Filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson are donating $25 million to a prestigious private school on Chicago's South Side.
The University of Chicago says Tuesday that the grant from The George Lucas Family Foundation will pay for a new arts hall at the university's Laboratory Schools.
The 86,000-square-foot building will open in 2015 and will be named after Gordon Parks, a photographer, musician and social justice advocate.
Hobson is president of Chicago-based Ariel Investments. She married the Star Wars filmmaker in 2013.
Lucas says in a statement that art can "transform lives and communities" and says he hopes Parks' legacy will inspire future generations.
The Hyde Park school has about 1,800 students in nursery school through 12th grade.
Actor Laurence Olivier, center, with his wife Joan Plowright, left, and actress Lauren Bacall at the U.S. premiere of Lord Olivier's only Shakespearean production made exclusively for television, "King Lear," in New York, May 3, 1983. (AP Photo/Carlos Rene Perez, File)
Award-winning British actor Joan Plowright, who with her late husband Laurence Olivier did much to revitalize the U.K.'s theatrical scene in the decades after World War II, has died. She was 95.
In a statement Friday, her family said Plowright died the previous day at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors in southern England, surrounded by her loved ones.
"She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire," the family said. "We are so proud of all Joan did and who she was as a loving and deeply inclusive human being."
Part of an astonishing generation of British actors, including Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Eileen Atkins and Maggie Smith, Plowright won a Tony Award, two Golden Globes and nominations for an Oscar and an Emmy. She was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Plowright racked up dozens of stage roles in everything from Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" to William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." She stunned in Eugene Ionesco's "The Chairs," and George Bernard Shaw's totemic two female roles "Major Barbara" and "Saint Joan."
"I've been very privileged to have such a life," Plowright said in a 2010 interview with The Actor's Work. "I mean it's magic and I still feel, when a curtain goes up or the lights come on if there's no curtain, the magic of a beginning of what is going to unfold in front of me."
The esteem in which Plowright was held in London was evident with the news that theaters across the West End will dim their lights for two minutes at 7 p.m. on Tuesday in her honor.
Born Joan Ann Plowright in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England, her mother ran an amateur drama group and Plowright was... Read More
