Toulouse

The Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse is an opera house and ballet company located within the main administration buildings, the Capitole, of... the city of Toulouse in south-west France. The first performance space, a salle du jeu de spectacle, was created in the building in 1736 by Guillaume Cammas. Following a period of neglect, the current space was created during the rebuild of 1818. The theatre suffered fire damage in 1917, but was restored in 1923. The front of house areas were modernised in 1996. The current capacity is 1156 seats. Michel Plasson was responsible for the artistic direction of the company from 1973. He was followed by Jacques Doucet in 1981, by Nicolas Joel in 1991, and by Frédéric Chambert in 2009, after Joel's move to the Opéra national de Paris. Chambert's first season was marked by the use of alternate spaces while the theatre was renovated, and the theatre was re-opened for the beginning of the 2010-11 season. The opera company is a member of the Réunion des Opéras de France.
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Christine Albanel is a French civil servant. From May 2007 to June 2009 she was France's Minister for Culture and Communication in François... Fillon's government. Albanel is agrégé in classical Letters. In 1982, she joined the administration of the city of Paris, and followed Jacques Chirac – working in his cabinet – when he became Prime Minister in 1986 and French President in 1995. In 2000, she became Conseiller d'État. She became president of the museum and domain administration of the Palace of Versailles in 2003. In 2007, she was appointed Minister of Culture in François Fillon's government. While in this position, she proposed a new law with the objective to reduce music and video piracy over the Internet, along the same 'graduated penalty' lines of thinking that previous ineffective 'DADVSI' law. This move generated huge debate as several Presumption of innocence key liberty and law principles were sacrificed for the sake of efficiency, while most experts in Internet technology said the attempt was anyway doomed as grossly underestimating the complexity of any reliable control system.
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Laurent Debuire , also known as Laurent Wolf, is a French electro-house producer and DJ. He is the author of several compilations that contain his... own tracks and also his remixes. He reached the top of the charts with his "Saxo" and "Calinda" compositions. Laurent Wolf was the winner of the DJ category in the 2008 World Music Awards. The single "No Stress", featuring vocals by Éric Carter, was #1 on the French SNEP Singles Chart. On October 28, 2009, DJ Magazine announced the results of their annual Top 100 DJ Poll, with Ultra Records Wolf placed at #66.
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Ticky Holgado , pseudonym of Joseph Holgado, was a French actor and a frequent collaborator with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. With Delicatessen by... Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, Ticky Holgado saw his acting talent acknowledged. Gérard Jugnot wrote for him the character of the beggar who meets the frame in the unemployment becoming NFA in Une époque formidable . He received the Caesar of the best male bit part in 1992 for Une époque formidable and in 1996 for Gazon maudit. In September 2003, Holgado announced the remission of his lung cancer, which had considerably rarefied his appearances on the screen since 2000. On 5 January 2004, he had just begun work on a new film with Lelouch, but he succumbed to cancer on 22 January 2004. He left a posthumous message, in the form of a document which appeared on his hospital bed after taking him to surgery to remove his 4th cancerous tumor. Holgado declared there: "It is necessary to tell to people that it's absolutely necessary to stop smoking". Ticky Holgado was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
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Laurent Terzieff was a French actor. Laurent Terzieff was the son of a plastician and of Jean Terzieff, a Russian sculptor who emigrated to France... during the First World War. The original surname of his family was Russian: Чемерзин Čemerzin. The spectacle of the bombardments had a dramatic effect on nine-year-old Laurent Terzieff. As an adolescent, he was fascinated with philosophy and poetry. He assisted with a representation of the "La Sonate des spectres" by Strindberg, directed by Roger Blin; while involved in the theater he decided he wanted to become an actor. Terzieff made his debut in 1953 with the Theatre of Babylon of Jean-Marie Serreau in Tous contre tous of Adamov. After several more roles, Marcel Carné offered him a lead role in 1958's Tricheurs, a tale about existentialist youth. He then appeared in the late works of "French quality" scenario writers such as Claude Autant-Lara, with whom he appeared in three films including Tu ne tueras point in 1961. Other collaborators included Henri-Georges Clouzot with "La Prisonnière", in which he interprets an artist manipulator.
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André Maranne is an Anglo-French actor who appeared chiefly in English-language roles from the mid 1950s. Born in Toulouse, France, Maranne's... most prominent recurring role was Sergeant François Chevalier in six of The Pink Panther films, alongside Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom. Before the Pink Panther, he cameoed in the James Bond movie Thunderball. He also appeared in diverse television programmes as Jason King , Fawlty Towers , Lord Peter Wimsey , Yes Minister, All Creatures Great and Small, and Doctor Who . Maranne was also a co-presenter of four in the French Teaching Programme, "Bonjour Francoise" on the BBC in the Sixties. He voiced M. Bouc in a BBC Radio 4 transmission of Murder on the Orient Express .
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Mady Mesplé is a French opera singer, the leading high coloratura soprano of her generation in France, sometimes heralded as the successor to... Mado Robin. Mady Mesplé was born in Toulouse, France, and studied piano and voice at the music conservatory of her native city, graduating with a gold medal. She played the piano in a local ballroom orchestra for a while, and later left for Paris for complementary voice lessons with French soprano Janine Micheau. Mesplé made her professional debut in Liège in January 1953, as Lakmé, a role with which she remained closely associated throughout her career, singing it an estimated 145 times. Lakmé was also her debut role at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1954. She quickly established herself in the standard lyric and coloratura roles of the French repertoire, such as Olympia in Les contes d'Hoffmann, Philline in Mignon, Leila in Les pêcheurs de perles, Juliette in Roméo et Juliette, Ophélie in Hamlet, Dinorah, Manon, Sophie in Werther, etc. She made her debut at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1956, as Zémire in Grétry's Zémire et Azor. The same year saw her debut at the Opéra-Comique as Lakmé.
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Andrée Vaurabourg was a French pianist and teacher. She was the wife of Swiss-French composer Arthur Honegger , whom she met at the Paris... Conservatoire in 1916. Honegger married her in 1926 on the condition that they live in separate apartments. They lived apart for the duration of their marriage, with the exceptions of an attempt at living together in 1935, which lasted less than a year, and the last year of Honegger's life, when he could no longer live alone. They had one daughter, Pascale, born in 1932. In September 1934, while traveling in Spain, Honegger's car ran into a tree after a tire burst. He only broke an ankle, but Vaurabourg, in the front passenger seat, broke both knees and was unable to walk for almost a year. She never fully recovered from the accident. She studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire, receiving first prize in counterpoint. She often performed her husband's piano works. Vaurabourg's students of counterpoint included Pierre Boulez and Roger Matton.
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