Jacqueline Lee "Jackie" Kennedy Onassis (née Bouvier, July 28, 1929 – May 19, 1994) was an American socialite, book editor, writer, and photographer who became First Lady of the United States as the wife of President John F. Kennedy. As first lady, her popularity was due to her dedication to the historic preservation of the White House, her fashion sense, and her devotion to protecting her children, which endeared her to the American public. During her lifetime, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was regarded as an international fashion icon. BiographyJacqueline Kennedy Onassis was born on July 28, 1929 in Southampton, New York, to Wall Street stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier III and socialite Janet Lee Bouvier. Her mother was of Irish descent, and her father had French, Scottish, and English ancestry. Named after her father, she was baptized at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan and raised in the Roman Catholic faith. A sister, Caroline Lee, was born four years later on March 3, 1933. Jacqueline Bouvier spent her early childhood years in Manhattan and at Lasata, the Bouviers' country estate in East Hampton on Long Island. She looked up to her father, who likewise favored her over her sister, calling his elder child "the most beautiful daughter a man ever had". From an early age, Jacqueline was an enthusiastic equestrienne who successfully competed in the sport and horse-riding remained a lifelong passion for her. She took ballet lessons, was an avid reader, and excelled at learning languages, speaking English, French, Spanish, and Italian. French was particularly emphasized in her upbringing. In 1935, Jacqueline Bouvier was enrolled in Manhattan's Chapin School, which she attended for Grades 1–7. She was a bright student but often misbehaved; one of her teachers described her as "a darling child, the prettiest little girl, very clever, very artistic, and full of the devil". The marriage of the Bouviers was strained by the father's alcoholism and extramarital affairs; the family had also struggled with financial difficulties following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The couple separated in 1936 and divorced four years later, with the press publishing intimate details of the split. When their mother Janet Lee married Standard Oil heir Hugh Dudley Auchincloss, Jr., the Bouvier sisters did not attend the ceremony, because it was arranged quickly and travel was restricted due to World War II. They gained three stepsiblings from Auchincloss's previous marriages, Hugh "Yusha" Auchincloss III, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss, and Jackie formed the closest bond with Yusha, who became one of her most trusted confidants. The marriage later produced two more children, Janet Jennings Auchincloss in 1945 and James Lee Auchincloss in 1947. After the remarriage, Auchincloss's Merrywood estate in McLean, Virginia, became the Bouvier sisters' primary residence, although they also spent time at his other estate, Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, and in their father's homes in New York City and Long Island. Although she retained a relationship with her father, Jacqueline Bouvier also regarded her stepfather as a close paternal figure. He gave her a stable environment and the pampered childhood she never would have experienced otherwise. While she adjusted to her mother's remarriage, she sometimes felt like an outsider in the WASP social circle of the Auchinclosses, attributing the feeling to her being Catholic as well as being a child of divorce, which was not common in that social group at that time. After seven years at Chapin, Jacqueline Bouvier attended the Holton-Arms School in Northwest Washington, D.C. from 1942 to 1944, and Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, from 1944 to 1947. She chose Miss Porter's because it was a boarding school that allowed her to distance herself from the Auchinclosses, and because the school placed an emphasis on college preparatory classes. In her senior class yearbook, Bouvier was acknowledged for "her wit, her accomplishment as a horsewoman, and her unwillingness to become a housewife". She graduated among the top students of her class and received the Maria McKinney Memorial Award for Excellence in Literature. In the fall of 1947, Jacqueline Bouvier entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, at that time a women's institution. She had wanted to attend Sarah Lawrence College, closer to New York City, but her parents insisted that she choose the more isolated Vassar. She was an accomplished student who participated in the school's art and drama clubs and wrote for its newspaper. Due to her dislike of Vassar's location in Poughkeepsie, she did not take an active part in its social life and instead traveled back to Manhattan for the weekends. She had made her debut to high society in the summer before entering college and became a frequent presence in New York social functions. Hearst columnist Igor Cassini (brother of Oleg Cassini, who would become her official designer when she became the first lady of the United States) dubbed her the "debutante of the year". She spent her junior year (1949–1950) in France—at the University of Grenoble in Grenoble, and at the Sorbonne in Paris—in a study-abroad program through Smith College. Upon returning home, she transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in French literature in 1951. While attending George Washington, Jacqueline Bouvier won a twelve-month junior editorship at Vogue magazine; she had been selected over several hundred other women nationwide. The position entailed working for six months in the magazine's New York City office and spending the remaining six months in Paris. Before beginning the job, she celebrated her college graduation and her sister Lee's high school graduation by traveling with her to Europe for the summer. The trip was the subject of her only autobiography, One Special Summer, co-authored with Lee; it is also the only one of her published works to feature Jacqueline Bouvier's drawings. On her first day at Vogue, the managing editor advised her to quit and go back to Washington. She followed the advice, left the job and returned to Washington after only one day of work. Bouvier moved back to Merrywood and was referred by a family friend to the Washington Times-Herald, where she was hired as a part-time receptionist. A week later she requested more challenging work, and was hired as an "Inquiring Camera Girl" despite her inexperience, paying her $25 a week. The position required her to pose witty questions to individuals chosen at random on the street and take their pictures for publication in the newspaper alongside selected quotations from their responses. During this time, Bouvier was briefly engaged to a young stockbroker named John Husted. After only a month of dating, the couple published the announcement in The New York Times in January 1952. After three months, she called off the engagement because she had found him "immature and boring" once she got to know him better. Jacqueline Bouvier and U.S. Representative John F. Kennedy belonged to the same social circle and were formally introduced by a mutual friend at a dinner party in May 1952. She was attracted to Kennedy's physical appearance, wit and wealth. The pair also shared the similarities of Catholicism, writing, enjoying reading and having previously lived abroad. Kennedy was busy running for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts; the relationship grew more serious and he proposed to her after the November election. Bouvier took some time to accept, because she had been assigned to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London for The Washington Times-Herald. After a month in Europe, she returned to the United States and accepted Kennedy's marriage proposal. She then resigned from her position at the newspaper. Their engagement was officially announced on June 25, 1953. Bouvier and Kennedy married on September 12, 1953, at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island. The wedding was considered the social event of the season with an estimated 700 guests at the ceremony and 1,200 at the reception that followed at Hammersmith Farm. The wedding dress was designed by Ann Lowe of New York City, and is now housed in the Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts. The dresses of her attendants were also created by Lowe, who was not credited by Jacqueline Kennedy. The newlyweds honeymooned in Acapulco, Mexico, before settling in their new home, Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Kennedy developed a warm relationship with her parents-in-law, Joseph and Rose Kennedy. In the early years of their marriage, she took continuing education classes in American history at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.. But the couple faced several personal setbacks. John Kennedy suffered from Addison's disease and from chronic and at times debilitating back pain, which had been exacerbated by a war injury; in late 1954, he underwent a near-fatal spinal operation. Additionally, Jacqueline Kennedy suffered a miscarriage in 1955 and in August 1956 gave birth to a stillborn daughter, Arabella. They subsequently sold their Hickory Hill estate to Kennedy's brother Robert and bought a townhouse on N Street in Georgetown. The Kennedys also resided at an apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street in Boston, their permanent Massachusetts residence during his congressional career. Kennedy gave birth to daughter Caroline on November 27, 1957. At the time, she and her husband were campaigning for his re-election to the Senate, and they posed with their infant daughter for the cover of the April 21, 1958 issue of Life magazine. On January 3, 1960, John F. Kennedy was a United States senator from Massachusetts when he announced his candidacy for the presidency and launched his campaign nationwide. Shortly after the campaign began, Jacqueline Kennedy became pregnant. Due to her previous high-risk pregnancies, she decided to stay at home in Georgetown. Despite her non-participation in the campaign, Jackie Kennedy became the subject of intense media attention with her fashion choices. On one hand, she was admired for her personal style; she was frequently featured in women's magazines alongside film stars and named as one of the 12 best-dressed women in the world. On the other hand, her preference for French designers and her spending on her wardrobe brought her negative press. On November 25, Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to the couple's first son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. On January 20, 1961 her husband was sworn in as president. The discussion about Kennedy's fashion choices continued during her years in the White House, and she became a trendsetter, hiring American designer Oleg Cassini to design her wardrobe. Although Kennedy stated that her priority as a first lady was to take care of the President and their children, she also dedicated her time to the promotion of American arts and preservation of its history. The restoration of the White House was her main contribution, but she also furthered the cause by hosting social events that brought together elite figures from politics and the arts. Throughout her husband's presidency and more than any of the preceding first ladies, Kennedy made many official visits to other countries, on her own or with the President and she proved popular among international dignitaries. During the Kennedys' first official visit to France in 1961, Jacqueline Kennedy impressed the public with her ability to speak French, as well as her extensive knowledge of French history. At the urging of U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy undertook a tour of India and Pakistan with her sister Lee Radziwill in 1962. The tour was amply documented in photojournalism as well as in Galbraith's journals and memoirs. In addition to these well-publicized trips during the three years of the Kennedy administration, she traveled to countries including Afghanistan, Austria, Canada, Colombia, United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, and Venezuela. In early 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy was again pregnant, which led her to curtail her official duties. She spent most of the summer at a home she and the President had rented on Squaw Island, which was near the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. On August 7 she gave birth to a boy, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who died two days after birth. She was deeply affected by Patrick's death and proceeded to enter a state of depression. Jacqueline Kennedy's friend Aristotle Onassis was aware of her depression and invited her to his yacht to recuperate.The trip was widely disapproved of within the Kennedy administration, by much of the general public, and in Congress. The First Lady returned to the United States on October 17, 1963. On November 21, 1963, the Jacqueline Kennedy the First Lady and the President embarked on a political trip to Texas, the first time that she had joined her husband on such a trip in the U.S. After a breakfast on November 22, they took a very short flight on Air Force One from Fort Worth's Carswell Air Force Base to Dallas's Love Field. She was wearing a bright pink Chanel suit and a pillbox hat, which had been personally selected by President Kennedy. A 9.5-mile (15.3 km) motorcade was to take them to the Trade Mart, where the president was scheduled to speak at a lunch. But he was shot during the trip and died shortly after in Parkland Hospital. Jacqueline Kennedy's unlaundered suit became a symbol of her husband's assassination, and was donated to the National Archives and Records Administration in 1964. Under the terms of an agreement with her daughter, Caroline, the suit will not be placed on public display before 2103. Following the assassination and the media coverage that had focused intensely on her during and after the burial, Kennedy stepped back from official public view. Kennedy spent 1964 in mourning and made few public appearances. She purchased a house for herself and her children in Georgetown but sold it later in 1964 and bought a 15th-floor penthouse apartment for $250,000 at 1040 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the hopes of having more privacy. After her husband's assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy relied heavily on her brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy. He had been a source of support after she had suffered a miscarriage early in her marriage; it was he, not her husband, who stayed with her in the hospital. In the aftermath of the assassination, Robert became a surrogate father for her children until eventual demands by his own large family and his responsibilities as attorney general required him to reduce attention. In early 1968 Robert Kennedy's advisors urged him to enter the upcoming presidential race. Despite her concerns, Jacqueline Kennedy campaigned for her brother-in-law and supported him. Just after midnight PDT on June 5, 1968, an enraged Palestinian gunman mortally wounded Robert Kennedy who died the following day at 42 years old. After Robert Kennedy's death in 1968, Kennedy reportedly suffered a relapse of the depression she had suffered in the days following her husband's assassination nearly five years prior. She came to fear for her life and those of her two children, saying: "If they're killing Kennedys, then my children are targets ... I want to get out of this country". On October 20, 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy married her long-time friend Aristotle Onassis, a wealthy Greek shipping magnate who was able to provide the privacy and security she sought for herself and her children. The wedding took place on Skorpios, Onassis's private Greek island in the Ionian Sea. After marrying Onassis, she took the legal name Jacqueline Onassis and consequently lost her right to Secret Service protection, which is an entitlement of a widow of a U.S. president. The marriage brought her considerable adverse publicity. She was condemned by some as a "public sinner", and became the target of paparazzi who followed her everywhere and nicknamed her "Jackie O". During their marriage, Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis inhabited six different residences: her 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, her horse farm in New Jersey, his Avenue Foch apartment in Paris, his private island Skorpios, his house in Athens, and his yacht Christina O. Aristotle Onassis's health deteriorated rapidly following the death of his son Alexander in a plane crash in 1973. He died of respiratory failure at age 69 in Paris on March 15, 1975. His financial legacy was severely limited under Greek law, which dictated how much a non-Greek surviving spouse could inherit. After two years of legal wrangling, Jacqueline Onassis eventually accepted a settlement of $26 million from Christina Onassis—Aristotle's daughter and sole heir—and waived all other claims to the Onassis estate. After the death of her second husband, Onassis returned permanently to the United States, splitting her time between Manhattan, Martha's Vineyard, and the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. In 1975, she became a consulting editor at Viking Press, a position that she held for two years. She resigned from Viking Press in 1977 and was hired by Doubleday, where she worked as an associate editor under an old friend, John Turner Sargent, Sr. Among the books she edited for the company are autobiographies of ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, singer-songwriter Carly Simon, and fashion icon Diana Vreeland. She also encouraged Dorothy West, her neighbor on Martha's Vineyard and the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, to complete the novel The Wedding (1995), a multi-generational story about race, class, wealth, and power in the U.S. In addition to her work as an editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis participated in cultural and architectural preservation. She remained the subject of considerable press attention, especially from the paparazzi photographer Ron Galella, who followed her around and photographed her as she went about her normal activities; he took candid photos of her without her permission. She ultimately obtained a restraining order against him, and the situation brought attention to the problem of paparazzi photography. From 1980 until her death, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis maintained a close relationship with Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-born industrialist and diamond merchant who was her companion and personal financial adviser. In the early 1990s, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis supported Bill Clinton and contributed money to his presidential campaign. Following the election, she met with First Lady Hillary Clinton and advised her on raising a child in the White House. In November 1993, she was thrown from her horse while participating in a fox hunt in Middleburg, Virginia, and was taken to the hospital to be examined. A swollen lymph node was discovered in her groin, which was initially diagnosed by the doctor to be caused by an infection. The fall from the horse contributed to her deteriorating health over the next six months. But in December, she developed new symptoms, including a stomach ache and swollen lymph nodes in her neck, and was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer. She began chemotherapy in January 1994 and publicly announced the diagnosis, stating that the initial prognosis was good. She continued to work at Doubleday, but by March the cancer had spread to her spinal cord and brain, and by May to her liver and was deemed terminal. Onassis made her last trip home from New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center on May 18, 1994. The following night at 10:15 p.m., she died in her sleep in her Manhattan apartment at age 64, with her children by her side. In the morning, her son John F. Kennedy, Jr. announced his mother's death to the press, stating that she had been "surrounded by her friends and her family and her books, and the people and the things that she loved". He added that "She did it in her very own way, and on her own terms, and we all feel lucky for that." On May 23, 1994, her funeral Mass was held a few blocks away from her apartment at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, the Catholic parish where she was baptized in 1929. She was interred at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, alongside President Kennedy, their son Patrick, and their stillborn daughter Arabella. President Bill Clinton delivered a eulogy at her graveside service. At the time of her death, Onassis was survived by her children Caroline and John Jr., three grandchildren, sister Lee Radziwill, son-in-law Edwin Schlossberg, and half-brother James Lee Auchincloss. She left an estate that its executors valued at $43.7 million. Even after her death, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis remained one of the most popular First Ladies. She was featured 27 times on the annual Gallup list of the top 10 most admired people of the second half of the 20th century, higher than that of any U.S. president. In 1999, she was listed as one of Gallup's Most-Admired Men and Women of the 20th century. In 2011, she was ranked in fifth place in a list of the five most influential First Ladies of the twentieth century for her "profound effect on American society". In 2015, she was included in a list of the top ten influential U.S. First Ladies due to the admiration for her based around "her fashion sense and later after her husband's assassination, for her poise and dignity". In 2020, Time magazine included her name on its list of 100 Women of the Year. Jacqueline Kennedy became a global fashion icon during her husband's presidency. After the 1960 election, she commissioned French-born American fashion designer and Kennedy family friend Oleg Cassini to create an original wardrobe for her appearances as First Lady. From 1961 to 1963, Cassini dressed her in many of her most iconic ensembles, including her Inauguration Day fawn coat and Inaugural gala gown, as well as many outfits for her visits to Europe, India, and Pakistan. In 1961, Kennedy spent $45,446 more on fashion than the $100,000 annual salary her husband earned as president. Kennedy preferred French couture, particularly the work of Chanel, Balenciaga, and Givenchy, but was aware that in her role as first lady, she would be expected to wear American designers' work. After noticing that her taste for Paris fashion was being criticized in the press, she wrote to the fashion editor Diana Vreeland to ask for suitable American designers, particularly those who could reproduce the Paris look. After considering the letter, which expressed her dislike of prints and her preference for "terribly simple, covered-up clothes," Vreeland recommended Norman Norell, who was considered America's first designer and known for his high-end simplicity and fine quality work. She also suggested Ben Zuckerman, another highly regarded tailor who regularly offered re-interpretations of Paris couture, and the sportswear designer Stella Sloat, who occasionally offered Givenchy copies. Kennedy's first choice for her Inauguration Day coat was originally a purple wool Zuckerman model that was based on a Pierre Cardin design, but she instead settled on a fawn Cassini coat and wore the Zuckerman for a tour of the White House with Mamie Eisenhower. In her role as first lady, Kennedy preferred to wear clean-cut suits with a skirt hem down to middle of the knee, three-quarter sleeves on notch-collar jackets, sleeveless A-line dresses, above-the-elbow gloves, low-heel pumps, and pillbox hats. Dubbed the "Jackie" look, these clothing items rapidly became fashion trends in the Western world. More than any other First Lady, her style was copied by commercial manufacturers and a large segment of young women. Her influential bouffant hairstyle, described as a "grown-up exaggeration of little girls' hair," was created by Mr. Kenneth, who worked for her from 1954 until 1986. Jacqueline Kennedy was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1965. Many of her signature clothes are preserved at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum; pieces from the collection were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2001. Titled "Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years," the exhibition focused on her time as a first lady. In her years after the White House, Kennedy underwent a style change; her new looks consisted of wide-leg pantsuits, silk Hermès headscarves, and large, round, dark sunglasses. She even began wearing jeans in public. She set a new fashion trend with beltless, white jeans with a black turtleneck that was never tucked in and instead pulled down over her hips.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis acquired a large collection of jewelry throughout her lifetime. Her triple-strand pearl necklace, designed by American jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane, became her signature piece of jewelry during her time as first lady in the White House. Often referred to as the "berry brooch," the two-fruit cluster brooch of strawberries made of rubies with stems and leaves of diamonds, designed by French jeweler Jean Schlumberger for Tiffany & Co., was personally selected and given to her by her husband several days prior to his inauguration in January 1961. She wore Schlumberger's gold and enamel bracelets so frequently in the early and mid-1960s that the press called them "Jackie bracelets"; she also favored his white enamel and gold "banana" earrings. Kennedy wore jewelry designed by Van Cleef & Arpels throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; her sentimental favorite was the Van Cleef & Arpels wedding ring given to her by President Kennedy. In 2012, Time magazine included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on its All-TIME 100 Fashion Icons list. In 2016, Forbes included her on the list 10 Fashion Icons and the Trends They Made Famous.
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George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra. Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success. In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award. His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by the late 1920s he had largely renounced Fabian Society gradualism and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and left—he expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin. In the final decade of his life he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946. Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare; analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights. The word Shavian has entered the language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them. Biography
George Bernard Shaw was born in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (1814–1885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (1830–1913). George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, was among the family's less successful members. His relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. His wife Bessie came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband.
By the time of Shaw's birth, his mother had become close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father. The young Shaw later recalled that his mother's indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply. He found solace in the music that abounded in the house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing; Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players. In 1862, Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house, and a country cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay. Lee's students often gave young Shaw books, which he read avidly; thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature. Between 1865 and 1871, Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated. His experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education. In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier. During this period, Shaw was known as "George Shaw"; after 1876, he dropped the "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw". In June 1873, Lee left Dublin for London and never returned. A fortnight later, Bessie followed him, and Shaw's two sisters joined her. Left in Dublin with his father, Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself to play the piano.
In March 1876 Shaw travelled to England to join his mother and his sister Lucy at his another sister Agnes's funeral. He never again lived in Ireland, and did not visit it for twenty-nine years.
Lee found a little work for Shaw, ghost-writing a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, The Hornet. Although Lee's relations with Bessie deteriorated after their move to London, shaw maintained contact with Lee, who later also found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer. Eventually Shaw was driven to applying for office jobs. In the interim he secured a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room (the forerunner of the British Library) and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, Immaturity (1879), was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed briefly by the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 1879–80, but when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw left to pursue a full-time career as an author. For the next four years Shaw made a negligible income from writing, and was subsidised by his mother. In 1881, for the sake of economy, and increasingly as a matter of principle, he became a vegetarian. He grew a beard to hide a facial scar left by smallpox. In rapid succession he wrote two more novels but neither found a publisher. In 1880 Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race". Here he met Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself. Despite difference of style and temperament, the two quickly recognised qualities in each other and developed a lifelong friendship.
In 1882 Shaw's interest in economics was awakened, he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital. In 1884, he joined the recently formed Fabian Society, and provided the society with its first manifesto.
"The most striking result of our present system of farming out the national Land and capital to private individuals has been the division of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other" Shaw, Fabian Tract No. 2: A Manifesto (1884). From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association which changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism.
The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic. He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years.
The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre. In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of The World in 1886 he secured the succession for Shaw. The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were William Morris and John Ruskin, and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms. Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of art for art's sake, and insisted that all great art must be didactic. Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950. From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review, edited by his friend Frank Harris. As at The World, he used the by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence".
At first he made slow progress; The Philanderer, written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production. Similarly, Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) was written five years before publication and nine years before reaching the stage.
Shaw's first play to bring him financial success was Arms and the Man (1894), a mock-Ruritanian comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class. The play ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York. It earned him £341 in royalties in its first year, a sufficient sum to enable him to give up his salaried post as a music critic.[75] Among the cast of the London production was Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, much resented by Jenny Patterson. The success of Arms and the Man was not immediately replicated. In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage; his biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when Richard Mansfield's production of the historical melodrama The Devil's Disciple earned the author more than £2,000 in royalties.
By the later 1890s Shaw's political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatist. When London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, he was elected to the newly formed borough council.
In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman who had proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage. The ceremony took place on 1 June 1898, in the register office in Covent Garden. The bride and bridegroom were both aged forty-one. There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated. By 1903, when his term as borough councillor expired, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm. In 1906 the Shaws found a country home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire; they renamed the house "Shaw's Corner", and lived there for the rest of their lives. They retained a London flat in the Adelphi and later at Whitehall Court. In 1906 National general election produced a huge Liberal majority. In the years after the 1906 election, Shaw felt that the Fabians needed fresh leadership, and saw this in the form of his fellow-writer H. G. Wells, who had joined the society in February 1903.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays.
The first, John Bull's Other Island, a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was requested by William Butler Yeats was a close friend of Shaw. Shaw admired other figures in the Irish Literary Revival, including George Russell and James Joyce, and was a close friend of Seán O'Casey, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading John Bull's Other Island. Man and Superman, completed in 1902, was a success both at the Royal Court in 1905 and in Robert Loraine's New York production in the same year. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were Major Barbara (1905), depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army; The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics; and Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year. Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce". These plays included Getting Married (premiered 1908), The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny's First Play (1911). Fanny's First Play, a comedy about suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play—622 performances. One of Shaw's most successful plays was Pygmalion written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards. The British production opened in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell as, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a cockney flower-girl. There had earlier been a romantic liaison between Shaw and Campbell that caused Charlotte Shaw considerable concern, but by the time of the London premiere it had ended.
After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract Common Sense About the War, which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable. Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends.
In the postwar period, Shaw despaired of the British government's coercive policies towards Ireland. Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934.
Shaw's first major work to appear after the war was Heartbreak House, written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920. It was produced on Broadway in November, and was coolly received. Shaw's largest-scale theatrical work was Back to Methuselah, written in 1918–20 and staged in 1922. This cycle of five interrelated plays depicts evolution, and the effects of longevity, from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD. Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch". He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays. This mood was short-lived. In 1920 Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by Pope Benedict XV; Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity". He had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the canonisation prompted him to return to the subject. He wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March.
In 1925 he was awarded Nobel Prize. He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs".
After Saint Joan, it was five years before Shaw wrote a play. From 1924, he spent four years writing what he described as his "magnum opus", a political treatise entitled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. The book was published in 1928 and sold well. Shaw returned to the theatre with what he called "a political extravaganza", The Apple Cart, written in late 1928. He described The Apple Cart to Sir Edward Elgar as "a scandalous Aristophanic burlesque of democratic politics, with a brief but shocking sex interlude". During the 1920s Shaw began to lose faith in the idea that society could be changed through Fabian gradualism, and became increasingly fascinated with dictatorial methods. He admired Mussolini and Stalin, in particular Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the 1930s.
Shaw's first play of the 30s was Too True to be Good, written in 1931 and premiered in Boston in February 1932. The reception was unenthusiastic.
During the decade Shaw travelled widely and frequently. Most of his journeys were with Charlotte; she enjoyed voyages on ocean liners, and he found peace to write during the long spells at sea. In December 1932 the couple embarked on a round-the-world cruise. In March 1933 they arrived at San Francisco, to begin Shaw's first visit to the US. He visited Hollywood, with which he was unimpressed, and New York, where he lectured to a capacity audience in the Metropolitan Opera House. New Zealand, which he and Charlotte visited the following year, struck him as "the best country I've been in". He used the weeks at sea to complete two plays and begin work on a third, The Millionairess. Despite his contempt for Hollywood and its aesthetic values, Shaw was enthusiastic about cinema, and in the middle of the decade wrote screenplays for prospective film versions of Pygmalion and Saint Joan. The latter was never made, but Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw was determined that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but was powerless to prevent it from winning one Academy Award; he described his award for "best-written screenplay" as an insult, coming from such a source. He became the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.
Towards the end of the decade, both Shaws began to suffer ill health. Charlotte was increasingly incapacitated by Paget's disease of bone, and he developed pernicious anaemia. His treatment, involving injections of concentrated animal liver, was successful, but this breach of his vegetarian creed distressed him and brought down condemnation from militant vegetarians.
Although Shaw's works since The Apple Cart had been received without great enthusiasm, his earlier plays were revived in the West End throughout the Second World War, starring such actors as Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat. In 1944 nine Shaw plays were staged in London and two touring companies took his plays all round Britain. The revival in his popularity did not tempt Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on prolific journalism. A second Shaw film produced by Pascal, Major Barbara (1941), was less successful both artistically and commercially than Pygmalion.
Following the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 and the rapid conquest of Poland, Shaw was accused of defeatism. The London blitz of 1940–41 led the Shaws, both in their mid-eighties, to live full-time at Ayot St Lawrence. Even there they were not immune from enemy air raids, and stayed on occasion with Nancy Astor at her country house, Cliveden. In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated, and she died in September. Pascal was given a third opportunity to film Shaw's work with Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). It cost three times its original budget and was rated "the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema". The film was poorly received by British critics, although American reviews were friendlier. In 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, he accepted the freedom of Dublin and became the first honorary freeman of the borough of St Pancras, London. In the same year the government asked Shaw informally whether he would accept the Order of Merit. He declined, believing that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history. Shaw continued to write into his nineties, and his last full-length work was Buoyant Billions (1947). During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden. Further interest
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Iman Abdulmajid (born Zara Mohamed Abdulmajid; Somali: Zara Maxamed Cabdulmajiid; 25 July 1955) is a Somali-American fashion model, actress and entrepreneur. A muse of designers Gianni Versace, Thierry Mugler, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Yves Saint Laurent, she is also noted for her philanthropic work. She is the widow of English rock musician David Bowie, whom she married in 1992. Iman was born Zara Mohamed Abdulmajid in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. She was later renamed Iman at her grandfather's urging. Iman is the daughter of Mariam and Mohamed Abdulmajid. Her father is a diplomat and a former Somali ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and her mother was a gynecologist. Iman is Muslim and she has four siblings. Iman lived with her grandparents during her formative years. At age four she was sent to boarding school in Egypt, where she spent most of her childhood and adolescence. Following political unrest in Somalia, Iman's father moved the family back to the country. At his behest, she and her mother and siblings subsequently traveled to Kenya and were later joined by her father and younger sister. Iman was first married at age 18 to Hassan, a young Somali entrepreneur and Hilton hotelier executive. She studied political science at the University of Nairobi for a brief period in 1975. She is fluent in five languages: Somali, Arabic, Italian, French, and English. While still at university, Iman was discovered by American photographer Peter Beard. She left her husband and moved to the United States to begin a modeling career. Her first modeling assignment was for Vogue a year later in 1976. She soon landed some of the most prestigious magazine covers, establishing herself as a supermodel. In 1977 Iman dated American actor Warren Beatty. Later that year, she became engaged to American basketball player Spencer Haywood, and they married soon after. Their daughter, Zulekha Haywood, was born in 1978. The couple divorced nine years later in February 1987. With her long neck, tall stature, slender figure, fine features, and copper-toned skin, Iman was an instant success in the fashion world, though she herself insists that her looks are merely or typically Somali. She became a muse for many prominent designers, including Halston, Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein, Issey Miyake and Donna Karan. She was a favourite of Yves Saint-Laurent, who once described her as his "dream woman". Iman has also worked with many notable photographers, including Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Annie Leibovitz. Iman credits the nurturing she received from various designers with giving her the confidence to succeed in an era when individuality was valued and model-muses were often an integral part of the creative process. Iman first featured in the 1979 British film The Human Factor, and had a bit part in the 1985 Oscar-winning film Out of Africa starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. She then portrayed Nina Beka in the 1987 thriller No Way Out with Kevin Costner, and Hedy in the Michael Caine comedy Surrender the same year. During her first year in Hollywood, in 1991, Iman worked on several film productions. including Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where she played a shapeshifting alien. Iman also took on some comedic roles. In 1991 she appeared in The Linguini Incident opposite her then-fiancé David Bowie. She had a smaller part in the 1991 comedy House Party 2 and in the 1994 comedy/romance film Exit to Eden. She also played roles in TV. Iman appeared in two episodes of Miami Vice, playing Dakotah in Back in the World (1985) and Lois Blyth in Love at First Sight (1988). She also had a guest role as Mrs. Montgomery on The Cosby Show (1985). In 1988, she appeared as Marie Babineaux in an episode of In the Heat of the Night. On 24 April 1992, Iman married English musician David Bowie in a private ceremony in Lausanne, Switzerland. The wedding was then solemnized in Florence, Italy on 6 June. Their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, was born 15 August 2000 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Iman is also stepmother to Bowie's son from a previous marriage, Duncan Jones. Both children bear Bowie's legal surname. Iman and her family resided primarily in Manhattan and London. After almost two decades of modeling, Iman started her own cosmetics firm in 1994, focusing on difficult-to-find shades for women. Based on her years of experience mixing her own formulations for make-up artists to use on her, she was closely involved with the final product and also acted as the commercial face of the company. Iman Cosmetics was a US$25-million-a-year business by 2010. It is centered on US$14.99 foundations in 4 formulations and 14 shades, and is among the top-selling foundation brands on Walgreens website. In the mid-2000s, Iman spent two years as the host of Bravo TV's fashion-themed show, Project Runway Canada. In November 2010, along with her friend and colleague, designer Isaac Mizrahi, Iman also began hosting the second season of The Fashion Show. Due to her marketability and high profile, Iman was approached in 2007 by the CEO of the Home Shopping Network (HSN) to create a clothing design line. Inspired by her childhood in Egypt and modeling time with Halston, Iman's first collection introduced embroidered, one-size-fits-all caftans. Today, her Global Chic collection is one of four best-selling items among more than 200 fashion and jewelry brands on HSN, having evolved into a line of affordable accessories. In addition to running her global beauty company, Iman is also actively involved in a number of charitable endeavors. Since September 2019, Iman has held the role of CARE's first-ever Global Advocate, where she works alongside CARE to support its mission to create a world where poverty has been overcome and all people live with dignity and security. She is also currently a spokesperson for the Keep a Child Alive program, and works closely with the Children's Defense Fund. She also serves as an Ambassador for Save the Children, and has been active in raising awareness of their relief services in the greater East Africa region. Additionally, Iman works with the Enough Project to end the global trade in conflict minerals. She played a key part in the public campaign against blood diamonds through her termination of her contract with the diamonds conglomerate De Beers over a conflict of ethics. Over the course of her long modeling and philanthropic career, Iman has received many awards. On 7 June 2010, she received a Fashion Icon lifetime achievement award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), a special prize reserved for "an individual whose signature style has had a profound influence on fashion". Iman selected her friend, actress and former model Isabella Rossellini, to present the award. Wearing a gown designed by Giambattista Valli with four giant diamond bracelets on each arm, Iman thanked her parents "for giving me a neck longer than any other girl on any go-see anywhere in the world". Iman's husband David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, and she wrote in tribute to him that "the struggle is real, but so is God."
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