Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985), known professionally as Louise Brooks, was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as a Jazz Age icon and as a flapper sex symbol due to her bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career. At the age of fifteen, Brooks began her career as a dancer and toured with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. After being fired, she found employment as a semi-nude dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. While dancing in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and was signed to a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life (1928). During this time, she became an intimate friend of actress Marion Davies and joined the elite social circle of press baron William Randolph Hearst at Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films which launched her to international stardom: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930). By 1938, she had starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films. After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship and became a paid escort. For the next two decades, she struggled with alcoholism and suicidal tendencies. Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, a reclusive Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Three years later, she died of a heart attack at age 78. BiographyBorn in Cherryvale, Kansas, Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer and Myra Rude, a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music. Brooks described the hometown of her childhood as a typical Midwestern community where the inhabitants "prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn." When Louise was nine years old, a neighborhood man sexually abused her. Beyond the physical trauma at the time, the event continued to have damaging psychological effects on her personal life as an adult and on her career. That early abuse caused her later to acknowledge that she was incapable of real love. Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts modern dance company in Los Angeles at the age of 15 in 1922. The company included founders Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham. However, a long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over one day, and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in the spring of 1924. Brooks was 17 years old at the time of her dismissal. She soon worked as a semi-nude dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. That same year she sued the New York glamour photographer John de Mirjian to prevent publication of his risque studio portraits of her; the lawsuit made him notorious. As a result of her work in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures. An infatuated Wanger signed her to a five-year contract with the studio in 1925. Soon after, Brooks met movie star Charlie Chaplin with whom she had a two-month affair while Chaplin was married to Lita Grey. When their affair ended, Chaplin sent her a check. Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years. In the summer of 1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had become infatuated with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team, following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as "the most fateful encounter of my life". She divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928. Sutherland was purportedly extremely distraught when Brooks divorced him and, on the first night after their separation, he attempted to take his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brooks continued her on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall which she later described as abusive. By the late1920s, she was socializing with wealthy and famous persons. She was a frequent house guest of the media magnate William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies(who also used to be a Ziegfeld Follies girl ) at Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Brooks gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port. Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair the same way. She refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise. Her friend and lover George Preston Marshall suggested that she travel to Europe to make films with the prominent Austrian Expressionist director G.W. Pabst. On the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case Brooks departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin. Brooks traveled to Europe accompanied by her paramour George Preston Marshall and his English valet. The German film industry was Hollywood's only major rival at the time, and the film industry based in Berlin was known as the Filmwelt ("film world") reflecting its own self-image as a highly glamorous "exclusive club". After their arrival in Weimar Germany, she starred in the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, directed by Pabst in his New Objectivity period. Pabst was one of the leading directors of the filmwelt, known for his refined, elegant films that represented the filmwelt "...at the height of its creative powers". The film Pandora's Box is notable for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first overt on-screen portrayals of a lesbian. Brooks' performance in Pandora's Box made her into a star. In looking for the right actress to play Lulu, the central figure of the film, Pabst had rejected Marlene Dietrich as "too old" and too obvious." Dissatisfied with Europe, Brooks returned to New York in December 1929. When Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films, God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931), but her performances in these films were largely ignored by critics, and few other job offers were forthcoming. After being offered of a $500 per week salary from Columbia Pictures, She returned to Hollywood, but after refusing to do a screen test for a Western film, the contract offer was withdrawn. Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932, and she began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living. In 1933, she married Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis Jr., but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of marriage, "without a good-bye... and leaving only a note of her intentions" behind her. The couple officially divorced in 1938. She attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles, a Western that led Columbia to offer her a screen test. In 1937, Brooks managed to obtain a bit part in the film King of Gamblers. Unfortunately, after filming, Brooks' scenes were deleted. Brooks made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she plays the romantic lead, opposite John Wayne, with a long hairstyle that renders her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days. Brooks' career prospects as a film actress had significantly declined by 1940. According to the federal census in May that year, she was living in a $55-a-month apartment in West Hollywood and was working as a copywriter for a magazine. Soon, however, she found herself unemployed and increasingly desperate for a steady income. Her longtime friend Paramount executive Walter Wanger warned her that she would likely "become a call girl" if she remained in Hollywood. Upon hearing Wanger's warning, Brooks purportedly also remembered Pabst's earlier predictions about the dire circumstances to which she would be driven if her career stalled in Hollywood: "I heard his [Pabst's] words again — hissing back to me. And listening this time, I packed my trunks and went home to Kansas." Heeding Wanger's warning, Brooks briefly returned to Wichita, where she was raised, but this undesired return "turned out to be another kind of hell.". After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned to New York City. Following brief stints there as a radio actor in soap operas and a gossip columnist, she worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. Between 1948 and 1953, Brooks embarked upon a career as a courtesan with a few select wealthy men as clients. As her finances eroded, an impoverished Brooks began working regularly for an escort agency in New York. She spent subsequent years "drinking and escorting" while subsisting in obscurity and poverty in a small New York apartment. By this time, "all of her rich and famous friends had forgotten her." as forseen by Pabst, with perhaps the exception of William S. Paley, the founder of CBS who was one of her paramours from years before. Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks for the remainder of her life, and this stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point. Angered by this ostracization, she attempted to write a tell-all memoir titled Naked on My Goat, a title drawn from Goethe's epic play, Faust. After working on that autobiography for years, she destroyed the entire manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator. As time passed, she increasingly drank more and continued to suffer from suicidal tendencies. In 1955, French film historians such as Henri Langlois rediscovered Brooks' films, proclaiming her an unparalleled actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon. This rediscovery led to a Louise Brooks film festival in 1957 and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country. During this time, James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Brooks "living as a recluse" in New York City. He persuaded her in 1956 to move to Rochester, New York, to be near the George Eastman House film collection where she could study cinema and write about her past career. With Card's assistance, she became a noted film writer. Although Brooks had been a heavy drinker since the age of 14, she remained relatively sober to begin writing perceptive essays on cinema in film magazines, which became her second career. A collection of her writings, titled Lulu in Hollywood, published in 1982 and still in print, was heralded by film critic Roger Ebert as "one of the few film books that can be called indispensable." In the 1970s, she was interviewed extensively on film for the documentaries Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), and Hollywood (1980), by Brownlow and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, released a year before her death. On August 8, 1985, after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years, Brooks died of a heart attack in her apartment in Rochester, New York. She had no survivors and was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester. After the filming of Pandora's Box concluded, Pabst cast Brooks again in his controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by Margarete Böhme.
On the final day of shooting Diary of a Lost Girl, Pabst counseled Brooks not to return to Hollywood and stay in Germany to continue her career as a serious actress. Pabst expressed concern that Brooks' carefree approach towards her career would end in dire poverty "exactly like Lulu's". He further cautioned Brooks that her then-paramour George Marshall and her "rich American friends" would likely shun her when her career stalled. Her appearances in Pabst's two films made Brooks an international star. In an interview published in the February 1930 issue of the American monthly Motion Picture.The Austrian director said: 'Louise has a European soul. You can't get away from it. When she described Hollywood to me—I have never been there—I cry out against the absurd fate that ever put her there at all. She belongs to Europe and to Europeans. She has been a sensational hit in her German pictures. I do not have her play silly little cuties. She plays real women, and plays them marvelously." After the success of her German films, Brooks appeared in one more European film entitled Miss Europe (1930), a French film by Italian director Augusto Genina.
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ProfileLinda Christian (born Blanca Rosa Welter; November 13, 1923 – July 22, 2011) was a Mexican film actress, who appeared in Mexican and Hollywood films. Her career reached its peak in the 1940s and 1950s. She played Mara in the last Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan film Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948). She is also noted for being the first Bond girl, appearing in a 1954 television adaptation of the James Bond novel Casino Royale. In 1963 she starred as Eva Ashley in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour titled "An Out for Oscar". BiographyLinda Christian was born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico, a daughter of Royal Dutch Shell executive Gerardus Jacob Welter (1904–1981), and his Mexican-born wife, the former Blanca Rosa Vorhauer (1901-1992), who was of Spanish, German and French descent. The Welter family moved a great deal during Christian's youth, living everywhere from South America and Europe to the Middle East and Africa. As a result of this nomadic lifestyle, Christian became an accomplished polyglot with the ability to speak fluent French, German, Dutch, Spanish, English, Italian and even a bit of haphazard Arabic and Russian. Christian had three younger siblings, a sister and two brothers. In her youth Christian's only aspiration was to become a physician. After she graduated from secondary school she had a fortuitous meeting with her screen idol Errol Flynn, who became her lover, and she was persuaded by him to give up her hopes of joining the medical profession, move to Hollywood, and pursue an acting career. Not long after arriving in Hollywood she was spotted by Louis B. Mayer's secretary at a fashion show in Beverly Hills. He offered her a seven-year contract with MGM. Her stage name was invented by Flynn, who gave her the surname of Fletcher Christian of Mutiny on the Bounty. Flynn had played Fletcher Christian in a 1933 Australian film. In his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn states that immediately after Linda Christian's screen test, he offered to pay for her to have a couple of crooked teeth fixed. When he got a whopping bill, he discovered that she had taken the opportunity to undergo major cosmetic dentistry. Years later, when he met her again, he said, "Smile, baby – I want to see those choppers: they took their first bite out of me." She made her film debut in the 1944 musical comedy Up in Arms, followed by Holiday in Mexico (1946), Green Dolphin Street (1947), and what was perhaps her best-known film, Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948). She was the subject of a well-known photograph published in the January 1, 1949 issue of Vogue. Christian was the first Bond girl to appear on screen, playing Valerie Mathis (opposite Barry Nelson as James Bond) in the 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale, beating Ursula Andress to the screen by eight years. Christian's fame, however, was largely derived from having been married to (and divorced from) the popular screen idol Tyrone Power. The couple married in Rome, Italy in 1949 at Santa Francesca Romana church; Christian wore a formfitting gold-damask gown, and the church was decorated with two thousand 'Esther' carnations. They had two daughters: Romina Power, singer and Taryn Power, actress. Romina was one half of the Italian singing duo Al Bano and Romina Power. In September 1956, a month after she divorced Tyrone Power, Christian was seen with Spanish racing driver Alfonso de Portago, who was married but was dating model Dorian Leigh. On 12 May 1957, Linda was photographed with de Portago at the Mille Miglia car race before he drove off and crashed his Ferrari, killing himself. The press labeled the photo "The Kiss of Death". De Portago was 28 years old. On several occasions, Christian and Power were offered the opportunity to work together, but for various reasons each offer was refused or rescinded. The most notable opportunity to co-star together came in 1953, when they were offered leading roles in From Here to Eternity. Power did not want to do the film and rejected the offer. The roles went to Donna Reed and Montgomery Clift. Another film they were offered together was Solomon and Sheba, but again Tyrone Power did not want to do it. In September 1958, Christian's ex-husband Tyrone Power and his third wife Debbie Minardos (Deborah Jean Smith) went to Madrid and Valdespartera, Spain, to film the Solomon and Sheba. Power had filmed about 75 percent of his scenes when he was stricken by a massive heart attack while filming a dueling scene with his frequent co-star and friend, George Sanders. A doctor, Juan Olaguíbel, diagnosed Power's death as "fulminant angina pectoris." He died while being transported to the hospital in Madrid on November 15, aged 44. Christian later would live in Spain for a few years. In 1960, Christian published her memoirs, Linda: My Own Story, in New York. In 1962 she was married to the Rome-based British actor Edmund Purdom but they were divorced next year in 1963. Linda Christian died of colon cancer in California on July 22, 2011 at the age of 87. In 2001, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars was dedicated to her. Further interestInterviews
ProfileLauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske; September 16, 1924 – August 12, 2014) was an American actress. She was named the 20th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute and received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 in recognition of her contribution to the Golden Age of motion pictures. She was known for her distinctive voice and sultry looks. Bacall began a career as a model before making her film debut as the leading lady in To Have and Have Not (1944) at the age of 19. She continued in the film noir genre with appearances alongside husband Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), and she starred in the romantic comedies How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. She co-starred with John Wayne in his final film The Shootist (1976) by Wayne's personal request. She also worked on Broadway in musicals, earning Tony Awards for Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981). She won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). BiographyLauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York City, the only child of her parents, both of whom were Jewish. They were divorced when Bacall was five, after which she no longer saw her father. Bacall was close to her mother, who remarried to Lee Goldberg and went to live in California after Bacall became a movie star. In 1941, Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she was a classmate of Kirk Douglas, while working as a theatre usher at the St. James Theatre and as a fashion model. She made her acting debut on Broadway in 1942, at age 17, as a walk-on in Johnny 2 X 4, and in 1942, she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village. As a teenage fashion model, she appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, and in magazines such as Vogue. An article in Life magazine in 1948 referred to her "cat-like grace, tawny blonde hair, and blue-green eyes". Though Diana Vreeland is often credited with discovering Bacall for Harper's Bazaar, it was in fact Nicolas de Gunzburg who introduced the 18-year-old to Vreeland. He had first met Bacall at Tony's, a club in the East 50s. De Gunzburg suggested that Bacall stop by his Bazaar office the next day. He then turned over his find to Vreeland, who arranged for Louise Dahl-Wolfe to shoot Bacall in Kodachrome for the March 1943 cover. The Harper's Bazaar cover caught the attention of "Slim" Keith, the wife of Hollywood producer and director Howard Hawks. She urged her husband to have Bacall take a screen test for his forthcoming film, To Have and Have Not. Hawks asked his secretary to find out more about her, but the secretary misunderstood and sent Bacall a ticket to come to Hollywood for the audition. After meeting Bacall in Hollywood, Hawks immediately signed her to a seven-year contract, with a weekly salary of $100, and personally began to manage her career. He changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose "Bacall", a variant of her mother's maiden name, as her screen surname. Slim Hawks also took Bacall under her wing, dressing Bacall stylishly and guiding her in matters of elegance, manners, and taste. At Hawks' suggestion, Bacall was also trained by a voice coach to make her voice lower and deeper, instead of her normal high-pitched, nasal voice. As part of her training, she was required to shout verses of Shakespeare for hours every day. Her height, at 5 feet 8½ inches (1.74 m), unusual among young actresses in the 1940s and 1950s, also helped her stand out. During her screen tests for To Have and Have Not (1944), Bacall was so nervous that, to minimize her quivering, she pressed her chin against her chest, faced the camera, and tilted her eyes upward. This effect, which came to be known as "The Look", became another Bacall trademark, along with her sultry voice. Bacall's character in the film used Slim Hawks' nickname "Slim", and Bogart used Howard Hawks' nickname "Steve". The on-set chemistry between the two was immediate, according to Bacall. She and Bogart, who was married at the time to Mayo Methot, began a romantic relationship several weeks into shooting. Bacall's role in the script was originally much smaller, but during filming, her part was revised multiple times to extend it into the lead part that it became in the released film. Once released, To Have and Have Not catapulted Bacall into instant stardom, and her performance became the cornerstone of her star image, the impact of which extended into popular culture at large, even influencing fashion,as well as film-makers and other actors. Warner Bros. launched an extensive marketing campaign to promote the picture and to establish Bacall as a movie star. As part of the public relations push, Bacall made a visit to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 1945. It was there that Bacall's press agent, chief of publicity at Warner Bros. Charlie Enfield, asked the 20-year-old Bacall to sit on the piano while U.S. Vice President Harry S. Truman played. On May 21, 1945, Bacall married Humphrey Bogart. Their wedding and honeymoon took place at Malabar Farm, Lucas, Ohio, the country home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, a close friend of Bogart. Bacall had two children with Bogart: Their Son Stephen Humphrey Bogart (born January 6, 1949) who is named after Bogart's character in To Have and Have Not. Their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart (born August 23, 1952) who is named after the actor Leslie Howard. After To Have and Have Not, Bacall was seen opposite Charles Boyer in Confidential Agent (1945), which was poorly received by critics. By her own estimation, it could have caused considerable damage to her career, but her next performance as the mysterious, acid-tongued Vivian Rutledge in Hawks's film noir The Big Sleep (1946), co-starring Bogart, provided a quick career resurgence. The Big Sleep laid the foundation for her status as an icon of film noir. She would be strongly associated with the genre for the rest of her career, and would often be cast as variations of the independent and sultry femme fatale character of Vivian she played in the movie. Bacall was cast with Bogart in two more films: Dark Passage (1947), another film noir in which she played an enigmatic San Francisco artist; and John Huston's melodramatic suspense film Key Largo (1948). Bacall turned down scripts she did not find interesting, and thereby earned a reputation for being difficult. Despite this, she further solidified her star status in the 1950s by appearing as the leading lady in a string of films that won favorable reviews. Bacall was cast opposite Gary Cooper in Bright Leaf (1950). In the same year, she played a two-faced femme fatale in Young Man with a Horn (1950), a jazz musical co-starring Kirk Douglas and Doris Day. From 1951 to 1952, Bacall co-starred with Bogart in the syndicated action-adventure radio series Bold Venture. She starred in the first CinemaScope comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), a runaway hit among critics and at the box office. Directed by Jean Negulesco and co-starring Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, Bacall got positive notices for her turn as the witty gold-digger, Schatze Page. After the success of How to Marry a Millionaire, she was offered, but declined, with Bogart's support, the coveted invitation from Grauman's Chinese Theatre to press her hand- and footprints in the theatre's cemented forecourt. "I want to feel I've earned my place with the best my business has produced." While struggling at home with Bogart suffering from terminal esophageal cancer, Bacall starred with Gregory Peck in Designing Woman (1957) to solid reviews. The musical comedy was her second feature with director Vincente Minnelli and was released in New York on May 16, 1957, four months after Bogart's death on January 14. Bacall had a relationship with Frank Sinatra after Bogart's death, but Sinatra ended the relationship abruptly after his marriage proposal had been leaked to the press. Bacall then met and began a relationship with Jason Robards. Their wedding was originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, on June 16, 1961; however, the plans were shelved after Austrian authorities refused to grant the couple a marriage license. They were refused a marriage also in Las Vegas, Nevada. On July 4, 1961, the couple drove to Ensenada, Mexico, where they wed. Four months later, on December 16, 1961, their son Sam Robards was born. The couple divorced in 1969. According to Bacall's autobiography, she divorced Robards mainly because of his alcoholism. Bacall was seen in only a handful of films in the 1960s. The few films Bacall made during this period were all-star vehicles such as Sex and the Single Girl (1964) with Henry Fonda, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood; Harper (1966) with Paul Newman, Shelley Winters, Julie Harris, Robert Wagner, and Janet Leigh; and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), with Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Martin Balsam, and Sean Connery. She starred on Broadway in Goodbye, Charlie in 1959, and went on to have a successful on-stage career in Cactus Flower (1965), Applause (1970), and Woman of the Year (1981). She won Tony Awards for her performances in the latter two. Bacall published her first autobiography Lauren Bacall by Myself in 1978 and then the second one Now in 1994. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), her first nomination after a career span of more than 50 years. She had already won a Golden Globe and was widely expected to win the Oscar, but she lost to Juliette Binoche for The English Patient. Bacall received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, and she was voted one of the 25 most significant female movie stars in history in 1999 by the American Film Institute. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her an Honorary Academy Award at the inaugural Governors Awards on November 14, 2009. Lauren Bacall died on August 12, 2014, one month before her 90th birthday, at her longtime apartment in The Dakota, the Upper West Side building near Central Park in Manhattan. According to her grandson Jamie Bogart, Bacall died after suffering a massive stroke. She was confirmed dead at New York–Presbyterian Hospital.
Bacall had an estimated $26.6 million estate. The bulk of her estate was divided among her three children: Leslie Bogart, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, and Sam Robards. Additionally, Bacall left $250,000 each to her youngest grandsons, the sons of Sam Robards, for college. |
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