Jean Cocteau

Ian Abercrombie, 77, the British character actor who played Elaine's demanding boss, Mr. Pitt, on "Seinfeld," died Thursday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said his friend Cathy Lind Hayes. He suffered complications of kidney failure and...

John Malkovich will give the annual message for World Theatre Day in Paris at a March 22 kickoff gala of events leading up to the 50th annual celebration on March 27. Here's the text he'll deliver....

As we bid farewell to the Summer of Swelter, it's a grand time for pulling up the appointment app on your smart phone (or pulling out the day planner, if you're a traditionalist) and setting aside some play dates with the hottest shows in town. BIG DEALS...

Q: Waaaaay back in the '60s I thought I saw bottles of wine with labels designed by Picasso, Dali and other popular artists. Was I dreaming? —Elizabeth Dewey, Crystal Lake, Ill. A: No, you weren't dreaming. The artists' labels were (and are) found...

The “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme” is about to earn yet another big screen re-telling, this one without animation or music. Guillermo del Toro is setting up a “Beauty and the Beast.” And he wants Harry Potter starlet...

• "A Memory of Two Mondays" by Eclipse Theatre: Making time for everyday heroes (review published Sept. 8, 2010) This week, I've been suffering through my usual Labor Day malaise. I hate the sudden end of summer — the arrival......

For his namesake collection at Paris Fashion Week, John Galliano's muse was haute huckster Maria Lani and his stage the gorgeous Opéra Comique. Lani is an amusing character from the 1920s Paris art scene, who persuaded every great artist --......

Movie attendance is down. Way down. And with the movies out in the early months of 2011, that should be no surprise. The major Oscar nominees did well, most of them, by sticking around when in other years bigger hits would have moved in and shoved them...

Artist Daniela Comani remakes classic book covers by inverting the gender. Mr. Dalloway, anyone?...

A frizzy-haired old woman wearing sandals used to sit on a stoop at the Palais-Royal in Paris. If people took her for a tramp, what did she care? Her extraordinary life was almost over. Now she could spend her afternoons eyeing passersby and cooing at...

"The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography" By Selina Hastings Random House, Inc., 640 pages, $35 In 1953 Sir Gerald Kelly, the President of the Royal Academy, organized a dinner in honor of Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to that august...

With Labor Day behind us, white shoes are retired until next summer and Southland denizens have finally returned from vacations and are settling into September. With a captive metropolis, art galleries are in full bloom with a weekend of wall-to-wall...