
When she and Paul decided to become vegetarians in 1975, Linda stated that she would no longer "eat anything with a face" and "if slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian."

This shift led to the creation of cookbooks and a company. In 1989, she released her first vegetarian cookbook, Linda McCartney's Home Cooking (she credits author Peter Cox "for all of his help and research" on the copyright page). Next in 1991, Linda started her own company called Linda McCartney Foods, that served frozen vegetarian meals. According to Far Out Magazine, Linda McCartney Foods, "helped make it easier and more accessible for people to choose not to eat meat. At the time, options were extremely limited and Linda essentially made vegetarianism possible on a much larger scale. The brand is one of Britain's most established meat-free food products." However, in 1999, the H. J. Heinz Company acquired the company, and in 2007, the Hain Celestial Group bought it.

Her next vegetarian cookbook, Linda's Kitchen: Simple and Inspiring Recipes for Meatless Meals, was published in 1995, and was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award in the Vegetarian Books category in 1996. In 2021, Paul, Stella, and Mary McCartney updated and veganized a number of Linda's vegetarian recipes, and released them as the vegan cookbook, Linda McCartney's Family Kitchen. Linda McCartney's Family Kitchen was nominated for an IVFF award in 2021.

Melville See Jr. (1962–1965)
Eastman's first marriage was to Joseph Melville See Jr. (April 19, 1938 – March 19, 2000), whom she met in college. He earned a geology degree from Princeton and pursued graduate studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Eastman followed him there, where she enrolled at the university to study art history. While she was there her mother was killed in the 1 March 1962 crash of American Airlines Flight 1 over Jamaica Bay, New York.

She married See on June 18, 1962, and their daughter Heather Louise was born on December 31, 1962. The couple had dissimilar lifestyles, became increasingly unhappy, and divorced in June 1965. He was an academic who spent much of his time studying and doing research, while she preferred a home life. She loved the wide open spaces in Arizona and enjoyed riding horses through the desert landscape. The settings, with saguaro cacti, reminded her of scenery from western films, which inspired her to take up photography as a hobby.

Paul McCartney (1969–1998)
On May 15, 1967, while on a photo assignment in London, Eastman met Paul McCartney at the Bag O'Nails club, where Georgie Fame was performing. They met again four days later at the launch party for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at Brian Epstein's house. When her assignment was completed, she flew back to New York City.

They got together again the following May in New York, while McCartney and John Lennon were there to inaugurate Apple Records. A few months after he returned to London, McCartney invited Eastman to spend some time with him there. When she arrived, they went to his home, where they spent the evening. "He must have been really happy that night", said one of the fans who often loitered outside his home. "He sat on the windowsill with his acoustic guitar and sang 'Blackbird' to us from his upstairs room."

McCartney was attracted to Eastman for a number of reasons, which he explained later: "I liked her as a woman; she was good-looking with a good figure, so physically I was attracted to her." McCartney also liked her sense of independence:

"'Her mental attitude was quite rebellious ... [growing up] she was the kind of kid who would hang out in the kitchen with the black maids' to learn cooking. She disliked socializing. They both liked natural surroundings, he said, and they shared a love of nature, which became one of their most important emotional links. He knew that because of her 'very free spirit', she was considered a rebel and a black sheep by her family for avoiding excelling in education, unlike her father and brother. 'She was an artist,' Paul said, 'and was not cut out to be an academic.'"

Linda's daughter, Heather, created another strong bond between them, since he had always liked and wanted children of his own. When McCartney first met Heather, who was nearly six, he insisted that she and Linda move to London to live with him. After they did, he devoted time to Heather, playing with her, reading her stories, and drawing cartoons with her. He sang her to sleep at bedtime.

Biographer Philip Norman observed that Linda had some personality aspects which Paul admired. She seemed less concerned with clothing or her public appearance, preferring to dress casually, even in semi-formal settings. She typically held his arm when they were together, often "gazing up at him in awe", and seeming to idolize him. Paul's friends said that he began to be less formal, whether shaving less often or just wearing simpler clothes. "He could go on the bus down to Apple," said his maid, "and no one would recognize him."

Linda's relaxed attitude about everyday things began to affect him in other ways. He recalls once feeling guilty because he was exhausted from work and, having trained himself to never appear tired, apologized to her. She simply replied, "it's allowed", which amazed him. "I remember thinking, Fucking hell! That was a mind-blower. I'd never been with anyone who thought like that ... it was patently clear that it was allowed to be tired."

They were married in a small civil ceremony at Marylebone Town Hall on March 12, 1969. British fans reacted negatively, partly because his marriage ended McCartney's status as the last unattached Beatle. John Lennon married Yoko Ono a week later, and both women were perceived by fans as reasons for the group's breakup. Lennon at one point publicly criticized the way the press treated Linda: "She got the same kind of insults, hatred, absolute garbage thrown at her for no reason whatsoever other than she fell in love with Paul McCartney."

In late 1969, Paul fell into a deep depression due to the Beatles' pending breakup after John Lennon's departure. He spent days in bed and drank excessively, wondering what to do with his life. McCartney later said that Linda helped him pull out of that crisis by praising his work as a songwriter and persuading him to continue writing and recording.

After a few troubled months, Paul McCartney wrote "Maybe I'm Amazed" in Linda's honour. He explained during an interview that the song was written "for me and Linda", and that with the Beatles breaking up,

"'that was my feeling: Maybe I'm amazed at what's going on ... Maybe I'm a man and maybe you're the only woman who could ever help me; Baby won't you help me understand ... Maybe I'm amazed at the way you pulled me out of time, hung me on the line, Maybe I'm amazed at the way I really need you.' He added that 'every love song I write is for Linda.'"

During their 29-year marriage, the McCartneys had four children: she brought her daughter Heather (whom Paul later formally adopted) from her first marriage, and together the couple had Mary (b. 1969), Stella (b. 1971), and James (b. 1977).

They sometimes went to his farmhouse retreat in the west of Scotland which he had originally purchased to "escape Beatlemania". They both liked and needed time away from the city, and were equally attracted to natural surroundings, writes biographer Barry Miles. "We'd just enjoy sitting out in nature", Paul said. The song "Two of Us" on Let it Be was written by Paul during one of their country drives. "This song was about that: doing nothing, trying to get lost ... [and] the wonderfully free attitude we were able to have."

Linda recalled the setting:

"Scotland was like nothing I'd ever lived in. It was the most beautiful land you have ever seen, way at the end of nowhere. To me it was the first feeling I'd ever had of civilization dropped away ... so different from all the hotels and limousines and the music business, so it was quite a relief."

McCartney began writing more of his songs away from the studio. "I found that I was enjoying working alone", he said. He wrote the song "The Lovely Linda" for his debut solo album while they were staying in Scotland. In 1971, they recorded the album Ram.

She became Lady McCartney when her husband was knighted in 1997. Her brother, entertainment lawyer John Eastman, had represented McCartney since the Beatles' breakup, until his death in 2022.

Animal rights activist
A strong advocate of animal rights, Linda lent her support to many organizations, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Council for the Protection of Rural England, and Friends of the Earth. She was also a patron of the League Against Cruel Sports. She narrated a TV advertisement for PETA in which she said: "Have you ever seen a fish gasping for breath when you take it out of the water? They're saying, 'Thanks a lot for killing me. It feels great, you know.' No! It hurts!" After her death, PETA created the Linda McCartney Memorial Award.

Marijuana
In 1984, McCartney was arrested in Barbados for possession of marijuana; her husband had been arrested in 1975 in Los Angeles on the same charge. After flying to Heathrow Airport, she was arrested on charges of possession. She later said that, while hard drugs are "disgusting", marijuana is "pretty lightweight".

Diagnosis and death
McCartney was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, and her condition worsened when the cancer metastasized to her liver. Paul was aware of the prognosis and later said, "The doctors had told me privately that we'd caught it too late, that she'll have about 18 months. And that was what she had." She died from the disease at the age of 56 on April 17, 1998, at the McCartney family ranch in Tucson, Arizona. Her family was with her when she died.

McCartney was cremated in Tucson, and her ashes were scattered at the McCartney family's English farm in Sussex. Paul later suggested that fans remember her by donating to breast cancer research charities that did not support animal testing, "or the best tribute: go veggie". A memorial service was held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, which was attended by George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Billy Joel, Elton John, David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel, and other celebrities among a congregation of 700. A memorial service was also held at Riverside Church in Manhattan two months after her death. Paul said at her funeral, "She was my girlfriend. I lost my girlfriend."

McCartney left all of her property to Paul, including royalties from books and records and rights to her photos. He pledged to continue her line of vegetarian food and to keep it free from GMOs.

Tributes and dedications
In June 1998, the artist Brian Clarke exhibited The Glass Wall (Dedicated to Linda McCartney), a 1,012 square foot artwork in stained glass, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York. Created by Clarke between 1997–98, a period in which he and McCartney exhibited their collaborations in photography and stained glass together at the Swiss National Museum of Glass Arts in Romont, the artwork—which takes as its motif the fleur-de-lys or lily, cited as Linda's favourite flower—was renamed in tribute to her after her death. The exhibition, of the same name, ran until September 1998, after which The Glass Wall was acquired by the Corning Museum of Glass, and installed as part of its permanent collection in Steuben. After her death, the Edinburgh International Film Festival premiered Wide Prairie, a six-minute cartoon fantasy film McCartney made with director Oscar Grillo.

In April 1999, Paul McCartney performed at the "Concert for Linda" tribute at the Royal Albert Hall, organized by two of their friends, Chrissie Hynde and Carla Lane. Among the artists who performed, besides Paul, were George Michael, the Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Tom Jones, and Neil Finn. Paul closed the concert by dedicating the event to Linda, whom he called his "beautiful baby", and their children.

On 19 July 1999, just a few yards from Calderstones House in Liverpool, Paul officially opened the Linda McCartney Children's Play Area in Calderstones Park, unveiling a plaque at the entrance and planting a Cypress Oak tree (Quercus fastigiata) nearby overlooking the play area.

In January 2000, Paul announced donations in excess of $2,000,000 for cancer research at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson, where Linda received treatment. The donations, through the Garland Appeal, were made on the condition that no animals would be used for testing. Also in 2000, The Linda McCartney Centre, a cancer clinic, opened at The Royal Liverpool University Hospital. In November 2002, the Linda McCartney Kintyre Memorial Trust opened a memorial garden in Campbeltown near where the family's Scottish farmhouse was located, with a bronze statue of her created by sculptor Jane Robbins, Paul's cousin.

Representation in other media
Elizabeth Mitchell and Gary Bakewell played the McCartneys in the 2000 TV film The Linda McCartney Story. She was portrayed by Catherine Strauss in the 1985 TV film John and Yoko: A Love Story. The McCartneys guest-starred as themselves in The Simpsons episode "Lisa the Vegetarian".

She appears in the 2021 Peter Jackson documentary The Beatles: Get Back.

Albums

 * Ram (1971) (with Paul McCartney)
 * Wide Prairie (1998)

Session work

 * Paul McCartney – McCartney (1970)
 * Denny Laine – Holly Days (1977)
 * Denny Laine – Japanese Tears (1980)
 * Paul McCartney – McCartney II (1980)
 * Paul McCartney – Tug of War (1982)
 * Paul McCartney – Pipes of Peace (1983)
 * Paul McCartney – Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984)
 * Paul McCartney – Press to Play (1986)
 * Paul McCartney – Flowers in the Dirt (1989)
 * Paul McCartney – Off the Ground (1993)
 * Paul McCartney – Flaming Pie (1997)

title: Linda McCartney


text:
Julius Vogel

Sir Julius Vogel (24 February 1835 – 12 March 1899) was the eighth premier of New Zealand. His administration is best remembered for the issuing of bonds to fund railway construction and other public works. He was the first Jewish prime minister of New Zealand. Historian Warwick R. Armstrong assesses Vogel's strengths and weaknesses: "Vogel's politics were like his nature, imaginative – and occasionally brilliant – but reckless and speculative. He was an excellent policymaker but he needed a strong leader to restrain him....Yet Vogel had vision. He saw New Zealand as a potential 'Britain of the South Seas', strong both in agriculture and in industry, and inhabited by a large and flourishing population."

Early life
Born in London, Vogel received his early education at University College School in University College, Gower St London. He later studied chemistry and metallurgy at the Royal School of Mines (later part of Imperial College London). He emigrated to Victoria, Australia in 1852, being editor of several newspapers on the goldfields, including the Inglewood Advertiser and the Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser. After an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Victorian Parliament in the Avoca district in August 1861 (he lost to James Macpherson Grant and Benjamin George Davies), he moved to Otago in October 1861, where he became a journalist for the Otago Witness. In November 1861, he founded the Otago Daily Times and became its first editor. In 1863 James Grant was charged with criminal libel against Vogel in an election pamphlet but was found not guilty by a jury.

On 19 March 1867, Vogel got married in Dunedin to his neighbour Mary "Polly" Clayton, the daughter of architect William Henry Clayton. They had three sons and one daughter.

Political career
Vogel first became involved in politics in 1862, winning election to the provincial council of Otago. Four years later became the head of the provincial government, a post which he held until 1869.

Member of Parliament
In 1863 he was unsuccessful in the for. Later in an he was elected a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives for the Dunedin and Suburbs North electorate.

In the 1866 election, he was defeated by William Murison in the electorate on Wednesday, 28 February. It is unclear why Vogel stood in Waikouaiti as two days earlier, he had been returned unopposed at the nomination for the Goldfields electorate. On retiring from the provincial government in 1869, he joined the William Fox ministry as colonial treasurer, afterward holding the posts of postmaster-general, commissioner of customs, and telegraph commissioner at various times.

In 1870, as Colonial Treasurer he introduced his "grand go-ahead policy" or great Public Works policy to revitalise and develop the country by borrowing overseas to build railways, roads and telegraph lines and to attract immigrants.

The Fox ministry having been forced to resign, Vogel carried a vote of no confidence in their successors, and in October 1872, returned to power as leader in the Lower House, colonial treasurer and postmaster-general. He represented several electorates throughout the colony: Dunedin and Suburbs North 1863–1866, Goldfields in Otago 1866–1870, Auckland East 1871–1875, Wanganui 1876 (resigned) and Christchurch North 1884–1889 (resigned).

Vogel successfully contested the 1884 election in Christchurch North against John Crewes.

Vogel was the first Member of Parliament to be named in New Zealand. He was named on 15 November 1887 by the Speaker of the House Maurice O'Rorke for saying that his fellow Member Robert Thompson was 'want of manners' in a debate about Vogel's use of constabulary for household purposes – a charge he denied.

Premier of New Zealand

Vogel was premier from 1873 to 1875 and again in 1876. From 1876 to 1881, he was agent-general for New Zealand in London, and, in 1884, he was again a member of the government of the colony. During his political career, Vogel worked generally successfully for reconciliation with the Māori people. In 1887, he introduced the first women's suffrage Bill to Parliament, but suffrage was not granted until 1893. He was knighted in 1875. He finally gave up the colonial office in 1887; from which date he lived in England and was the Agent-General for New Zealand.

Vogel is best remembered for his "Great Public Works" scheme of the 1870s. Before 1870, New Zealand was a country largely dominated by provincial interests and pork-barrel politics. After Vogel, as colonial treasurer, proposed borrowing the massive sum of 10 million pounds, New Zealand developed a significant infrastructure of roads, railways and communication, all administered by central government.

Vogel is also noteworthy as one of the few practising Jewish prime ministers outside Israel. Since Vogel, two other New Zealanders of Jewish descent have held the premiership: Francis Bell, an Anglican who briefly became prime minister in May 1925; and John Key, New Zealand's prime minister between 2008 and 2016 who was not religious despite attending synagogue as a child on occasion. Benjamin Disraeli, of Jewish descent but Anglican, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom contemporaneously to Vogel's premiership.

Life after politics
Vogel has a reputation as the first New Zealander to write a science-fiction novel: Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman's Destiny, published in 1889. It anticipated a utopian world where women held many positions of authority. New Zealand went on to become the first country to give women the vote, and, from 1997 to 2008, continuously had a female Prime Minister, while for a short period (2005–2006) women simultaneously held all five highest government positions (Monarch, Governor-General, Prime Minister, Speaker of the House and Chief Justice).

In honour of this book, the Sir Julius Vogel Awards for New Zealand speculative fiction take their name from him.

He died in London, having retired there in 1887 after electoral defeat. He had been an invalid for several years.

On his death at East Molesey in 1899, Vogel was interred in Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London.

Namesakes
Several things bear his name today:

 * The Sir Julius Vogel Awards for science fiction writing.
 * Suburbs named Vogeltown in Wellington and New Plymouth.
 * Vogel House, the former official residence of New Zealand Prime Ministers for most of the 20th century.
 * Vogel Building in Wellington built for the Ministry of Works, now housing much of the Ministry of Justice. This building has been renamed the Justice Centre as of July 2013.
 * Various streets throughout the country named Vogel Street, such as the one in his former constituency of Dunedin.

title: Julius Vogel