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      How the Queen of Denmark Shaped the Look of Netflix’s “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction”

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      Once upon a time, there was a princess in Denmark who aspired to become an artist.Though she was the eldest child of the country’s reigning king, for the first 12 years of the princess’s life, only men had the right to inherit the throne. That changed when the Danish constitution was amended in 1953, and the princess became her father’s presumptive heir soon after turning 13. She continued to pursue her interest in art throughout her teenage years, producing drawings by the stacks before largely stopping in her 20s.Around the time the princess turned 30 — and after she had earned a diploma in prehistoric archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and had studied at Aarhus University in Denmark, the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics — she read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” It inspired her to start drawing again.Three years later, upon her father’s death in 1972, the princess was crowned as queen: Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, to be specific.Margrethe, now 83, celebrated 50 years on the throne in 2022. But in assuming the role of queen, she did not abandon her artistic passions. As a monarch she has taken lessons in certain media, has taught herself others and has been asked to bring her eye to projects produced by the Royal Danish Ballet and Tivoli, the world’s oldest amusement park, in Copenhagen.Margrethe made 81 decoupages, a type of cut-and-paste artwork, that served as the basis for sets in “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction.” Interiors at a castle in the film were based on this decoupage.NetflixHer paintings have been shown at museums, including in a recent exhibition at the Musée Henri-Martin in Cahors, France. And her illustrations have been adapted into artwork for a Danish translation of “The Lord of the Rings.” (They were published under the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer, and the book’s publisher approached her about using them after she sent copies to Tolkien as fan mail in 1970.)Margrethe recently notched another creative accomplishment: serving as the costume and production designer for “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction,” a feature film that debuted on Netflix in September and has wardrobes and sets based on her drawings and other artworks.The film is an adaptation of the fairy tale “Ehrengard” by Karen Blixen, a Danish baroness who published under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Set in a fictional kingdom, the story is loosely about a woman named Ehrengard who becomes a lady-in-waiting and foils a royal court painter’s plot to woo her.“It was great fun,” Magrethe said of working on the film in an interview in August at the Château de Cayx, the Danish royal family’s estate in Luzech, a village near Cahors in the South of France.“I hope that Blixenites will accept the way we’ve done it,” she said.Conjuring AtmospheresThe Netflix adaptation, a sort of fantasy dramedy, has been more than a decade in the making.JJ Film, the Danish production company behind it, approached Margrethe about working on the movie after she served as production designer for two shorter films it produced, “The Snow Queen” and “The Wild Swans,” which were both adapted from Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. Those films, released on Danish television in 2000 and 2009, also featured sets based on artworks by Margrethe, who in 2010 became an honorary member of the Danish Designers for Stage and Screen union.For the Netflix film, the queen designed 51 costumes and made 81 decoupages — a type of cut-and-paste artwork — that were used as the basis for sets. (She was not paid by Netflix or JJ Film.) Her sketches, along with some of the clothes and many of the decoupages, are being shown at the Karen Blixen Museum just outside Copenhagen through next April. Afterward, there are plans to show them in New York, Washington and Seattle.The movie, an adaptation of the fairy tale “Ehrengard,” is loosely about a woman named Ehrengard who becomes a lady-in-waiting and foils a royal court painter’s plot to woo her.NetflixFor certain decoupages, the queen cut up images of interiors and pasted the pieces together to create new scenes, like this sumptuous room.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesMargrethe based her costume designs on clothes from the Biedermeier period, which took place in parts of Europe from 1815 to 1848. Certain details, like leg-of-mutton sleeves, reflected fashion at that time.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesTo compose the decoupages, the queen cut up images of various landscapes and interiors and pasted the pieces together to create new scenes, like a sumptuous sitting room and a rocky canyon with a fortress and a waterfall.“Sometimes it takes hours, and sometimes things want to come together and they do as you want them to do, and suddenly you’ve done a whole decoupage in an afternoon,” she said. “It’s kind of a puzzle.”She was guided by Blixen’s “very visual writing,” she said, noting that Blixen, as well as Tolkien and Andersen, were writers who also painted or drew.Bille August, 74, the film’s director, described the queen’s decoupages as a “tuning fork” that he used to build “a world that is detached from reality without being a full-on fairy tale.” (He compared the general visual style he sought to the tone of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”)“Conjuring that special atmosphere is perhaps the queen’s greatest achievement here,” Mr. August said.Scouts would seek locations that reflected the decoupages, which set designers would then style with props to further emulate the artworks. Elements in the decoupages that couldn’t be found were rendered using computer-generated imagery. Some decoupages were scanned and details from the artworks were added to scenes in postproduction.Blixen did not set “Ehrengard” in a specific time, giving Margrethe freedom to interpret the look of the costumes. She chose to base her designs on clothes from the Biedermeier period in Austria and other parts of central and northern Europe, which took place from 1815 to 1848.Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen, 56, the film’s costume supervisor, said she generally translated Margrethe’s sketches “one to one” when fabricating the garments, which were made with textiles and trimmings that the queen helped select.Bille August, left, the film’s director, described Margrethe’s decoupages as a tuning fork. “Conjuring that special atmosphere is perhaps the queen’s greatest achievement here,” he said.Jacob Jørgensen/NetflixMargrethe said that for one costume she had sketched — a dress in hunter green with pink paisley-like specks — she had hoped to find a sprigged fabric. “But we couldn’t find one,” she said, so the pattern was custom printed. Another costume designed for the film’s grand duchess character was inspired by a portrait of a French queen.“She was wearing a lovely get-up,” Margrethe said. “It seemed to me exactly what the grand duchess should be wearing.”Certain elements of the costumes, like leg-of-mutton sleeves, reflected fashion at the time of the Biedermeier period. “I quite like that style,” Margrethe said. “I’ve been interested in style and in the history of style and costume for a very long time.”Other details were less historically accurate: Some dresses had waistlines that were slightly lower than those typical of that era, to give them a more flattering fit.Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, 39, the actor who played the court painter, Cazotte, said that when Margrethe saw an early version of his costume, she thought it lacked color. “And she was clear about exactly which colors she wanted to see,” he added.The actress Alice Bier Zanden, 28, who played the title role of Ehrengard in the film, said that at a costume fitting attended by Margrethe, the queen’s enthusiasm was palpable. “You’re just smitten by it,” she said.Sidse Babett Knudsen, 54, who played the grand duchess, described the queen’s presence at the fitting this way: “bare legs, beautiful shoes, nice jewelry — smoking away.” (Margrethe has made no secret of her fondness for cigarettes.)Scouts would seek locations that reflected the decoupages, like this one Margrethe made using clippings from images of landscapes. NetflixMs. Knudsen added that she felt comfortable “clowning around” in front of Margrethe, who has generally been popular in Denmark. According to a 2021 poll by YouGov Denmark, she was the most admired woman in the country (the most admired man was Barack Obama), and in a 2013 Gallup poll conducted for Berlingske, Denmark’s oldest newspaper, 82 percent of participants agreed or partly agreed that the country benefits from the monarchy.Her critics have included members of her family. Prince Joachim, the younger of her two sons, bristled at her recent decision to shrink the monarchy by stripping his children of their royal titles. In 2017 her husband, Prince Henrik, announced that he did not wish to be buried beside Margrethe because he had never been given the titles king or king consort. (He died six months later.)Helle Kannik Haastrup, 58, an associate professor of film and media studies at the University of Copenhagen, who specializes in celebrity culture, said that some detractors have dismissed Margrethe as “a Sunday painter.”But to other people, Professor Haastrup added, the fact that Margrethe is a head of state with a “side hustle” has made her more relatable.‘Honestly, She Can’t Stop’Margrethe sketches and makes art at the chateau in France and at studios at Amalienborg Palace and Fredensborg Palace, the royal family’s residences in Denmark. She described the studios as places “where I can let things lie about,” adding, “I try to clear them up occasionally — but not too often!”“I work when I can find the time,” she said, “and I seem usually to be able to find the time.”“Sometimes, I think people are at their wit’s end because I’m trying to do these two things at the same time,” Margrethe said of her royal duties and her creative undertakings. “But it usually works, doesn’t it?”Annelise Wern, one of the queen’s four ladies-in-waiting, said, “Honestly, she can’t stop.”In the 1980s, when she was in her 40s, Margrethe took weekly painting lessons. She has mostly concentrated on painting landscapes with watercolors and acrylics — or “lazy girl’s oils,” as she called them.The queen said that when she started to make decoupages in the early 1990s, she didn’t know there was a name for the artworks. “I called it ‘cutting and sticking,’” she said.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesThen, in the early 1990s, she started cutting up pages from The World of Interiors magazines and catalogs from auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s and using the paper cutouts to decorate objects.“I didn’t even know there was a smart name for it,” she said, referring to decoupage. “I called it ‘cutting and sticking.’”Since then, her relatives have occasionally been “smothered in decoupage,” as she jokingly put it. And in needlepoint, which she had learned as a girl and picked up again later in life.Her colorful needlepoint designs, some of which were recently featured in an exhibition at the Museum Kolding in Kolding, Denmark, have been fashioned into purses for family members and have been used to upholster fireplace screens, footstools and cushions for the royal family’s yacht, Dannebrog, which shares its name with the Danish flag.Margrethe’s taste for bold colors can be also seen in her wardrobe. In a 1989 biography of the queen by the Danish journalist Anne Wolden-Raethinge, Margrethe said: “I always dream in color. At full blast. Technicolor. Everywhere. Every shade.”Her clothes often feature vivid prints and fur trims, and are almost always accessorized with jewelry. Among the items in her personal collection are gold pieces by the Danish jewelers Arje Griegst and Torben Hardenberg, whose designs are both baroque and gothic-punk, and costume jewelry like plastic clip-on earrings she found at a Danish drugstore.For her 80th birthday, in 2020, Margrethe had a gown made using velvet that she had requested be dyed a particular shade of sky blue. A floral raincoat she had made with a waxed fabric meant for tablecloths, which she picked out at the department store Peter Jones & Partners in London, has inspired other fashion designers’ collections.“I usually am quite deeply involved,” she said of having clothes made for her.Ulf Pilgaard, 82, a Danish stage and screen actor, has parodied the queen some dozen times over the decades. (He was knighted by Margrethe in 2007.) “I always wore earrings and a necklace and very nice colorful outfits,” Mr. Pilgaard said.For his last turn as Margrethe, in 2021, he wore a bright yellow dress with oversize pearl earrings and a chunky turquoise ring. At the end of the performance, she surprised him onstage.“People got on their feet and started roaring and clapping,” he said. “For a few seconds, I thought it was all for me.”Margrethe wore a pantsuit in the red color of the Danish flag (and the Netflix logo) to the film’s premiere in Copenhagen last month.Valdemar Ren/NetflixAt the premiere of “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction” in Copenhagen last month, Margrethe wore a pantsuit in the red color of the Danish flag (and the Netflix logo), along with a hefty turquoise brooch and matching earrings by Mr. Hardenberg, who before starting his namesake jewelry line made costumes and props for theater and film productions.Nanna Fabricius, 38, a Danish singer and songwriter known as Oh Land, who has worked alongside Margrethe on recent productions at Tivoli, said, “I think a very big part of why the queen is so liked is because she does things.”“We aren’t totally surprised when she makes a Netflix movie,” she added.“She’s kind of what Barbie wants to be,” Ms. Fabricius said. “She does it all.” More

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      Terence Davies, 77, Dies; Filmmaker Mined Literature and His Own Life

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      With a poetic sensibility, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” echoed his Liverpool upbringing, and “The House of Mirth” put Edith Wharton’s novel on the screen.Terence Davies, a British screenwriter and director known for his poetic, intensely personal films like “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and literary adaptations like “The House of Mirth,” died on Saturday at his home in the village of Mistley, Essex, on the southwest coast of England. He was 77.His manager, John Taylor, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, saying only that Mr. Davies had died after “a short illness.”An obituary from the British Film Institute said, “No one made movies like Davies, who precisely sculpted out of a subjective past, creating films that glided on waves of contemplation and observation.”The very specific “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988) starred Pete Postlethwaite as a violently abusive Liverpool father who terrorizes his wife and children. When the film was rereleased in 2018, The Guardian called it the director’s “early autobiographical masterpiece” and declared it “as gripping as any thriller.”When critics referred to Mr. Davies’s film dramas as musicals, they were only half joking. Songs are sung or heard in his movies just as they are in real life — at bars, at celebrations, at church and on the radio.In “Distant Voices,” the townspeople and their children sing “Beer Barrel Polka” in a bomb shelter to distract themselves from the horrors of World War II. Audiences hear “If You Knew Susie” at a wedding reception, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” while Mr. Postlethwaite takes a curry comb to a horse and “Taking a Chance on Love” issuing from a radio in the background even during the most brutal scenes.The film won the International Critics’ Prize at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.Mr. Davies directing Gillian Anderson on the set of “The House of Mirth,” which was released in 2000. “Brilliantly adapted,” The Village Voice said.Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection“The House of Mirth” (2000), based on Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, starred Gillian Anderson as the doomed heroine, Lily Bart. Writing in The Village Voice, J. Hoberman called the film “brilliantly adapted” and Ms. Anderson’s performance “unexpectedly stunning.”Stephen Holden of The New York Times found the film “funereally gloomy,” but he had to admit, he wrote, that the story was “so gripping, it almost doesn’t matter how it’s couched.” And The San Francisco Chronicle praised it as “such a mesmerizing downer.” For all that, it grossed only $5 million worldwide (a little more than $9 million in today’s currency).The industry eventually forgave him for his commercial limitations and continued to back his films, including “The Deep Blue Sea” (2011), starring Rachel Weisz, which was based on Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play about a judge’s wife having an emotionally destructive affair.It was not a blockbuster either, but critics were generally admiring. A review in New York magazine noted Mr. Davies’s “ability to blend the particular with the iconic, to turn ordinary moments into something almost mythical.”Terence Davies was born on Nov. 10, 1945, in Liverpool, England, the youngest of 10 children in a working-class family.When Terence was 7, his father died of cancer. He grew up in his mother’s Roman Catholic faith but developed doubts and rejected religion completely when he was 22.“Then I realized it’s a lie,” he recalled in an interview with The New Yorker in 2017. “Men in frocks — nothing else.”He left school at 15 and worked as a shipping clerk and a bookkeeper. More than a decade later, he changed course and enrolled in a drama school in Coventry, more than 100 miles south of Liverpool, near Birmingham.A scene from “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” Mr. Davies’s 1988 portrait of a working-class English family. From left, Freda Dowie, Dean Williams, Angela Walsh and Lorraine Ashbourne.Mary Evans/BFI/Ronald Grant/Everett CollectionHe was still a student when he began work on his first short film, “Children” (1976), later edited into “The Terence Davies Trilogy” (1983).The next half-century or so brought Mr. Davies awards, film festival attention and a prestigious list of credits.He did “The Long Day Closes” (1992), a young gay man’s battle with the church, his family and his own guilt; “The Neon Bible” (1995), starring Gena Rowlands, based on John Kennedy Toole’s novel, set in the American South; the documentary “Of Time and the City” (2008), a history of and reflection on his hometown, Liverpool (a “lovely, astringent film,” A.O. Scott wrote in The Times); and “Sunset Song” (2015), starring Agyness Deyn, based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel about coming of age in early 1900s Scotland.Finally, Mr. Davies, who always said that he was drawn to the past, began to explore the lives of the poets themselves.He made “A Quiet Passion” (2016), in which Cynthia Nixon portrays Emily Dickinson, the reclusive 19th-century American poet. The Times’s critic found that Mr. Davies possessed “a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.”His last film was “Benediction” (2021), a drama about the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. The New Yorker called it “an energizing and inspiring movie about the vanity of existence itself.“Mr. Davies, who was gay and never married, leaves no known survivors and had lived alone since 1980. He had tried the gay dating scene, he said, and dismissed it for, among other reasons, what he called its devotion to narcissism.Lamenting the age of complete license — in the arts as well as in daily life, he told L.A. Weekly in 2012: “The first thing that goes is subtlety. The first thing that goes is any kind of restraint or even wit sometimes. I don’t know how to deal with that in the modern world.” More

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      in Television

      Do You Know These Science Fiction Novels That Became TV Shows?

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s monthly quiz about books that have been made into television shows, movies, theatrical productions and more. This month’s challenge is about science fiction novels from the past 60 years that were adapted into television shows. Tap or click your answers to the five questions below.New literary quizzes appear on the Book Review page every week and you can find previous installments in the Book Review Quiz Bowl archive online. More

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      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘Madonna: A Rebel Life,’ by Mary Gabriel

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      Mary Gabriel’s biography is as thorough as its subject is disciplined. But in relentlessly defending the superstar, where’s the party?MADONNA: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna’s biggest hits, “Vogue,” but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim’s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded, as if with Dolby sound.“Before Madonna even had a manager, she had a court of valets and minstrels following her everywhere,” the record executive Seymour Stein observed.Though technically a solo vocalist, Madonna has been backed by dancers from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. She has six children: two biological, four adopted from Malawi. Many more consider themselves her spiritual offspring: gay men to whom she’s been den mother; younger female performers she’s inspired.And she’s trooped around the world with an elastic entourage of friends, writers, producers, directors, handlers, photographers, publicists, reporters and fans, all of whom helpfully populate Mary Gabriel’s big, indignant new biography of her: a dogged, brick-by-brick bulwark against any detractors bobbing in the moat of her castle.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is one of those books you measure in pounds, not pages: almost three, which would have been more if the publisher hadn’t decided to post the endnotes and bibliography online rather than printing them. It’s not going to fit on the little shelf of the StairMaster at the gym — a classically Madonna piece of exercise equipment — though you might hoist it afterward for wrist curls.If you wander into an aerobics class instead, not only are chances high that the instructor will play a song from Madonna’s catalog, but she’ll probably be wearing a hands-free headset microphone — and that is muy Madonna as well. As Gabriel notes, though the technology was used before by pilots and Kate Bush, it was her subject who popularized it on her 1989 “Blond Ambition” tour.For this book, though, the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958, the same year as Prince and Michael Jackson, stayed quiet. Her voice is piped through from plentiful previous interviews, recorded performances and the occasional post on Instagram, where early in the pandemic she outcringed the Gal Gadot “Imagine” video with one of herself naked in a bath amid floating rose petals, declaring Covid-19 “the great equalizer.”The closest Gabriel gets to Madonna in the actual flesh is half a dozen conversations with her brother, Christopher Ciccone, whose best-selling 2008 memoir, “Life With My Sister Madonna,” caused at least temporary estrangement between the siblings, longtime professional collaborators. (Madonna’s sense of betrayal is hard to jibe with her ardent defense of free personal expression.)Gabriel also talks to 30-odd other sources, surprisingly few for the scope of the work, and turns up a few interesting archived nuggets, such as Norman Mailer, in an early draft of the more than 200 he wrote for a 1994 Esquire profile, describing Madonna as a “pint‐size” Italian American (he used an ethnic slur instead) “with a heart built out of the cast‐iron balls of a hundred peasant ancestors.”Previous Madonnagraphers have either been breathily unauthorized — Andrew Morton, J. Randy Taraborrelli — or taken a more “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” approach; universities have offered entire courses on her. Gabriel brings extra intellectual cred to the task. “Love and Capital,” her book about Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; her group portrait of five female painters, “Ninth Street Women,” was rhapsodically received. But she doesn’t describe her own connection to this project, as she did the others, and this reader was left wondering if it might be less love than capital.Not that Gabriel doesn’t make a diligent case for Madonna’s cultural importance: inviting us to consider, for example, her Mylar-encased coffee-table book “Sex,” pummeled with judgment when it was published in 1992, in the same light as James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room.” She airs at length the praise of the curator Jeffrey Deitch, who worked with Madonna on a 2013 multimedia installation called “X‐STaTIC PRo=CeSS.”Maybe we’ve all miscast Madonna as the Queen of Pop — a dubious analogue to Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul — and she’s closer, on a mass scale, to Karen Finley, the performance artist who used to smear her nude body in chocolate or honey? Indeed, describing the period Madonna lived in Miami, Gabriel writes of her “daily ritual of covering herself in honey and jumping into Biscayne Bay, where she floated until the honey melted away,” with no apparent concern for sharks.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is organized as a busy, seven-decade, mostly urban travel itinerary. Like Franklin, Madonna lost her mother early and was raised in Detroit, where her father, who also had half a dozen children, “thought we should always be productive,” she said. Her Barbie would tell Ken: “I’m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You stay home! I’m going out tonight. I’m going bowling, OK, so forget it!” Among her formative influences were J.D. Salinger and Anne Sexton (literary); the Shangri-Las and David Bowie (musical); Martha Graham and Frida Kahlo (visual). “The sight of her mustache consoled me,” she said of the latter.I might be biased as a native who craved rubber bracelets and lace socks and waited to hear if FM radio played “Borderline” through the “la-la-la-la,” but the section when Madonna arrives in New York City, though well trafficked, is one of the most compelling in this book. She eats French fries out of garbage cans; learns guitar at an abandoned synagogue in Flushing Meadows nicknamed “the Gog”; brings a demo tape to the DJ booth at Danceteria; and, signed by Stein from his hospital bed, hangs with a “coterie” of artists that included Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was also raped at knife point on a rooftop, an ordeal not publicly aired until the punishing Abel Ferrara film “Dangerous Game” in 1993.Having segued to Hollywood (and later Broadway and the West End), she gave the middle finger to its male establishment: walking away from an early marriage to Sean Penn, cursing out David Letterman on the air and roundly shushing Harvey Weinstein when he offers feedback on “Truth or Dare,” her 1991 documentary. (“I don’t care what your point of view is,” she tells him. “I never want to hear it. Who the hell are you to tell me what kind of film I should be doing?”) Her onetime paramour Warren Beatty, who directed her in “Dick Tracy,” mocked how she wanted to live on-camera all the time; who with an iPhone now does otherwise?Madonna is rightly celebrated here as a pioneer of AIDS education — she lost countless friends to the disease — and a genuine philanthropist. But as she grows more practiced with the press and isolated by her fame, the book softens and suffers. The muchness of Madonna, her cross-disciplinarity — from MTV to “Evita” — seems impossible to corral.Madonna’s drug is work — she makes a discipline of even decadence — and “A Rebel Life” increasingly becomes a litany of remote description and tabulation: boundaries crossed, records broken, shows staged, money made, countries visited, foreign cultures sampled. “All artists appropriate,” is how Gabriel defends her against a frequent charge. “It is called inspiration.”Clichés sneak into her prose. Madonna is burning the candle at both ends, igniting a firestorm and is a lightning rod for controversy. She has never taken the road most traveled, but does take a long hard look in the mirror.Speaking of mirrors: Gabriel acknowledges Madonna’s talent for self-reinvention, but oddly ignores her transformation after cosmetic procedures and the resultant backlash — a sensitive matter to parse, but hardly irrelevant for someone whose oeuvre has been so entwined with image. “I’m going to make it easier for all those girls behind me when they turn 60,” the star said when promoting her 2019 album, “Madame X.” Well, some of those girls want to know why she can’t shake her skull-topped cane at the anti-aging industrial complex.“A Rebel Life” hits its marks but rarely soars, as Madonna did suspended by cables during her Drowned World tour. (Rather, the book is submerged in names, places and dates and historical exposition.) Then again, assessing Madonna’s legacy before she has a chance to recover from recent health setbacks may be an impossibly premature endeavor.“The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over,” Gabriel writes. “Time and again, the jury was wrong.”MADONNA: A Rebel Life | By Mary Gabriel | Illustrated | 858 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $38 More

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      Book Review: ‘In the Form of a Question,’ by Amy Schneider

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      Amy Schneider’s new memoir, “In the Form of a Question,” captures a life of bold choices well beyond wagers on the Daily Double.IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life, by Amy SchneiderAmy Schneider is one of the “Jeopardy!” greats, second only to Ken Jennings in games won (40 to Jennings’s 74). She’s fourth overall in regular-season winnings ($1,382,800) and fifth if you include tournaments ($1,632,800). In her new memoir, “In the Form of a Question,” she locks down a No. 1 spot, though, for best hang. Extolling the virtues of recreational drugs, the thrills of casual sex, the flirting potential in offering tarot readings? Ken Jennings could never.In “Question,” Schneider bounces between bloggier, jokier chapters (“Why in God’s Name Did They Make ‘Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue’?”) and more revealing, still jokey ones, about her gender transition and other formative experiences (“So if You’re Trans, Does That Mean You Like Guys?”). Her prose is warm and funny, though the omnipresent snarky footnotes sometimes deflate moments of earnest momentum.Other times, the little sidebars are home to some of the more endearing jokes, such as describing “The Music Man” as “probably the best work of literature ever written about the eternal conflict between unsophisticated farmers and the grifters who want to sell them musical instruments at above-market prices.” This is, deeply and completely, a theater-kid book.“When it comes to other people, I don’t have a setting between ‘at least slightly uncomfortable’ and ‘almost disturbingly comfortable,’ between ‘co-worker’ and ‘Elena Ferrante character,’” Schneider writes. That comes through here, and the more Ferrante-ish chapters are the book’s most interesting. Perhaps there is less of a need for listing the meanings of each tarot card, or an essay describing how good the TV show “Daria” is.Images from a handwritten diary entry from the day her first wife left; her candor about self-loathing (“I kept a mental list of all my shortcomings, all my failures, everything I had to feel ashamed of, and I tended to that list with great care, always on the lookout for opportunities to add to it”); the nervous ecstasy in her trans awakening — that’s where the book feels the most special and alive.The gossip in any of us will always yearn for more happy tales of sex and drugs, and Schneider has a bunch of fun ones. “There’s a fascinating nocturnal world out there, and the only people who can access it are those who have done some blow,” she notes. Sure, having a long-term partner who cares about you can be fulfilling. “But when you hook up with somebody who doesn’t know you well, then it must be because they’re horny for you, and that feels great!”Fleeting moments of righteous bitterness — “not that everything about my wife’s sexual relationship with a mysterious homeless felon that she met at a comedy open mic was perfect” — and tossed-off lines about acrimonious friend breakups and decades-long love triangles add edge and fizz.In the scheme of “Jeopardy!” memoirs, this one is not particularly “Jeopardy!”-centric. There is no training-montage section, no “Jeopardy!” war room, and Schneider describes herself as a lonely and ambivalent student. Her self-actualization comes about not through a career in software engineering or through making money from trivia, but through casting off the oppressive guilt and shame around sex and bodies that colored her entire young life.Fame is mostly but not exclusively great, she admits, and drifting too far into its bubble is dangerous. “I love how many more ways I can now imagine life turning out for me,” she writes, though “icon, but like in a cautionary tale sort of way,” could be one of them.Trans stories are often commodified for either misery or nobility in the face of misery, but “In the Form of a Question” is a much fuller, livelier, more textured and sardonic picture. When you win enough money to quit your job, you actually get a new job, Schneider says. She describes hers, wryly but rightly, as “Famous Celebrity Trans Person.” If this book is part of the gig, things seem like they’re going pretty well.IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life | By Amy Schneider | 272 pp. | Avid Reader Press | $28 More

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      in Theater

      Echo Brown, Young Adult Author and Performer, Dies at 39

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      A one-woman show that used her date with a white hipster to talk about life, race, love and sex, led an editor to sign her to write two novels.Echo Brown, a late blooming storyteller who mined her life to create a one-woman show about Black female identity and two autobiographical young adult novels in which she used magical realism to help convey her reality, died on Sept. 16 in Cleveland. She was 39.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her friend Cathy Mao, who said the cause had not yet been determined. But Ms. Brown was diagnosed with lupus in about 2015, leading eventually to kidney failure, Ms. Mao said by phone. A live kidney donor had been cleared for a transplant, which was expected to take place early next year.Ms. Brown, who grew up in poverty in Cleveland and graduated from Dartmouth College, had no professional stage experience when her serio-comic show, “Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters,” made its debut in 2015. It told her autobiographical story, through multiple voices, about dating a white hipster, including wondering what his reaction to her dark skin would be, and the sex, love, depression and childhood trauma she experienced.“It’s very revealing, and I felt very vulnerable doing it,” she told The Oakland Tribune in 2015, adding, “It’s as if you get onstage and share your deepest, darkest secrets. Putting my sexuality out there in front of people can make me feel very exposed.”The show was successfully staged in theaters in the Bay Area; she also performed it in Chicago, Cleveland, Dublin and Berlin.Robert Hurwitt, the theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Ms. Brown “an instantly attractive and engaging performer” who “has us eating out of her hand well before she gets everyone up and dancing to illustrate (with a little help from Beyoncé) why Black women shouldn’t dance with white men until at least after marriage.”And the writer Alice Walker said on her blog in 2016, “What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer’s narrative.”When “Black Virgins” was mentioned in a profile of Ms. Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, took notice.“I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience,” Ms. Anderson said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t familiar with young adult or children’s literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be.”The result was “Black Girl Unlimited” (2020), a novel that Ms. Brown tells through the lens of her young self as a wizard who deals with a fire in her family’s cramped apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration, sexual assault and her mother’s overdose.Ms. Brown’s first novel presents her young self as a wizard and carries readers through events like a fire in her family’s apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration and her sexual assault. Macmillan“Brown’s greatest gift is evoking intimacy,” Karen Valby wrote in her review in The New York Times, “and as she delicately but firmly snatches the reader’s attention, we are allowed to see this girl of multitudes and her neighborhood of contradictions in full and specific detail.”Ms. Brown’s second book was “The Chosen One: A First-Generation Ivy League Odyssey” (2022), a coming-of-age story that uses supernatural elements like twisting portals on walls to depict her disorienting and stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Ms. Brown’s second novel focuses on her stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Christy Ottaviano BooksPublishers Weekly praised Ms. Brown for the way she ruminated on her “independence, fear of failure and mental health” with “vigor alongside themes of healing, forgiveness and the human need to be and feel loved.”Echo Unique Ladadrian Brown was born on April 10, 1984, in Cleveland. She was reared by her mother, April Brown, and her stepfather, Edward Trueitt, whom she regarded as her father. Her father, Edward Littlejohn, was not in her life. During high school she lived for a while with one of her teachers.Ms. Brown thought that Dartmouth, with its prestige and stately campus, would represent a “promised land” to her and be “the birth of my becoming,” she said in a TEDx talk in 2017.But early on she heard voices from a speeding truck shout the N-word at her.“They weren’t students, they probably weren’t affiliated with Dartmouth in any way, but it was enough to shatter me,” she said. The incident taught her a lesson: “There are no promised lands in this world for marginalized people, those of us who fall outside the category of normal.”She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political science — she was the first college graduate in her family — and was hired as an investigator with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent oversight agency of the New York City Police Department. She left after two years, believing that “we didn’t have the power to do the work that was necessary,” she told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.She worked as a legal secretary and briefly attended the Columbia Journalism School. She became depressed, started to study yoga and meditation, and moved to Oakland in 2011. While there, she was hired as a program manager at Challenge Day, a group that holds workshops at schools aimed at building bonds among teenagers.Her job included telling students about her life, which helped her find her voice.“I found that I could drop people into emotion and pull them out with humor,” she said in the Dartmouth magazine article. “That’s where I learned I was a good storyteller and wondered, ‘Where can I go to tell more stories?’”She began taking classes in solo performing with David Ford at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. At first, she wrote comic scenes, then created more serious ones.“It was clear that she was someone who was ready for this, and she had a very easy time getting the words off the pages as a performer,” Mr. Ford said. “There was something miraculous about her.”In addition to her mother and stepfather, Ms. Brown is survived by her brother Edward. Her brother Demetrius died in 2020.Ms. Brown’s latest project was a collaboration with the actor, producer and director Tyler Perry on a novel, “A Jazzman’s Blues.” It is based on a 2022 Netflix film of the same name that Mr. Perry directed from a script that he wrote in 1995, about an ill-fated romance between teenagers (the young man becomes a jazz musician) in rural Georgia that takes place largely in the late 1930s and ’40s. It is to be published early next year.Ms. Anderson said the project came about because, as Ms. Brown got sicker, “it was too energy-consuming for her to work on her own material. So she was looking for a more creative partnership. and this came about through her agent.” More

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      Ed Begley Jr. Can Tell You the 3 Best Comedies of All Time

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      The actor and environmentalist considered hiring a ghostwriter for help with his memoir, then realized as he was writing things down, “This is too much fun.”Is there anyone in Hollywood that Ed Begley Jr. doesn’t know?“I think there’s a publicist at Paramount I need to have lunch with soon, and there’s a dolly grip at Fox,” he quipped. “I’m going to clear that up by the week’s end.”Readers of Begley’s new memoir, “To the Temple of Tranquility … and Step on It!,” might suspect that even that list is stretching it. In the book, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Christopher Guest, Cass Elliot, John Belushi, Tom Waits, the Beatles and even Charles Manson make appearances. As do memories from his work on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “St. Elsewhere,” “A Mighty Wind” and “She-Devil.”Begley, 74, had been considering writing a memoir for a year or two when his younger daughter, Hayden, asked him to spill his stories into her smartphone. His wild 20s, when he drank a quart of vodka a day, took pills and did cocaine. His transformation into an outspoken advocate for sustainable living. The Parkinson’s diagnosis he received in 2016.He took about 45 pages of notes, ostensibly for a ghostwriter, but realized he was enjoying the process. “I don’t want any ghostwriter touching it,” he recalled thinking. “This is too much fun.”In a video interview from his Los Angeles home, Begley spoke about practicing what he preaches and gave some much-needed love to the city’s Metro system. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1My BikeThere’s no doubt in my mind that the high point of my 8th year was getting a bicycle. A beautiful blue Schwinn. Later to be replaced by a white Peugeot, then a brown Nishiki, then a titanium Klein, and finally by a fat-tire American Flyer with electric assist — a compromise that my age and physical condition dictate, but I’m still riding!2‘Midnight Run’This is one of those perfect films. There’s not one misstep in the whole two hours and six minutes. Bob De Niro is great, as always, and though Charles Grodin is no longer with us, he was, and remains, a national treasure. It’s a brilliant script by George Gallo and flawlessly directed by Martin Brest. I would argue that it is one of the three best comedies of all time. The other two being “Bridesmaids” and “The In-Laws” — a self-serving selection, admittedly, but true nonetheless.3My LEED Platinum HomeTwelve-inch-thick walls, passive solar design, a 10,000-gallon rainwater tank, a gray-water system for the fruit trees, steel construction to avoid taking down trees to build a home. Not to mention the fire hazard when building homes out of sticks. Six raised beds and four compost bins allow me to grow a good deal of my own food. All of it proving that living more sustainably is certainly possible.4‘Loves of a Blonde’Milos Forman certainly made a good many fine films, several of them big hits like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.” But there is an extraordinary early film of his, made [in Czechoslovakia] in 1965. If you haven’t seen it, please try to find it somewhere. It is a gem.5The L.A. MetroI know what you’ve heard, and most of it’s true. Things fell apart during Covid, and we haven’t been able to fix a good many serious problems that got worse during 2020. But I’m not giving up my senior pass, and I’m not giving up on public transportation in Los Angeles! Given the future that we’re facing with climate change, we must get people out of their polluting cars. And public transportation offers people a cost-effective way to do so.6Fryman Canyon ParkThere’s a precious tract of open space, a miniature Griffith Park, right in the middle of Studio City. It’s called Fryman Canyon. I’ve been in the valley my whole life and in Studio City since 1971, and I’ve been enjoying hiking this trail for over half a century. And I’m not done.7Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’No further discussion is necessary.8Paula PoundstoneI’ve seen her perform countless times, and it never ceases to bring me amazement and pure joy. It is certainly humbling to watch her work a crowd, but my more immediate problem is often catastrophic respiratory failure. I have more than once laughed so hard that I thought it would be the end of me. But what a way to go!9H.O.P. E. Healthy Organic Positive EatingA vegan restaurant in Studio City that is my go-to dining experience. It is a Thai restaurant, family-owned and delicious. One of the biggest contributions we can make to reducing the threat of climate change is to eat more plant-based food.10‘The Heart of Saturday Night’Though Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan have put out countless brilliant albums like “Mule Variations” and “Bad as Me,” “The Heart of Saturday Night” is the soundtrack for my life in the ’70s, and I always like paying a visit there. More

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      How Tupac Shakur Remained a Defining Rap Figure After His Death

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      A star during his lifetime, he became an almost mythical figure in the decades since his 1996 killing.Tupac Shakur has been dead for longer than the 25 years he lived. During his lifetime, he rose to levels of stardom matched by few other rappers, rocketing quickly from a Digital Underground backup dancer to a chart-topper and movie star, all while courting controversy with law enforcement and presidential administrations. In the decades since his 1996 murder in Las Vegas, he has endured as one of the genre’s defining figures, in no small part because of the mystery surrounding his death.The Friday arrest of Duane Keith Davis in connection with Shakur’s killing — he was indicted on a murder charge — is a step in solving one of hip-hop’s greatest tragedies and longest mysteries. Nearly two years before his death, Shakur had been ambushed and shot in New York. The assault instigated a visceral feud between Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., a New York rapper who was slain nearly six months after Shakur, forever linking the rivals and the coastal feud that hung over ’90s hip-hop.Shakur’s breadth as a rapper included enduring anthems like “Dear Mama,” “Keep Ya Head Up” and “California Love,” while also featuring songs laced with misogyny and vengeance. He poignantly rapped about social activism and the oppression of Black Americans, which helps his music resonate just as strong today as it did in the ’90s.“His death caused people to really magnify what he was doing musically and when they saw it, they were like, ‘Oh my Lord,’” said Greg Mack, a radio programmer who helped bring hip-hop music into the mainstream on the West Coast. “We didn’t know that’s who we had.”Shakur at the MTV Video Music Awards just days before his death in 1996. ReutersPart of Shakur’s staying power is because his murder investigation stayed open longer than he lived, allowing fans to offer up theories about what may have happened. Almost immediately after his Sept. 13, 1996, death was announced, rumors circulated that Shakur was actually alive and well, recording in solitude on some far-off island. These wild theories continued with regularity over the years.(In one 2011 example, hackers gained access to the PBS website and wrote that Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. were living together in a small New Zealand town. The story spread quickly on social media even after PBS removed it.)Shakur often prophesied an early death in lyrics and interviews. He recorded a trove of music during his lifetime, and much of that material saw the light of day after his death. Over the course of a decade, Shakur’s estate released several albums that culminated with 2006’s “Pac’s Life.”His posthumous output extends beyond his own albums. A holographic image of Shakur memorably performed at 2012’s Coachella festival. Kendrick Lamar used excerpts from a rare 1994 Shakur interview for the two to engage in a conversation on his influential album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” In June, Shakur received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Actors including Anthony Mackie and Demetrius Shipp Jr. have portrayed him in films.More than a dozen documentaries, plays and books have been shot, acted and written to display and dissect Shakur’s short life, including 2003’s “Tupac: Resurrection,” which earned an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature.This year, the director Allen Hughes released “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” a five-part docuseries that examines Shakur’s relationship with his mother, Afeni Shakur. (Tupac Shakur once assaulted Hughes for firing him from the movie “Menace II Society.”) Next month, Staci Robinson, who knew Shakur in high school, will publish the first estate-approved biography on Shakur, a book she worked on for more than 20 years.“Tupac Shakur no longer belongs to Tupac Shakur,” Neil Strauss of The New York Times wrote in 2001. “Soon he won’t even belong to Afeni Shakur. He will belong to playwrights, filmmakers, novelists, television executives and other modern-day mythmakers. ” That prediction has largely rung true. More