Virginia Woolf

Today is the 131st anniversary of Virginia Woolf's birth. Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf! Woolf was a groundbreaking writer, an incisive critic and a catalyst for the modernist movement in British letters. Among her most significant works are the novels "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927), "Orlando" (1928), "The Waves" (1931) and the nonfiction treatise on women's writing, "A Room of One's Own" (1929). Adeline Virginia Stephen was born to a literary family in London in 1882.

Today is the 131st anniversary of Virginia Woolf's birth. Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf! Woolf was a groundbreaking writer, an incisive critic and a catalyst for the modernist movement in British letters. Among her most significant works are the novels "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927), "Orlando" (1928), "The Waves" (1931) and the nonfiction treatise on women's writing, "A Room of One's Own" (1929). Adeline Virginia Stephen was born to a literary family in London in 1882.

Everybody's happy. Paramount and Miramax are happy to have an intelligent movie up for nine academy awards. David Hare, who wrote the screenplay, is happy to have worked on a project in which so little had to be changed in the sometimes rocky journey from page to screen. Stephen Daldry, the director, is, well, happy. And Michael Cunningham, the author of the book of the same name upon which "The Hours" is based, is happy because he fell in love with Virginia Woolf's language in her novel "Mrs.

Will Self joined us from the office of his London publisher, Bloomsbury, to talk about his challenging new novel "Umbrella. " It was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Just released in the U.S. by Grove/Atlantic, "Umbrella" is told in stream-of-consciousness form, following in the footsteps of high modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. While some have called it a masterpiece , its style has put off some readers, who find it too difficult. Does that mean that writing in styles made famous by Joyce and Woolf is somehow still avant-garde, nearly a century later?

A party can be very theatrical. Stars and supporting players come and go. Intense impressions of each other are based on a few sketchy fragments of information. People think one thing and say another. The overall effect can be exhilarating or excruciating. Finally, all of the effort creates nothing more permanent than memories. It's like many a play. Virginia Woolf took her readers behind the scenes, so to speak, into the brains of several partygoers at Mrs.

For only the second time in its history, "Masterpiece Theatre" is airing a one-woman production, British actress Eileen Atkins playing Virginia Woolf in an adaptation of Woolf's burnished call for women's creative freedom, "A Room of One's Own" (Sunday on KCET Channel 28 at 9 p.m.). Woolf raised eyebrows in 1928 when she told young female students at Cambridge University's Girton College that "a woman must have money and a room of one's own if she is to write fiction."

A towering and tormented figure, Virginia Woolf experienced life through the distorted prism of her own troubled mind. As her writings reveal, Woolf was subject to manic mood swings, periods of despair countered by intense raptures--her most fertile artistic periods--that led her to pour forth her swirling emotions into precise, pointed prose. Her life ended in suicide, but Woolf's enduring legacy of proto-feminist essays and stream-of-consciousness fiction paved the way to the modern novel.

The ghost of Virginia Woolf hangs lightly over Bloomsbury. A blue plaque on the wall of a building in which she once lived is all that remains to tell of her life here. There are no homes to visit, no museums and no shrines either to her or to other members of the literary "group" that once stirred and shocked English sensibilities. What remains are the squares of Bloomsbury, each a green retreat from the pressures of the city.

Any production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" usually clocks in at three hours even when the pace is brisk and the mordant humor is allowed to zip along. But if the pulsating wisecracks of Edward Albee's corrosive marital epic are turned into mere recriminations and buried beneath a portentous tone, as they are in the current revival by the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, those three hours can seem like an eternity.

The announcement last week was unexpected but specific: "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" will not--repeat, not --come to the Century City Shubert next April. Look for it now in May. May, 1991. After it goes to Japan. Whaaaaaaat? . . . Never mind that the show (still going strong on Broadway) was scheduled and advertised for April. Never mind that it was offered to (and paid for by) Ahmanson subscribers as part of their 1989-90 season. Never mind that $2.

NEW YORK - Tracy Letts has his hands full these days writing plays and preparing for the release of the movie version of his Pulitzer-Prize-winning drama, "August: Osage County. " But he's added another formidable task to his agenda: elucidating Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" for a 21st century audience. Playwrights often shed indirect light on their predecessors. Harold Pinter's taut language, for example, helped us to better appreciate Samuel Beckett's minimalist aesthetics.

NEW YORK - A few years ago, Tracy Letts was at the Broadway rehearsal of a play he'd written when he noticed some of the younger actors slacking off. Letts pulled them aside. "Don't take this for granted," the playwright and actor told them. "I mean, I've never been on a Broadway stage. " Letts recalled the story from a lounge area in the basement of the Booth Theater, where about an hour later, he had stepped onstage as George, that embodiment of human complexity and marital dysfunction in the revival of Edward Albee's classic "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

In the picture, I am probably 10 years old. I'm wearing blue jeans and a bright red sweater, and I'm perched on the stump of a redwood tree, surrounded by a forest of the same. On my lap, I hold an open book. My head is bowed, long blond hair studiously tucked behind my ears. I wish I could remember the book I was reading, but I can't. What I do remember is that I knew my mother was taking the picture — even though she didn't know I knew it. As a result, I was trying extra-hard to look serious.

'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' George Segal received his only Oscar nomination for his supporting performance in 1966's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" as Nick, a young college instructor who gets more than he bargains for when he and his wife visit a squabbling couple. 'A Touch of Class' Segal and Glenda Jackson were perfectly matched in the 1973 comedy "A Touch of Class" as a couple having an affair who fall in love. Segal won the Golden Globe; Jackson earned a Globe and an Oscar for her role.

You can't blame a writer for taking risks, especially when the writer is as talented as Stephanie Barron, whose background includes a degree in European history and a stint as a CIA intelligence analyst. Under the name Francine Mathews, she has written contemporary mysteries centered on Nantucket and globe-trotting thrillers set in the present as well as in World War II Paris ("The Alibi Club"). These are in addition to the nine novels in the Jane Austen mystery series for which Barron is best known.

How often have you sat through a movie wishing you could talk back to the screen, reshuffle the ending or cut and paste your own dialogue to suggest what Indiana Jones is really thinking about the local Asian help? Have you ever perceived a riotous subtext lurking beneath the placid surface of some classic Hollywood narrative and wanted to leap out of your seat and regale your fellow viewers? Well, imagine no more.

As late in her life as 1940, the year before her death, Virginia Woolf had a story rejected. Although Harper's Bazaar had urgently solicited "The Legacy," they never published it. Now this fragile mystery, along with a mixed assortment of other unpublished and published stories, is available in "The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf."

"We do have seasons out here," someone once observed when I was complaining about the lack of them, "but they're subtle as hell." That certainly applies to the arts. In New York at this time of year, you know you're at the top of a new theater season. The summer lull is over; the newspaper stories have started to appear about how this is going to be the best (or worst) Broadway season in 20 years; the starters are at the gate. . . . It doesn't work that way in Southern California.

Let US pause for a moment and imagine literature without Bloomsbury. That group of writers, philosophers and artists occupies a fertile spot in our minds. Questions like: Is it possible to have a happy marriage without fidelity to one's spouse, how much freedom of spirit does an artist need in order to create, how much cross-fertilization of ideas among friends, how much money to be free? These queries (and many others) disappear into that dark hole, forever unanswered.

George Grizzard, a veteran actor who originated the role of Nick in the 1962 play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and earned acclaim for his ability to add depth -- and often mystery -- to the wide range of characters he inhabited, has died. He was 79. Grizzard, who also appeared in films and on television, died Monday at a New York City hospital of complications from lung cancer, his agent, Clifford Stevens, confirmed. "What was remarkable about his acting was he didn't seem to be acting at all," said Andre Bishop, artistic director of New York's Lincoln Center Theater, where Grizzard sometimes performed.