Anyone who found themselves at a checkout counter in May of 2003 might have had occasion to flip through Entertainment Weekly, having spied the tantalizing cover story: The 50 Greatest Cult Movies of All Time. Smack in the middle was a picture of a Black man in striped bellbottoms, a white hat, an open leopard-print shirt, a vest, snakeskin boots, and two guns, his posture suggesting something between a soul singer’s body drop and a rehearsal for a bank robbery.

If, like me, you were 14 when you opened that edition and saw Jimmy Cliff’s photo above the words “Don’t. Fuck. Wit. Me.” it was as if you were seeing the Matrix. This was the coolest, most immediate, most touched image of a person I’d ever seen. Who was he? What was “The Harder They Come”? From what cultural galaxy did this meteor emerge? The name was dimly familiar to me, but I’d never considered that there was more to him than the music I knew so little about. Forty years into his career, The Right Honorable Jimmy Cliff, Order of Merit, activist, actor, pioneer, producer, Grammy award-winning singer and writer, was about to change my life.

James Chambers was born in the eye of a hurricane one Jamaican summer, in St. James parish, to a family with seven siblings, with another on the way. The Chambers were dirt poor. Jimmy spent some of his childhood with his aunt when his parents couldn’t afford to feed him. His angelic voice lit up the church every Sunday. A fortuitous move to Kingston set him on a course for fame. He went from basking in the soundtrack of his neighbor’s window radio, his only exposure to new music, to performing his own songs in talent shows with a bamboo guitar he carved himself. After adopting his stage name, his first singles were “Hurricane Hattie” and “Miss Jamaica.” He was 17.

The song that would get him off the streets and into a recording studio, however, was “Dearest Beverly.” He sang it for record producer and Island Records co-founder Leslie Kong in 1961, a song written specifically to catch the Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneur’s ears. He had a shop called Beverly’s, from which he ran his business. Cliff was the first major artist on Beverly Records, Kong’s solo Jamaican label, and he was soon working for the label’s A&R department. Jimmy’s first discovery was a young singer named Bob Marley.

The rest of the world got its first taste of Cliff in 1964. He was sent to represent Jamaica at the World’s Fair in Queens, and a crew was sent to Jamaica to film a program called “This is Ska!” Ska was just one of a dozen Caribbean musical forms that collectively evolved into Reggae. West African folk music was brought to the islands, and its essence has remained consistent for hundreds of years, making it unique among popular genres. What became the Blues in America became Mento, Calypso, Dancehall, Roots, Rocksteady, Dub, and finally Reggae in Jamaica.

Cliff, as he renamed himself, was enticed to London to record with Kong at Island HQ, their resources better suited to handling a star. Cliff was asked to tailor his sound for the audience paying to see Jimi Hendrix (who became a friend), Spencer Davis (for whom he opened), and The Rolling Stones (for whom he sang in the 80s). The result was Hard Road to Travel, in which Cliff did his best impression of a rock singer. You can see Cliff’s rock efforts in clips from TV performances, like his cover of “When a Man Loves a Woman.” You could easily forget that the man howling and shaking like James Brown in 1967 was the same man so coolly feeling his way through “The Harder They Come” in 1972.

If “Time Will Tell,” the song that opens his 1969 self-titled album, isn’t the first pop reggae song ever recorded, it sure sounds like it is. So complete and rich, so clear and joyous; the Jimmy Cliff we all know was standing in the studio with a cigarette waiting for the playback, waiting for his truest self to arrive. The upbeat sounds are a Trojan horse for Cliff’s pained lyrics about poverty, the Vietnam War, and capitalism; heady topics he renders human. Cliff brought this to the top of the charts worldwide. In particular, his song “Wonderful World, Beautiful People,” about a soldier’s death, was so popular that they renamed the album after it in its re-release.

Song two was his monumental hit “Many Rivers to Cross,” his answer to American soul and Motown, and was inspired by Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” which Cliff covered on his forgotten second album “Jimmy Cliff in Brazil.” It was haunting and melancholy. It transcended genre. Harry Nilsson, Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstadt, The Walker Brothers, and fellow Beverly Records artist Desmond Dekker all covered it.

It was 1972’s “The Harder They Come,” a movie tailored for him by Jamaican director Perry Henzell, that ensconced Cliff in the annals of pop culture. The film starred Cliff as Ivanhoe Martin, a real criminal killed by police in 1948 at age 24. Updating the story for the early 70s, Henzell made the first ever Jamaican movie, the island’s very own “Breathless,” complete with chases, crime sprees, and trips to the cinema.

Cliff’s Ivanhoe arrives in Kingston looking for work but quickly finds the streets an inhospitable place. After a screening of Sergio Corbucci’s “Django” (“The hero can’t die until the last reel!” the crowd screams) and taking in the local sounds, Ivanhoe decides he’s going to be a rock star. When that doesn’t pan out, he starts stealing, dealing, and shooting his way out with a gun in each hand. The movie ends with a beachfront shootout, as in the real Ivan’s life, cut with footage from “Django,” turning real violence into an essay on the representation of violence.

Cliff’s title song, which grows more popular with every crime he commits, plays next to needle drops from other luminaries like Dekker and The Maytals. The soundtrack was added to the National Recording Registry in 2021, having been praised by Robert Christgau, Time, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork. The movie was a rare grindhouse film with a coherent political perspective and cultural sympathy, and the soundtrack was a rare album as rich as its inspiration. Michael Dare: “The Beatles had already done “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” Paul Simon had already sung “Mother and Child Reunion,” The Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane had both recorded in Kingston, but it was “The Harder They Come” that really put reggae on the map.” Roger Corman bought it and sold it, The Clash wrote a song about it, and Spike Lee called it one of the best musicals of all time.

When I first saw the image of Cliff in EW, I tracked down the film immediately, on a now long-out-of-print Criterion disc. I’d never seen a hero who draws up his violent self-actualization from the earth. Having only seen the Caribbean in tourist cinema (including, ironically, the Steven Seagal movie “Marked for Death,” which features an extended Cliff cameo), seeing the poverty on screen, reflective of Cliff’s own experience, was a revelation. This was his Jamaica. This gorgeous outlaw, with the sweet upper register (he sounds at times like Michael Jackson), who could write perfect pop songs, showed me (and millions more) a world I’d never seen. The idea of shooting a film on the streets you knew, the bands you knew, the people you knew; “The Harder They Come” went from stylish post-pop war cry to one of the most important films I’d ever see. It could be done. Jimmy Cliff did it.

Having grown up with so little, Cliff left none of his life out of his music. In his downtime, he sired 19 children. He became involved in the fight to end apartheid, playing benefits, organizing festivals (chronicled in the documentary “Bongo Man”), taking part in Little Steven’s Sun City fundraiser, incorporating Afrobeat into his reggae music in the late ’70s until the ’90s, and writing lyrics about the reality of living in violent, segregated societies. Even when he became a cultural legacy and a staple of late-night television, working with famous artists like Joe Strummer, Tim Armstrong, Wyclef Jean, and Bruce Springsteen inspired him; he never lost his empathy for the oppressed.

A string of bad reviews in the ’80s (not, it’s safe to say, unrelated to his holding the West’s feet to the fire regarding South Africa) pulled Cliff from the spotlight he’d worn since he was a teenager. A lead part in the disastrous, embarrassing “Club Paradise” changed little about his perceived slide into irrelevance. Cliff wore it all humbly, going with the flow and staying true to himself.

Years after giving up religion (“…now I believe in science.”), Cliff spoke out on behalf of the gay community, condemned the violence in “The Harder They Come” after it had been cited as a model of black-on-black violence, and released his final album in collaboration with the UN Refugee Fund. When Jamaica named a street after him in Montego Bay, it was as much for his early triumphs as his enduring commitment to his homeland, and to people everywhere in need of a powerful voice. He loved his life and changed the world with it.

To me, the gentleness of the real man, the care and love and empathy he brought to the world, will always compete with the bolt of lightning that struck me when I saw him for the first time in that photograph: a real man and an immortal idea. In a 2006 documentary, he thoughtfully muses, “What I’ve learned to do…is turn that bitterness into sweetness. Maybe I could have been a better person in this life…but what I know is what I am.”

On November 30^th, on what would have been her 90^th birthday, TCM is airing a double feature of two of Diane Ladd’s best performances: 1974’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and 1991’s “Rambling Rose.” Oscar-nominated for both, they are wonderful examples of Ladd’s skill at sketching characters who felt like people you knew.

She had a grounded realism to her acting, a performer who looked at the world around her and incorporated those she met into her craft. She was an underrated actress, too rarely mentioned among the greats, but the truth is she was as reliable as anyone in her generation. She never felt false. You couldn’t see the strings as you do when so many performers try to step into the shoes of “real people.” She sought truth in her characters and, by doing so, got lost in them.

And she shaped careers in a manner that’s also underrated. We wouldn’t really have the same impression of legends like Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne, Roman Polanski, or David Lynch without the way she influenced their legacies. She was an outspoken leader in her craft, and Hollywood is a darker place now that she’s left it.

Few actresses had Diane Ladd’s longevity, with credits spanning an incredible eight decades and over 200 projects. Her Mississippi roots served her well when it came to playing characters from the region—she was actually a second cousin of Tennessee Williams—but she also sought to leave some of that behind, telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1993, “Southern women are supposed to be the greatest wives – next to the Japanese; we were raised to be slaves. I’ve come a long way.”

She started on that long way when she was just a teenager, landing a role in a stage production of Tobacco Road. Her first film appearance reportedly came in an uncredited role in 1961’s “Something Wild,” but she had already done notable TV work by then. She would pop up regularly on the small screen throughout the ‘60s, appearing in classics like “The Fugitive,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Big Valley,” and “Ironside.”

Diane Ladd became a household name in 1974 when she appeared in two of the best films of that year: Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” and Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” The first one to win was nominated for Best Picture, and the second one landed Ladd her first of three Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress. These two fantastic performances also displayed Ladd’s range. She was a performer who often felt stereotyped into “Southern Dame” roles, but these are such unique, fully-drawn characters that they alone prove the shallowness of that criticism.

She worked consistently from that point on in both film and television. Film highlights include “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” “Wild at Heart” (her second Oscar nod), “Rambling Rose” (her third and final), “Citizen Ruth,” “Primary Colors,” and “Joy.” She also did a run on the TV sitcom “Alice,” loosely based on Scorsese’s movie, in 1980, but she lasted only one season, for which she won a Golden Globe. She was Emmy-nominated for guest appearances on “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “Grace Under Fire,” and “Touched by an Angel.” She knew how to make an impact.

Of course, she was also a part of a legendary family. She married Bruce Dern in 1960, and they had two children. Sadly, one died at 18 months, but the other was Laura Dern, an Oscar winner herself. Whenever they would appear together, such as in “Rambling Rose,” “Wild at Heart,” or the truly special “Enlightened,” they brought an unmistakable truth with them to the set.

In a statement, Dern herself said it more beautifully than we possibly could:

“My amazing hero and my profound gift of a mother, Diane Ladd, passed with me beside her this morning, at her home in Ojai, Ca. She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist, and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created. We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”

Like so many contemporary R&B fans, I was gutted when it was reported that Michael Eugene Archer, better known as groundbreaking neo-soul artist D’Angelo, passed away on Tuesday at the too-damn-young age of 51, after a long, private battle with pancreatic cancer.

The man was an elusive enigma, only dropping three studio albums–Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000) and Black Messiah (2014)–that nevertheless became influential masterworks. But he did spend those years in-between albums recording songs for movie soundtracks. Back in the good ol’ days when every movie came with a soundtrack full of bangers, D’Angelo was a regular presence. You could literally make a playlist out of the secret heaters he recorded for the movies, which is what I’ve done.

“U Will Know” from “Jason’s Lyric” (1994)

D’Angelo was just 19 when he co-wrote and co-produced this all-star single, which also serves as the theme song for the 1994 hood drama starring Allen Payne as a man torn between being there for his self-destructive, ex-con brother (Bokeem Woodbine) and falling in love with an entrancing waitress (a pre-Will Smith Jada Pinkett). Most of the era’s biggest R&B male singers—including co-producer Brian McKnight, Gerald Levert, R. Kelly, Boyz II Men, Tevin Campbell, Keith Sweat, and Usher—joined forces as a Black-and-proud choir, practically one-upping each other in the vocal-run department, as they sing encouraging lyrics for all the struggling brothas out there. 

“Girl You Need a Change of Mind” from “Get on the Bus” (1996)

In the first of many classic songs he would remake for movie soundtracks, D’Angelo got with veteran producer/Miles Davis collaborator James Mtume and recorded a cover of former Temptation Eddie Kendricks’ proto-disco 1973 single, which saluted all the fine ladies who were fighting for equal rights back in the day. D’Angelo and Mtume simply amp up the already defiant, gospel-inspired, righteous soul Kendricks and producer Frank Wilson already laid down. It did fit in quite well in the soundtrack for the Spike Lee-directed dramedy, where a bus full of Black men (including Ossie Davis, Andre Braugher and comedian Bernie Mac) travel en route to the Million Man March. 

“Your Precious Love” from “High School High” (1996)

D’Angelo collaborated with Erykah Badu, another neo-soul trailblazer, and producer Bob Power for an old-fashioned rendition of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s great Motown duet, originally penned by beloved singer-songwriter duo Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. While the cover made an appearance on the soundtrack for the forgotten high-school movie parody, starring “SNL” alum Jon Lovitz as a white teacher getting his Dangerous Minds on in an inner-city school, it was also included on Marvin Is 60, a Marvin Gaye tribute album, in 1999.  

“I Found My Smile Again” from “Space Jam” (1996)

The 6x platinum soundtrack from the live-action animated sports comedy starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny had a slew of singles, from the bass-booming title track by Quad City DJs to R. Kelly’s Grammy-winning anthem “I Believe I Can Fly” to Seal’s rendition of Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle.” Buried within the collection is D’Angelo’s enticing, enthusiastic track. D opens up the tune by nimbly twinkling the ivories on his electric piano, then sliding into a spry soulful ode to that special someone who brings out the rosiness in a brotha’s cheekbones. (“I haven’t felt like this in a while/Girl. I wanna thank you for helping me find my smile.”) Although the original isn’t available to stream, a re-recorded, radio-edit version can be found on his 2008 The Best So Far… compilation. 

“The ‘Notic” from “Men in Black” (1997)

“Men in Black” infamously had a soundtrack album where, apart from star Will Smith’s smash theme song, most of the songs did not appear in the movie. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop D’Angelo and hip-hop band The Roots (featuring drummer/frequent D’Angelo collaborator Questlove) from doing a jazzy remake of “The Hypnotic,” from The Roots’ 1996 album Illadelph Halflife. Along with adding ad-libs and keyboard-tickling, D’Angelo deliciously repurposes the chorus from Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Shining Star.” Erykah Badu can also be heard throwing in some background vocals.

“She’s Always In My Hair” from “Scream 2” (1997)

D’Angelo got the chance to cover Prince, one of his most obvious influences, when he remade the Purple One’s 1984 B-side for the sequel to Wes Craven’s hit meta-slasher flick. The first song you hear in the movie (an apt choice, as it begins with a young, Black couple, played by Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps, unfortunately becoming this installment’s first casualties), D puts a hard-driving, Black-rock spin on Prince’s spacey, synth-funk rarity. An invigorating change-of-pace from the smooth neo-soul he was already known for, the cover hints at the musical experimenting he would later do on Voodoo.

“Devil’s Pie” from “Belly” (1998)

Music-video director Hype Williams’s directorial debut–basically an urban spin on “Mean Streets” starring rap icons Nas and DMX as partners in crime–is most known for its ultra-stylish opening credits, a slo-mo club sequence set to an acapella version of Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life.” But the movie also gave us this unofficial theme song from D’Angelo and legendary hip-hop producer DJ Premier (best known as one-half of East Coast rap duo Gang Starr). With Premier sampling a bassline from Teddy Pendergrass’s “And If I Had” and throwing in scratches and clipped lines from other rappers, D’Angelo sings about the dangers of succumbing to greed and materialism, serving as the perfect background music for a montage where Nas and DMX’s drug dealers start cracking on their operation. The song would also end up on Voodoo.

“Heaven Must Be Like This” from “Down in the Delta” (1998) and “Can’t Hide Love” from “Dancing in September” (2001)

Here are two more covers, which were both included on D’Angelo’s formerly rare, 1998 live album Live at the Jazz Cafe, London. His rosy rendition of the Ohio Players’ sweet-talking “Heaven Must Be Like This”–a bonus track that only appeared on the album’s Japanese release–doesn’t appear in “Delta,” which marked the directorial debut of the revered poet Maya Angelou. But it did end up on the soundtrack album. As for Reggie Rock Bythewood’s TV satire, which is obviously named after a line from Earth, Wind and Fire’s hit “September,” D’s bad-to-the-bone version of the group’s “Can’t Hide Love” (originally recorded by LA soul group Creative Source) slyly plays over the end credits. 

“Talk Shit 2 Ya” from “Baby Boy” (2001)

D’Angelo’s soundtrack contributions, much like D’Angelo himself, became a rarity after the success of Voodoo. A year after the album’s release, he dropped this track for John Singleton’s oft-repeated-on-BET hood drama, where Singleton goes back to South Central to tell the story of a thugish man-child (Tyrese Gibson). D mostly takes a backseat on this tune, providing the G-funk melody (which includes a groovy bass loop sampled from Curtis Mayfield’s “Mother’s Son”) and deep-voiced background vocals while rapper Marlon C is front and center with his rhymes. 

“I Want You Forever” from “The Book of Clarence” (2024)

D’Angelo’s final soundtrack appearance was on the soundtrack for director Jeymes Samuel’s satirical take on the story of Jesus, with LaKeith Stanfield as a struggling Jerusalem man who claims to be the new Messiah. D teams up with Samuel (who also composed the score) and Jay-Z for this blowsy, bombastic jam session of a song, mostly adding a sprawling chorus to this de facto love theme for Clarence and his love interest Varinia (Anna Diop).

Bonus: “Unshaken” from “Red Dead Redemption 2” (2019) 

OK, so this is from a video game. But when “Red Dead Redemption” fan D’Angelo found out that a sequel was in the works, he approached Rockstar Games about adding a song to the soundtrack. He got with Grammy-winning producer Daniel Lanois (best known for co-producing U2’s most essential albums) and recorded a moody, outlaw-country number for a nightriding sequence that have been known to give goosebumps to streaming gamers. Listening to it again only makes me sad that the man never got to score a Western.

In her last on-camera interview, English primatologist Jane Goodall used her platform to uplift others. In a direct address to an unknown audience, she says, “Your life matters, and you are here for a reason. And I just hope that reason will become apparent as you live through your life.” 

Growing up in a family with two parents who studied anthropology and archaeology, one of whom taught a physical anthropology course at the local community college, some of the earliest people I thought of as celebrities were palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey, as well as his protégés Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. These two women challenged the way we think about primates as social beings who live in communities not all that dissimilar to our own. They showed me, and other girls like me, a path towards living life with passion and dedicating oneself to something greater than oneself.

Fossey had her short but impactful life memorialized by the 1988 film “Gorillas In The Mist,” featuring an Oscar-nominated Sigourney Weaver as the primatologist who was murdered by poachers at the age of 53. Jane Goodall was much luckier with her work, spanning nearly six decades. By the time she passed away on October 1st at the age of 91, Goodall had authored thirty-two books, fifteen of which were specifically written for children, and had been featured in over forty documentary films. 

Born in 1934 in Hampstead, London, Goodall became interested in animals after her father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee, which she named Jubilee, rather than a traditional teddy bear. This fascination led her to the White Highlands in the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya in 1957. A life-changing meeting with Leakey led to several opportunities for her to study primate behavior and primate anatomy with experts Osman Hill and John Napier, and later to earn a PhD in Ethology from the University of Cambridge. Leakey’s thought was that if they could learn more about the behavior of existing great apes, this would help his work, which sought to understand the behavior of early hominids.

Goodall has said her mother’s encouragement gave her strength as she began her research career in this intensely male-dominated field. Goodall’s trailblazing work, along with her ongoing advocacy for more young women to join the field, has been cited as a factor in the equalization of men and women working in primatology today. 

In her 1999 book “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey,” Goodall recalled that while observing chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania in the 1960s, she initially thought that they were “nicer than human beings,” but later she found, “that chimpanzees could be brutal—that they, like us, had a darker side to their nature.” This, along with her discovery that chimpanzees can make tools, helped redefine everything we thought we knew about both early humans and our primate cousins. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 with the aim of continuing her research, as well as facilitating legal frameworks to protect wildlife habitats. 

Goodall and her work have been the subject of numerous documentaries over the years. Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman’s 1990 short documentary, “Chimps: So Like Us,” features interviews with Goodall as she describes how each chimp has its own unique voice, just like humans do, intercut with footage of chimps in the wild living their lives. That same year, Judith Dwan Hallet’s “In The Life and Legend of Jane Goodall” similarly follows Goodall as she does her job in the wild, observing the animals while teaching what she’s learned to others. In this film, Goodall shares with the audience her feelings about her favorite family of chimps, whom she affectionately calls the “F” troop.

While these early films align with Goodall’s goal of sharing her singular knowledge with the world as a form of preservation and activism, later films about Goodall take a more hagiographic approach, aiming instead to position her into an icon status. However, one recent film stands high above the pack: Brett Morgen’s impressionistic 2017 documentary “Jane,” which features astonishing never-before-seen footage of Goodall’s field work, shot mainly on lush 16mm color film stock by filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, who would later become Goodall’s first husband, that had been hidden away in the National Geographic archives until its discovery in 2014. Morgen’s kaleidoscopic editing style, Philip Glass’s impassioned score, and the love between Lawick and Goodall that shines through his breathtaking footage form a rich portrait of both the trailblazing woman and the sacrifices she made to protect that natural world that had so beguiled her. 

In March of this year, Goodall was interviewed by filmmaker Brad Falchuk for a Netflix series called “Famous Last Words,” intended to be released only after her death. The hour-long special features a candid fifty-minute conversation between Goodall and Falchuk. The two then share a shot of whisky, Falchuk leaves the sound stage, and Goodall faces the camera, addressing the world for one last time. Goodall’s goodbye to people of the world lasts a full five minutes. Her speech ends with an urgent clarion call about the impact of man-made climate change, reminding us that, “as we destroy one ecosystem after another, as we create worse climate change, worse loss of diversity, we have to do everything in our power to make the world a better place for the children alive today, and for those that will follow.”

Goodall lived her life with a purpose, not just rooted in her work with chimpanzees, but also in her mission to conserve our natural world before it’s too late. As I read more and more headlines about the destruction of the world’s oceans, the depletion of resources for A.I. data centers, and the environmental impact of war, I truly hope her life wasn’t lived in vain after all. 

When she was only 19, Claudia Cardinale won a competition for the Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia, and the movie career that would follow over the next two decades would create millions of fans who would agree with that prize. Cardinale’s beauty helped make her a star, but it was her elusive charm and mysterious nature in films like “The Leopard,” “8 ½,” “The Pink Panther,” “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and so many more that made her one of the most recognizable faces of the ‘50s and ‘60s. She passed in Nemours, France this week, one of the few remaining superstars of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

After getting the attention of Jacques Baratier through her appearance in a short film that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, Cardinale was cast in a minor role in her debut: 1958’s “Goha,” directed by Baratier and starring Omar Sharif. The film premiered in competition at Cannes. In the late ‘50s, Cardinale signed a seven-year contract with the Italian production company Vides, which was run by Franco Cristaldi, who Cardinale would actually be married to from 1966 to 1975.

Her breakthrough came in the 1958 comedy “Big Deal on Madonna Street,” which was a big hit in Italy, and she worked consistently from then on really. Highlights of this era include “Il bell’Antonio,” “Austerlitz,” “Rocco and His Brothers,” “Silver Spoon Set,” and “Time of Indifference.” Her career really took off in 1963, when she appeared in both “The Leopard” and “8 ½,” two of the most acclaimed Italian films of all time. “8 ½” actually marked the first time that Cardinale could use her own voice—she was always dubbed before that. In the ‘60s, she was often considered the most popular film star in Italy, but she also became a notable presence in Hollywood, appearing opposite Rock Hudson in “Blindfold” and Anthony Quinn in “Lost Command.” One of her most timeless roles came in 1968 in Sergio Leone’s legendary “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

Much more than a pretty face, Claudia Cardinale worked almost non-stop from her launch in the late ‘50s to her death over six decades later, appearing in a French Netflix original film called “Rogue City” as recently as 2020. She was a legend who never undervalued the work it took to be a legend, giving notable performances well into seventies, including in 2012’s “Gebo and the Shadow” and “The Artist and the Model.” She worked from Fellini to opposite Emma Thompson in 2014’s “Effie Gray,” a connection to the past of European cinema that has now sadly been lost.

The passing of Claudia Cardinale was an internationally recognized event this week. French President Emmanel Macron wrote on X, “Claudia Cardinale embodied a freedom, a vision and a talent that contributed decisively to the works of the greatest, from Rome to Hollywood, up to Paris, which she chose as her homeland. We French will always carry this Italian and world star in our hearts, for the eternity of cinema”. An Italian outlet named Ansa has a wonderful quote from the star about what mattered to her: “I lived the profession of cinema, not to escape from life but to live it better than I lived real life, at least with more sincerity and awareness”.

One of my earliest memories of watching something on-screen was seeing reruns of the Canadian children’s television series “The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon” on television throughout the day. In it, Graham Greene plays Mr. Crabby Tree, a wisecracking tree who, while frequently in a bad mood, eventually comes around to the incessant questions of the leading child characters by the end of each episode. Often acting as a mentor to Dudley and the children, Greene’s presence in this series was marked by a soft, almost lilting voice commonly found in rural Canadian elders, reminding me of my own grandfather, who had a specific twang to certain words and whistled when he spoke. 

Graham Greene was born on June 22, 1952, in Ohsweken, Ontario, Canada, on the Six Nations Reserve. Before moving into acting, Greene worked as a draftsman, steelworker, and welder. His story is not unlike many people I know, nor unlike myself. The trades are common here for people born on rural soil, bodies forced to endure agony until they just about snap. This typical career route is natural for many of us who may see it as the only prospect in a province rife with poverty. Later, Greene worked as an audio technician for Canadian rock bands before transitioning to acting in plays at Native Earth Performing Arts.

My introduction to Greene as a performer encapsulated how I felt each time I saw him on screen. It was a comforting presence I welcomed, and one that, as I grew older, I came to encounter in the same way I would when seeing portraits of family members I hadn’t seen in years, or those who had long been lost to time. While Greene became prevalent on Canadian television in the late 1980s, he burst forth as one of cinema’s most arresting actors in the 1990 film “Dances with Wolves.” In the film, Greene plays Sioux medicine man Kicking Bird, a character whose presence (along with Rodney A. Grant, who plays Wind In His Hair) easily outshines leading man Kevin Costner. 

No role Greene took was like the previous one. Whether he was playing a hero or a villain, the same fierceness existed within the foundation of each of his performances. What could also be traced throughout each of his performances was a startling amount of empathy. In embodying the characters that he did, Greene showcased a talent for relaying his lines in a way that forced you to look and listen as if you were witnessing a miracle unfold. He elevated each project he was in, making even what could have been a silly chase sequence with a vampire set to Thom Yorke’s song “Hearing Damage” in “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” feel like one of the most tense and well-put-together action scenes of the 2000s. 

The empathy and dedication that Greene showcased on screen were also seen off of it. After an episode in 1997 that landed him in a hospital, the actor spoke about his struggles with alcoholism and depression with a frankness most actors would shy away from. Each of these is a struggle embedded in our culture, one that my loved ones and I have long been affected by. The nights here are long and the winters are brutal, so much so that at times it feels as if the only thing that can thaw you is a drink or two. During an interview with fellow Canadian actor R.H. Thomson, Greene denounced the notion that one needs superhuman strength to pull through. “I dove into that well just to see how far I could go,” he told Thomson. “I came out of it. Not totally destroyed, but I think as a better performer. A better person with tolerance.”

Even as the host of “Exhibit A: Secrets of Forensic Science,” a Canadian true-crime documentary series similar to “Forensic Files,” Graham’s presence as a “talking head” of sorts reverberated through the cases at hand, adding levity to these retellings with his distinctive voice alone. Everything he did as an actor and as an advocate for the growth of Canadian cinema and Indigenous peoples’ place within it was done with the utmost care. He used his body and voice to inhabit the characters and roles he was playing, almost disappearing within them to create someone (or something) wholly original and unseen before. Yet that classic Greene presence remained, with long hair cascading past his shoulders, and a grin so infatuating that it was hard to look away from. 

This past June, Greene received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement during a ceremony in Ottawa, our nation’s capital. It often feels like the contributions Canadian actors and filmmakers have made to cinema’s growing legacy are not often celebrated as much as our American neighbors, and it’s up to us to command that they be seen, celebrated, and honored before it’s too late. The state of our industry is rife with financial troubles, and films often find themselves in distribution hell, even if they premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the world’s most renowned film festivals. Despite the realities of how our films are seen beyond the borders of this country, the contributions of Graham and other artists like him are intertwined with the roots from which our trees grow.

It feels inevitable that when an actor passes on, they will be recognized for their roles (no matter how small) in colossal Hollywood films. Already, Greene is being labeled as the “Die Hard With a Vengeance” and “Longmire” actor in various news headlines. While his roles in these films and TV shows are ones I undeniably enjoy, Graham was more than just a supporting actor in pieces of media led by white actors. He led films like “Clearcut,” which saw him portray a militant Indigenous activist who kidnaps a white lawyer, and “Skins,” where he played an alcoholic Vietnam War veteran. It’s these films, and Greene’s startlingly vulnerable performances, he should be remembered for. They have been shown to Canadians in cinema studies courses, one that often plays on our television screens in the middle of the night. 

Perhaps that’s what made Graham Greene the titan that he was. Even with the smallest amount of screen time, he was able to captivate the audience in a way I’m not sure that I’ve seen another Canadian actor do. His talent can be seen in even the smallest of our television shows and the films of ours that made it out of this small but expansive country. With his death, I can’t help but wish Greene had been given more space to flourish, not only in Canadian cinema but beyond its boundaries as well. His presence on screen, beyond his Oscar-nominated role in “Dances with Wolves” or his witty but short cameo in “The Last of Us,” deserved to be one that dominated not only the consciousness of Canadian film critics and scholars, but viewers around the world. 

It feels impossible to imagine a cinema, more specifically a Canadian cinema, that exists without Graham Greene’s presence. While his career post-Oscar nomination didn’t take off internationally as much as one could have hoped, his mark as an actor continues to be felt throughout North American culture. As one of the most well-known Indigenous actors of his time, Greene was a titan of not only Hollywood films like “The Green Mile,” but also smaller Canadian works of art that remain ingrained in the memories of each of us. I can’t help but wish Greene had been given more time to grace our screens, but in the decades that he did, he transformed what roles Indigenous actors could have and morphed the very foundation of our nation’s cinema.

“A lot of ‘em are gone…the old faces,” Terence Stamp’s Wilson says flatly an hour into Steven Soderbergh’s exquisite neo-noir “The Limey,” with a twinge of sadness he doesn’t allow himself to let breathe. Wilson has come from England after a nine-year stretch for petty crime. An escape followed by an escape. Stamp knew what this was like; he specialized in rebirth. He’d go away and come back once and again, circling back around to remind us that he wasn’t merely an enigmatic beauty, gifted with piercing blue eyes like he won the genetic lottery. The prettiest man in England. But could he act? When he arrived, he dazzled all, seeming to hoard awards and nominations, but it never seemed to faze him.

Like so many of his characters, he was created off-screen with a searing interiority; born standing with a zen-like command of his emotions. You could say Wilson was the part he was born to play, but that would be a white lie. He was born to be exactly who he was, and every character that found him. The pictures were born for him to play. He was a movie star, and he was an actor. But maybe more than that, he was a perfectly inscrutable face. Tragedy, comedy, and, as they say, a secret third thing: Terence Stamp. He’s gone, too, now. The old face and the young face, they’re all that’s left now. Happily, that’s more than enough.

Stamp’s childhood was a happy one, given the circumstances. He was born in 1938 in the once aristocratic hamlet of Stepney. He spent the most time with his loving mother as she gave him four more siblings by their literally remote father. He was a sailor, a stoker filling steamship furnaces with coal between stints in the merchant navy. When they weren’t dodging bombs during the Blitz as a child, he and his mother would go to the pictures. He remembered truly coming alive when, 23 minutes into William Wellman’s picaresque “Beau Geste,” a strapping Gary Cooper bounds down the stairs of an English manor and grabs an axe from a decorative suit of armor. He’s playful, but, as the film progresses, he shows his quality as a man, and of course, an actor who transcends whatever trappings in which he’s been placed. He’s having fun up there.  

He was accepted into the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, which had already produced some of the most important British screen actors, like Donald Sinden, Angela Lansbury, and Patrick Macnee. Collecting the essence of Sinden’s posh strivers, Macnee’s clever John Steed, and Lansbury’s blushing flower in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” you get the heart of Stamp. After graduation, he started acting in plays, meeting future roommate Michael Caine in a production of Willis Hall’s The Long, the Short and the Tall, about a lost patrol in Malaysia during the Second World War.

His popularity grew and grew over the next two years. His first films add up to one of those perfect debuts like Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane” or Lily Gladstone in “Certain Women,” that make you glad screen acting exists. The first was Peter Glenville’s “Term of Trial” with a reserved Laurence Olivier as his foil, a stern teacher. Sir Laurence walks into his classroom full of delinquents and miscreants, and Stamp is just one more sneering face until he’s called upon. “Can you repeat the question, sir?” He asks, shoulders heavy with annoyance and embarrassment. “Repeating the question won’t help,” hisses Olivier. Stamp gets his first close-u,p and it’s like seeing the Mona Lisa. “No, sir, no, it won’t.” He has the downcast beauty, devil-may-care attitude, and feline body language of Robert Mitchum, the boxer’s posture of Jean Gabin, the eyes and seeping sexuality of Kay Francis. He’s dangerous, all the more so for looking like nothing ever phases him. “I’m thinking.” He isn’t kidding. He’d make a career of showing us what it looks like to think on camera. Peter Ustinov’s adaptation of “Billy Budd” followed, where he makes a meal of quiet logic and churning doubts.

“Billy Budd” was one of Herman Melville’s unfinished novels. It portrays a Christ-like sailor from Bristol, an orphan and ultimately a martyr. The martinet master of arms (played in the film with diamond-cut smugness by the great Robert Ryan) tortures Billy for his beatific insubstantiality. He seems more condition than man, and the wicked Claggart can’t stand it, putting the screws to him until finally, in a moment of squirming frustration (“a convulsed tongue-tie”), he kills the man. He punches him hard into a block of wood that cracks his skull. Ryan smiles at Stamp and then dies wordlessly. He has finally connected with Billy and now … release. Stamp’s face goes slack and empty. He looks not like a murderer but a victim of violation. He knows what’s coming. “Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!” Stamp, astride a ship like his stoker father, made for a perfect, earthbound seraphim, violent of contradiction, easy and free, yet capable, as all of us, of reverting to our most savage nature. Under that wind-blown blonde mane was a mind working so fast it looked slow, like a helicopter blade. He was nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta, won a Golden Globe, and inspired a Paul Weller song. His place in screen history was secure.

Stamp’s reluctance to fame meant he cut something of a Billy Budd-like figure himself for the next decade, an interloping innocent in a nest of vipers. His first-ever press scrum began with being asked if he minded being called Terry. “No…it’s my name.” He went home for Sunday dinner with his parents after it ended, ever the working-class boy. Nevertheless, Stamp accidentally courted the tabloids relentlessly. He dated models and actresses, did gorgeous photo spreads, and rocketed around Europe in top-down sports cars. If not for the broad accent and the spy craft, he’d be playing himself as a lethal playboy in Joseph Losey’s wonderful “Modesty Blaise”. He was the very picture of what would be called ‘the swinging sixties,’ his experience easily influencing a theatrical triumph as the lead of Bill Naughton’s “Alfie,” when it migrated from London to New York’s Morosco theatre. He’d been reluctant to do it, but roommate Michael Caine urged him. His lithe gigolo made heads swivel, and offers poured in, not least to be in Lewis Gilbert’s movie adaptation. He couldn’t make it work and suggested Caine, who happily obliged and became a star.

Stamp next starred opposite fellow Douglas Webber grad Samantha Eggar in William Wyler’s “The Collector,” which dug into another pocket of Stamp’s suit. He plays a quiet and sensitive psychopath, bent by virginity and child-like shyness, who collects butterflies and kidnaps Eggar to cure his loneliness. Stamp’s performance keeps the film moving, as Wyler’s flagging direction is caught between mod affectation and his old searching psychology.

Equally wedged between eras and sensibilities was John Schlesinger’s “Far from the Madding Crowd,” in which Stamp plays Sergeant Troy to then-girlfriend Julie Christie’s Bathsheba. The film’s best scene is his. Troy and Bathsheba meet in rolling hills, caught in Nic Roeg’s swooning widescreen frame, and he gives her an erotic fencing lesson. There are quite a few adaptations of Thomas Hardy’s novel, but none has ever managed to outdo this scene’s psychedelic brio; Stamp’s foxlike insouciance and schoolboy’s boastful romanticism make him the Troy to beat. On a personal note, I named my band after his character, so taken by the confoundingly lusty montage and Stamp’s remarkable performance.

Ken Loach’s debut feature “Poor Cow” was Stamp’s following picture and the antithesis of “Madding Crowd” and “Modesty.” Stamp is an improbably handsome but authentically working-class husband and father, stripping away the artifice of his last few pictures and allowing himself a shot at the “angry young man” school of edged simplicity.

Stamp moved to Italy in the late ‘60s (he was offered “Blow-Up” and Bond) and was cast by two of the country’s biggest directors. Pier Paolo Pasolini cast him in the scintillating “Teorema,” in which he seduces every member of an upper-class family, causing them all to implode. It would be Pasolini’s most unvarnished work until “Saló”, and it’s difficult to imagine an actor better suited to playing a sexual pied piper. In Federico Fellini’s “Toby Damnit,” a segment of the omnibus “Spirits of the Dead,” he plays himself in all but name. He’s an actor who has made a deal with Satan, pursued by paparazzi. He tools around Rome in a Ferrari, enveloped by an orange, hellish miasma. It may be the best he ever looked, rumpled, unclean, ash-covered, and hungover. The prettiest boy in England was becoming lined by drink and grayed by stress, but the prettiest he remained. He’d bounce around Europe the next couple of years, starring in forgotten Italian, French, British, and Spanish genre films, always as the depressive outsider. The work slowed, and he moved to one of Krishnamurti’s ashrams in India. He liked finding himself more than he wanted to be found. The only thing that brought him back was a telegram asking if he wanted to make a movie with Marlon Brando. The movie hardly mattered, but it happened to be “Superman”.

Stamp’s presence in “Superman” and “Superman II” is his best remembered by most moviegoers, imbuing General Zod with sadistic gravity. He never winks, he barely even blinks. The scene in which he invades the White House, the famous “Kneel Before Zod” scene, is rescued from daffy staging and hopeless mise en scène by Stamp. It gives me, a seasoned hater of all things caped, chills. I watch the scene on YouTube from time to time just to hear him say six words with iron certainty.

In 1984, Stamp entered his next act. He appears as a very modern devil in Neil Jordan’s adaptation “The Company of Wolves,” alongside Webber Douglas alum Lansbury. He’s the one striking deals now; elegance itself. “The Hit” remains one of Frears’ best films, a lightly existential yet still bloody and neurotic crime film. Art once more imitating life, Stamp plays a criminal who turned in his accomplices and now lives like a reclusive artist in Spain. He rejoins his old world when two hitmen (Tim Roth and John Hurt) show up to retrieve him. Hurt catches Roth sleeping on the job and runs to find a missing Stamp, only to discover him standing serenely before a waterfall, taking in the pleasant sounds and misty sights, the splendor of being alive just before he dies. Hurt nearly shoots, but the sight literally disarms him. Stamp turns to face him, and there is the Mona Lisa once more. The angel must hang.

The parts changed Stamp from a faded lead into an eccentric, philosophizing support pillar in films as diverse as the sci-fi phenomenon “Alien Nation,” the sex therapy drama “Bliss,” the zeitgeist-courting “Wall Street,” and the riotous showbiz farce “Bowfinger.” He was always memorable, even when the films were not.

He experienced one more rebirth when he played trans widow Bernadette Bassenger in the mainstream queer classic “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” His by-then weathered face and whiskeyed voice give Bernadette’s sorrow truth and dimension. 1999’s “The Limey” looks, in macro, like it was another rebirth, a film in which he plays a British gangster headed to Los Angeles for the first time to find out who killed his daughter, but it was something else: a eulogy in motion. He discovers fellow 60s/70s icons Peter Fonda, Barry Newman, and Joe Dallesandro waiting for him and, in a particularly Soderberghian flourish, he’s played in flashback by himself in “Poor Cow”. He is transfixing in his anger. You believe that he can take men half his age in a fight, his guilt having made him into an instrument of destruction.

It seemed like it could be another fresh start for Stamp, but after playing Wilson, he’d been there and done that. It was time to collect paychecks and fade away. The films were largely dreadful during his final decades, but he was always the deep voice of uncertainty on the edge of a film’s periphery. If he took your money after “The Limey,” it was because you were the highest bidder. But he always showed up.

“I work primarily for the camera—it’s not something I really talk about a lot, but it’s part of the way I am as a movie actor. The camera is my girl, as it were.” Just as in “Alfie,” “Modesty,” and ”Madding Crowd,” his girl came to him. Stamp went from the cinema’s most radiant blank to its most timeless sage without ever losing the knowing glare, the softness of his eyes, the potential for menace lurking in his every change of expression. He knew how to tell a story with the sight of him thinking through a situation. It is as delightful to watch him puzzle out a solution as it is to see him empty of thought, gliding through the world. He was the prettiest man in England, and always more than a pretty face.

“Tell me … tell me,” snarls Wilson in the opening seconds of darkness in “The Limey.” The old face is gone, but Stamp told us everything. One look said it all.

The great comedic songwriter and performer Tom Lehrer passed away at 97 yesterday, outliving one of the writers credited with penning the “advance” obituary that The New York Times had been holding for many years, a phenomenon that sometimes occurs with notable people who live longer than expected. Lehrer might also have been amused by the people who heard news of his passing and expressed astonishment that he hadn’t already kicked the bucket. He released his first album in 1953 and retired from live performance in 1967, never to return, although he continued to write and record new songs in studios for another decade.

Some mistook his withdrawal from public life for having died; A 2003 Sidney Morning Herald profile of Leher began, “Word that we’ve secured an interview has people around the office launching into such unlikely yet infectious ditties as ‘The Vatican Rag,’ ‘Smut’ and Lehrer’s ode to spring pursuits, ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.’ It also has people asking with a surprised tone: ‘Is he still alive?’”

It’s fun to imagine the songs Lehrer would have written about all this. His discography is stocked with all-timers, but only if you’re into novelty songs that riff on things that were happening in the middle part of the 20th century but now require footnotes. The work combines erudite social commentary, boundary-pushing cheekiness, and a piano sound rooted in the music halls that birthed vaudeville.

“We Will All Go Together When We Go” captures the bleak absurdity of mutually assured destruction in the Cold War era, and now feels like a predecessor to “Dr. Strangelove” as well as to Randy Newman’s “Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One).” “The Masochism Tango” is about what it sounds like it’s about (“I ache for the touch of your lips, dear/But much more for the touch of your whips, dear”). So is “The Elements,” which is set to the music of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major-General” song, and consists mostly of Lehrer reciting the names of elements on the periodic table, but rearranged to rhyme. “National Brotherhood Week” calls out the hypocrisy of devoting a mere week to brotherhood while giving people who loathe each other the other 51 weeks of the year an opportunity to pretend they’re decent (“It’s fun to eulogize/The people you despise/As long as you don’t let them in your school”). 

One of my favorites is Lehrer’s nonexistent title song for the film adaptation of Oedipus Rex, which includes such verses as, “He loved his mother like no other/His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother!/One thing on which you can depend is/He sure knew who a boy’s best friend is!”

I first encountered Lehrer’s work when my fourth-grade choir performed a few of his songs during a winter recital. One of them was “Pollution,” which is done in the style of a song that the Sharks would’ve sung in West Side Story. It’s a toe-tapping ditty about humanity’s destruction of the environment. It begins, “If you visit American city/You will find it very pretty/Just two things of which you must beware/Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!” The first chorus goes, “Pollution, pollution/We got smog and sewage and mud/Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud!”  

Memorizing the names of songwriters wasn’t something I did at that age. I made a point of memorizing Lehrer’s after I heard “Pollution” and other Lehrer classics played on The Dr. Demento Show, a syndicated radio program specializing in comedic songs, sketches, and other silliness. Demento, also known as Barret Eugene Hansen, announced his retirement earlier this year. Still, his show ran for more than five decades, introducing established names like Lehrer to new generations while giving up-and-comers a platform to find a mass audience. Demento’s most significant find was “Weird Al” Yankovic, who, as Yankovic himself has said on many occasions, probably would not have existed if he hadn’t grown up listening to Lehrer. 

Lehrer was originally a mathematics professor (first at the University of California, Santa Cruz, then at Harvard) and continued to teach even when his music was at its peak. He was a ferociously nimble pianist and a composer of funny, topical songs that he’d play for friends. It all started in 1953 when, mainly for the heck of it, he paid for the pressing of 400 albums of his original work to give out to friends. A 1997 profile by Elijah Wald sums up his ascent:

The 1950s are often remembered as a cultural war zone, with Eisenhower and suburban conformity on one side, and the wildness of rock ‘n’ roll and beat poetry on the other. Lehrer stood firmly against both, and against decency, compassion, and virtually the whole range of human virtues. His songs, crafted with the care of the great Broadway tunesmiths, were studiedly intellectual and fiendishly irreverent. His idea of a cheerful ditty was “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” His idea of nostalgic sentimentality was an ode to “The Old Dope Peddler.” His idea of romance was “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” a paean to the woman he has killed, but whose hand he has kept as a souvenir. 

“I think I could get away with that stuff because I was this clean cut college kid in a bow-tie and horn-rimmed glasses, being kind of innocent and smart,” Lehrer said. Fans took the record home on vacations, and orders began drifting in from around the country. “The word spread like herpes,” as Lehrer puts it, and soon he was making nightclub appearances. After a while he graduated to concert halls, then recorded his second studio album in 1959. That same year, he recorded live versions of both albums, one at Harvard and the other at MIT. (His advertisement for a live set said it “contains exactly the same songs, but unfortunately also includes Mr. Lehrer’s tedious spoken commentary.”) 

In reality, Lehrer’s onstage patter was as sharp as his lyrics. “You know, of all the songs I have ever sung, that is the one I’ve had the most requests not to,” he said after performing, “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” a charming tale of murder and dismemberment, on “Songs by Tom Lehrer.” In that same show, Lehrer said, “I don’t like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn’t as though I had to do this, you know. I could be making, oh, $3,000 a year just teaching.”

Lehrer became a national phenomenon when he was invited to perform his work on “That Was the Week That Was,” a U.S. adaptation of the same-named satirical-musical British series that looked back on the previous seven days’ worth of news. “TWTWTW,” as it was known, ran just two seasons, from 1963 to 65. Lehrer’s work survived and endured, though, probably because each song seemed to exist in its own hermetically sealed universe.

Lehrer declined all requests to return to the keys and unveil new material or play the hits. Part of the problem, he told interviewers, was that he didn’t find much humor in many of the major political developments after his heyday. What was he gonna do, a funny song about 9/11 or the 2008 recession? More than that, “I didn’t feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding,” he said. “To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.”

However, although Lehrer stopped performing and recording fairly soon into his music career, he was always willing to discuss his work. He did countless interviews over the decades. They produced many amazing quotes, like “If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it,” and “Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize,” and my favorite, “Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”

“I really don’t have anything more to say,” he told Bob Claster last year, in one of his last interviews. “To just come back and stand on a stage and do the old songs again doesn’t really appeal to me, and performing doesn’t appeal to me at all.” He said people used to speculate that he must not have liked performing if he decided to stop doing it. Lehrer would reply that he liked high school, but didn’t want to do that again, either. Then he added that he was grateful for his brief window of fame because it let him travel all over the world and meet interesting people and, more importantly, it “enabled me to do what I always wanted to do, which is teach part time and hang out.” If not for the music, “I would have had to have a real job, god forbid.”

“The wreckage of my past is haunting me, it just won’t leave me alone,” sang Ozzy on “Road to Nowhere,” the reflective closer on his bestselling 1991 album No More Tears. It’s a standout in a solo career that endeared him to Gen Xers as much as his Black Sabbath albums did for boomers and The Osbournes for millennials, by which point Ozzy’s status as a top-tier rock legend was irrefutable. The establishment didn’t take him seriously—his first Rolling Stone cover story wasn’t until 2002 (he graced the cover twice that year), and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame didn’t induct Sabbath nor Ozzy solo until many years after their earliest eligibility. That may have endeared Ozzy all the more to fans who packed amphitheaters for Ozzfest and bought millions of his records that FM radio was hesitant to play. Like David Lynch or Pee-wee Herman, he was a very public weirdo who offended puritans and made other weirdos feel safe. People wanted to dismiss this pastor-terrorizing, bat-chomping, Alamo-desecrating hellion as a shock-rocker, but those of us who listened knew part of what made the Ozzman such a striking artist was how hard he worked to convince us of the opposite.

In Penelope Spheeris’ unforgettable “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years,” rockers are eager to be filmed showing off their excesses—beset by young groupies, or chugging vodka in a private swimming pool, perhaps. Ozzy gave the most memorable interview by showing himself making breakfast in his kitchen. (We now know that the orange juice spill is staged, which further speaks to Ozzy’s humor.) He constantly downplayed his music’s heaviness (“I’ve never felt comfortable about that title that they put on me — ‘metal,’…it was always just rock music”), Satanism (“We couldn’t conjure up a fart”), and annoyed his more serious bandmates by jumping around on stage too much. He duetted with Miss Piggy on the 1994 Muppets album Kermit Unpigged. He was far more likely to sing the praises of the Beatles or Peter Gabriel than his Ozzfest brethren, though he certainly elevated numerous young and underappreciated artists on tour. He insisted Black Sabbath were “the last hippie band” (“We were into peace”) and sang about leaning to love and forgetting to hate in his biggest solo hit. Most famously, he played the befuddled father on an MTV show that may have been the worst possible publicity for someone widely marketed as the Prince of Darkness, or the Godfather of Metal. In a Rolling Stone profile riding on the success of the hit show “The Osbournes,” Ozzy recounted being recently invited to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, where he bashfully tried to cover up his tattooed fingers (O-Z-Z-Y) for the monarch. Ozzy wasn’t trying to get people to ignore the man behind the curtain, he wanted to reassure us the man on stage wasn’t so bad.

But like the wolfman Ozzy sang about in “Bark at the Moon,” or the Robert Louis Stevenson character he referenced on an Ozzmosis deep cut, something horrifying kept breaking out of John Michael Osbourne. No matter how much he downplayed his dark side, there was something unpredictable and unnerving in his persona. No other rock musician can seem so convincingly possessed. Part of it was the debauchery—if Ozzy’s peers and his fabulous autobiography I Am Ozzy are to be believed, he lived through and forgot about more depravity than most rock stars have enjoyed (anyone who can gross out the members of Mötley Crüe is on another level). But the most stunning thing about Ozzy Osbourne will always be his music. “I don’t want to change the world, I don’t want the world to change me” chanted Ozzy in another No More Tears banger, which eventually (speaking of shocking) won him a Grammy. No matter what he intended, the world changed for Ozzy Osbourne, a troubled, impoverished boy from an abusive household, a high school dropout with undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia, who struggled to fight off bullies or hold down a steady job, and grew up to be one of the most celebrated artists of his lifetime.

Black Sabbath sounded like nothing before it when their first album dropped in February 1970, and every metal act in their wake owes something to them. It’s still startling how contemporary Sabbath still sounds with today’s cutting-edge metal bands. Purists like to point out that guitarist Tony Iommi was the riff architect and bassist Geezer Butler wrote most of the band’s lyrics, while Sabbath’s reunion minus original drummer Bill Ward emphasized his critical percussion. But Ozzy’s ability to own and define songs he didn’t write underscores his place as heavy metal’s Elvis, its first global superstar arriving as a jaw-dropping, irreplaceable talent. Nobody sings like Ozzy—most metal vocalists are operatic (Rob Halford, Bruce Dickinson) or growlers (Lemmy, James Hetfield), none of whom can achieve Ozzy’s banshee wail. He could pull off wild harmonies with himself through multitracked vocals, or go from singsong to maniacal within seconds. He articulated insecurity, uncertainty, and even love as well as the most rowdy or foreboding characters he’s known for. It was not the kind of voice people develop with singing lessons. Ozzy may have the distinction of being both metal’s most influential and inimitable vocalist. Analyzing some of metal’s biggest vocalists in a feature for metal blog Invisible Oranges, renowned voice teacher Claudia Friedlander noted that the “War Pigs” singer’s technique was all wrong, asking, “How long did his career last?” Ozzy’s howl didn’t sound like it was meant to last, which is part of what kept us hooked to every note, even as he seemed to withstand every ingested narcotic, vehicle collision, deadly illness, or other catastrophe thrown his way. 

When Ozzy was unceremoniously fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, one could be forgiven for thinking he’d be metal’s Art Garfunkel, adrift without his corresponding songwriters. But with a help of a new team (Ozzy was always quick to attribute his solo success to wife/manager Sharon Osboune and prodigy guitarist Randy Rhoads), Ozzy forged a new path on his knockout solo albums Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, pioneering a speed metal sound with enough pop hooks to make songs like “Crazy Train” and “Over the Mountain” eventual anthems, armed with the most innovative young rock guitarist this side of Eddie Van Halen. Like a metal Iggy Pop with David Bowie, Ozzy and Rhoads will always be linked as collaborators for their two genre-changing albums together, establishing the frontman as his own astonishing voice rising from his previous band’s implosion. After Rhoads was tragically killed in a plane crash, Ozzy soldiered on with new guitarist Jake E. Lee for some less consistent albums that still have some gems and a deserved following. Ozzy seemed to be having more fun than ever when the Satanic Panic preachers and PMRC parents started blaming him for society’s ills, and he was happy to mock Jimmy Swaggert in the “Miracle Man” video or play a televangelist in 1986 horror movie Trick or Treat. Looking back at the goofball on the cover of Diary of a Madman or in the “Shot in the Dark” music video, it’s hard to believe so many people were afraid of him.

The body of work he created is versatile enough to be loved by glam rockers, grunge musicians, punks, thrashers, and the alternative nation, making him a rare artist to thrive across multiple generations. Rappers liked him enough for sampling (Trick Daddy’s hit “Let’s Go” riffs on “Crazy Train”) and collaboration (from “For Heaven’s Sake 2000” with the Wu-Tang Clan through “Take What You Want” with Post Malone and Travis Scott, giving the septuagenarian his greatest Billboard success in three decades).

But while Ozzy updated his sound with new levels of heaviness (special thanks to first mate guitarist Zakk Wylde, who’s performed on Ozzy’s best work since the ‘90s), and expanded his range with power ballads (the lovely “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” a song few of Ozzy’s peers could have pulled off, is as enduring as anything he recorded), he didn’t chase trends. He maintained his older fanbase but never stopped drawing in young fans. Nobody questioned Ozzy’s ability to headline over the mightiest thrash, doom, death, and black metal bands of his day, not to mention the nu-metal and rap-rock trends he outlasted. Anyone with a passing interest in metal can impersonate Ozzy’s garbled, f-bomb-heavy stage banter, offset by jumping and clapping, or the hunched, stalking, variation he adopted when his body started slowing down, like a heavy metal Crypt-Keeper inviting listeners in for a story. Ozzy wasn’t always a sober or coherent performer, but he was always magnetic, and the last time I saw him (2016 at Madison Square Garden, one of two sold-out nights) he was transcendent. 

The world has been catching up to Ozzy. After years of only making rare appearances on rock radio, he’s almost ubiquitous on classic rock and metal playlists, not to mention athletic events and movie soundtracks. A few seconds of Ozzy could be the best scene of a bad movie (his “Jerky Boys” and “Little Nicky” cameos are worth a YouTube search), or the best line of a good movie (his priceless delivery in “Private Parts”).

His Rock Hall induction, with an impassioned speech by Jack Black and performers ranging from Billy Idol to Maynard James Keenan to Jelly Roll, didn’t occur until last October. On July 5, 2025, seventeen days before his passing, Ozzy and Black Sabbath headlined the highest-grossing charity concert to date, packed with the greatest all-star metal lineup ever assembled, including Metallica, Gus N’ Roses, Slayer, Pantera, Tool, Gojira, Lamb of God, and Mastodon. At the end of the sold-out stadium show, Ozzy looks awestruck, as if he still can’t believe all this is happening to him. For someone who supposedly had seen and done it all, it’s not hard to see the young Birmingham slaughterhouse worker (“The stink was unbelievable”), car horn tuner (“Can you imagine being in a room with that fucking racket?”), and jailbird (“The best thing my father ever did for me was he refused to pay fine”) up on stage, still processing ten hours of tributes from some of the world’s biggest metal bands, while he’s handed a cake and watches fireworks go off in his honor.

I met Ozzy once. I was interning at a radio show where he was being interviewed, and I begged for a chance to give Ozzy his waiver to sign. Ozzy’s handler was firm with me: I was not to talk to, acknowledge, look at, or breathe near Ozzy, unless Sharon was in the room. I understood.

Sharon and Ozzy arrived together, and Ozzy sat peacefully in a chair while Sharon schmoozed. Sharon was delightful (when we didn’t have the drink she asked for she happily took a substitute) and signed her waiver, no problem. But when I turned to Ozzy with his waiver, Sharon walked out of the room.

I never found out if Sharon left because she didn’t care about the handler, or because she knew it’d make me euphoric to have a moment alone with Ozzy Osbourne. I can’t remember what I gushed to him about for 30 seconds (what does one even say to the Prince of Darkness? Shouldn’t we be kneeling?). But I’ll always feel blessed that he took a moment to peer out from behind his purple-tinted sunglasses and gently offer me a handshake. “Thank you,” said Ozzy.

A minute later, I watched Ozzy cackle and raise his arms when the DJ introduced him. There he was. The greatest metal frontman who ever lived.

Ben Apatoff is the author of Body Count (33⅓) and Metallica: The $24.95 Book, two books about bands that frequently cite Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s influence.

On this Juneteenth, a day for reflecting on Black Liberation, resilience, and joy, we honor the legacy of Ananda Lewis. She was a trailblazer who interviewed a variety of guests from Tupac to Kobe Bryant to Hillary Clinton on BET’s Teen Summit, where she became the voice of a generation. She addressed Black Youth with the respect and seriousness we’d often been denied. 

She went on to win the hearts of many as a VJ on MTV in the late 1990s, where she held her own alongside the biggest names in entertainment while remaining grounded and relatable. No matter how high her star rose, she never stopped being for Us. On her talk show, “The Ananda Lewis Show,” she connected music, politics, and identity in a way that was unapologetically Black and boldly authentic.

But the most courageous chapter of her life came years later, when she opened up about a long and private battle with breast cancer. After six years of fighting in silence, she came forward. Not to center herself but to wake up the rest of us. “I need you to get your mammograms,” she said in a candid video. “I need you to do your self-exams. I need you to ask your doctor for ultrasounds.” Ananda didn’t sugarcoat the truth; she regretted delaying screenings and felt that sharing her choices might spare someone else.

Her advocacy became a movement, especially for Black women who continue to be diagnosed later and die at higher rates. She gave us permission to question and push. To know our bodies and to value ourselves enough to fight for our lives on our terms.

Since her passing on June 11, 2025, the outpouring of love has been both staggering and affirming. Tributes came from celebrities, media colleagues, and everyday people whose lives were touched by her work and her words. 

For me, it was deeply personal. I’m friends with her sister, Dr. Lakshmi Emory, a breast cancer survivor herself, and I’ve seen firsthand the strength and compassion this family has carried, even in the face of the unimaginable grief.

Dr. Emory recently shared this powerful reflection with me:

“I always knew my little sister was a trailblazer. She became a celebrity, but she never had that celebrity attitude. That’s just one of the things that made her so special. What truly set her apart was how much she cared about people, and she showed it in everything she did.

Right now, our family is completely overwhelmed, but in the best possible way, by all the messages and posts. They’re pouring in from everyone, from people who knew her intimately to total strangers. And you know what the most amazing thing is? The same message keeps coming up, over and over again: ‘She was so kind,’ and ‘She was incredibly generous.’ That was my sister to a tee. It’s heartwarming to see how many lives she touched, and how deeply her true self resonated with so many.”

So as we celebrate freedom in all its forms on this Juneteenth, we reflect on the kind of liberation Ananda modeled. The freedom to be fully human, to speak truth, to choose vulnerability, To love out loud, to advocate for your community, your body, and your peace.

Rest in Peace, Ananda. You taught us so much. And we are listening.