​Jeanne Paquin(23 June 1869–28 August 1936) was a leading French fashion designer, known for her resolutely modern and innovative designs. She was the first major female couturier and one of the pioneers of the modern fashion business.

​Jeanne Paquin, née Jeanne Beckers le 23 juin 1869 à L'Île-Saint-Denis et décédée le 28 août 1936 à Paris 7e, est une grande couturière française. Elle est l'une des premières à avoir acquis une renommée internationale, à la fin du xixe siècle.

Jeanne Paquin was born Jeanne Marie Charlotte Beckers in 1869. Her father was a physician. She was one of five children.

Sent out to work as a young teenager, Jeanne trained as a dressmaker at Rouff (a Paris couture house established in 1884 and located on Boulevard Haussmann). She quickly rose through to ranks becoming première, in charge of the atelier.

In 1891, Jeanne Marie Charlotte Beckers married Isidore René Jacob, who was also known as Paquin. Isidore owned Paquin Lalanne et cie, a couture house which had grown out of a menswear shop in the 1840s. The couple renamed the company Paquin and set about building the business.

Jeanne Paquin was the first couturier to send models dressed in her apparel to public events such operas and horse races for publicity. Paquin also frequently collaborated with the illustrators and architects such as Léon Bakst, George Barbier, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Louis Süe. She was also known to collaborate with the theatre, in a time when other houses rejected collaboration. In 1913, a New York Times reporter described Jeanne as "the most commercial artist alive".

A London branch of The House of Paquin was opened in 1896 and the business became a limited company the same year. This shop employed a young Madeleine Vionnet. The company later expanded with shops in Buenos Aires and Madrid.

In 1900, Jeanne was instrumental in organizing the Universal Exhibition and she was elected president of the Fashion Section. Her designs were featured prominently at the Exhibition and Jeanne created a mannequin of herself for display.

Isidore Paquin died in 1907 at the age of 45, leaving Jeanne a widow at 38. Over 2,000 people attended Isidore's funeral. After Isidore's death, Jeanne dressed mostly in black and white.

In 1912, Jeanne and her half-brother opened a furrier, Paquin-Joire, on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The same year, Jeanne signed an exclusive illustration contract with La Gazette du Bon Ton, which featured six other leading Paris designers of the day – Louise Chéruit, Georges Doeuillet, Jacques Doucet, Paul Poiret, Redfern & Sons, and the House of Worth.

In 1913, Jeanne accepted France's prestigious Legion d’Honneur in recognition of her economic contributions to the country – the first woman designer to receive the honor. A year later, Jeanne toured the United States. For five dollars, attendees saw The House of Paquin's latest designs. Despite the high ticket price, the tour sold out.

During World War I, Jeanne served as president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. She was the first woman to serve as president of an employers syndicate in France.

At its height, the House of Paquin was so well known that Edith Wharton mentioned the company by name in The House of Mirth.

When Jeanne Paquin retired in 1920, she passed responsibility to her assistant Madeleine Wallis. Wallis remained as house designer for Paquin until 1936, the same year that Jeanne Paquin died.

Between 1936 and 1941, the Spanish designer Ana de Pombo, Wallis's assistant, was house designer. In 1941, de Pombo left, and her assistant, Antonio del Castillo (1908–1984) took over as head designer. In 1945 del Castillo left Paquin to become a designer for Elizabeth Arden, and would later become head designer for the house of Lanvin. He was succeeded by Colette Massignac, who was tasked with the challenge of keeping Paquin going during the post-War years, when new designers such as Christian Dior were receiving greater publicity and attention. In 1949, the Basque designer Lou Claverie became head designer at Paquin, until 1953, when he was succeeded by a young American designer, Alan Graham. However, Graham's understated designs failed to reinvigorate the brand of Paquin, and the Paris house closed on 1 July 1956.

Elle préside la section Modes de l'Exposition universelle de 1900. Dans son stand, elle se fait représenter par un mannequin de cire vêtu d'un déshabillé brodé de roses d'or.

Associée à des partenaires britanniques, Jeanne Paquin transfère, en 1896, son siège à Londres, au 39 Dover Street, tout en gardant sa succursale de Paris. En 1912, elle ouvre à New York, au 398 de la Cinquième Avenue, une boutique consacrée à la fourrure, qu’elle confie à son demi-frère, Henri Joire et dont l'agencement est réalisé par Robert Mallet-Stevens. La même année elle fait réaliser une villa au 33, rue du Mont-Valérien à Saint-Cloud (alors en Seine-et-Oise, aujourd'hui dans les Hauts-de-Seine) par l'architecte décorateur Louis Süe. Peu de temps après, deux nouvelles succursales voient le jour à Madrid et à Buenos Aires. Elle est la première grande couturière à recevoir, en 1913, la croix de la Légion d'honneur.

La « maison Paquin » est immortalisée par la chanson de Léo Lelièvre, La Biaiseuse en 1912 (reprise notamment par Annie Cordy et Marie-Paule Belle) : « Je suis biaiseuse chez Paquin... ».

La couturière se fait construire une villa à Deauville en 1909 : le premier projet, demandé à Robert Mallet-Stevens, semblant ne pas avoir abouti, c'est finalement l'architecte Auguste Bluysen qui est retenu. Au xxie siècle, la villa est baptisée Les Abeilles.

Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan CBE (10 June 1911 – 30 November 1977) was a British dramatist and screenwriter. His plays are typically set in an upper-middle-class background. He wrote The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Separate Tables (1954), among many others.

A troubled homosexual who saw himself as an outsider, Rattigan wrote a number of plays which centred on issues of sexual frustration, failed relationships, or a world of repression and reticence.

​Terence Rattigan was born in 1911 in South Kensington, London, of Irish Protestant extraction. Rattigan's birth certificate and his birth announcement in The Times indicate he was born on 9 June 1911. However, most reference books state that he was born the following day; Rattigan himself never publicly disputed this date. There is evidence suggesting that the date on the birth certificate is incorrect. He was given no middle name, but he adopted the middle name "Mervyn" in early adulthood.

He had an elder brother, Brian. They were the grandsons of Sir William Henry Rattigan, an India-based jurist, and later a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament for North-East Lanarkshire. His father was Frank Rattigan CMG, a diplomat whose exploits included an affair with Princess Elisabeth of Romania (future consort of King George II of Greece) which resulted in her having an abortion. The Royal House of Romania is considered to be the inspiration of Rattigan's play The Sleeping Prince.

Rattigan was educated at Sandroyd School from 1920 to 1925, and Harrow School. Rattigan played cricket for the Harrow First XI and scored 29 in the Eton–Harrow match in 1929. He then went to Trinity College, Oxford.

His success as a playwright came early, with the comedy French Without Tears in 1936 which was inspired by his 1933 visit to a village called Marxzell in the Black Forest, where young English gentlemen went to learn German.

Rattigan's determination to write a more serious play produced After the Dance (1939), a satirical social drama about the "bright young things" and their failure to politically engage. The outbreak of the Second World War scuppered any chances of a long run. 

During the war, Rattigan served in the Royal Air Force as a tail gunner. After the war, Rattigan alternated between comedies and dramas, establishing himself as a major playwright: the most successful of which were The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and Separate Tables (1954).

Rattigan's belief in understated emotions and craftsmanship was deemed old fashioned after the overnight success in 1956 of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger began the era of kitchen sink dramas by the writers known as the Angry Young Men. Rattigan responded to this critical disfavour with some bitterness. His plays Ross, Man and Boy, In Praise of Love, and Cause Célèbre, however show no sign of any decline in his talent. Rattigan explained that he wrote his plays to please a symbolic playgoer, "Aunt Edna", someone from the well-off middle-class who had conventional tastes.

Rattigan was gay, with numerous lovers but no long-term partners.

It has been claimed his work is essentially autobiographical, containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from all but his closest friends. 

Rattigan was fascinated with the life and character of T. E. Lawrence. In 1960 he wrote a play called Ross, based on Lawrence's exploits. Preparations were made to film it, and Dirk Bogarde accepted the role. However, it did not proceed because the Rank Organisation withdrew its support, not wishing to offend David Lean and Sam Spiegel, who had started to film Lawrence of Arabia. Bogarde called Rank's decision "my bitterest disappointment".

The same year, a musical version of French Without Tears was staged as Joie de Vivre, with music by Robert Stolz of White Horse Inn fame. It starred Donald Sinden, lasted only four performances, and has never been revived.

Rattigan was diagnosed as having leukaemia in 1962 and recovered two years later, but fell ill again in 1968. He disliked the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s and moved abroad, living in Bermuda, where he lived off the proceeds from lucrative screenplays including The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. For a time he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world.

In 1964, Rattigan invested £3,000 in young playwright Joe Orton's outrageous comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane, trying to get the play transferred to the West End. Although an unlikely champion of the risqué Orton, Rattigan recognised the younger man's talent and approved of what he considered a very well written piece of theatre. 

Rattigan was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours of June 1971 for services to the theatre, being only the fourth playwright to be knighted in the 20th century (after Sir W. S. Gilbert in 1907, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero in 1909 and Sir Noël Coward in 1970). He had previously been appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), in June 1958. He moved back to Britain, where he experienced a minor revival in his reputation before his death.

Terence Rattigan died in Hamilton, Bermuda, from bone cancer in 1977, aged 66. His cremated remains were deposited in the family vault at Kensal Green Cemetery.

In 1990, the British Library acquired Rattigan's papers consisting of 300 volumes of correspondence and papers relating to his prose and dramatic works.

There was a revival of of his plays since early 90s, In 2011, the BBC presented The Rattigan Enigma by Benedict Cumberbatch, a documentary on Rattigan's life and career presented by actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who, like Rattigan, attended Harrow.

A new screen version of The Deep Blue Sea, directed by Terence Davies, was released in 2011, starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston.

Books

Natalie Portman (born June 9, 1981) is an Israeli-born American actress. With an extensive career in film since her teenage years, she has starred in various blockbusters and independent films, for which she has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Golden Globe Awards.

Portman began her acting career at age twelve, when she starred as the young protégée of a hitman in the action drama film Léon: The Professional (1994). While in high school, she made her Broadway debut in a 1998 production of The Diary of a Young Girl and gained international recognition for starring as Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). From 1999 to 2003, Portman attended Harvard University for a bachelor's degree in psychology, while continuing to act in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002, 2005) and in The Public Theater's 2001 revival of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull. In 2004, Portman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a Golden Globe Award for playing a mysterious stripper in the romantic drama Closer.

Portman's career progressed with her starring roles as Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta (2005), Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), and a troubled ballerina in the psychological horror film Black Swan (2010), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She went on to star in the romantic comedy No Strings Attached (2011) and featured as Jane Foster in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero films Thor (2011), and Thor: The Dark World (2013), which established her among the world's highest-paid actresses. She has since portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the biopic Jackie (2016), earning her third Academy Award nomination.

Portman's directorial ventures include the short film Eve (2008) and the biographical drama A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015). She is vocal about the politics of America and Israel, and is an advocate for animal rights and environmental causes. She is married to dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with whom she has two children.

​Natalie Herschlag was born on June 9, 1981, in Jerusalem, to parents of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Her native language is Hebrew. She is the only child of Shelley (née Stevens), an American homemaker who works as Portman's agent, and Avner Hershlag, an Israeli-born gynecologist. Her maternal grandparents were American Jews, whereas her paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants to Israel.

Portman and her family first lived in Washington, D.C., but relocated to Connecticut in 1988 and then moved to Long Island in 1990 where she attended a Jewish elementary school, the Solomon Schechter Day School of Nassau County. She studied ballet and modern dance at the American Theater Dance Workshop, and regularly attended the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Describing her early life, Portman has said that she was "different from the other kids. I was more ambitious. I knew what I liked and what I wanted, and I worked very hard. I was a very serious kid."

When Portman was ten years old, a Revlon agent spotted her at a pizza restaurant and asked her to become a child model. She turned down the offer but used the opportunity to get an acting agent. She auditioned for the 1992 off-Broadway Ruthless!, a musical about a girl who is prepared to commit murder to get the lead in a school play. Portman and Britney Spears were chosen as the understudies for star Laura Bell Bundy.

Six months after Ruthless! ended, Portman auditioned for and secured a leading role in Luc Besson's action drama Léon: The Professional (1994). To protect her privacy, she adopted her paternal grandmother's maiden name, Portman, as her stage name. She played Mathilda, an orphan child who befriends a middle-aged hitman (played by Jean Reno). Her parents were reluctant to let her do the part due to the explicit sexual and violent nature of the script, but agreed after Besson took out the nudity and killings committed by Portman's character. 

After filming The Professional, Portman went back to school. She also enrolled at the Stagedoor Manor performing arts camp, where she played Anne Shirley in a staging of Anne of Green Gables.

In 1996, Portman had brief roles in Woody Allen's musical Everyone Says I Love You and Tim Burton's comic science fiction film Mars Attacks!.

Portman was cast opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), but she dropped out during rehearsals when studio executives found her too young for the role. She was also offered Adrian Lyne's Lolita, based on the novel of the same name, but she turned down the part due to its excessive sexual content.

Portman instead signed on to star as Anne Frank in a Broadway adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, which was staged at the Music Box Theatre from December 1997 to May 1998. She found a connection with Frank's story, given her own family's history with the Holocaust. 

Natalie Portman began filming the part of Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy in 1997, which marked her first big-budget production. She worked closely with the director George Lucas on her character's accent and mannerisms, and watched the films of Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, and Katharine Hepburn to draw inspiration from their voice and stature.

The first film of the series, Episode I – The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, when she was in her final year of high school. She did not attend the film's premiere so she could study for her high school final exams. The film earned $924 million worldwide, the second highest-grossing film of all time to that point, and it established Portman as a global star.

Portman graduated from Syosset High School in 1999.

Following production on The Phantom Menace, Portman played the leading role in the coming-of-age film Anywhere but Here (1999) for which she received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination for it.

In 2000 she began attending Harvard University to pursue her bachelor's degree in psychology, where she also studied advanced Hebrew literature, neurobiology, thus significantly reducing her acting roles over the next few years.  When asked about balancing her career and education, she said, "I don't care if [college] ruins my career. I'd rather be smart than a movie star."

In the summer of 2001, she returned to Broadway to perform Chekhov's drama The Seagull, which was directed by Mike Nichols and co-starred Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The following year, she reprised her role of Amidala in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, which she had filmed in Sydney and London during her summer break of 2000. She was excited by the opportunity to play a confident young woman who did not depend on the male lead. Portman graduated from Harvard in 2003 and her sole screen appearance that year was in the brief part of a young mother in the war film Cold Mountain.

Next year she played a mysterious stripper in Closer, a drama directed by Mike Nichols based on the play of the same name, and co-starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Clive Owen. The actress agreed to her first sexually explicit adult role, after turning down such projects in the past, saying that it reflected her own maturity as a person. Closer grossed over $115 million against a $27 million budget, and Portman won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in addition to receiving an Academy Award nomination in the same category.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, the final installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, was Portman's first film release of 2005. It earned over $848 million to rank as the second-highest-grossing film of the year.

In late 2006, she starred in Miloš Forman's Goya's Ghosts, about the painter Francisco Goya. Forman cast her in the film after finding a resemblance between her and Goya's portrait The Milkmaid of Bordeaux. She insisted on using a body-double for her nude scenes after discovering on set that she had to perform them when they were not originally in the script.

Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson starred as rival sisters Mary and Anne Boleyn, respectively, in the period film The Other Boleyn Girl (2008). She was excited by the opportunity to work opposite another actress her age, bemoaning that such casting was rare in film. The film had modest box-office earnings.

She served as a jury member of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and also launched her own production company, named handsomecharlie films, after her late dog. Portman's directorial debut, the short film Eve, opened the short-film screenings at the 65th Venice International Film Festival. It is about a young woman who goes to her grandmother's romantic date, and Portman drew inspiration for the older character (played by Lauren Bacall) from her own grandmother.

In 2009, Portman played a ballerina overwhelmed with the prospect of performing Swan Lake in Darren Aronofsky's psychological horror film Black Swan. She was trained by the professional ballerina Mary Helen Bowers, and in preparation, she trained for five to eight hours daily for six months and lost 20 pounds (9 kg). Her performance was acclaimed.

Black Swan emerged as a sleeper hit, grossing over $329 million worldwide against a $13 million budget, and earned Portman several prizes including the Academy Award for Best Actress. 

Portman next served as an executive producer for No Strings Attached (2011), a romantic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher and her as a young couple in a casual sex relationship. She described the experience of making it as a "palate cleanser" from the intensity of her Black Swan job. It received unfavorable reviews but was a commercial success.

​Portman portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the biopic Jackie (2016), about Kennedy's life immediately after the 1963 assassination of her husband. She was initially intimidated to take on the part of a well-known public figure, and eventually researched Kennedy extensively by watching videos of her, reading books, and listening to audiotapes of her interviews. She also worked with a dialect coach to adapt Kennedy's unique speaking style.

She won the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Natalie Portman met French danseur and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, while working together on the set of Black Swan. The couple began dating in 2009 and wed in a Jewish ceremony held in Big Sur, California on August 4, 2012. They have two children, son Aleph (born 2011) and daughter Amalia (born 2017). The family lived in Paris for a time, after Millepied accepted the position of director of dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, and Portman expressed a desire to become a French citizen. They currently reside in Los Angeles.

In January 2014, her husband Millepied said he was in the process of converting to Judaism.