INDIANAPOLIS — Were it not, perhaps, for Stanley Kubrick’s deft direction, the fight scene in the 1960 Hollywood classic Spartacus might well have been laughable rather than iconic. At nearly six-feet-four-inches tall, the African gladiator Draba, played by the former pro football star, Woody Strode, towered over Kirk Douglas’s eponymous character. The two actors, both…

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. left behind a legacy of courage and clarity in the face of racial and economic injustice. It has been five decades since the world lost this visionary—the preeminent leader of the Civil Rights Movement—but his words and actions continue to inspire the fight for democracy and racial equality…

WASHINGTON — Google the name “Tallulah Bankhead” and you will be regaled (or mortified if your mores tend to the Victorian) with tales of the actor’s libertine appetites, her breakout performance in the Hitchcock classic Lifeboat, or her half-camp, half-vamp villainess in the 1960s Batman television series. Wikipedia references her patrician mien — dahling not…