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    The Artists We Lost in 2023, in Their Words

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    The many creative people who died this year built their wisdom over lives generously long or much too short, through times of peace and periods of conflict. Their ideas, perspectives and humanity helped shape our own: in language spoken, written or left unsaid; in notes hit, lines delivered, boundaries pushed. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their voices.“I never considered giving up on my dreams. You could say I had an invincible optimism.”— Tina Turner, musician, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)“Hang on to your fantasies, whatever they are and however dimly you may hear them, because that’s what you’re worth.”— David Del Tredici, composer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Ever since I can remember, I have danced for the sheer joy of moving.”— Rena Gluck, dancer and choreographer, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“The stage is not magic for me. It never was. I always felt the audience was waiting to see that first drop of blood.”— Lynn Seymour, dancer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Paul Reubens.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Most questions that are asked of me about Pee-wee Herman I don’t have a clue on. I’ve always been very careful not to dissect it too much for myself.”— Paul Reubens, actor, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“If you know your voice really well, if you’ve become friends with your vocal apparatus, you know which roles you can sing and which you shouldn’t even touch.”— Grace Bumbry, opera singer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Actors should approach an audition (and indeed, their careers) with the firm belief that they have something to offer that is unique. Treasure who you are and what you bring to the audition.”— Joanna Merlin, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Glenda Jackson.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady. I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”— Glenda Jackson, actress and politician, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t see myself as a pioneer. I see myself as a working guy and that’s all, and that is enough.”— William Friedkin, filmmaker, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“Some people, every day you get up and chop wood, and some people write songs.”— Robbie Robertson, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I wasn’t brought up in Hollywood. I was brought up in a kibbutz.”— Topol, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jimmy Buffett.Michael Putland/Getty Images“I don’t play at my audience. I play for my audience.”— Jimmy Buffett, musician, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)“I’m still not a natural in front of people. I’m shy. I’m a hermit. But I’m learning a little more.”— Andre Braugher, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)“Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”— Louise Glück, poet, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I paint because I believe it’s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being. I paint for myself. I paint for my wife. And I paint for anybody that’s willing to look at it.”— Brice Marden, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“Writing is about generosity, passing on to other people what you’ve had the misfortune of having to find out for yourself.”— Fay Weldon, author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Ryuichi Sakamoto.Ian Dickson/Redferns, via Getty Images“I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima, and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, ‘Nature tuned it.’”— Ryuichi Sakamoto, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“I hate everything that is natural, and I love the artificial.”— Vera Molnar, artist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“A roof could be a roof, but it also could be a little garden.”— Rafael Viñoly, architect, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“True architecture is life.”— Balkrishna Doshi, architect, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)Sinead O’Connor.Duane Braley/Star Tribune, via Getty Images“Words are dreadfully powerful, and words uttered are 10 times more powerful. The spoken word is the science on which the entire universe is built.”— Sinead O’Connor, musician, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)“Before I can put anything in the world, I have to wait at least a couple of years and edit them. Nothing is going out that hasn’t been edited a dozen times.”— Robert Irwin, artist, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“An editor is a reader who edits.”— Robert Gottlieb, editor and author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Matthew Perry.Reisig & Taylor/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“Sometimes I think I went through the addiction, alcoholism and fame all to be doing what I’m doing right now, which is helping people.”— Matthew Perry, actor, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)“It was the period of apartheid. You know, it was very hard, very difficult and very painful — and many a time I felt, ‘Shall I continue with this life or shall I go on?’ But I continued. I wanted to dance.”— Johaar Mosaval, dancer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“God would like us to be joyful / Even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.” (“Fiddler on the Roof”)— Sheldon Harnick, lyricist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“I remember back in the day, saying it’s so cool that the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie are still played. That’s what we wanted hip-hop to be.”— David Jolicoeur, musician, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)“Civilization cannot last or advance without culture.”— Ahmad Jamal, musician, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Harry Belafonte. Phil Burchman/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die.”— Harry Belafonte, singer and actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“Some people say to artists that they should change. Change what? It’s like saying, ‘Why don’t you walk differently or talk differently?’ I can’t change my voice. That’s the way I am.”— Fernando Botero, artist, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”— André Watts, pianist, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)Renata Scotto.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Singing isn’t my whole life.”— Renata Scotto, opera singer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate.”— Frances Sternhagen, actress, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)David Crosby.Mick Gold/Redferns, via Getty Images“I don’t know if I’ve found my way, but I do know I feel happy.”— David Crosby, musician, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“I’m very abstract. Once it becomes narrative, it’s all over. Let the audience decide what it’s about.”— Rudy Perez, choreographer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t have a driven desire actually to be in the act of writing. But my response to any form of excitement about reading is to want to write.”— A.S. Byatt, author, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t think I ever wrote music to react to other music — I really had a very strong need to express myself.”— Kaija Saariaho, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Richard Roundtree.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“Narrow-mindedness is alien to me.”— Richard Roundtree, actor, born 1942, though some sources say 1937 (Read the obituary.)“The reason I’ve been able to dance for so long is absolute willpower.”— Gus Solomons Jr., dancer and choreographer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“My practice is a resistance to the glamorous art object.”— Phyllida Barlow, artist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”— Milan Kundera, author, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Mary Quant.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“The most extreme fashion should be very, very cheap. First, because only the young are daring enough to wear it; second, because the young look better in it; and third, because if it’s extreme enough, it shouldn’t last.”— Mary Quant, fashion designer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)“I spontaneously enter the unknown.”— Vivan Sundaram, artist, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark.”— Richard Hunt, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Angus Cloud.Pat Martin for The New York Times“Style is how you hold yourself.”— Angus Cloud, actor, born 1998 (Read the obituary.)“I have an aura.”— Barry Humphries, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“Intensity is not something I try to do. It’s just kind of the way that I am.”— Lance Reddick, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)Alan Arkin.Jerry Mosey/Associated Press“There was a time when I had so little sense of myself that getting out of my skin and being anybody else was a sigh of relief. But I kind of like myself now, a lot of the times.”— Alan Arkin, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“I have always thought of myself as a kind of vessel through which the work might flow.”— Valda Setterfield, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”— Cormac McCarthy, author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Elliott Erwitt.Steven Siewert/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“In general, I don’t think too much. I certainly don’t use those funny words museum people and art critics like.”— Elliott Erwitt, photographer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its humorless own arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.” (“The Information”)— Martin Amis, author, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)Magda Saleh.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“I did not do it on my own.”— Magda Saleh, ballerina, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means, ‘I dare you.’”— Wayne Shorter, musician, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“What is a jazz singer? Somebody who improvises? But I don’t: I prefer simplicity.”— Astrud Gilberto, singer, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)“It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”— Anne Perry, author, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“When I think about my daughter and the day that I move on — there is a piece of me that will remain with her.”— Ron Cephas Jones, actor, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)“Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future.”— Norman Lear, television writer and producer, born 1922 (Read the obituary.)Tony Bennett.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough.”— Tony Bennett, musician, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via Getty Images. More

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      ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ Review: Desire, Once Upon a Time

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      George Miller directs a visually sumptuous, grown-up fairy tale with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. It jumps across time but too often just stumbles.There are storytellers, and then there is Scheherazade, the savvy bride who in “One Thousand and One Nights” entertains her husband, the king of Persia, by telling him stories. The king has a nasty habit of killing his wives, so to keep her head Scheherazade practices narrative interruptus: Each night, she relates wondrous tales without finishing them, keeping him hooked on her cliffhangers so that she can live another day. For her, storytelling is life.The stakes are far lower for Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) in George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” A self-described narratologist, Alithea has meaningful work, reputational standing, a movieland dream house and a potential new chapter in a mysterious being (Idris Elba). She is also a storyteller. But unlike Scheherazade, Alithea risks nothing meaningful when she spins this yarn, a problem for a movie that insists on the importance of storytelling. Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.The movie begins with a promising, characteristically energetic Miller-esque whoosh of swooping cameras, brisk editing, pops of colors and a sense of urgency. Things are about to happen! Except — as Alithea explains — everything to come has already occurred. “My story is true,” she says, adding: “You’re more likely to believe me, however, if I tell it as a fairy tale.” And so, with a melodious once-upon-a-time voice, she revs up an elaborate story about a loquacious genie called, well, Djinn (Elba). Soon enough, the story skips back in time, she frees him from a bottle, he offers her three wishes and she reacts warily until she doesn’t.Any movie with Elba and Swinton has its appeal, and the same holds true of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” which pulls you in every time they’re together onscreen. It takes flight with Alithea en route to a conference in Istanbul. Things quickly get weird, and a certain je ne sais what perfumes the air when she meets a peculiar fellow at the airport and encounters an even odder, ominous-looking stranger at the conference. During a lecture on storytelling, Alithea sits before huge images of modern gods like Batman and Superman, a display that gestures toward the continuity between new myths and those of the ancient world. And then she faints.Certainly, Miller — whose fables include the Mad Max series — is keenly interested in the power of stories. But in “Years of Longing,” he has tethered himself to hopeless, uninvolving source material. That would be a self-reflexive, tediously long story by A.S. Byatt titled “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” which also centers on a single, middle-aged British academic who (eventually) travels to Turkey, meets a genie, is offered three wishes and experiences several life-altering changes. Filled with literary allusions and deep thoughts, it is serious stuff, no doubt, but it’s also about a white woman getting laid by an exotic Other.Race doesn’t factor into the original story, or maybe it does; I was so bored I admittedly resorted to skimming chunks of it. Whatever the case, the casting in the movie adds complications because of the way that cinema concretizes ideas. Actors don’t only play parts; they give those ideas flesh, histories, social and cultural meanings. Djinn is a captive to whoever releases him from the bottle; he’s a fictional creation, and this is a fairy tale. Yet it’s also a story in which a sexualized Black man is, at least initially, held captive to the desires of a lonely white woman who wants what he’s got — provocative terrain the movie ignores.“Three Thousand Years of Longing” — it was written by Miller and his daughter, Augusta Gore — has more life than the original story, but it still drags. After Alithea unbottles Djinn, the two face off in her hotel room, where after some awkwardness and silliness (enter a wee Albert Einstein), they settle into matching hotel bathrobes, and he recounts the stories that shaped his previous 3,000 years. As the movie’s title announces, these are suffused with longing. The first involves the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), another turns on an enslaved girl (Ece Yuksel) and yet another on an unhappy wife (Burcu Golgedar).All the stories have their appeal, and Miller, working with a predictably stellar crew, seems to have an enjoyable time playing with his digital tool kit. Yet his exuberance and delight are most evident — and most infectious — at the granular level. Although several of the tales are heavily populated, teeming with intrigues and swarming with minions, the movie charms most successfully with the beauty and wit of its filigreed details: the gleam of its polished surfaces, the hues of its variegated palette and the inventiveness of its smaller delights, like the bewitching musical instrument that plays itself with its own nimble hands.Despite these flashes of playfulness, the stories blur rather than build. They’re overlong, for one, and because Djinn often narrates their characters’ words, thoughts and deeds, they rarely come alive. Much like the figurines in old-fashioned automaton clocks, they enter at the appointed time, execute clever bits of business and exit, leaving no impression other than admiration for clockmaker’s skill. Worse, they take you away from Alithea and Djinn. And while the last half-hour is lovely — it’s here that you see the movie, and feel the tenderness, that Miller himself clearly yearns to convey — by then, alas, the clock has almost run out.Three Thousand Years of LongingRated R for fairy-tale violence, nudity and sex. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      George Miller on ‘Furiosa’ and His New Cannes Film

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      In between screenings and interviews, the 77-year-old director is working on the next film in the “Mad Max” universe, and he seems to be having a ball.CANNES, France — On Tuesday, just a few days after the premiere of his latest movie, “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” at the Cannes Film Festival, the Australian director George Miller is heading home to direct “Furiosa,” the fourth installment in his phantasmagoric “Mad Max” series.“The cast is already out there,” he said when I interviewed him Saturday. “They’ve been shooting second unit.” Miller has been working on “Furiosa” in between screenings, interviews and having what looks like a very good time at the festival. “Nowadays, modern communication allows you to be there,” he said, obviously pleased with his multitasking. “It’s really great.”Miller is a Cannes veteran, but while he’s served on three of the festival’s juries in 30 years, only two of his movies have been presented here, both out of competition. The last time was for his masterpiece “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which set the festival afire in 2015. Audiences and critics alike gave the movie plenty of love, and it received a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, winning half a dozen statuettes. Predictably, though, it lost best picture to “Spotlight,” which encapsulates the kind of self-flattering, ostensibly serious work the academy has historically embraced.I suspect that “Fury Road” was simply too far out, too uncategorizable and narratively playful, to suit old-guard academy members. It was probably also too much fun. Fun is for kiddie movies, which presumably is why Miller did win an Oscar for “Happy Feet,” a fanciful yet classically Milleresque, technically flawless tale filled with deep feelings and great questions that tethers environmental catastrophe to the story of a cute tap-dancing penguin named Mumble. “When we congregate with strangers in the dark,” Miller once said, “it’s a kind of dreaming.” Sometimes those dreams are nightmares.Hugh Keays-Byrne, center, in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Miller’s masterpiece.Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.It takes about a day to fly between Australia and France. Miller, who turned 77 in March, will be making the trip twice in less than a week, but if he was tired, he didn’t look it. To escape the din of the crowds, we met on the terrace at the office of FilmNation, which is handling the new movie’s international distribution and sales. A colleague had described Miller as professorial and alerted me that he was prone to digressions, a trait that the filmmaker cheerfully volunteered as he issued forth on movies, Einstein, the forces of the universe, Joseph Campbell and how cellphones use relativity to work.Einstein makes a special appearance in “Three Thousand Years,” which is as nearly unclassifiable as its director. As the title suggests, the movie spans millenniums to tell the sweeping story of an ancient djinn (Idris Elba) and a modern-day scholar, Alithea (Tilda Swinton). She’s traveled to Turkey for a conference — Alithea studies narratives, puzzling through them just like Miller does — but her plans take an unforeseen turn when she opens a peculiar blue-and-white-striped bottle that she’s bought, inadvertently releasing the djinn from a long captivity. What follows is a fantastical fable of love and suffering, imprisonment and release, mythology and the material world.The djinn tries to grant her three wishes, but it gets complicated. Instead, he starts recounting episodes from his long life, all involving women and intrigues that led to his repeat captivity. He tells stories, but so does Alithea, who also narrates. As the movie continues, it shifts between the C.G.I.-heavy past and the present, always returning to the djinn and Alithea, who grow progressively close. “Three Thousand Years” is essentially about storytelling, which means it’s about desire: The yearning expressed in the djinn’s tales, the longing awakened in Alithea and the craving the viewer has to find out what happens next.“Three Thousand Years” is based on “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” a story in a collection from the British writer A.S. Byatt. Miller doesn’t read fiction (he did as a kid), but someone rightly sussed that he might like the book. He was especially taken with “Nightingale” — “it kept playing in my mind as stories do” — and secured the rights. Miller said that Byatt was surprised he had singled out this story, which she’d written quickly. But it was also grounded in her own life history. She too had once gone to a conference in Istanbul. Everything in the story is true, she told him, except for the djinn.Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” the new Miller film that played at Cannes.MGMMiller wrote the script with his daughter, Augusta Gore; his wife, Margaret Sixel, edited the movie. She’s edited several of his other movies, winning an Oscar for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Miller clearly likes creating in a familial setup and has worked with some crew members repeatedly, including the cinematographer John Seale, who shot “Three Thousand Years” and “Fury Road.” Miller has been with one of his collaborators, Guy Norris, for 41 years; Norris was the stunt coordinator on “The Road Warrior” (a.k.a. “Mad Max 2”) and is serving as the second-unit director on “Furiosa.”Norris holds a special place in the “Mad Max” history because of an accident he had while driving a stunt car for “The Road Warrior.” One of the signatures of the “Mad Max” series is the elegantly choreographed, seemingly gravity-defying practical stunts, and this one involved Norris driving into two other vehicles and then into a ditch. It didn’t go as planned and he flew through the air the wrong way, missing his high-tech cushioning (a pile of cardboard boxes) and badly hurting himself — ouch. In the video of the accident (it’s available online), you can see that Miller was among the first to race to Norris’s side. You might expect that from any decent person, except that in this case the visibly worried filmmaker was also a doctor.Miller, who grew up in a small town in Queensland, Australia, attended medical school with his fraternal brother, John. (They have two other brothers.) A movie lover since childhood, Miller made his first film, a short, while in school. By the time he made his first feature, a low-budget wonder called “Mad Max,” he was a doctor. His day job came in handy, he explained, because every time the production ran out of money, he worked as an emergency physician to make money. He practiced for about a decade, only finally quitting when he made “Road Warrior.” Filmmaking, he thought, “was a really interesting thing to do, but there was no real career.”He and his former producing partner Byron Kennedy (who died in 1983) had made “Mad Max” out of what Miller describes as “pure curiosity.” As Miller talks, it’s clear that curiosity remains a driving force for him. One particularly lovely story that he shares hinges on a lecture at school delivered by the architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. “He synthesized so much that was rumbling around loosely my mind,” said Miller, who was struck by Fuller’s remark that “I am not a noun, I seem to be a verb.” Suddenly, Miller wasn’t a medical student, he was simply studying medicine — which liberated him.Miller has been going and shooting and moving ever since. He too is a verb, I think, and not a noun, and shows no sign of stopping. Listening to him spin story after story, I suddenly thought I knew why he didn’t read fiction — or at least I thought I did, so I asked if his imagination crowded his head, leaving no room for other’s people’s stories. “Definitely,” he said. “If I’m walking down the street, there’s some story or something going in my head. As I’ve often said to my family, ‘If I’m the guy sitting in the nursing home in a wheelchair staring at the ceiling, probably there’s some sort of story going on.’”For now, though, it’s just go, go, go. More