Puppeteer Caroll Spinney, who brought Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch to life on the iconic children’s television show Sesame Street for half a century, died on Sunday at the age of 85.
Spinney died at home in Connecticut after living for some time with the movement disorder dystonia, which causes uncontrollable muscle contractions, according to a statement from Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces the show.
The actor retired from the show last year, having hand-picked successors to play both Big Bird and Oscar — two very different characters he helped create, delighting millions of children. Those characters — one a towering yellow bird, the other a grumpy, green monster in a trash can — existed in what many considered a magical world created by puppet master Jim Henson and including pals Bert and Ernie, the lovable Cookie Monster and the goofy Kermit the Frog.
Photo: AFP
Spinney once told The New York Times he had modeled Oscar the Grouch on a cross between a “magnificently rude” restaurant waiter and a ranting New York cab driver.
In 1973, a year after then US president Richard Nixon made his dramatic trip to China, Spinney flew to Beijing for a performance dressed as Big Bird — he said he only paid half-price for the plane ticket because the character was only six years old.
When Henson died in 1990, Big Bird sang Kermit’s sweetly melancholy tune It’s Not Easy Being Green at a memorial service.
“Caroll was an artistic genius whose kind and loving view of the world helped shape and define Sesame Street from its earliest days in 1969 through five decades,” Sesame Workshop said in a statement.
“His enormous talent and outsized heart were perfectly suited to playing the larger-than-life yellow bird who brought joy to generations of children and countless fans of all ages around the world, and his lovably cantankerous grouch gave us all permission to be cranky once in a while.”
Poignantly, Spinney’s death came as the show marked its 50th birthday, and as it is lauded with one of America’s top cultural awards — the Kennedy Center Honors — at a gala Sunday in Washington.
Spinney himself won multiple Daytime Emmys for his work, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award. He also earned a Grammy Award, for best children’s recording.
At the time of his retirement, he was quoted as saying that his Big Bird alter ego had “opened my mind and nurtured my soul.”
He hand-picked his successors in the two major roles — after mentoring them for more than two decades.
A shy child, Spinney embraced puppetry and reportedly owned 70 puppets by the age of 12. He met Henson at a puppeteers festival in 1962 and bumped into him again in 1969; months later, he joined Sesame Street.
Spinney’s life was the subject of the 2014 documentary I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story.
Big Bird, the instantly recognizable giant yellow bird with the huge beak, is more than 250cm tall.
Spinney, who was 178cm tall, had to use his hands and wires to manipulate the towering puppet, guided by a TV monitor in the costume.
In 2000, he was named a Living Legend by the US Library of Congress, and he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Henson’s family said in a statement that Spinney managed to “perfectly convey the humor and heart in our father’s creations. Big Bird was childlike, without being childish. And Oscar the Grouch reflected universal feelings we all share, no matter our age.”
“That he could do this work so brilliantly, responsibly and with such infectious love and joy is his gift to us all,” the statement said.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families wait months for prescriptions buy it “off label.” But is it worth the risk? “The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen remembers giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a pediatrician who gave them to her own child. “It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies,
The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s F1, a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor. Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in Top Gun: Maverick, has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on Maverick, takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping
There is an old British curse, “may you live in interesting times,” passed off as ancient Chinese wisdom to make it sound more exotic and profound. We are living in interesting times. From US President Donald Trump’s decision on American tariffs, to how the recalls will play out, to uncertainty about how events are evolving in China, we can do nothing more than wait with bated breath. At the cusp of potentially momentous change, it is a good time to take stock of the current state of Taiwan’s political parties. As things stand, all three major parties are struggling. For our examination of the
RSS