Frank Rich | |
---|---|
Born | Frank Hart Rich Jr. June 2, 1949 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
Occupation |
|
Alma mater | Harvard University (BA) |
Period | 1971–present |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Spouse |
|
Children |
Frank Hart Rich Jr. [1] (born 1949) is an American essayist and liberal op-ed columnist, [2] [3] who held various positions within The New York Times from 1980 to 2011. [4] He has also produced television series and documentaries for HBO.
Rich is currently writer-at-large for New York magazine, where he writes essays on politics and culture and engages in regular dialogues on news of the week for the "Daily Intelligencer". [5] He served as executive producer of the long-running HBO comedy series Veep , having joined the show at its outset in 2011, and of the HBO drama series Succession .
Born on June 2, 1949, Rich grew up in Washington, D.C. His mother, Helene Fisher (née Aaronson), a schoolteacher and artist, was from a Russian Jewish family that originally settled in Brooklyn, New York City, but moved to Washington, D.C., following the stock market crash of 1929. His father, Frank Hart Rich, a businessman, was from a German Jewish family long-settled in Washington. [6] [7] [8] He attended public schools and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1967. [9]
Rich attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson , [10] the university's daily student newspaper. Rich was an honorary Harvard College scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and received a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship. He graduated magna cum laude in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American history and literature. [4]
Before joining The New York Times in 1980, Rich was a film and television critic for Time , a film critic for The New York Post , and film critic and senior editor of New Times Magazine . In the early 1970s, he was a founding editor of the Richmond (Va.) Mercury. [4]
Rich served as chief theater critic of The New York Times from 1980 to 1993, earning the nickname "Butcher of Broadway" for the perceived power of his negative reviews to close Broadway shows. [11] He first won attention from theater-goers with an essay for The Harvard Crimson about the Broadway musical Follies (1971), by Stephen Sondheim, during its pre-Broadway tryout run in Boston. [12] In his study of the work, Rich was "the first person to predict the legendary status the show eventually would achieve". The article "fascinated" Harold Prince, the musical's co-director, and "absolutely intrigued" Sondheim, who invited the undergraduate to lunch to further discuss his feelings about the production. [13]
External videos | |
---|---|
Presentation by Rich on Hot Seat, September 1, 1998, C-SPAN |
In a retrospective article for The New York Times Magazine , "Exit the Critic," published in 1994, Rich reflected on the controversies during his tenure as drama critic as well as on the playwrights he championed and on the tragedies that decimated the New York theater during the height of the AIDS crisis. [14] A collection of Rich's theater reviews was published in a book, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980–1993 (1998). He also wrote The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, with Lisa Aronson, in 1987. [4]
From 1994 to 2011, Rich was an op-ed columnist for The New York Times; he wrote regularly on the connections between mass media and American politics. His columns, now appearing in New York Magazine, make regular references to a broad range of popular culture—including television, movies, theater and literature. In addition to his long-time work for the Times and New York, Rich has written for many other publications, including The New York Review of Books and The New Republic .
The commentator Bill O'Reilly, host of the Fox News Channel talk show The O'Reilly Factor , criticized Rich following Rich's criticism of Fox in 2004 as having a politically conservative bias. [15]
Rich also attracted controversy by dismissing the historical-drama film The Passion of the Christ (2004), directed by Mel Gibson, as "nothing so much as a porn movie, replete with slo-mo climaxes and pounding music for the money shots." [16]
External videos | |
---|---|
Presentation by Rich on The Greatest Story Ever Sold, December 4, 2006, C-SPAN |
In a January 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show , commenting on the James Frey memoir scandal, Rich expanded on his usage in his column of the term truthiness to summarize a variety of ills in culture and politics. [17] His book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (2006), criticized the American media for what he perceived as its support of George W. Bush's administration's propaganda following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and during the run-up to the Iraq war. [10]
A July 2009 column focused on what Rich believes is the bigoted nature of President Barack Obama's detractors. [18] On the Tea Party movement, which emerged in 2009, Rich opined that at one of their rallies they were "kowtowing to secessionists." He wrote that death threats and a brick thrown through a congressman's window were a "small-scale mimicry of "Kristallnacht" (or "night of broken glass", the November 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria). [19] [20] In his essays at New York, Rich has continued to examine the American right, including its latest revival during the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump.
Since 2008, Rich has been a creative consultant for HBO, where he has helped initiate and develop new programming and was an Executive Producer of Veep , the long-running comedy series created by Armando Iannucci and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He was also an Executive Producer of Succession , the HBO drama series created by Jesse Armstrong that debuted in June 2018 to critical praise. [21] [22]
Rich was also an Executive Producer for the HBO documentaries Six by Sondheim (2013), directed by James Lapine, and Becoming Mike Nichols (2016), directed by Douglas McGrath.
Rich's journalistic honors include the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005 [23] and, in 2011, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University (also his alma mater). In 2011, Rich was awarded an honorary doctorate from The New School. [24] In 2016, he received the Mirror Award for Best Commentary from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2015.
Rich was twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, in 1987 and 2005. [25] In 2010, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Silurians Press Club. [26]
Rich received Emmy Awards in 2015, 2016, and 2017 for Veep , which was named Outstanding Comedy Series, and in 2020 for Succession, which was named Outstanding Drama Series. [27] He also received a Golden Globe in 2020 for Succession, which won the Best Drama Series prize. [28] He has won three Peabody Awards: for Succession in 2020, for Veep in 2017, and, in 2013, for Six by Sondheim, [29] which was also honored with the ASCAP Deems Taylor Television Broadcast Award.
In 2011, The New Republic included him along with Rachel Maddow, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, etc. in an editorial roundup of the "Most Over-Rated Thinkers" of the year, calling him "an utterly conventional pundit of the old salon liberal variety". [3]
Rich lives in Manhattan with his wife, Alex Witchel, an author and journalist; they married in 1991. [7] He has two sons from his previous marriage to Gail Winston, [30] [31] Simon Rich, a novelist and short story writer who created the television series Man Seeking Woman and was a writer for Saturday Night Live , and Nathaniel Rich, who is a novelist, journalist, and essayist.
External videos | |
---|---|
Booknotes interview with Rich on Ghost Light: A Memoir, December 10, 2000, C-SPAN |
Frank Rich's memoir Ghost Light (2000) chronicles his childhood in the late 1950s and 1960s in Washington, D.C., with a focus on his lifelong adoration of the theater and the impact it had on his life. [4]
Mandel Bruce Patinkin is an American actor and singer, known for his work in musical theatre, television, and film. He is a critically acclaimed Broadway performer known for his collaborations with Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. He is known for his leading roles on stage and screen and has received numerous accolades including a Tony Award, a Primetime Emmy Award as well as nominations for seven Drama Desk Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited with reinventing the American musical. With his frequent collaborations with Harold Prince and James Lapine, Sondheim's Broadway musicals tackled unexpected themes that ranged beyond the genre's traditional subjects, while addressing darker elements of the human experience. His music and lyrics were tinged with complexity, sophistication, and ambivalence about various aspects of life.
Nathan Lane is an American actor. Since 1975, he has been seen on stage and screen in both comedic and dramatic roles. Lane has received numerous awards, including three Tony Awards, six Drama Desk Awards, an Olivier Award, three Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Lane received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006 and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2010, The New York Times hailed Lane as "the greatest stage entertainer of the decade".
Jonathan David Larson was an American composer, lyricist and playwright most famous for writing the musicals Rent and Tick, Tick... Boom!, which explored the social issues of multiculturalism, substance use disorder, and homophobia. He received three posthumous Tony Awards and a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Rent.
James Elliot Lapine is an American stage director, playwright, screenwriter, and librettist. He has won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical three times, for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion. He has frequently collaborated with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn.
George Hearn is an American actor and singer, primarily in Broadway musical theatre.
Walter Francis Kerr was an American writer and Broadway theatre critic. He also was the writer, lyricist, and/or director of several Broadway plays and musicals as well as the author of several books, generally on the subject of theater and cinema.
Benjamin Shenkman is an American actor. He is known for his roles in the comedy-drama series Royal Pains and the acclaimed HBO miniseries Angels in America, which earned him both Primetime Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations.
Richard Greenberg is an American playwright and television writer known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. He has had more than 25 plays premiere on and Off-Broadway in New York City and eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, including The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, and Hurrah at Last.
Michael Cerveris is an American actor, singer, and guitarist. He has performed in many stage musicals and plays, including several Stephen Sondheim musicals: Assassins, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Road Show, and Passion. In 2004, Cerveris won the Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Assassins as John Wilkes Booth. In 2015, he won his second Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for Fun Home as Bruce Bechdel.
Robert Sanford Brustein was an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator. He founded the Yale Repertory Theatre while serving as dean of the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the American Repertory Theater and Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a creative consultant until his death, and was the theatre critic for The New Republic. He commented on politics for the HuffPost.
Boris Aronson was an American scenic designer for Broadway and Yiddish theatre. He won the Tony Award for Scenic Design six times in his career.
John Rubinstein is an American actor, composer and director.
J. T. Rogers is an American playwright who lives in New York.
Martin Gottfried was an American critic, columnist and author. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Merrily We Roll Along is a 1981 American musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth. It is based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.
Lonny Price is an American director, actor, and writer, primarily in theatre. He is best known for his New York directing work, including Sunset Boulevard, Sweeney Todd, Company, and Sondheim! The Birthday Concert. As an actor, he is perhaps best known for his creation of the role of Charley Kringas in the Broadway musical Merrily We Roll Along, Neil Kellerman in Dirty Dancing, and Ronnie Crawford in The Muppets Take Manhattan.
Jean Isabel Smith, credited professionally as J. Smith-Cameron, is an American actress. She gained prominence for her roles in the television series Rectify (2013–2016) and Succession (2018–2023), the latter of which earned her two Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
Peter Friedman is an American stage, film, and television actor. He made his Broadway debut in the Eugene O'Neill play The Great God Brown in 1972. His other Broadway credits include roles in The Rules of the Game (1974), Piaf (1981), The Heidi Chronicles (1989), and Twelve Angry Men (2004). He earned a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical nomination for his role as Tateh in Ragtime (1998).
Arian Moayed is an Iranian-American actor, screenwriter, and director. Moayed has received two Tony Award nominations for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performances in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (2011) and A Doll's House (2023). He earned two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his role as Stewy Hosseini in HBO's Succession.
{{cite book}}
: |work=
ignored (help)