Great Lives

Like Stanley Kubrick, his gift was to imagine and then realise the unimaginable, the unrealisable – places you could never go

‘Pippo’ soared to fame alongside Maria Callas in the 1950s but his playboy lifestyle ultimately led to the loss of his golden voice

At a time when cyclists had begun to resemble machines, Pantani was almost impossibly human, unable to conceal his emotions

Her career as one of the world’s leading operatic sopranos often came second to gushing entreaties to her ravishing appearance

One chance encounter transforming a life is rare enough. Guilbert enjoyed two a few days apart

Little blame can be attached to André Roussimoff for exaggerating the truth of his stories because everything about the wrestler and actor was already exaggerated

The footballer was the toast of the Viennese coffee houses, the intelligence of his play being praised in the same terms as poets

Many directors might not have scaled their creative heights without Ponti’s recognition that one could make daring and challenging cinema and still turn a profit

The daughter of a songwriter and from a long line of composers, the woman born Isabelle Gall was predestined for a career in music

There were huge advantages to being outside the Soviet Union, but the filmmaker's love of Russia bound him to home

For a woman who never desired the limelight, Silvana Mangano achieved cinematic immortality almost in spite of herself

The intensity he displayed in the saddle was an extension of his personality. He was spiky, surly and could bear a spectacular grudge

An adventurous romantic life lent almost a Zelig-like quality to the writer, constantly drawing her towards the centre of events

Her young daughters grieving before a grave she didn’t occupy was not even the worst tribulation to afflict the life of the Hungarian

The troubled journalist forged her place in and around a world to which she never quite belonged

The relationship between Jean Marais and Jean Cocteau was one of the great romances of 20th-century European culture

What he saw as the blandness of tradition bore little or no resemblance to the world he knew and the art he wanted to create

Graham was one of the most high-profile critics of Reagan’s visit to Bitburg. It was personal

The Frenchman won seven Grand Slam singles titles in the 1920s before becoming an innovator in the world of sportswear and tennis equipment

The biggest-selling Portuguese music artist in history was instrumental in popularising the fado genre worldwide

The trailblazing French actress defied Hollywood’s ageism to win an Academy Award for Room at the Top

A combination of deep thinking, a fascination with the everyday and a playful wit produced some of the most groundbreaking fiction of the 20th century

The Frenchman relished each project with its opportunity for reinvention, presenting a new challenge each time

One of the first women of celebrity in the modern sense of the word, Elisabeth of Austria was a gifted, vibrant woman imprisoned by contemporary etiquette

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