Ray Milland, Actor, Director, #BornOnThisDay in 1907, in Neath, Wales

John Sturges, Director, #BornOnThisDay in 1910, in Oak Park, Illinois

Thelma Schoonmaker, Film Editor, Film Preservationist, #BornOnThisDay in 1940, in Algiers, Algeria

Hank and Hildy here, wishing you a happy #Caturday and judging you silently for your many transgressions.

Robert Nathan, Novelist, Poet, Screenwriter, #BornOnThisDay in 1894, in New York City

For the BFI, 10 great films from 1926 www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-gre...

“Sublime”. FWIW, I agree w/ Ms B.

I will never see a better performance than Anjelica Huston’s in The Dead (her dad’s last film, based on the greatest short story ever written), and neither will you.

Basil Dearden, Director, #BornOnThisDay in 1911, in Westcliff-on-Sea, England

Dana Andrews, Actor, #BornOnThisDay in 1909, near Collins, Mississippi

Alfred Stieglitz, Photographer, #BornOnThisDay in 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey ‘Winter, Fifth Avenue’ (1893), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Maria Edgeworth, Writer, #BornOnThisDay in 1768, in Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, England “A man who sells his conscience for his interest will sell it for his pleasure. A man who will betray his country will betray his friend.”

Milt Jackson, Jazz Vibraphonist, Composer, #BornOnThisDay in 1923, in Detroit

What I will see the New Year in with. I’ll attempt to time it so, at the moment of midnight, Pamela Brown - with her wonderful face of secrets and shadows - suddenly falls into frame to warn Torquil that “she’s running away from you!”

It’s Edward Morgan’s birthday tomorrow. 📸 Cecil Beaton (1956)

Phyllis Elinor Legh’s ‘The Servants’ New Year’s Eve Ball in the Entrance Hall at Lyme Park’, National Trust, Lyme Park

“This morning I discovered the newborn year on my doorstep, begging to be welcomed into the house. I hesitated a moment for fear of what might come in its wake. But it continued to plead until I picked it up, not out of pity, but because I had to.” (‘Autobiographies: A Year in Llŷn’)

It’s Anthony’s birthday tomorrow.

Joseph Farquharson’s ‘The Sun Had Closed the Winter Day’, Manchester Art Gallery

Also going back to “Rhapsody in Blue” this week while I’ve got big blocks of open practice time.

“Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic.”

Carol Reed, Director, Producer, #BornOnThisDay in 1906, in Putney, London

Rudyard Kipling, Writer, #BornOnThisDay in 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India “I have watched a thousand days Push out and crawl into night Slowly as tortoises. Now I, too, follow these. It is fever, and not the fight— Time, not battle,—that slays.” 🎨 Sir Philip Burne-Jones (1899)

Stan Tracey, Jazz Pianist, Composer, #BornOnThisDay in 1926, in Denmark Hill, London ‘Starless and Bible Black’: youtu.be/Frnd-wuhBic?...

Dublin. Undisclosed location. 28 December.

Rory missed his friend.

Marlene Dietrich, Actress, #BornOnThisDay in 1901, in Schöneberg, German Empire 📸 Edward Steichen (1932)

A beautiful and quiet morning in the woods with the Branch Manager

My older brother, this Christmas season, set himself the task of organizing my mother‘s holiday recipes and testing out, for the first time in many years, all of her cookies. He started simply, with the sugar cookies, cut using her cutters into all the familiar shapes, iced with her trademark…

Terence Rattigan (1954)

Taken in a hurry but sometimes you only need one shot. The light in the rain outside London Bridge station yesterday evening. #Shardenfreude #ReasonsToLoveLondon

‘Crossing Delancey’, ‘The Browning Version’, ‘Obsession’, ‘The Shopworn Angel’, ‘A Canterbury Tale’, ‘One Way Passage’, ‘The Shop Around the Corner’, ‘How Green Was My Valley’ ❤️

By coincidence, today is also the anniversary of our adoption of Hank and Hildegard!

Someone just liked these photos so I’m taking the opportunity to repost them. STB died just under two years ago. He was the loveliest cat, a streetwise rescue who could not get over the existence of soft furnishings and liked to have a bedtime story read to him. Still miss him.

It’s Peggy’s birthday tomorrow.* (*I will be travelling tomorrow so what I post tonight may be the sum of it.) 📸 Howard Coster (1935)

Anthony Powell, Writer, #BornOnThisDay in 1905, in Westminster, London “Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.” (‘The Valley of Bones’) 📸 Antony Armstrong-Jones (January 16, 1978)

Diana Athill, Editor, Novelist, Memoirist, #BornOnThisDay in 1917, in Kensington, London

Maud Gonne, Revolutionary, Suffragette, Actress, Muse, #BornOnThisDay in 1866, in Tongham, England

It’s a funny old world when just the idea of the mayor-elect of New York City can make one sob uncontrollably. We so desperately need good news wherever we can find it…

Kaiju and I have set out in the manner in which we intend to go on for the next two weeks. (Not pictures: the Oscar Peterson Christmas tunes we are listening to.)

He's been! Here's everything I read this year (and a few things I wrote): Henry James! Joseph Heller! Penelope Fitzgerald! A biography of the unsuccessful 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, Al Smith! advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2025/12/Book...

Irene Dunne, Actress, #BornOnThisDay in 1898, in Louisville, Kentucky 📸 Ernest Bachrach (1938)

RIP to Sir Humphrey Burton, who more or less created what we think of as quality arts programming on television. A giant in the UK, too-little known in the US. I had the privilege of working with him several times—and even had the honor of having him say something nice about me in one of his books.

I worked on a production years ago that starred Michael Gambon, David Bradley, and David Walliams, and I can tell you that Gambon and Bradley were utterly delightful.