title: Bill Evans

text: By the end of the summer, Davis knew Evans was quickly approaching his full professional development; and that he would soon decide to leave Davis' group. This year, Evans won the "DownBeat" International Critics' Poll for his work with Davis and his album "New Jazz Conceptions".


title: Bill Evans

text: In September 1958, Evans recorded as a sideman in Art Farmer's album "Modern Art", also featuring Benny Golson. All three had won the "DownBeat" poll. Later, Evans deemed this record as one of his favorites. During this period, despite all the successes, Evans was visiting a psychiatrist, as he was unsure whether he wanted to continue as a pianist.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans left Davis' sextet in November 1958 and stayed with his parents in Florida and his brother in Louisiana. While he was burned out, one of the main reasons for leaving was his father's illness. During this sojourn, the always self-critical Evans suddenly felt his playing had improved. "While I was staying with my brother in Baton Rouge, I remember finding that somehow I had reached a new level of expression in my playing. It had come almost automatically, and I was very anxious about it, afraid I might lose it."


title: Bill Evans

text: Shortly after, he moved back to New York, and in December Evans recorded the trio album "Everybody Digs Bill Evans" for Riverside Records with bassist Sam Jones and drummer Philly Joe Jones. This was Evans's second album as a leader, the first since "New Jazz Conceptions", recorded two years earlier. While producer Orrin Keepnews had many times tried to persuade Evans to make a second trio recording, the pianist felt he had nothing new to say ... until then. He had also been too busy traveling with Davis to make a record.


title: Bill Evans

text: One of the pieces to appear on the album was Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time". Evans started to play an introduction using an ostinato figure. However, according to Keepnews, who was present, the pianist spontaneously started to improvise over that harmonic frame, creating the recording that would be named "Peace Piece". According to Evans: "What happened was that I started to play the introduction, and it started to get so much of its own feeling and identity that I just figured, well, I'll keep going." However, Gretchen Magee claims that the piece had been penned as an exercise during his college years, while Peri Cousins says that he would often play the piece at home.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans returned to the Davis sextet in early 1959, at the trumpeter's request, to record "Kind of Blue", often considered the best-selling jazz album of all time.


title: Bill Evans

text: As usual, during the sessions of "Kind of Blue", Miles Davis called for almost no rehearsal and the musicians had little idea what they were to record. Davis had given the band only sketches of scales and melody lines on which to improvise. Once the musicians were assembled, Davis gave brief instructions for each piece and then set about taping the sextet in studio.


title: Bill Evans

text: During the creative process of "Kind of Blue", Davis handed Evans a piece of paper with two chords—G minor and A augmented—and asked "What would you do with that?" Evans spent the next night writing what would become "Blue in Green". However, when the album came out, the song was attributed exclusively to Davis. When Evans suggested he might deserve a share of the royalties, Davis offered him a check for $25. Evans also penned the liner notes for "Kind of Blue", comparing jazz improvisation to Japanese visual art. By the fall of 1959, Evans had started his own trio with Jimmy Garrison and Kenny Dennis, but it was short-lived.


title: Bill Evans

text: Sometime during the late 1950s, most probably before joining Miles Davis, Evans began using heroin. Philly Joe Jones has been cited as an especially bad influence in this aspect. Although Davis seems to have tried to help Evans kick his addiction, he did not succeed.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans's first long-term romance was with a black woman named Peri Cousins (for whom "Peri's Scope" was named), during the second half of the 1950s. The couple had problems booking in hotels during Evans's gigs, since most of them did not allow inter-racial couples. By the turn of the decade, Evans had met a waitress named Ellaine Schultz, who would become his partner for twelve years.


title: Bill Evans

text: In mid-1959, Evans was performing at Basin Street East, and was visited by bassist Scott LaFaro, who was playing with singer and pianist Bobby Scott at a club around the corner. LaFaro expressed interest in forming a trio, and suggested Paul Motian, who had appeared on Evans's album New Jazz Conceptions, as the drummer for the new group. The trio with LaFaro and Motian became one of the most celebrated piano trios in jazz. With this group Evans's focus settled on traditional jazz standards and original compositions, with an added emphasis on interplay among band members. Evans and LaFaro would achieve a high level of musical empathy. In December 1959 the band recorded its first album, "Portrait in Jazz" for Riverside Records.


title: Bill Evans

text: In early 1960, the trio began a tour that brought them to Boston, San Francisco (at Jazz Workshop), and Chicago (at the Sutherland Lounge). After returning to New York in February, the band performed at Town Hall on a multi-artist bill, and then began a residency at Birdland. While the trio did not produce any studio records in 1960, two bootleg recordings from radio broadcasts from April and May were illegally released in the early 1970s, which infuriated Evans. Later, they would be posthumously issued as "The 1960 Birdland Sessions".


title: Bill Evans

text: In parallel with his trio work, Evans kept working as a backing musician for other bandleaders. In 1960, he performed on singer Frank Minion's album "The Soft Land of Make Believe", featuring versions of the "Kind of Blue" compositions "Flamenco Sketches" and "So What" with added lyrics. That year, he also recorded "The Soul of Jazz Percussion", with Philly Joe Jones and Chambers.


title: Bill Evans

text: In May 1960, the trio performed at one of the Jazz Profiles concerts, a series organized by Charles Schwartz. Around this time, Evans hired Monte Kay as his manager. During one of his concerts at the Jazz Gallery, Evans contracted hepatitis, and went to his parents' house in Florida to recuperate. During this time period, Evans also participated in the recordings "The Great Kai & J. J." and "The Incredible Kai Winding Trombones" for Impulse! Records. In May and August 1960, Evans appeared on George Russell's album "Jazz in the Space Age." In late 1960, he performed on "Jazz Abstractions", an album recorded under the leadership of Gunther Schuller and John Lewis.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans' trio with Motian and LaFaro recorded "Explorations" in February 1961, the group's second and final studio album. According to Orrin Keepnews, the atmosphere during the recording sessions was tense, Evans and LaFaro having had an argument over extra-musical matters. Additionally, Evans was suffereing at the session from headaches, and LaFaro was playing with a loaned bass. The disc features the Evans' first trio version of "Nardis", the Miles Davis piece Evans had recorded with Cannonball Adderley for Adderley's Portrait of Cannonball album in 1958. Apart from "Nardis" and "Elsa", the album consisted of jazz standards. After the recording sessions, Evans was initially unwilling to release the album, believing the trio had played badly. However, upon hearing the recording, he changed his mind, and later thought of it in very positive terms. In February 1961, shortly after the "Explorations" sessions, he appeared as a sideman in Oliver Nelson's "The Blues and the Abstract Truth".


title: Bill Evans

text: In late June 1961, Riverside recorded Evans' trio live at the Village Vanguard, which resulted in the albums "Sunday at the Village Vanguard", and "Waltz for Debby." (Further recordings from this performance were issued in 1984 as "More From The Vanguard.") Evans later showed special satisfaction with these recordings, seeing them as the culmination of the musical interplay of his trio.


title: Bill Evans

text: The death of 25-year-old LaFaro in a car accident, ten days after the Vanguard performances, devastated Evans. He did not record or perform in public again for several months.


title: Bill Evans

text: In October 1961, persuaded by his producer Orrin Keepnews, Evans returned to the musical scene on the Mark Murphy album Rah. With new bassist Chuck Israels, they recorded in December a session for "Nirvana", with flautist Herbie Mann. In April and May 1962, Evans completed the duo album, "Undercurrent", with guitarist Jim Hall.


title: Bill Evans

text: When he re-formed his trio in 1962, two albums, "Moon Beams" and "How My Heart Sings!" resulted. In 1963, at the beginning of his association with Verve, he recorded "Conversations with Myself", an album which featured overdubbing, layering up to three individual tracks of piano for each song. The album won him his first Grammy award.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans's heroin addiction increased following LaFaro's death. His girlfriend Ellaine was also an addict. Evans habitually had to borrow money from friends, and eventually, his electricity and telephone services were shut down. Evans said: "You don't understand. It's like death and transfiguration. Every day you wake in pain like death and then you go out and score, and that is transfiguration. Each day becomes all of life in microcosm."


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans never allowed heroin to interfere with his musical discipline, according to a 2010 BBC record review article which contrasts Evans's addiction with that of Chet Baker. On one occasion while injecting heroin, Evans hit a nerve and temporarily disabled it, performing a full week's engagement at the Village Vanguard virtually one-handed. During this time, Helen Keane began having an important influence, as she gave significant assistance helping to maintain Evans's career despite his self-destructive lifestyle, and the two developed a strong friendship.


title: Bill Evans

text: In summer 1963, Evans and his girlfriend Ellaine left their flat in New York and settled in his parents' home in Florida, where, it seems, they quit the habit for some time. Even though never legally married, Bill and Ellaine were, in all other respects, husband and wife. At that time, Ellaine meant everything to Evans, and was the only person with whom he felt genuine comfort.


title: Bill Evans

text: Though he recorded many albums for Verve, their artistic quality was uneven. Despite Israels' fast development and the creativity of new drummer Larry Bunker, they were ill-represented by the perfunctory album "Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra", featuring Gabriel Fauré's "Pavane". Some recordings in unusual contexts were made, such as a big-band live album recorded at Town Hall, New York that was never issued owing to Evans's dissatisfaction with it (although the more successful jazz trio portion of the Pavane concert was released), and an album with a symphony orchestra that was not warmly received by critics. Live recordings and bootleg radio broadcasts from this time period represent some of the trio's better work.


title: Bill Evans

text: In 1966, Bill Evans met Puerto-Rico born, Julliard-graduated bassist Eddie Gómez. In what turned out to be an eleven-year stay, Gómez sparked new developments in Evans's trio conception. One of the most significant releases during this period is "Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival" (1968), which won him his second Grammy award. It has remained a critical favorite, and is one of two albums Evans made with drummer Jack DeJohnette.


title: Bill Evans

text: Other highlights from this period include "Solo – In Memory of His Father" from "Bill Evans at Town Hall" (1966), which also introduced "Turn Out the Stars"; a second pairing with guitarist Jim Hall, "Intermodulation" (1966); and the solo album "Alone" (1968, featuring a 14-minute version of "Never Let Me Go"), that won his third Grammy award.


title: Bill Evans

text: In 1968, drummer Marty Morell joined the trio and remained until 1975, when he retired to family life. This was Evans's most stable, longest-lasting group. Evans had overcome his heroin habit and was entering a period of personal stability.


title: Bill Evans

text: Between 1969 and 1970, Evans recorded "From Left to Right", featuring his first use of electric piano.


title: Bill Evans

text: Between May and June 1971, Evans recorded "The Bill Evans Album", which won two Grammy awards. This all-originals album (four new), also featured alternation between acoustic and electric piano. One of these was "Comrade Conrad", a tune that had originated as a Crest toothpaste jingle and had later been reelaborated and dedicated to Conrad Mendenhall, a friend who had died in a car accident.


title: Bill Evans

text: Other albums included "The Tokyo Concert" (1973); "Since We Met" (1974); and "But Beautiful" (1974; released in 1996), featuring the trio plus saxophonist Stan Getz in live performances from the Netherlands and Belgium. Morell was an energetic, straight-ahead drummer, unlike many of the trio's former percussionists, and many critics feel that this was a period of little growth for Evans. After Morell left, Evans and Gómez recorded two duo albums, "Intuition" and "Montreux III".


title: Bill Evans

text: In the early 1970s, Evans was caught at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport with a suitcase containing heroin. Although the police put him in jail for the night, he was not charged. However, both he and Ellaine had to begin methadone treatment.


title: Bill Evans

text: In 1973, while working in Redondo Beach, California, Evans met and fell in love with Nenette Zazzara, despite his long-term relationship with Ellaine. When Evans broke the news to Ellaine, she pretended to understand, but then committed suicide by throwing herself under a subway train. Evans's relatives believe that Ellaine's infertility, coupled with Bill's desire to have a son, may have influenced those events. As a result, Evans went back on heroin for a while before resuming methadone treatment. In August 1973, Evans married Nenette, and, in 1975, they had a child, Evan. The new family, which also included Evans's stepdaughter Maxine, lived in a large house in Closter, New Jersey. Both remained very close until his death. Nenette and Bill remained married until Evans’s death in 1980.


title: Bill Evans

text: In 1974, Bill Evans recorded a multimovement jazz concerto written for him by Claus Ogerman entitled "Symbiosis".


title: Bill Evans

text: During the mid-1970s Bill Evans collaborated with the singer Tony Bennett on two critically acclaimed albums: "The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album" (1975) and "Together Again" (1977).


title: Bill Evans

text: It was Tony Bennett who initiated the collaboration with Bill Evans. The two musicians had mutual respect for each other's talent. Bennett and Evans concertized together for about two years. Although Evans was using cocaine regularly during this period, he was reported sober when recording the albums with Bennett.


title: Bill Evans

text: Both Bennett and Evans stated that it was not just a singer with accompanist affair, but rather a mutually stimulated creative effort to enhance some well known hits with a new twist on familiar melodies and harmonies. Harmonically sophisticated piano arrangements by Evans and his extended piano solos were encouraged by Bennett to emphasize equally valuable input from both musicians.


title: Bill Evans

text: Bennett and Evans recorded the first album in four studio sessions in June 1975, and the second album in four studio sessions in September 1976. Between the two recordings, the Bennett and Evans performed live as a duo, featuring songs from their recordings including But Beautiful, Days of Wine and Roses, Dream Dancing.


title: Bill Evans

text: In 1975, Morell was replaced by drummer Eliot Zigmund. Several collaborations followed, and it was not until 1977 that the trio was able to record an album together. Both "I Will Say Goodbye" (Evans's last album for Fantasy Records) and "You Must Believe in Spring" (for Warner Bros.) highlighted changes that would become significant in the last stage of Evans's life. A greater emphasis was placed on group improvisation and interaction, and new harmonic experiments were attempted.


title: Bill Evans

text: Gómez and Zigmund left Evans in 1978. Evans then asked Philly Joe Jones, the drummer he considered his "all-time favorite drummer", to fill in. Several bassists were tried, with Michael Moore staying the longest. Evans finally settled on Marc Johnson on bass and Joe LaBarbera on drums. This trio would be Evans's last.


title: Bill Evans

text: In April 1979, Evans met Laurie Verchomin, a Canadian waitress (later, a writer) with whom he had a relationship until his death. Verchomin was 28 years younger.


title: Bill Evans

text: At the beginning of a several-week tour of the trio through the Pacific Northwest in the spring of 1979, Evans learned that his brother, Harry, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had committed suicide at age


title: Bill Evans

text: 52. This news shocked him deeply, and some of the concerts had to be canceled. His friends and relatives believe that this event precipitated his own death the following year.


title: Bill Evans

text: Marc Johnson recalled: "This fateful trip marks ... the beginning of the end. Bill's willingness to play and work decreased noticeably after the death of Harry, actually it was just the music itself that held him upright. He fulfilled his obligations because he needed money, but these were the few moments in his life when he felt comfortable — the times in between must have been depressing, and he barely showed a willingness to live."


title: Bill Evans

text: In August 1979, Evans recorded his last studio album, "We Will Meet Again", featuring a composition of the same name written for his brother. The album won a Grammy award posthumously in 1981, along with "I Will Say Goodbye".


title: Bill Evans

text: During the late 1970s, Evans kicked his heroin habit, with the help of methadone, only to become addicted to cocaine. He started with one gram per weekend, but later started taking several grams daily. His brother Harry's suicide may have also influenced his emotional state after 1979. His sister-in-law Pat Evans has stated that she knew Bill would not last long after Harry's death and she wondered if that is what prompted her to buy three plots in a Baton Rouge Cemetery, where Harry was interred. It has been documented that he voluntarily quit his treatment for chronic hepatitis. Laurie Verchomin has claimed that Evans was clear in mind that he would die in a short time.


title: Bill Evans

text: On September 15, 1980, Evans, who had been in bed for several days with stomach pains at his home in Fort Lee, was accompanied by Joe LaBarbera and Verchomin to the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where he died that afternoon. The cause of death was a combination of peptic ulcer, cirrhosis, bronchial pneumonia, and untreated hepatitis. Evans's friend Gene Lees described Evans's struggle with drugs as "the longest suicide in history". He was interred in Baton Rouge, next to his brother Harry. Services were held in Manhattan on Friday, September 19. A tribute, planned by producer Orrin Keepnews and Tom Bradshaw, was held on the following Monday, September 22, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Fellow musicians paid homage to the late pianist in the first days of the 1980 Monterey Jazz Festival, which had opened that very week: Dave Brubeck played his own "In Your Own Sweet Way" on the 19th, The Manhattan Transfer would follow on the 20th, while John Lewis dedicated "I'll Remember April". In 1981, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays released the piece "September Fifteenth" (dedicated to Bill Evans)" on their album "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls".


title: Bill Evans

text: Bill Evans is credited with influencing the harmonic language of jazz piano. Evans's harmony was itself influenced by impressionist composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.


title: Bill Evans

text: His versions of jazz standards, as well as his own compositions, often featured thorough reharmonisations. Musical features included added tone chords, modal inflections, unconventional substitutions, and modulations.


title: Bill Evans

text: One of Evans's distinctive harmonic traits is excluding the root in his chords, leaving this work to the bassist, played on another beat of the measure, or just left implied. "If I am going to be sitting here playing roots, fifths and full voicings, the bass is relegated to a time machine." This idea had already been explored by Ahmad Jamal, Erroll Garner, and Red Garland. In Evans's system, the chord is expressed as a quality identity and a color. Most of Evans's harmonies feature added note chords or quartal voicings. Thus, Evans created a self-sufficient language for the left hand, a distinctive voicing, that allowed the transition from one chord to the next while hardly having to move the hand. With this technique, he created an effect of continuity in the central register of the piano. Lying around middle C, in this region the harmonic clusters sounded the clearest, and at the same time, left room for contrapuntal independence with the bass.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans's improvisations relied heavily on motivic development, either melodically or rhythmically. Motives may be broken and recombined to form melodies. Another characteristic of Evans's style is rhythmic displacement. His melodic contours often describe arches. Other characteristics include sequenciation of melodies and transforming one motive into another. He plays with one hand in the time signature of 4/4 and the other momentarily in 3/4.


title: Bill Evans

text: At least during his late years, Evans's favorite keys to play in were A and E. Evans greatly valued Bach's music, which influenced his playing style and which helped him gain good touch and finger independence. "Bach changed my hand approach to playing the piano. I used to use a lot of finger technique when I was younger, and I changed over to a weight technique. Actually, if you play Bach and the voices sing at all, and sustain the way they should, you really can't play it with the wrong approach." Evans valued Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier" and his "Two- and Three-Part Inventions" as excellent practice material.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans's career began just before the rock explosion in the 1960s. During this decade, jazz was swept into a corner, and most new talents had few opportunities to gain recognition, especially in America. However, Evans believed he had been lucky to gain some exposure before this profound change in the music world, and never had problems gaining bookings and recording opportunities.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans never embraced new music movements; he kept his style intact. For example, he lamented watching Davis shift his style towards jazz fusion, and blamed the change on considerations of commerce. Evans commented "I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master [Davis], but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience. It happens more and more these days, that unqualified people with executive positions try to tell musicians what is good and what is bad music." However, Evans and Davis kept in touch throughout their lives.


title: Bill Evans

text: While Evans considered himself an acoustic pianist, from the 1970 album "From Left to Right" on, he also released some material with Fender-Rhodes piano intermissions. However, unlike other jazz players (such as Herbie Hancock) he never fully embraced the new instrument, and invariably ended up returning to the acoustic sound. "I don't think too much about the electronic thing, except that it's kind of fun to have it as an alternate voice. ... [It's] merely an alternate keyboard instrument, that offers a certain kind of sound that's appropriate sometimes. I find that it's a refreshing auxiliary to the piano—but I don't need it ... I don't enjoy spending a lot of time with the electric piano. I play it for a period of time, then I quickly tire of it, and I want to get back to the acoustic piano." He commented that electronic music: "just doesn't attract me. I'm of a certain period, a certain evolution. I hear music differently. For me, comparing electric bass to acoustic bass is sacrilege."


title: Bill Evans

text: Bill Evans was an avid reader, in particular philosophy and humorous books. His shelves held works by Plato, Voltaire, Whitehead, Santayana, Freud, Margaret Mead, Sartre and Thomas Merton; and he had a special fondness for Thomas Hardy's work. He was fascinated with Eastern religions and philosophies including Islam, Zen, and Buddhism. It was Evans who introduced John Coltrane to the Indian philosophy of Krishnamurti.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans liked to paint and draw. He was also a keen golfer, a hobby that began on his father's golf course. Evans had a fondness for horse racing and frequently gambled hundreds of dollars, often winning. During his last years, he even owned a racehorse named "Annie Hall" with producer Jack Rollins.


title: Bill Evans

text: Music critic Richard S. Ginell wrote: "With the passage of time, Bill Evans has become an entire school unto himself for pianists and a singular mood unto himself for listeners. There is no more influential jazz-oriented pianist—only McCoy Tyner exerts nearly as much pull among younger players and journeymen."


title: Bill Evans

text: During his short tenure with Davis in 1958, when the band left New York to go on the road, Evans sometimes received cold receptions from the mostly black audiences. Evans later acknowledged that some felt his presence threatened the black pride aspect of the famed Davis band's success. Pettinger believed in a recording, for his solo on a tune named "Walkin'", Evans received noticeably less applause than the other soloists, and for that on "All Of You", none at all. Davis and the other band members would respond "he's supposed to be there, Miles wants him there" on the bandstand whenever audience members made comments. Davis noted in his autobiography that Evans was sensitive to the criticism and let it get to him. This might have been a contributing factor to Evans leaving the band after just seven months.


title: Bill Evans

text: When Ken Burns' television miniseries "Jazz" was released in 2001, it was criticised for neglecting Evans's work after his departure from the Miles Davis' sextet.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans has left his mark on such players as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Paul Bley, Keith Jarrett, Steve Kuhn, Warren Bernhardt, Michel Petrucciani, John Taylor, Vince Guaraldi, Stefano Bollani, Don Friedman, Marian McPartland, Denny Zeitlin, Bobo Stenson, Fred Hersch, Bill Charlap, Lyle Mays, Eliane Elias, Diana Krall, Ralph Towner, John McLaughlin, Lenny Breau, and Rick Wright of Pink Floyd, classical pianists Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Denis Matsuev, and many other musicians in jazz and other music genres.


title: Bill Evans

text: Many of his tunes, such as "Waltz for Debby", "Turn Out the Stars", "Very Early", and "Funkallero", have become often-recorded jazz standards.


title: Bill Evans

text: During his lifetime, Evans was honored with 31 Grammy nominations and seven Awards. In 1994, he was posthumously honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.


title: Bill Evans

text: The Bill Evans Jazz Festival at Southeastern Louisiana University began in 2002. A Bill Evans painting hangs in the Recital Hall lobby of the Department of Music and Performing Arts. The Center for Southeastern Louisiana Studies at the Simms Library holds the Bill Evans archives. He was named Outstanding Alumnus of the year in 1969 at Southeastern Louisiana University.


title: Bill Evans

text: Evans's repertoire consisted of both jazz standards and original compositions. Many of these were dedicated to people close to him. Some known examples are: "Waltz for Debby", for his niece; "For Nenette", for his wife; "Letter to Evan", for his son; "NYC's No Lark", an anagram of Sonny Clark in memory of his friend the pianist; "Re: Person I Knew", another anagram, of the name of his friend and producer Orrin Keepnews; "We Will Meet Again", for his brother; "Peri's Scope", for girlfriend Peri Cousins; "One for Helen" and "Song for Helen", for manager Helen Keane; "B minor Waltz (For Ellaine)", for girlfriend Ellaine Schultz; "Laurie", for girlfriend Laurie Verchomin; "Yet Ne'er Broken", an anagram of the name of cocaine dealer Robert Kenney; "Maxine", for his stepdaughter; "Tiffany", for Joe LaBarbera's daughter; "Knit For Mary F." for fan Mary Franksen from Omaha.


title: Karim Lala

text: Karim Lala (1911 – 19 February 2002), born as Abdul Karim Sher Khan in the Samalam Village of the Shegal District of the Kunar province of Afghanistan, was infamous as one of the three "mafia dons of Mumbai" in India for more than two decades from the sixties to the early eighties. The other two being Mastan Mirza aka Haji Mastan and Varadarajan Mudaliar.


title: Karim Lala

text: Karim Lala was an Afghan who emigrated from Kunar, Afghanistan to Mumbai (then Bombay) in the 1920s. His family settled in one of the most densely populated and impoverished Muslim communities of Bhendi Bazaar in South Mumbai.


title: Karim Lala

text: Starting as an ordinary worker in the Mumbai docks, he later joined a gang of ethnic Pashtuns (called "Pathans" in India) who worked as illegal recovery agents for Marwari and Gujarati money lenders, landlords, and businessmen. These money lenders and landlords employed the burly Pathans whose tall imposing size and intimidating demeanor made it easy to recover money from defaulting debtors and evicting tenants and owners from prime properties in the expensive south Mumbai area.


title: Karim Lala

text: For over two decades, he was the leader of the dreaded "Pathan Gang" that operated in impoverished and crime-infested Muslim ghettos of South Mumbai like Dongri, Nagpada, Bhendi Bazaar, and Mohammad Ali Road.


title: Karim Lala

text: The Pathan Gang was involved in operating illegal gambling (satta) and liquor dens, illegal money recovery, illegal land evictions, kidnapping, protection racket (hafta), contract killing (supari), distribution of narcotics and counterfeit currency.


title: Karim Lala

text: Lala soon rose up the ranks to be the chief of the "Pathan Gang" that became notorious for contract killings, forced evictions from property, kidnapping, and extortion. The gang operated several "carrom clubs" that were a facade for illegal moneylending, gambling, and betting rackets.


title: Karim Lala

text: In the 1970s, Lala agreed to a pact with the other two ganglords, Haji Mastan and Varadarajan Mudaliar to divide Mumbai amongst themselves so that they could freely run their criminal activities without any conflict between each other.


title: Karim Lala

text: Due to failing health during the late seventies, Lala gradually transferred the leadership of the Pathan gang to his nephew, Samad Khan and then managed his hotel and transport business.


title: Karim Lala

text: Although Lala had several illegitimate businesses, his legitimate business included two hotels (Al Karim Hotel and New India Hotel) and a travel and passport agency called New India Tours and Travels.


title: Karim Lala

text: Lala remained friendly with his other counterparts- Haji Mastan and Varadarajan. He was also close to Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray


title: Karim Lala

text: In 1980, Lala unsuccessfully tried to mediate peace between his nephew, Samad Khan and his rivals, Shabir Ibrahim Kaskar and Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar.


title: Karim Lala

text: Lala also held a weekly "durbar" where people from different walks of life narrated their grievances to Lala and he helped them financially or to get justice using his gang's muscle power.


title: Karim Lala

text: He died on 19 February 2002 at the age of 90. His younger brother (Ali Mohammed) was living in Kabul Afghanistan at that time and could never meet his brother.


title: Karim Lala

text: During his peak, Lala frequently invited several personalities from Bollywood (Hindi film industry) to his daawats (parties) and Eid celebrations. Many characters from Bollywood movies closely resemble Karim Lala and his mannerisms and accent.


title: Karim Lala

text: The 1973 movie, "Zanjeer", the writer duo, Salim–Javed created a Pathan character called "Sher Khan" (played by actor Pran) whose mannerisms resembled Karim Lala.


title: Karim Lala

text: Widely considered to be the inspiration for the magnanimous crime lord Abdel Khader Khan in the 2003 bestselling novel Shantaram, Karim shares personal and behavioral similarities with the fictional mafia don.


title: Karim Lala

text: Ajay Devgn played the character of Karim Lala in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2022 film Gangubai Kathiawadi.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: John Chapman (September 26, 1774March 18, 1845), better known as Johnny Appleseed, was an American pioneer nurseryman who introduced apple trees to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Ontario, as well as the northern counties of present-day West Virginia. He became an American legend while still alive, due to his kind, generous ways, his leadership in conservation, and the symbolic importance he attributed to apples. He was also a missionary for The New Church (Swedenborgian) and the inspiration for many museums and historical sites such as the Johnny Appleseed Museum in Urbana, Ohio.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Chapman was born on September 26, 1774, in Leominster, Massachusetts, the second child of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman (née Simonds, married February 8, 1770). His birthplace has a granite marker, and the street is now called "Johnny Appleseed Lane".


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Chapman's mother, Elizabeth, died in 1776, shortly after giving birth to a second son, Nathaniel Jr., who died a few days later. In 1780, his father, Nathaniel, who was in the military, returned to Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where, in the summer of the same year, he married Lucy Cooley.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Author Rosella Rice stated, "Johnny had one sister, Persis Broom, of Indiana. She was not at all like him; a very ordinary woman, talkative, and free in her frequent, 'says she's' and 'says I's.'"


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: According to some accounts, an 18-year-old John persuaded his 11-year-old half-brother Nathaniel Cooley Chapman to go west with him in 1792. The duo apparently lived a nomadic life until their father brought his large family west in 1805 and met up with them in Ohio. The younger Nathaniel decided to stay and help their father farm the land.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Shortly after the brothers parted ways, John began his apprenticeship as an orchardist under a Mr. Crawford, who grew apples, thus inspiring Chapman's life journey of planting apple trees. In 1800, at the age of 26, Chapman was in Licking River, Ohio. His first orchard was on the farm of Isaac Stadden in Licking County. In 1806, he embarked upon a canoe voyage down the Ohio, Muskingum, and Walhonding rivers, using two canoes lashed together to transport himself and his seeds.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: There are stories of Johnny Appleseed practicing his nurseryman craft in the area of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and of picking seeds from the pomace at Potomac River cider mills in the late 1790s. Another story has Chapman living in Pittsburgh on Grant's Hill in 1794 at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: The popular image is of Johnny Appleseed spreading apple seeds randomly everywhere he went. In fact, he planted nurseries rather than orchards, built fences around them to protect them from livestock, left the nurseries in the care of a neighbor who sold trees on shares, and returned every year or two to tend the nursery. He planted his first nursery on the bank of Brokenstraw Creek, south of Warren, Pennsylvania. Next, he seems to have moved to Venango County, along the shore of French Creek, but many of these nurseries were in the Mohican River area of north-central Ohio. This area included the towns of Mansfield, Lisbon, Lucas, Perrysville and Loudonville.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In 1817, a bulletin of the Church of New Jerusalem printed in Manchester, England, was the first to publish a written report about Chapman. It described a missionary who traveled around the West to sow apple seeds and pass out books of the New Church.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In 1819, Chapman was nearly killed in an accident in Ohio. One morning he was picking his crops in a tree when he fell and caught his neck in the fork of the tree. Shortly after he fell, one of his helpers, eight-year-old John White, found him struggling in the tree. Unable to get him out of the tree, young John White cut the tree down, saving Chapman's life.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In 1822, the first known use of "John Appleseed" was written in a letter from a member of the New Church.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: According to "Harper's New Monthly Magazine", toward the end of his career he was present when an itinerant missionary was exhorting an open-air congregation in Mansfield, Ohio. The sermon was long and severe on the topic of extravagance, because the pioneers were buying such indulgences as calico and imported tea. "Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?" the preacher repeatedly asked, until Johnny Appleseed, his endurance worn out, walked up to the preacher, put his bare foot on the stump that had served as a pulpit, and said, "Here's your primitive Christian!" The flummoxed sermonizer dismissed the congregation.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Author Rosella Rice, who met Chapman in his later years, stated in the 1863 "History of Ashland County, Ohio":His personal appearance was as singular as his character. He was a small, "chunked" man, quick and restless in his motions and conversation; his beard, though not long, was unshaven, and his hair was long and dark, and his eye black and sparkling. He lived the roughest life, and often slept in the woods. His clothing was mostly old, being generally given to him in exchange for apple-trees. He went bare-footed, and often traveled miles through the snow in that way...[He] wore on his head a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot...Historian Paul Aron argues, "Chapman was actually a successful businessman. He bought many of the parcels of land on which he planted his seeds and ultimately accumulated about twelve hundred acres across three states...He wore pauper's clothing by choice and not out of necessity."


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Chapman would tell stories to children and spread New Church gospel to the adults, receiving in return a floor to sleep on for the night, and sometimes supper. Rice stated, "We can hear him read now, just as he did that summer day, when we were busy quilting upstairs, and he lay near the door, his voice rising denunciatory and thrilling—strong and loud as the roar of wind and waves, then soft and soothing as the balmy airs that quivered the morning-glory leaves about his gray beard. His was a strange eloquence at times, and he was undoubtedly a man of genius.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: He made several trips back East, both to visit his sister and to replenish his supply of Swedenborgian literature.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: He cared very deeply about animals, including insects. Henry Howe visited all the counties in Ohio in the early nineteenth century and collected several stories from the 1830s, when Johnny Appleseed was still alive:One cool autumnal night, while lying by his camp-fire in the woods, he observed that the mosquitoes flew in the blaze and were burned. Johnny, who wore on his head a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot, filled it with water and quenched the fire, and afterwards remarked, "God forbid that I should build a fire for my comfort, that should be the means of destroying any of His creatures."


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Another time, he allegedly made a camp-fire in a snowstorm at the end of a hollow log in which he intended to pass the night but found it occupied by a bear and cubs, so he removed his fire to the other end and slept on the snow in the open air, rather than disturb the bear.In a story collected by Eric Braun, he had a pet wolf that had started following him after he healed its injured leg.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: More controversially, he also planted dogfennel during his travels, believing that it was a useful medicinal herb. It is now regarded as a noxious, invasive weed.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: According to another story, he heard that a horse was to be put down, so he bought the horse, bought a few grassy acres nearby, and turned it out to recover. When it did, he gave the horse to someone needy, exacting a promise to treat it humanely.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: During his later life, he was a vegetarian. Chapman chose not to marry, as he believed he would find his soulmate in Heaven if she did not appear to him on Earth.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Different dates are listed for his death. "Harper's New Monthly Magazine" of November 1871 was apparently incorrect in saying that he died in mid-1847, though this is taken by many as the primary source of information about John Chapman. Multiple Indiana newspapers reported his death date as March 18, 1845. The "Goshen Democrat" published a death notice for him in its March 27, 1845, edition, citing the day of death as March 18 of that year. The paper's death notice read:


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Rosella Rice wrote in 1863;He died near Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1846 or 1848, a stranger among strangers, who kindly cared for him. He died the death of the righteous, calmly and peacefully, and with little suffering or pain. So long as his memory lives will a grateful people say: "He went about doing good."The site of his grave is also disputed. Developers of the Canterbury Green apartment complex and golf course in Fort Wayne, Indiana, claim that his grave is there, marked by a rock. That is where the Worth cabin sat in which he died.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Steven Fortriede, director of the Allen County Public Library (ACPL) and author of the 1978 "Johnny Appleseed", believes that another gravesite is the correct site, in Johnny Appleseed Park in Fort Wayne. Johnny Appleseed Park is a Fort Wayne city park that adjoins Archer Park, an Allen County park. Archer Park is the site of John Chapman's grave marker and used to be a part of the Archer family farm.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: The Worth family attended First Baptist Church in Fort Wayne, according to records at ACPL, which has one of the nation's top genealogy collections. According to an 1858 interview with Richard Worth Jr., Chapman was buried "respectably" in the Archer cemetery, and Fortriede believes that use of the term "respectably" indicates that Chapman was buried in the hallowed ground of Archer cemetery instead of near the cabin where he died.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In 1934, a committee of the Johnny Appleseed Commission Council of the City of Fort Wayne reported, "[A]s a part of the celebration of Indiana's 100th birthday in 1916 an iron fence was placed in the Archer graveyard by the Horticulture Society of Indiana setting off the grave of Johnny Appleseed. At that time, there were men living who had attended the funeral of Johnny Appleseed. Direct and accurate evidence was available then. There was little or no reason for them to make a mistake about the location of this grave. They located the grave in the Archer burying ground."


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Johnny Appleseed left an estate of over of valuable nurseries to his sister. He also owned four plots in Allen County, Indiana, including a nursery in Milan Township with 15,000 trees, and two plots in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He bought the southwest quarter (160 acres) of section 26, Mohican Township, Ashland County, Ohio, but did not record the deed and lost the property.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: The financial panic of 1837 took a toll on his estate. Trees brought only two or three cents each, as opposed to the "fippenny bit" (about six and a quarter cents) that he usually got. Some of his land was sold to pay taxes following his death, and litigation used up much of the rest.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1928, American song poet Vachel Lindsay published poems about Johnny Appleseed. One of these poems was the source text for Eunice Lea Kettering's prize-winning choral-orchestral composition "Johnny Appleseed." Gail Kubik composed a work for bass, chorus and orchestra called "In Praise of Johnny Appleseed"; this work was also based on the eponymous Vachel Lindsay poem, and entered into the same 1942 National Federation of Music Clubs composition competition as Kettering's work.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In 1933, poets Rosemary Carr Benét and Stephen Vincent Benét mythologized Appleseed in children's poem book "A Book of Americans."


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In Disney's 1948 film "Melody Time", Appleseed is featured in an animated musical segment titled "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed".""


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Since 1975 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Johnny Appleseed Festival has been held the third full weekend in September in Johnny Appleseed Park and in Archer Park. Musicians, demonstrators, and vendors dress in early-19th-century attire and offer food and beverages that would have been available then. Similar festivals are held in Sheffield, PA; Apple Creek, OH; Crystal Lake, IL; Lisbon, OH; and Paradise, CA.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In 2008 the Fort Wayne Wizards, a minor-league baseball club, changed their name to the Fort Wayne TinCaps. In their first season with the new name, 2009, the Tincaps won their only league championship. The name "Tincaps" refers to the tin hat (or pot) which Johnny Appleseed allegedly wore. The team mascot is named "Johnny".


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: From 1962 to 1980, a high-school athletic league made up of schools from around the Mansfield, Ohio, area used the name the "Johnny Appleseed Conference".


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: A memorial in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, stands on the summit of the grounds in Section 134. A circular garden surrounds a large stone upon which a bronze statue of Chapman stands, face looking skywards, holding an apple-seedling tree in one hand and a book in the other. A bronze cenotaph identifies him as Johnny Appleseed and gives a brief biography and eulogy.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: March 11 and September 26 are sometimes celebrated as Johnny Appleseed Day. The September date is Appleseed's acknowledged birthdate, but the March date is sometimes preferred because it falls during planting season.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Johnny Appleseed Elementary School is a public school in Leominster, Massachusetts, his birthplace. Mansfield, Ohio, one of Appleseed's stops in his peregrinations, was home to Johnny Appleseed Middle School until it closed in 1989.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: In 2016, John Chapman appeared in Tracy Chevalier's historical fiction novel "At the Edge of the Orchard."


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: A large terracotta sculpture of Johnny Appleseed, created by Viktor Schreckengost (1906-2008), adorns the front of the Lakewood High School Civic Auditorium in Lakewood, Ohio. Although the local board of education deemed Appleseed too "eccentric" a figure to grace the front of the building (renaming the sculpture simply "Early Settler"), students, teachers, and parents alike still call the sculpture by its intended name: "Johnny Appleseed".


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Urbana University in Urbana, Ohio, maintains one of two Johnny Appleseed museums in the world, which is open to the public. The Johnny Appleseed Educational Center and Museum hosts a number of artifacts, including a tree that is believed to have been planted by Johnny Appleseed. They also provide a number of services for research, including a national registry of Johnny Appleseed's relatives. In 2011 the museum was renovated and updated. The educational center and museum was founded on the belief that those who have the opportunity to study the life of Johnny Appleseed will share his appreciation of education, his country, the environment, peace, moral integrity, and leadership.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Supposedly, the only surviving tree planted by Johnny Appleseed grows on the farm of Richard and Phyllis Algeo of Nova, Ohio. Some marketers claim that it is a Rambo; some even make the claim that the Rambo was "Johnny Appleseed's favorite variety", ignoring the fact that he had religious objections to grafting and preferred wild apples to all named varieties. It appears that most nurseries are calling the tree the "Johnny Appleseed" variety, rather than a Rambo. Unlike the mid-summer Rambo, the Johnny Appleseed variety ripens in September and is a baking-applesauce variety similar to an Albemarle Pippin. Nurseries offer the Johnny Appleseed tree as an immature apple tree for planting, with scions from the Algeo stock grafted on them.


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Author Michael Pollan believes that since Chapman was against grafting, his apples were not of an edible variety and could be used only for cider: "Really, what Johnny Appleseed was doing and the reason he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio and Indiana was he was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. He was our American Dionysus."


title: Johnny Appleseed

text: Joe Strummer of punk rock band The Clash devoted a song to Johnny Appleseed on his album Global a Go-Go.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: Zoya Akhtar (born 14 October 1972) is an Indian film director and screenwriter who works in Hindi cinema. After completing a diploma in filmmaking from NYU, she assisted directors such as Mira Nair, Tony Gerber and Dev Benegal, before becoming a writer and director herself. Akhtar is the recipient of several accolades, including five Filmfare Awards. Zoya, along with Reema Kagti founded Tiger Baby Films, a film and web studio, in October 2015.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: She has directed movies such as "Luck by Chance" (2009), "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara" (2011) and "Sheila Ki Jawani", a segment of "Bombay Talkies" (2013). She has co-written "" (2012) alongside Reema Kagti. She then went on to direct "Dil Dhadakne Do" (2015) and "Gully Boy" (2019).


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: Zoya Akhtar was born to poet, lyricist and screenwriter Javed Akhtar and screenwriter Honey Irani. Akhtar's stepmother is actress Shabana Azmi. Her younger brother, Farhan Akhtar, is an actor and director. She attended Maneckji Cooper and earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Xavier's College, both from Mumbai. Later, she joined the New York University Tisch School of the Arts to learn film production.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: Her great-grandfather, Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, a scholar of Islamic studies and theology, edited the first diwan of Mirza Ghalib on his request and later became a figure during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 in his native Khairabad.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: She is great-granddaughter of Urdu poet Muztar Khairabadi and granddaughter of poet Jan Nisar Akhtar.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: Akhtar grew up in an agnostic environment and along with her brother Farhan and father Javed Akhtar, and does not believe in any religion.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: Akhtar started her career as the co-director of a music video called "Price of Bullets" for a rock band called Pentagram. She has worked as a casting director for films including "Split Wide Open" (1999) and "Dil Chahta Hai" (2001), and as an assistant director for her brother Farhan Akhtar's films "Dil Chahta Hai" and "Lakshya" (2004). She then worked as an executive producer for her longtime associate and friend Reema Kagti's "Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd." (2007), also produced by Excel Entertainment.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: Akhtar made her directorial debut with "Luck By Chance" (2009), starring her brother Farhan Akhtar and Konkona Sen Sharma. It tells the story of a struggling actor who breaks into the industry. The film was well received by critics, despite underperforming at the box office.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: In 2011, she directed "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara", which starred an ensemble cast of Hrithik Roshan, Farhan Akhtar, Abhay Deol, Katrina Kaif and Kalki Koechlin. It turned out to be a huge commercial success at the box-office and won her the Filmfare Award for Best Director.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: In 2013, Akhtar teamed up with Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar for "Bombay Talkies". It was made as a celebration of 100 years of Indian cinema. She then went on to direct "Dil Dhadakne Do" (2015), a film based on a dysfunctional Punjabi family starring Anil Kapoor as an egotistical industrialist, Shefali Shah as his bitter socialite-wife, and Priyanka Chopra and Ranveer Singh as their children. The film also featured Anushka Sharma and Farhan Akhtar as love interests for Ranveer Singh and Priyanka Chopra respectively.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: In 2018, she then again teamed up with Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar for "Lust Stories", which premiered on Netflix in June 2018.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: After "Dil Dhadakne Do", Akhtar directed "Gully Boy" starring Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt, loosely based on the lives of Mumbai rapper Naezy. "Gully Boy" won a second Best Director award at Filmfare. She thus became the only female director to win the award twice.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: Zoya and Kagti also worked on a story for a web series produced by Tiger Baby Films and Excel Entertainment for Amazon Prime called "Made in Heaven", a story about two wedding planners in New Delhi.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: In October 2019, she began directing a segment of "Ghost Stories" (2020), a horror anthology film, consisting of 4 short film segments. Other segments are directed by Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, and Karan Johar. "Ghost Stories" premiered on Netflix on 1 January 2020.


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: In November 2021, Netflix announced that Akhtar would direct a live-action feature film adaptation of "The Archies".


title: Zoya Akhtar

text: She appeared on the Valentine's Day charity show of "Kaun Banega Crorepati" along with her brother Farhan Akhtar. She also appeared in a very brief role as Rasa Devi's (Rekha's) courtesan in "" in September 1996. She and Shah Rukh Khan had a 'fireside chat' with Jeff Bezos of Amazon in January 2020.


title: All About Eve

text: All About Eve is a 1950 American drama film written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. It is based on the 1946 short story "The Wisdom of Eve" by Mary Orr, although Orr does not receive a screen credit.


title: All About Eve

text: The film stars Bette Davis as Margo Channing, a highly regarded but aging Broadway star, and Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, an ambitious young fan who maneuvers herself into Channing's life, ultimately threatening Channing's career and her personal relationships. The film co-stars George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, and Hugh Marlowe, and features Thelma Ritter, Marilyn Monroe in one of her earliest roles, Gregory Ratoff, Barbara Bates and Walter Hampden.


title: All About Eve

text: "All About Eve" held its world premiere in New York City on October 13, 1950. Praised by critics at the time of its release, "All About Eve" received a record 14 Academy Award nominations. and won six, including Best Picture. "All About Eve" is the only film in Oscar history to receive four female acting nominations (Davis and Baxter as Best Actress, Holm and Ritter as Best Supporting Actress). Widely considered as among the greatest films of all time, in 1990, it became one of 25 films selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry, deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film was ranked No. 16 on AFI's 1998 list of the 100 best American films.


title: All About Eve

text: Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is a Broadway star who has recently turned 40 and worries about what her advancing age will mean for her career. After a performance of Margo's latest play "Aged in Wood," Margo's close friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm), wife of the play's author Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), brings in besotted fan Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) to meet Margo. Eve tells the group gathered in Margo's dressing roomKaren, Lloyd, and Margo's maid Birdie Coonan (Thelma Ritter)that she followed Margo's last theatrical tour to New York City after seeing her perform in San Francisco. She tells an engrossing story of growing up poor in Wisconsin and losing her young husband Eddie in the South Pacific during World War II. Margo is moved and befriends Eve, takes her into her home and hires her as her assistant, upsetting Birdie.


title: All About Eve

text: Eve quickly manipulates her way into Margo's life, acting as her secretary and adoring fan. She places a long-distance phone call to Margo's boyfriend Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill) when Margo forgets his birthday. Margo becomes increasingly distrustful and bitter toward Eve, particularly after she catches Eve taking a bow to an empty theater while pretending to wear Margo's costume. Margo asks her producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff) to hire Eve at his office, but instead, Eve manages to become Margo's understudy without Margo's knowledge.


title: All About Eve

text: As Margo's irritation grows, Karen feels sorry for Eve. In hopes of humbling Margo, Karen arranges for her to miss a performance so that Eve may perform in her place. Eve invites the city's theater critics to attend the performance – including the acerbic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) – which is a triumph for her. Later that night, Eve tries to seduce Bill, but he rejects her. Instead, Addison takes her under his wing and interviews her for a column harshly criticizing Margo for resisting younger talent.


title: All About Eve

text: Margo and Bill announce their engagement at dinner with Lloyd and Karen. Eve summons Karen to the ladies' room and, after first appearing regretful, delivers an ultimatum: Karen must recommend her to Lloyd for the lead role of Cora in Lloyd's next play or she will reveal Karen's role in Margo's missed performance. Before Karen can talk with Lloyd, Margo announces to everyone's surprise that she does not wish to play Cora, as she is too old for the role"."


title: All About Eve

text: Eve is cast as Cora. Just before the premiere of the new play in New Haven, Eve presents Addison with her next plan: to marry Lloyd, whom she claims is in love with her, so that he can write plays in which she can be the star"." Angered with Eve's antics, Addison reveals that he knows that her backstory is a lie; her real name is Gertrude Slescynski, she was never married, and she had been paid to leave town over an affair with her boss. With this information, Addison blackmails Eve, whom he says now "belongs" to him.


title: All About Eve

text: Months later, Eve is a Broadway star headed for Hollywood. At an awards banquet, she thanks Margo, Bill, Lloyd, and Karen, while all four stare back at her coldly. Eve skips a party in her own honor and returns home, where she encounters Phoebe (Barbara Bates), a teenage fan who had slipped into her apartment and fallen asleep. Phoebe (her chosen name as she admits, not her real name) professes her adoration and tries to insinuate herself into Eve's life, offering to pack Eve's trunk for Hollywood. Eve invites her to stay the night rather than take the long trip back to Brooklyn by subway. While Eve rests, Addison brings Eve's award to the door. He sees that Phoebe will play the same role in Eve's life that Eve had played in so many others' lives. After Addison leaves, Eve asks who was at the door, Phoebe lies and says that it was a taxi driver. Phoebe, then out of sight of Eve, wears the elegant robe that Eve wore to the banquet and poses in front of a three-paned mirror, holding the award and bowing.


title: All About Eve

text: The story of "All About Eve" originated in an anecdote related to Mary Orr by actress Elisabeth Bergner. While performing in "The Two Mrs. Carrolls" during 1943 and 1944, Bergner allowed a young fan to become part of her household and employed her as an assistant, but later regretted her generosity when the woman attempted to undermine her. Referring to her only as "the terrible girl", Bergner related the events to Orr, who used it as the basis for her short story "The Wisdom of Eve" (1946). In the story, Orr gives the girl an even more ruthless character and allows her to succeed in stealing the older actress's career and the husband of the unnamed female narrator. Bergner later confirmed the basis of the story in her autobiography "Bewundert viel, und viel gescholten" ("Greatly Admired and Greatly Scolded").


title: All About Eve

text: In 1949, Joseph Mankiewicz was considering a story about an aging actress and, upon reading "The Wisdom of Eve," felt that the conniving girl would be a useful element. He sent a memo to Darryl F. Zanuck saying it "fits in with an original idea [of mine] and can be combined. Superb starring role for Susan Hayward." Mankiewicz presented a film treatment of the combined stories under the title "Best Performance." He changed the main character's name from Margola Cranston to Margo Channing and retained several of Orr's characters – Eve Harrington, Lloyd and Karen Richards and Miss Casswell – while removing Margo's husband completely and replacing him with a new character, Bill Sampson. The intention was to depict Margo in a new relationship and allow Eve to threaten Margo's professional and personal lives. Mankiewicz also added the characters Addison DeWitt, Birdie Coonan, Max Fabian and Phoebe.


title: All About Eve

text: Zanuck was enthusiastic and provided numerous suggestions for improving the screenplay. In some sections, he felt that Mankiewicz's writing lacked subtlety or provided excessive detail. He suggested diluting Birdie Coonan's mistrust of Eve so the audience would not recognize Eve as a villainess until much later in the story. Zanuck reduced the screenplay by about 50 pages and chose the title "All About Eve" from the opening scene in which Addison DeWitt says that he will soon tell "more of Eve ... All about Eve, in fact."


title: All About Eve

text: Among the actresses originally considered to play Margo Channing were Mankiewicz's original inspiration Susan Hayward, who was rejected by Zanuck as "too young", Marlene Dietrich, dismissed as "too German" and Gertrude Lawrence, who was ruled out when her lawyer insisted that she not have to drink or smoke in the film and that the script would be rewritten to allow her to sing a torch song. Zanuck favored Barbara Stanwyck, but she was not available. Tallulah Bankhead was considered, as was Joan Crawford, who was working on the film "The Damned Don't Cry."


title: All About Eve

text: The role went to Claudette Colbert, but she withdrew after an injury shortly before filming began. Mankiewicz briefly considered Ingrid Bergman before offering the role to Bette Davis. Davis, who had recently ended an 18-year association with Warner Bros. after several poorly received films, accepted the role after realizing that the script was among the best that she had ever read. Margo had been originally conceived as genteel and knowingly humorous, but with the casting of Davis, Mankiewicz revised the character to introduce abrasive qualities. Mankiewicz praised Davis for her professionalism and for the caliber of her performance.


title: All About Eve

text: Anne Baxter had spent a decade in supporting roles and had won the 1946 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for "The Razor's Edge." She won the role of Eve after Jeanne Crain, the first choice, became pregnant. Crain was at the height of her popularity and had established a career playing likable heroines; Zanuck believed that she lacked the "bitch virtuosity" required by the part and that audiences would not accept her as a deceitful character.


title: All About Eve

text: Mankiewicz greatly admired Thelma Ritter and wrote the character of Birdie Coonan for her after working with her on "A Letter to Three Wives" in 1949. As Coonan is the only character immediately suspicious of Eve Harrington, Mankiewicz was confident that Ritter would contribute a shrewd characterization that cast doubt on Eve and provided a counterpoint to the more theatrical personalities of the other characters. Marilyn Monroe, relatively unknown at the time, was cast as Miss Casswell, referred to by DeWitt as a "graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art". Monroe won the part after a lobbying campaign by her agent, despite Zanuck's initial antipathy and belief that she was better suited to comedy. The inexperienced Monroe was cowed by Davis, and it took 11 takes to complete the scene in the theater lobby; when Davis barked at her, Monroe left the set to vomit. Smaller roles were filled by Gregory Ratoff as the producer Max Fabian, Barbara Bates as Phoebe and Walter Hampden as the host of the award ceremony. Hampden was the president of the prestigious Players Club in New York, a club for actors that gives a lifetime achievement award.


title: All About Eve

text: The film earned $3.1 million in receipts in the United States during its release, more than double its original budget of $1.4 million. To date the film has a cumulative gross of $8.4 million, more than five times its production costs.


title: All About Eve

text: "All About Eve" received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics upon its release on October 13, 1950, at a New York City premiere. The film's competitor, "Sunset Boulevard," released the same year, drew similar praise, and the two were often favorably compared. Film critic Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" loved the picture, stating that "a fine Darryl Zanuck production, excellent music and an air of ultra-class complete this superior satire." "Variety" called it "a literate, adult film" with "exceedingly well-cast performances," while "Harrison's Reports" called it "a fascinating, continually absorbing story about Broadway theatrical people, given a mature treatment and penetrated with realistic dialogue and flashes of slick, sardonic humor." John McCarten of "The New Yorker" called it "a thoroughly entertaining movie".


title: All About Eve

text: Writing in 2000, film critic Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun Times" praised the film, saying Bette Davis' character "veteran actress Margo Channing in "All About Eve" was her greatest role." Boxoffice.com stated that it "is a classic of the American cinema – to this day the quintessential depiction of ruthless ambition in the entertainment industry, with legendary performances from Bette Davis, Anne Baxter and George Sanders anchoring one of the very best films from one of Hollywood's very best Golden Era filmmakers: Joseph L. Mankiewicz."


title: All About Eve

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, "All About Eve" holds an approval rating of 99% based on 107 reviews, with an average rating of 9.30/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Smart, sophisticated, and devastatingly funny, "All About Eve" is a Hollywood classic that only improves with age." Metacritic assigned a weighted average score of 98 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: All About Eve

text: Critics and academics have delineated various themes in the film. Rebecca Flint Marx, in her "Allmovie" review, notes the antagonism that existed between Broadway and Hollywood at the time, stating that the "script summoned into existence a whole array of painfully recognizable theatre types, from the aging, egomaniacal grand dame to the outwardly docile, inwardly scheming ingenue to the powerful critic who reeks of malignant charm." Abel Green, writing in "Variety" said, "The snide references to picture people, the plug for San Francisco ("an oasis of civilization in the California desert") and the like are purposeful and manifest an intelligent reflex from a group of hyper-talented people towards the picture business."


title: All About Eve

text: Roger Ebert, in his review in "The Great Movies", says Eve Harrington is "a universal type", and focuses on the aging actress plot line, comparing the film to "Sunset Boulevard." Similarly, Marc Lee's 2006 review of the film for "The Daily Telegraph" describes a subtext "into the darker corners of show business, exposing its inherent ageism, especially when it comes to female stars." Kathleen Woodward's 1999 book, "Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Theories of Contemporary Culture)", also discusses themes that appeared in many of the "aging actress" films of the 1950s and 1960s, including "All About Eve." She reasons that Margo has three options: "To continue to work, she can perform the role of a young woman, one she no longer seems that interested in. She can take up the position of the angry bitch, the drama queen who holds court (the deliberate camp that Susan Sontag finds in this film). Or she can accept her culture's gendered discourse of aging which figures her as in her moment of fading. Margo ultimately chooses the latter option, accepting her position as one of loss."


title: All About Eve

text: Professor Robert J. Corber, who has studied homophobia within the cultural context of the Cold War in the United States, posits that the foundational theme in "All About Eve" is that the defense of the norms of heterosexuality, specifically in terms of patriarchal marriage, must be upheld in the face of challenges from female agency and homosexuality. The nurturing heterosexual relationships of Margo and Bill and of Karen and Lloyd serve to contrast with the loveless relationship predation and sterile careerism of the homosexual characters, Eve and Addison. Eve uses her physical femininity as a weapon to try to break up the marriages of both couples, and Addison's extreme cynicism serves as a model of Eve's future. Even film reviewer Kenneth Geist, despite being critical of the emphasis that Sam Staggs' book "All About All About Eve" places on the film's homosexual elements, nonetheless acknowledged that Eve's lesbianism seemed apparent; specifically, Geist states that "manifestations of Eve's lesbianism are only twice briefly discernible." Geist asserted that Mankiewicz "was highly contemptuous of both male and female homosexuals," although Mankiewicz himself suggested otherwise in an interview in which he argued that society should "drop its vendetta against them."


title: All About Eve

text: Homosexuality was often linked to communism during the Cold War's Lavender Scare and critics have written about film's subtle, yet central, Cold War narrative. The fair amount of subtlety employed in "All About Eve" is seen as primarily being due to Production Code restrictions on the depiction of homosexuals in the media during this time. However, notwithstanding those restrictions, Corber cites the film as but one example of a recurrent theme within American film of the homosexual as an emotionally bereft predator. The documentary "The Celluloid Closet" also affirms this theme to which Corber refers, including citing numerous other film examples from the same Production Code time period in which "All About Eve" was made.


title: All About Eve

text: Another important theme of the film, in terms of war politics and sexuality, involves the post-World War II pressure placed upon women to resume "traditional" female roles. This is illustrated in the contrast between Margo's mockery of Karen Richards for being a "happy little housewife" and her lengthy and inspired monologue, as a reformed woman later, about the virtuousness of marriage, including how a woman is not truly a woman without having a man beside her. This submissive and feminine Margo is contrasted with the theatricality, combativeness, and egotism of the earlier career woman Margo, and the film's two homosexual characters. Margo quips that Eve should place her award "where her heart should be", and Eve is shown bereft at the end of the film. At dinner, the two married couples see Eve and Addison in a similarly negative light, with Margo wondering aloud what schemes Eve was constructing in her "feverish little brain". Additionally, Eve's utility as a personal assistant to Margo early in the film, which is a subtle construct of a same-sex intimate relationship, is decried by Birdie, the same working-class character who immediately detected the theatricality in Eve's story about her "husband". Birdie sees such agency as being unnatural, and the film contrasts its predatory nature ("studying you like a blueprint") with the love and warmth of her later reliance upon Bill. The pressure to acquiesce agency and more highly value patriarchy, following the return of men from the war, after having been shown propaganda promoting agency such as Rosie the Riveter and after having occupied traditionally male roles such as bomb-building factory worker, was deemed "the problem that has no name" by well-known feminist Betty Friedan.


title: All About Eve

text: Despite what critics such as Corber have described as the homophobia pervasive in the movie, "All About Eve" has long been a favored film among gay audiences, likely due to its campy overtones (in part due to the casting of Davis) and its general sophistication. Davis, who long had a strong gay fan base, expressed support for gay men in her 1972 interview with "The Advocate".


title: All About Eve

text: In 1990, "All About Eve" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The Academy Film Archive preserved "All About Eve" in 2000. The film received in 1997 a placement on the Producers Guild of America Hall of Fame. The film also has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has been selected by the American Film Institute for many of their 100 Years lists.


title: All About Eve

text: When AFI named Bette Davis #2 on its list of the greatest female American screen legends, "All About Eve" was the film selected to highlight Davis' legendary career.


title: All About Eve

text: The film opens with the image of a fictitious award trophy, described by DeWitt as the "highest honor our theater knows: the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement." The statuette is modeled after the famous painting of Siddons costumed as the tragic Muse by Joshua Reynolds, a copy of which hangs in the entrance of Margo's apartment and often visible during the party scene. In 1952, a small group of distinguished Chicago theater-goers began to give an award with that name, which was sculpted to look like the one used in the film. It has been given annually, with past honorees including Bette Davis and Celeste Holm.


title: All About Eve

text: The first radio adaptation was a one-hour broadcast on "Lux Radio Theatre" on CBS Radio on October 1, 1951, with Bette Davis, Gary Merrill and Anne Baxter reprising their original roles. "Lux Radio Theatre" did a follow-up adaptation on November 23, 1954, this time on NBC radio with Ann Blyth and Claire Trevor playing the lead roles, with Trevor replacing Ida Lupino when she became ill and was unable to attend the broadcast.


title: All About Eve

text: A radio version of "All About Eve" starring Tallulah Bankhead as Margo Channing was presented on NBC's "The Big Show" by the Theatre Guild of the Air on November 16, 1952. Bankhead and many contemporary critics felt that the characterization of Margo Channing was patterned on her, a long-rumored charge denied by both Mankiewicz and Davis, but attested by costume designer Edith Head. Additionally, Bankhead's rivalry with her understudy (Lizabeth Scott) during the production of "The Skin of Our Teeth" is cited as an alternative hypothesis for the origin of Mary Orr's "The Wisdom of Eve," the original short story that formed the basis for the film. Bette Davis played three roles on film that Tallulah Bankhead had originated"Dark Victory", "Jezebel" and "The Little Foxes", much to Bankhead's chagrin. Bankhead and Davis were considered to be somewhat similar in style. Several decades later Davis called Channing "the essence of a Tallulah Bankhead kind of actress" in an interview with Barbara Walters. The production is notable in that Mary Orr, of "The Wisdom of Eve," played the role of Karen Richards. The cast also featured Alan Hewitt as Addison DeWitt (who narrated), Beatrice Pearson as Eve Harrington, Don Briggs as Lloyd Richards, Kevin McCarthy as Bill Samson, Florence Robinson as Birdie Coonan, and Stefan Schnabel as Max Fabian.


title: All About Eve

text: In 1970, "All About Eve" was the inspiration for the stage musical "Applause," with book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, lyrics by Lee Adams, and music by Charles Strouse. The original production starred Lauren Bacall as Margo Channing, and it won the Tony Award for Best Musical that season. It ran for four previews and 896 performances at the Palace Theatre on Broadway. After Bacall left the production, she was replaced by Anne Baxter in the role of Margo Channing.


title: All About Eve

text: In 2019, a stage adaptation of "All About Eve" premiered at the Noël Coward Theatre in London, directed by Ivo van Hove and starring Gillian Anderson as Margo Channing and Lily James as Eve Harrington.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: It is inhaled or "sniffed" (alternatively sometimes written as "snuffed") into the nasal cavity, delivering a swift hit of nicotine and a lasting flavored scent (especially if flavoring has been blended with the tobacco). Traditionally, it is sniffed or inhaled lightly after a pinch of snuff is either placed onto the back surface of the hand, held pinched between thumb and index finger, or held by a specially made "snuffing" device.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Snuff originated in the Americas and was in common use in Europe by the 17th century. Traditional snuff production consists of a lengthy, multi-step process, in tobacco snuff mills. The selected tobacco leaves are first subject to special tobacco curing or fermentation processes, where they will later provide the individual characteristics and flavor for each type of snuff blend. Snuff is usually scented or flavored, with many blends of snuff requiring months to years of special storage to reach the required maturity. Typical traditional flavors are varieties of blended tobacco leaves considered original "fine snuff" without any addition of scents or essences. Varieties of spice, piquant, fruit, floral, and mentholated (also called "medicated") soon followed, either pure or in blends. Each snuff manufacturer usually has a variety of unique recipes and blends, as well as special recipes for individual customers. Common flavors also include coffee, chocolate, bordeaux, honey, vanilla, cherry, orange, apricot, plum, camphor, cinnamon, rose and spearmint. Modern flavors include bourbon, cola and whisky. Traditional classic German snuff blends are the pungent and sharp "Schmalzler" and "Brasil" blends.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Snuff comes in a range of texture and moistness, from very fine to coarse, and from toast (very dry) to very moist. Often drier snuffs are ground more finely. There is also a range of tobacco-free snuffs, such as Pöschl's Weiss (White), made from glucose powder or herbs. While strictly speaking, these are not snuffs because they contain no tobacco, they are an alternative for those who wish to avoid nicotine, or for "cutting" a strong snuff to an acceptable strength.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: The indigenous populations of Brazil were the first people known to have used ground tobacco as snuff. They would grind their tobacco leaves using a mortar and pestle made of rosewood, where the tobacco would also acquire a delicate aroma of the wood. The resulting snuff was then stored airtight in ornate bone bottles or tubes to preserve its flavor for later consumption.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Snuff-taking by the Taino and Carib people of the Lesser Antilles was observed by the Franciscan friar Ramón Pané on Columbus' second voyage to the New World in 1493. Pané returned to Spain with snuff, introducing it to Europe.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: In the early 16th century, the Spanish Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) established and held a trade monopoly in the first manufacturing industries of snuff, in the city of Seville, which became Europe's first manufacturing and development centre for snuff. The Spanish called snuff "polvo" or "rapé". At first they were independent production mills dispersed within the city, state control over the activity later concentrated the production to one location opposite the Church of San Pedro. By the mid-18th century it was decided to build a large and grand industrial building outside the city walls, and thus the Royal Tobacco Factory ("Real Fábrica de Tabacos") was built, becoming Europe's first industrial tobacco factory, producing snuff and auctioning tobacco at first, and Spain's second largest building at the time.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: In 1561 Jean Nicot, the French ambassador in Lisbon, Portugal, who described tobacco's medicinal properties as a panacea in his writings, is credited with introducing ground tobacco snuff to the Royal Court of Catherine de' Medici to treat her persistent headaches. Catherine was so impressed with its curative relieving properties, she promptly declared the tobacco would henceforth be termed "Herba Regina" (Queen Herb). Her royal seal of approval would help popularize snuff among the French nobility.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: The Dutch, who named the ground powdered tobacco "snuff" ("snuif"), were using the product by 1560. By the early 1600s, snuff had become an expensive luxury commodity. In 1611, commercially manufactured snuff made its way to North America by way of John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, who introduced a sweeter Spanish variety of tobacco to North America. Though most of the colonists in America never fully accepted the English style of snuff use, American aristocrats used snuff. Snuff use in England increased in popularity after the Great Plague of London (1665–1666) as people believed snuff had valuable medicinal properties, which added a powerful impetus to its consumption. By 1650, snuff use had spread from France to England, Scotland, and Ireland, and throughout Europe, as well as Japan, China, and Africa.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: By the 17th century some prominent objectors to snuff-taking arose. Pope Urban VIII banned the use of snuff in churches and threatened to excommunicate snuff-takers. In Russia in 1643, Tsar Michael prohibited the sale of tobacco, instituted the punishment of removing the nose of those who used snuff, and declared that persistent users of tobacco would be killed. Despite this, use persisted elsewhere; King Louis XIII of France was a devout snuff-taker, whereas later, Louis XV of France banned the use of snuff from the Royal Court of France during his reign.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: By the 18th century, snuff had become the tobacco product of choice among the elite. Snuff use reached a peak in England during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14). It was during this time that England's own production of ready-made snuff blends started; home-made blending was common. Prominent snuff users included Pope Benedict XIII who repealed the smoking ban set by Pope Urban VIII; Queen Anne; King George III's wife Queen Charlotte, referred to as 'Snuffy Charlotte', who had an entire room at Windsor Castle devoted to her snuff stock; and King George IV, who had his own special blends and hoarded a stockpile of snuff. Napoleon, Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Marie Antoinette, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Disraeli all used snuff, as well as numerous other notable persons. The taking of snuff helped to distinguish the elite members of society from the common people, who generally smoked their tobacco.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: It was also during the 18th century that an English author and botanist, John Hill, concluded nasal cancer could develop with the use of snuff. Under the guise of a doctor, he reported five cases of "polyps, a swelling in the nostril adherent with the symptoms of open cancer". In Victorian era Britain, a few miracle "snake oil" claims on the health or curative benefits of certain snuff types surfaced in publications. For instance, a London weekly journal called "The Gentlewoman" advised readers with ailing sight to use the correct type of Portuguese snuff, "whereby many eminent people had cured themselves so that they could read without spectacles after having used them for many years".


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Snuff's image as an aristocratic luxury attracted the first U.S. federal tax on tobacco, created in 1794. Despite two centuries of pipe smoking and snuff use, by the mid-1850s, North Americans rejected European practices in general—especially British practices—that entailed snuff boxes and formality. By the late 1700s, taking snuff nasally had fallen out of fashion in the United States. Instead, dry snuff users would use a twig as a brush to "dip" the snuff, which then involved placing the snuff inside the cheek. This is seen as a precursor to dipping tobacco (moist snuff) use which is still very much popular today. In addition, orally chewing tobacco or dipping snuff was more convenient for Americans trekking westward in their wagons. During the 1800s until the mid-1930s, a communal snuff box was installed for members of the US Congress. American snuff is subject to the same warning labels on all smokeless tobacco, indicating a possibility of oral cancer and tooth loss. This reflects the fact that American dry snuff users may still use the product orally, unlike the majority of Europe, but nasal use of snuff is also practiced by some users. Dry snuff is typically not readily available outside of the South and Appalachia, unlike its successor, dipping tobacco (moist snuff), which is available throughout the United States and is much more widely consumed.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: In certain areas of Africa, some claim that snuff reached native Africans before white Europeans did, even though tobacco is not indigenous to Africa. A fictional representation of this is in Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart", where the Igbo villagers are regular snuff-takers long before they ever encountered the first British missionaries. In some African countries, such as South Africa and Nigeria, snuff is still popular with the older generation, though its use is slowly declining, with cigarette smoking becoming the dominant form of tobacco use. This includes parts of southern Ethiopia, where powdered tobaccos can be purchased at many larger markets across the Oromo region.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: When snuff-taking was fashionable, the manufacture of snuff accessories was a lucrative industry in several cultures. In Europe, snuff boxes ranged from those made in very basic materials, such as horn, to highly ornate designs featuring precious materials made using state of the art techniques. Since prolonged exposure to air causes snuff to dry out and lose its quality, pocket snuff boxes were designed to be airtight containers with strong hinges, generally with enough space for a day's worth of snuff only.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Large snuff containers, called "mulls" (made from a variety of materials, notably including rams horns decorated with silver), were usually kept on the table.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: An accessory often carried with the snuff box was the snuff spoon, a small spoon used for snuff-taking, that was used to avoid staining the fingers with powder.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: A floral-scented snuff called "English Rose" is provided for members of the British House of Commons. Recent practice has been for this tradition to be maintained at the principal doorkeeper's personal expense due to smoking in the House being banned since 1693. A famous silver communal snuff box kept at the entrance of the House was destroyed in an air raid during World War II with a replacement being subsequently presented to the House by Winston Churchill. Very few members are said to take snuff nowadays.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: In China, snuff bottles were used, usually available in two forms, both made of glass. In one type, glass bottles were decorated on the inside to protect the design. Another type used layered multi-colored glass; parts of the layers were removed to create a picture. Another common accessory is the snuff bullet, which is designed to make snuff use easier and more discreet in public situations. These are small, bullet shaped devices that you would use to store a small amount of snuff for use throughout the day.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: The self-applicator pipe is known as ‘Kuripe’, and the blow pipe is known as a ‘Tepi’ in the Brazilian tradition.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: When sniffed, snuff often causes a sneeze, though this is often seen by snuff-takers as the sign of a beginner. This is not uncommon; however, the tendency to sneeze varies with the person and the particular snuff. Generally, drier snuffs are more likely to do this. For this reason, sellers of snuff often sell handkerchiefs. Slapstick comedy and cartoons have often made use of snuff's sneeze-inducing properties.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: A study program initiated in 1969 by the World Health Organization (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), titled "IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, Volume 89, Smokeless Tobacco and Some Tobacco-specific "N"-Nitrosamines", published in 2007 representing the views and expert opinions of the IARC Working Group; concluded on snuff-taking and snuff tobacco that "studies on nasal use of snuff did not provide conclusive evidence of a relationship with cancer [...] There is sufficient evidence in experimental animals for the carcinogenicity of moist snuff." The study program was also supported by the United States National Cancer Institute, the European Commission Directorate-General (Employment and Social Affairs) Health, Safety and Hygiene at Work Unit, and the United States National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Sapundzhiev & Werner (2003) found that the chronic "abuse [of nasal sniffing of dry snuff] leads to morphological and functional changes in the nasal mucosa", but, although dry nasal snuff "contains many substances that are potentially carcinogenic, there is no epidemiological evidence for increased incidence of local malignancies in habitual snuff users."


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: A recent systematic review of studies published in this area concluded that there is "strong evidence that smokeless tobacco produces dependency".


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Users of smokeless tobacco products, including snuff, face no known cancer risk to the lungs, but, depending on the form of the smokeless tobacco product being consumed, may have other increased cancer risks than people who do not consume any form of tobacco products. To date there have been no health suits filed against any of the UK's snuff manufacturers and, based on current knowledge, there is no evidence to suggest that nasal snuff causes lung cancer when used, as intended, nasally. As the primary harm from smoking to lungs comes from the smoke itself, snuff has been proposed as a way of reducing harm from tobacco.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: An article from the 1981 "British Medical Journal" examining "Nicotine intake by snuff users" concluded:


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Snuff is readily available over the counter in most European tobacco shops, it is also subject to the same sale and purchase age restrictions as with other tobacco products in accordance with local laws. In the United Kingdom, tobacco duty is not charged on "nasal" snuff tobacco.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: In the United States, snuff is less readily available and is typically found only in specialty tobacco shops or online.


title: Snuff (tobacco)

text: Smokeless tobacco products including snuff are banned from sale in Australia but up to 1.5kg may be imported for personal use only.


title: Charminar

text: The Charminar () is a mosque and monument located in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. Constructed in 1591, the landmark is a symbol of Hyderabad and officially incorporated in the emblem of Telangana The Charminar's long history includes the existence of a mosque on its top floor for more than 425 years. While both historically and religiously significant, it is also known for its popular and busy local markets surrounding the structure, and has become one of the most frequented tourist attractions in Hyderabad. Charminar is also a site of numerous festival celebrations, such as Eid-ul-adha and Eid al-Fitr, as it is adjacent to the city's main mosque, the Makkah Masjid.


title: Charminar

text: The Charminar is situated on the east bank of Musi River. To the west lies the Laad Bazaar, and to the southwest lies the richly ornamented granite Makkah Masjid. It is listed as an archaeological and architectural treasure on the official list of monuments prepared by the Archaeological Survey of India. The English name is a translation and combination of the Urdu words "chār" and "minar" or "meenar", translating to "Four Pillars"; the eponymous towers are ornate minarets attached and supported by four grand arches.


title: Charminar

text: The fifth ruler of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, built the Charminar in 1591 after shifting his capital from Golkonda to the newly formed city of Hyderabad.


title: Charminar

text: The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), the current caretaker of the structure, mentions in its records, "There are various theories regarding the purpose for which Charminar was constructed. However, it is widely accepted that Charminar was built at the centre of the city, to commemorate the eradication of plague", a deadly disease which was wide spread at that time. According to Jean de Thévenot, a French traveller of the 17th century whose narration was complemented with the available Persian texts, the Charminar was constructed in the year 1591 CE, to commemorate the beginning of the second Islamic millennium year (1000 AH). The event was celebrated far and wide in the Islamic world, thus Qutb Shah founded the city of Hyderabad to celebrate the event and commemorate it with the construction of this building. Due to its architecture it is also called as Arc de Triomphe of the east.


title: Charminar

text: The Charminar was constructed at the intersection of the historical trade route that connects the city to international markets through the port city of Machilipatnam. The Old City of Hyderabad was designed with Charminar as its centrepiece. The city was spread around the Charminar in four different quadrants and chambers, segregated according to the established settlements. Towards the north of Charminar is the Char Kaman, or four gateways, constructed in the cardinal direction. Additional eminent architects from Persia were also invited to develop the city plan. The structure itself was intended to serve as a mosque and madrasa. It is of Indo-Islamic architecture style, incorporating Persian architectural elements. A sample of Charminar is said to have been created at Dabirpura/Nagaboli graveyard before the actual construction.


title: Charminar

text: Historian Masud Hussain Khan says that the construction of Charminar was completed in the year 1592, and that it is the city of Hyderabad which was actually founded in the year 1591. According to the book "Days of the Beloved", Qutb shah constructed the Charminar in the year 1589, on the very spot where he first glimpsed his future queen Bhagmati, and after her conversion to Islam, Qutb Shah renamed the city as "Hyderabad". Though the story was rejected by the historians and scholars, it became popular folklore among the locals.


title: Charminar

text: Qutb Shah was also among the early poets of Dakhani Urdu. While laying the foundation of Charminar, he performed the prayers in Dakhini couplets, which are recorded as follows:


title: Charminar

text: During the Mughal governorship between Qutb Shahi and Asaf Jahi rule, the southwestern minaret "fell to pieces" after being struck by lightning and was repaired at a cost of Rs. 60,000. In 1824, the monument was replastered at a cost of Rs. One lakh.


title: Charminar

text: The Charminar masjid is a square structure with each side being 20 meters (approximately 66 feet) long. Each of the four sides has one of four grand arches, each facing a fundamental point that opens directly onto the street in front of it. At each corner stands an exquisitely shaped, 56 meter-high (approximately 184 feet) minaret, with a double balcony. Each minaret is crowned by a bulbous dome with dainty, petal-like designs at the base. Unlike the minarets of Taj Mahal, Charminar's four fluted minarets are built into the main structure. There are 149 winding steps to reach the upper floor. The structure is also known for its profusion of stucco decorations and the arrangement of balustrades and balconies.


title: Charminar

text: The structure is made of granite, limestone, mortar, and pulverised marble, weighing approximately 14,000 tones apiece. Initially the monument was so proportionately planned that when the fort first opened, one could see all four corners of the bustling city of Hyderabad through each of its four grand arches, as each arch faced one of the most active royal ancestral streets.