Aurelia Butler

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    South Korean Actress Kim Sae-ron Is Found Dead

    The 24-year-old star, once a prolific child actor, appeared at the Cannes Film Festival and on Netflix, until a drunk-driving incident in 2022 derailed her career.South Korean actress Kim Sae-ron, a former child star whose promising career suffered a setback in recent years after a drunk-driving incident, was found dead in her home on Sunday afternoon, police said.Ms. Kim, who was 24, was discovered by a friend who had visited her house, according to the Seongdong Police Station in Seoul. The police on Monday said Ms. Kim’s death was a suicide. One of South Korea’s most lauded young actors, Ms. Kim had not appeared in any shows since she faced public criticism after being convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol in 2022.Her death marks the latest tragedy to strike South Korea’s booming but high-pressure entertainment industry, which has faced criticism for the toll it places on the mental health of its burgeoning stars. A celebrity’s popularity is often contingent on a spotless reputation, experts say.Over the past few years, several young stars were ruled to have died by suicide, one after receiving hate messages for being outspoken and opinionated, and another after a legal battle put her romantic and sex life in the public domain.Ms. Kim started her acting career by starring in “A Brand New Life,” a film about a girl abandoned in an orphanage, in 2009. She was 9 years old when the movie premiered and was invited to the Cannes Film Festival.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    BAFTA Awards Winners: ‘Conclave,’ ‘Anora’ and ‘The Brutalist’ Take Home Top Prizes

    “Anora” and “The Brutalist” also took home major prizes at the British equivalent of the Oscars, tipping the scales again.“Conclave” won the best movie title at the EE British Academy Film Awards at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sunday — adding the latest twist to a chaotic awards season in which no one movie has dominated the major ceremonies.The film, which stars Ralph Fiennes and was directed by Edward Berger, is a thriller about the selection of a new pope. It took home four awards on Sunday at Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, commonly known as the BAFTAs. The other three prizes were in minor categories: best editing, best adapted screenplay and outstanding British film.In securing the best film award, “Conclave” beat Sean Baker’s “Anora,” a dramedy in which an exotic dancer marries the son of a Russian oligarch, and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” about a Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) rebuilding his life in the United States after the Holocaust.It also triumphed over the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and “Emilia Pérez.”“Conclave” hadn’t previously featured among the major winners this awards season. It only secured one Golden Globe, for best screenplay, at a ceremony in which “Emilia Pérez” and “The Brutalist” were the big winners. More recently, the momentum for the best picture Oscar had swung to “Anora,” after that movie picked up major honors at this year’s Critic’s Choice ceremony and the Directors Guild of America and Producers Guild of America awards.Yet the prominence of “Conclave” at the BAFTAs will give the movie momentum going into this year’s Academy Awards, scheduled for March 2. There is significant overlap between the voting bodies for both awards, and the BAFTAs and Oscars regularly have the same winners.The cast and crew of “Conclave” looked stunned when the best film prize was announced. Isabella Rossellini, who plays a nun in the movie, stood onstage smiling gleefully throughout Berger’s acceptance speech, in which he said he was “deeply humbled” to see his film receive the honor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Marvel’s New ‘Captain America’ Is No. 1, Despite a Backlash and Poor Reviews

    “Captain America: Brave New World” was expected to take in $100 million from Thursday through Monday in North America.At the height of the superhero boom a few years ago, Disney pushed its Marvel assembly lines to run faster and faster. After awhile, quality suffered and ticket sales declined.So Disney slowed the pace. Last year, Marvel released one movie (the megasuccessful “Deadpool & Wolverine”) and two Disney+ series. To compare, in 2021 Marvel churned out four movies (with mixed results) and five Disney+ series.Factory problem fixed?Maybe: Marvel’s “Captain America: Brave New World” was a runaway No. 1 at the global box office over the weekend. The movie, which cost at least $300 million to make and market worldwide, was on pace to sell roughly $100 million in tickets from Thursday through Monday in the United States and Canada, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. Moviegoers overseas were poised to chip in another $92 million or so.Maybe not: “Brave New World” received the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s lowest-ever grade (B-minus) from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls. Reviews were only 50 percent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes, which resulted in a “rotten” rating from the site. Just two Marvel movies rank lower on the Rotten Tomatoes meter, and both quickly ran out of box office steam after No. 1 starts that were driven by die-hard fans and marketing bombast.“Brave New World” outperformed analyst expectations amid a racist backlash from some internet users and right-wing pundits, who criticized Marvel’s decision to refresh the “Captain America” franchise by giving the title role to a Black actor. (A “D.E.I. hire,” they maintained in numerous X posts, a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.) Anthony Mackie, who took over the character from Chris Evans, also came under attack as “anti-American” for a comment he made while promoting the film overseas.“Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term, you know, ‘America’ should be one of those representations,” Mr. Mackie said. “It’s about a man who keeps his word, who has honor, dignity and integrity. Someone who is trustworthy and dependable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Oscars Rewind: How ‘American Beauty’ Lost Its Luster

    At the 2000 Academy Awards, the film won five Oscars, including best picture. Then came 9/11, a tanking economy and Kevin Spacey.It was March 2000, and everything was coming up roses for “American Beauty.”There were the box office receipts (more than $350 million worldwide, not adjusted for inflation, against a budget of roughly $15 million, according to the data site Box Office Mojo). The rave reviews (“a hell of a picture,” Kenneth Turan wrote in The Los Angeles Times). The three Golden Globes.“It was bizarre, because I expected it to be a little art house movie,” Alan Ball, who won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay, said in a recent phone conversation from his home in Los Angeles. “I think that’s all that any of us expected it to be.”“I had no idea it was going to become what it became,” said Annette Bening, who played a materialistic wife in Ball’s satire about a suburban family whose father, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), quits his office job and becomes obsessed with his teenage daughter’s best friend.Then, even more laurels: Five Oscars, including best picture, director (Sam Mendes), original screenplay (Ball), cinematography (Conrad L. Hall) and actor (Spacey).“I’m a little bit overwhelmed,” a wide-eyed Mendes said in his acceptance speech, as he joined the ranks of Delbert Mann, Jerome Robbins, Robert Redford, James L. Brooks and Kevin Costner as the only filmmakers to win the academy’s top directing honor for their feature directorial debut.“I had a flask in my pocket,” Ball said, recalling the moment. “That was the only way I could kind of deal with it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Edith Mathis, Radiant Swiss Soprano, Is Dead at 86

    Known for her interpretations of Bach, Mozart and Weber, she was praised for her clear, bright voice and her perfect intonation even on the highest notes.Edith Mathis, a light-voiced Swiss soprano who sparkled in Bach, Mozart and Weber and was the agile-voiced favorite of several of the conducting giants who dominated mid-20th-century concert halls, died on Sunday at her home in Salzburg, Austria. She was 86.Her death was announced by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where she sang throughout the 1970s and ’80s.But she was also a star in all the world’s other major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, illuminating roles like Cherubino and Susanna in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” Ännchen in Weber’s “Der Freischütz” and Marzelline in Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” which she sang five times at the Met in 1971 under Karl Böhm. She was a favorite of his, as she was of his rival for conducting pre-eminence in the last century, Herbert von Karajan.The dozens of opera, oratorio, cantata and song recordings Ms. Mathis left behind illustrate why: a clear, bright voice, perfect intonation even on the highest notes, an unaffected manner and absolute service to the text — “the voice so reliably radiant and clear, the musicianship so reliably impeccable,” the British critic Hugo Shirley wrote in Gramophone magazine in 2018, reviewing a CD collection released by Deutsche Grammophon in observance of her 80th birthday. She was, the dramaturg Malte Krasting wrote in a tribute for the Bavarian State Opera, “the epitome of an ideal Mozart singer.”She was also ideal in the German lieder repertoire — Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf — many of whose songs she recorded with all-star partners like Christoph Eschenbach and Graham Johnson.When, for instance, she sang the Schubert song “Schlaflied” in a 1994 recording with Mr. Johnson, she gave a slight, barely perceptible push to the German word “jedem” (“all” or “every”), in the line “And is healed of all pain.” The extra measure of reassurance for the poem’s subject, a young boy, adds a dramatic point to the whole song.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Chiwetel Ejiofor on the Shakespeare Play That ‘Revolutionized’ Him

    The “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” actor talks about the ways John Coltrane, Paul Cézanne and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie influence him.Chiwetel Ejiofor went to see “Bridget Jones’s Diary” back in 2001, fully expecting to be bombarded by female energy.Instead, he left the theater stunned by how much he related to her, he said: “feeling all of that chaos and a little bit out of step with the world but somehow with optimism and hopefulness and a sort of fake-it-till-you-make-it spirit.”So when the director Michael Morris asked him to discuss “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” the franchise’s latest installment, over tea in London, Ejiofor didn’t have to fake anything.“I loved the whole world of it,” he said.This time around, Renée Zellweger’s Bridget is a widowed mother of two, and Ejiofor is Mr. Wallaker, her son’s science teacher and a potential love interest.Not that he would dare attempt to replace Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) and Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). “They’re iconic,” he said.But portraying a distinct character at a different, perhaps more challenging time in Bridget’s life “made it incredibly fun to play,” he said — if occasionally poignant. “You can’t hold onto your 30-something self obviously, but if you still maintain a bit of that quality, it assists you in navigating these waters.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jay-Z Accuser Drops Rape Lawsuit Against Him and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs

    The anonymous plaintiff’s account was attacked as inconsistent after an NBC report called details from her account into question.The anonymous woman who accused Jay-Z and Sean Combs of raping her when she was 13 years old dropped her lawsuit on Friday against the hip-hop moguls.Jay-Z’s lawyers had pointed to what they described as “glaring inconsistencies” in the woman’s account, citing information that came to light in an NBC report that called details from her allegations into question.Jay-Z’s lawyers had asked a judge to dismiss the complaint, but the plaintiff’s lawyers at that time stood by the accuser in court papers, writing that being a victim of sexual abuse can cause memory lapses. Court papers submitted by the plaintiff on Friday said the suit had been “voluntarily dismissed with prejudice,” meaning that it cannot be refiled.In a statement, Jay-Z, who vehemently denied the claims from the outset, celebrated the decision, writing that the suit was “never going anywhere.”“The fictional tale they created was laughable, if not for the seriousness of the claims,” he said. “I would not wish this experience on anyone. The trauma that my wife, my children, my loved ones and I have endured can never be dismissed.”Lawyers for Mr. Combs, who is in a Brooklyn jail awaiting a trial on racketeering and sex trafficking charges, said in a statement on Friday that the dismissal was “yet another confirmation that these lawsuits are built on falsehoods, not facts.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Night at the Kennedy Center, Just After Trump’s Takeover

    It’s still called the Kennedy Center. But after President Trump’s takeover, drag performers protested outside while audience members inside worried about what might be in store.It was the night after President Trump had officially taken over the Kennedy Center and made himself its chairman, and two well-dressed Washington women were wandering along the plush red carpet inside its Grand Foyer, so grand it could fit the Washington Monument laid on its side. They reached the eight-foot-tall bronze head of John F. Kennedy that lords over the hall and looked forlornly into his eyes.How much longer, one woman joked to the other, until the statue of the 35th president gets torn down and replaced with one of the 47th? They laughed bitterly.It was just last week that Mr. Trump announced his plan to purge the Kennedy Center’s board of its Biden appointees and to install “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” He named one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, interim president and proclaimed that there would be no more “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA” shown. He complained about drag queens performing there and said it had all become too “wokey.” Some artists canceled shows. “Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!” Mr. Trump said on social media, posting an A.I.-generated image of himself waving his arms like a conductor in a concert hall.Most of the people who turned up at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night to see performances in its various theaters had purchased their tickets long before any of that was set in motion. Now they found themselves at an arts center on the cusp of becoming something different — something Trumpian.Some speculated what that might look like.“I feel like we might just have ‘Cats’ on rotation moving forward,” said Pamela Deutsch, a documentary film producer who once worked as an usher at the Kennedy Center. (Mr. Trump, who once had dreams of becoming a Broadway producer, is a longtime fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber.) She was there to catch a set by the comic W. Kamau Bell. So was Louis Woolard, a 73-year-old psychotherapist from Maryland. What sort of cultural programming did he envision under the artistic stewardship of the 47th president? “I don’t know,” said Mr. Woolard. “I guess country music.”At the other end of the Grand Foyer, American Ballet Theater was putting on a production of “Crime and Punishment,” an effort to make dance out of Dostoyevsky. A 75-year-old real estate investment banker named Wayne Koonce waited in line to have his ticket scanned. “Maybe the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi will be invited back now that he’s cozying up to Putin,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More