Great Lives

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

Attempting to steal children’s Christmas gifts from a kindly old man is only one item on the charge sheet of the cannibalistic witch

His zeal doused by public apathy and establishment ambivalence, Albert became gradually overwhelmed by disillusionment

The relentlessly prolific author of plays, poems, short stories and novels, Pirandello was always looking ahead

There was no other with his extraordinary improvising in the medium

Malle’s unique approach to cinema meant he was always on the hunt for ways to freshen things up, no matter the risk

The blame for the end of a glorious imperial story cannot be laid solely at his feet, but the longer he lived the more anachronistic his rule became

For all the cod philosophy attached to the art, being a goalkeeper did not cause the Germany international to end his life

Never a religious man, at the end of his life converting a damp garage into a chapel became an unlikely obsession

The Swedish actress’s unhappy Hollywood experience prompted a lifelong questioning of what being herself actually meant

Few cultural figures can have combined political activism and theatre as successfully as Fo