Paying tribute to Sydney Pollack for presenting one of my favourite movies
about one of my favourite writers Karen Blixen aka Isak Dinesen.
Click here for so much more information about Karen Blixen.
The rose in the photo above is named the Karen Blixen Rose.
Sydney Pollack, Oscar Winner for `Out of Africa,' Dies at 73
By Laurence Arnold
May 27 (Bloomberg) -- Sydney Pollack, the actor, producer and AcademyAward-winning director of ``Tootsie'' and ``Out of Africa'' who used love stories, politics and humor to explore loss and human frailty, has died. He was 73.
Pollack died yesterday at his Los Angeles home after battling cancer, Leslee Dart, a spokeswoman for the family, said in a telephone interview. Pollack is survived by his wife, Claire, two daughters, a brother and six grandchildren.
Pollack excelled at serious, sometimes melancholy movies that explored relationships strained by emotional and cultural differences. The connection between man and woman is ``a metaphor for everything else in life,'' he told Newsweek in 1985. In a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said he was drawn to ``love stories in which the obstacle is too great to finally be overcome.''
I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold. Karen Blixen.
If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me? Karen Blixen.
Finishing with the last poem from the movie and said to be on Finch-Hatton's obelisk stone here in part:
Denys Finch Hatton loved this poem. The lines "He prayeth well, who loveth well /Both man and bird and beast" appear on commemorative brass plaques, once placed by Denys Finch Hatton's brother Toby on the obelisk at Denys's tomb in the Ngong Hills, and still found in Ewerby Church, Lincolnshire, England. In the flyleaf of the copy of the poem owned by Karen Blixen, Denys drew a picture of a rhinoceros. This drawing is reproduced in Isak Dinesen's Letters from Africa, page 140.)
"...--Laughed loud and long, and all the while /His eyes went to and fro. /Ha, ha, quoth he, full plain I see /The Devil knows how to row.
Farewell, farewell, but this I tell /To thee, thou Wedding Guest: /He prayeth well, who loveth well /Both man and bird and beast."
Taken from: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
