Great Lives

CHARLIE CONNELLY looks at the life of Maria von Trapp. One afternoon during the early 1940s a young assistant in Scribner’s bookshop on Fifth Avenue, New York, approached a prim-looking woman betraying an air of haughty impatience as she wandered among the shelves. ‘Can I help you ma’am?’ he asked. ‘Book on sex appeal, please,’ […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on French actor and ‘queen of self-promotion’ Sarah Bernhardt’s Great European Life. At 1pm on Thursday June 29, 1899, a private train pulled into the station at Stratford-upon-Avon to commence an afternoon unlike any seen before in the town of Shakespeare’s birth. On board was the French actor Sarah Bernhardt and her entourage […]

Considered by many to be the finest goalkeeper to play the game, CHARLIE CONNELLY looks at the life of Lev Yashin. Of all the positions on the football field the goalkeeper is mythologised the most. Goalkeepers are thinkers, standing alone, protecting the goal as the last line of defence, diving, catching, punching, pacing, watching, judging; […]

F.W Murnau, December 28, 1889 – March 11, 1931 In February 1931, F.W. Murnau was as relaxed and happy as he’d ever been. Recently returned to California from Tahiti, where he had spent almost two years making his feature film Tabu, the 42-year-old looked out at the Pacific horizon from the balcony of his Santa […]

Anna Akhmatova, June 11, 1889 – March 5, 1966 In 1965, the Randolph Hotel, Oxford, was about as far from Leningrad as one could imagine. With its gothic arches and windows in the fabled city of dreaming spires, cycling dons and freewheeling debates, the Soviet Union must have seemed as if it was on another […]

Remembering of the life of the French actor, singer and songwriter. One night in 1948 the French singer and songwriter Charles Trenet walked into a New York bar and heard the resident pianist playing his song La Mer. Released by Trenet in 1946, La Mer was his greatest success and would go on to sell […]

On the anniversary of his death CHARLIE CONNELLY takes a look at novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in this week’s Great European Lives. By December 22, 1849, 28-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky had been imprisoned inside St Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress for eight months. Charged with membership of utopian-socialist discussion group the Petrashevsky Circle by a Tsarist regime […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY takes a look into the life of German heavyweight boxing champion Max Schmeling. Yankee Stadium, New York, June 22, 1938. It’s barely 90 seconds into the world heavyweight title bout between reigning champion Joe Louis and German challenger Max Schmeling and the American is already dishing out one of the most brutal pastings […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY looks into the life of La Goulue. In 1928 filmmaker Georges Lacombe was exploring the fringes of Paris for a documentary he was making called The Zone, about the city’s rag pickers. In Neuilly-sur-Marne, a poor district to the east of the city, he came upon a flea market where once he’d begun […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY examines the life of Edvard Munch, December 12, 1863 – January 23, 1944 When the Norwegian government took possession of Edvard Munch’s estate outside Oslo in line with the artist’s wishes following his death at the age of 80 in 1944, explorations of the upstairs rooms soon revealed an extraordinary trove: more than […]

#83: Lola Montez, dancer and adventuress. February 17, 1821 – January 17, 1861 In the early summer of 1843 Her Majesty’s Theatre in London announced a performance of Rossini’s The Barber 
of Seville. ‘Between the acts of the opera,’ the notice read, ‘Dona Lola Montez of the Teatro Real, Seville, will have the honour of […]

Gilda Gray built an entire career on the shimmy, the dance she developed as a teenager, writes CHARLIE CONNELLY in the most recent Great European Lives. ‘A ripple here, a quiver there and a 
shudder or two – then I shake all the 
way up from my feet, with everything.’ Gilda Gray built an entire […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the life of the last president of Czechoslovakia Václav Havel was in a hurry in the early evening of March 21, 1990. He’d been president of Czechoslovakia for just under three months and this was the first full day of a state visit to Britain that was already behind schedule. After lunch […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY reflects on the work of iconic Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. On January 2, 1911, in Munich, 45-year-old Wassily Kandinsky attended a concert of music by the avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg. While the Austrian hadn’t yet completely abandoned traditional tonality his Second String Quartet and Three Pieces For Piano, Opus 11, both of which […]

#78 Alexandre Dumas, July 24, 1802 – December 5, 1870. At the height of his fame in the late 1850s, Alexandre Dumas was caricatured in the magazine La Vie Parisienne by Émile Marcelin. The leading French cartoonist of the day, pictured him holding two pens in each hand while scribbling on four pieces of paper […]

#76 Leo Tolstoy. September 9, 1828 – November 20, 1910 The station building is incongruously large for its rural setting. An imposing two-storey red brick construction, it looks out of place serving a backwater 230 miles south-east of Moscow where a regional passenger shuttle trundles in and out a few times a day and the […]

#73: Marcel Cerdan, boxer. July 22, 1916 – October 27, 1949 They compared the scenes to the liberation. At 4am on September 22, 1948, as the eastern horizon began to grow pink with imminent sunrise the streets of Paris suddenly filled with jubilant, cheering crowds. They filed out of nightclubs, bars and cafés and danced […]

#71: Jean Cocteau July 5, 1889 – October 11, 1963 The world has always had trouble accepting the true polymath. Even a person of great genius can take decades to excel in one genre, we harrumph, how can someone be a genuine success at a multitude of things? They’re chancers, people who haven’t paid their […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY examines the life of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, August 30, 1958 – October 7, 2006 On the day she died Anna Politkovskaya, for once, had domestic matters on her mind. She was still coming to terms with the sudden death a fortnight earlier of her father Stefan, who had collapsed from a heart […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY takes you through the fascinating life of environmentalist, Petra Kelly. It was almost three weeks before the bodies were discovered. Petra Kelly, 44, was found in bed, killed by a bullet through her left temple, at the home she shared with her 69-year-old partner Gert Bastian who was himself lying outside the bedroom […]

Born December 31, 1908; died September 20, 2005. CHARLIE CONNELLY on the extraordinary life of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal Portrait of the Austrian Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. 1970s (Photo by Adriano Alecchi/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images) – Credit: Mondadori via Getty Images When American troops liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp, east of Linz, on May […]

Lili Elbe: December 28, 1882 – September 13, 1931 After much thumb-twiddling and clockwatching they realised the artist’s model was not merely late, she wasn’t going to turn up at all. In a Copenhagen studio that afternoon in 1908 sat Gerda Wegener, an artist and illustrator of growing renown, her husband the landscape artist Einar […]

Luciano Pavarotti: October 12, 1935 – September 6, 2007 Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti performs during the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. Photo: ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images – Credit: AFP/Getty Images If we were to reel off a list of the world’s great opera locations it’s probably a safe bet that Beech House […]

Next in the series looking at great European lives, Charlie Connelly looks at the life of Bert Trautmann. There were 17 minutes left of the 1956 FA Cup final when Birmingham City outside-left Alex Govan punted a high ball towards the edge of the Manchester City penalty area. Centre forward Eddy Brown headed the ball […]

Danish philosopher, May 5, 1813 – November 11, 1855 In the spring of 1846 Søren Kierkegaard would find himself pausing briefly at the door before setting out for the long daily walks that had made him such a familiar figure on the streets of Copenhagen. It would only be a fleeting moment’s uncertainty as he […]

Composer, May 7, 1840 – November 6, 1893 On the night of November 1, 1893, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and a group of friends including his brother Modest and their nephew Vladimir Davydov, known as ‘Bob’, left a performance of Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Ardent Heart and made for a regular haunt, Leiner’s restaurant on St […]

Of all the hundreds of hours of footage shot of Max Linder during his extraordinary career at the dawn of cinema, the most poignant was filmed in the spring of 1917 and lasts for barely a minute. It’s an informal snippet of Linder and Charlie Chaplin together in the US, where Linder has just arrived […]

Roland Garros had every intention of pursuing a career as a concert pianist. An air show outside Reims during the late summer of 1909 changed all that. Aviation came of age at an air show outside Reims during the late summer of 1909. Held during the third week in August, the Grande Semaine d’Aviation de […]

How the ‘Flying Finn’ dominated distance running during the 1920s through sheer dogged determination more than natural talent. It’s often the case with the world’s best words that there’s no direct English translation, something certainly true of the Finnish sisu. Indeed, for a concept that lies at the very core of Finnish character and identity […]

Writer, April 17, 1885 – September 7, 1962 In New York in the spring of 1959 Karen Blixen danced on a table with Marilyn Monroe and fellow novelist Carson McCullers. At least, that was according to McCullers’ version of events: while the three certainly met it’s unlikely the frail, sickly Blixen would have been tapping […]

Philosopher, February 3, 1909 – August 24, 1943 When Emmanuel Macron cited Simone Weil in a speech to the French Congress last month most people, including the official government transcriber, assumed he was referring to the feminist lawyer and government minister Simone Veil who had died a few days earlier. Instead Macron, a keen student […]