Great Lives

The director emerged from a well-trodden European emigration narrative to become a Zelig-like figure in the early history of modern popular culture

Few things in music sound more like the punchline to a joke than a millionaire mouth organist, but Thielemans forged a brilliantly idiosyncratic path

Brecht lived through some of Europe’s darkest times yet still produced some of the 20th century’s boldest, most influential and epoch-defining theatre

With his gramophone recordings, the Italian transcended the closed world of performance to become a global phenomenon

He was only truly fulfilled when either in the air or writing about being in the air

‘The Gay Girl from Gaul’ had a brief, traumatic – and wet – experience of stardom

With an eye for the smallest detail as well as the big picture, Trump became a vital driving force of the family business empire

The advent of sound signalled the end of the silent movie star's career

The German-American science writer had an ability to straddle effortlessly the worlds of advanced engineering and mass popular culture

Ingrid Bergman said the German possessed more charm in his little finger than most men had in their whole body

Ligeti’s rigorous antipathy to ideology was maintained throughout his life and extended way beyond his music

Before Segovia, the guitar was not an instrument to be taken seriously. In a matter of minutes, everything changed

Four days after surviving a huge crash, his love of being behind the wheel was too strong to resist

Whether she had an actual gun in her hand or not, art became her weapon, a noisy defence against the world and an instrument of her reckoning with the past

He arrived in America pretending to be the son of an Austrian count but became one of early cinema’s most adventurous and meticulous directors

The Italian revolutionised children’s education and established the schools that carry her name all over the world to this day

Whatever and wherever he played, his deep feeling for the music made the instrument seem like an extension of him

The Italian will be forever remembered for a wordless walk in a Viennese cemetery

A dream provided an epitaph inadvertently appropriate for a man who spent his life producing art and literature that shocked and appalled the unsuspecting

Even for all her success and the wealth that came with it, Valadon’s bohemianism remained undiminished

Finesse, sensuality and richness are what Debussy brought to a staid musical world unprepared for such an emphatic upending of form and technique

To the Dutchman commercial art was just as fulfilling as something more purely creative – and it came with a wage

A barely concealed desire for the old Russian empire would infuse his work but even this did not preclude Stalin’s tacit admiration

He arrived in the US as the “James Dean of Germany” but that promise would never truly be fulfilled

Many exiled European writers embraced their situation, but for Zweig the loss of his nation represented the loss of his identity

As good a musician as Keith Richards, the German was never entirely comfortable in the limelight

Once the toast of New York society, the mystery of why she did what she did remains

The singer almost came to embody the nation’s revival before it all ended at the dawn of a decade that could have been made for him

The role of Rico in Little Caesar proved as career-defining for Robinson as Frankenstein’s monster was for Boris Karloff or Dracula for Bela Lugosi

More famous dancers would follow her lead but Nora Kovach was the first, the pioneer, arguably the bravest of them all

While she became one of the most highly respected names in the history of US theatre, Hagen brought a European sensibility to Broadway

So emblematic of the city’s spirit did she become that Mistinguett seemed timeless even in her own lifetime