profiles ·
John Lahr on the actress and screenwriter—who has appeared in such movies as “Love Actually,” “Sense and Sensibility,” and “Nanny McPhee”—taking on a musical adaptation of the latter.
John Lahr
John Lahr has written for The New Yorker since 1991. His latest book “ Arthur Miller: American Witness ” came out November, 2022.
Read more on The New Yorker →22 picks · 1991–2022
Featured Picks
profiles ·
For screen and stage, Mendes works like a sculptor—continually molding and remolding space, speech, and gesture, John Lahr writes.
profiles ·
Where do Claire Danes’s volcanic performances come from?
profiles ·
The reign of Helen Mirren.
profiles ·
John Lahr’s 2006 profile of Sean Penn. “He is warm but no hail-fellow, polite but without that come-hither thing. ‘You see me from ten feet away, everyone thinks I’m gonna bite or something,’ Penn says.”
profiles ·
John Lahr’s 2005 Profile of the “Angels in America” playwright. “For me, drama without politics is inconceivable,” Kushner said.
a critic at large ·
The not so merry soul of Cole Porter.
profiles ·
How the filmmaker Mira Nair makes people see the world her way.
profiles ·
John Lahr on the playwright who wrote “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson,” and more.
profiles ·
How Mike Nichols re-created comedy and himself.
profiles ·
PROFILE of Swedish film and stage director Ingmar Bergman, 80... Describes his single-story gray-brown house on Faro, in the Baltic Sea... It sits …
profiles ·
Profile of comedian and actor Bob Hope.
profile ·
John Lahr on the playwright: the dominating themes of his work—the sense of not belonging, the betrayal of authority—evolve out of his childhood.
profiles ·
John Lahr on the singer who kept reinventing American music, in this Profile from 1997.
profile ·
John Lahr’s 1996 piece on the director Woody Allen. “Allen sees his extraordinary artistic freedom as a mixed blessing. ‘I’ve often said, the only thing standing between me and greatness is me.’ ”
personal history ·
What was a Ziegfeld girl about? Taking a hard life and turning it into a world of fun and glamour, John Lahr wrote about his mother, a former Broadway chorus dancer, in 1996.
onward and upward with the arts ·
John Lahr on how the tap dancer Savion Glover moved the rhythms of the street onto the American stage.
profiles ·
PROFILE of comedienne and television producer Roseanne Barr. Within three years, Roseanne's Big Food Diner, which she started in Eldon, Iowa, during …
a life in the wings ·
Lady Maria St. Just’s talent for outrageous mythmaking charmed Tennessee Williams. John Lahr looks at their friendship.
annals of comedy ·
John Lahr writes about the acerbic comedian Bill Hicks, whom CBS censored from a 1993 episode of the David Letterman show.
the theatre ·
John Lahr on the pioneering playwright Tony Kushner.
profiles ·
PROFILE of Australian comic Barry Humphries who gives solo performances on the British stage as Dame Edna Everage, a character he has created. Tells about …