Jerry Lee Rice

Jerry Lee Rice 1962-, American football player, b. Crawford, Miss. Winning national attention while at the otherwise obscure Mississippi Valley State College, Itta Bena, Miss., Rice subsequently played professionally with the San Francisco 49ers (1985-2001), the Oakland Raiders (2001-2004), and the Seattle Seahawks (2004). One of the game's most durable players, he became the NFL's oldest ever wide receiver and one of its greatest players. At his retirement he held career records for receptions (1,549), receiving yards (22,895), touchdowns (208), and receiving touchdowns (197) during the regular season and the season record for receiving yards (1,848). Rice was rookie of the year for the 1985 season, most valuable player for 1987, Super Bowl most valuable player in 1989, and NFL player of the year for 1990 and 1997, and helped the 49ers win three Super Bowls (1989-90, 1995).

Bibliography: See his Rice (with M. Silver, 1996).

Simonson, Lee (1888–1967), American designer, whose first work for the stage was done in connection with the Washington Square Players. He later became one of the founders and directors of the Theatre Guild, for which many of his finest sets were done, among them those for Leo Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness, Strindberg's The Dance of Death (both 1920), Molnár's Liliom (1921), and Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1923). His sets for Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (also 1923) were Expressionistic. He also designed the sets for the first productions of two plays by O'Neill, Marco Millions (1928) and Dynamo (1929)—the latter a constructivist set based on the interior of a power house. He was responsible for Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight (1936) and Maxwell Anderson's The Masque of Kings (1937), and did the settings for the world premières of Shaw's Heartbreak House (1920), Back to Methuselah (1922), and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935). For other managements he designed mainly for new American plays, among them Sherwood's The Road to Rome (1927), O'Neill's Days without End (1934), and Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine (1946).

Auntie Mame (1956), a comedy by Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee. [Broadhurst Theatre, 639 perf.] Auntie Mame ( Rosalind Russell), an irrepressible scatterbrain but also a life‐affirming optimist, finds she must take under her wing her young orphaned nephew, Patrick Dennis ( Jan Handzlik). Mame's often indulgent, freethinking ideas of how to raise a youngster bring her into confrontation with the authorities and sometimes even with her friends. But in the end her guidance proves more than satisfactory. When he grows up to be a stable man, Patrick ( Robert Higgins) marries and brings his own son to visit Mame, who promptly hustles the boy off to adventures in Europe. Based on the novel by Patrick Dennis, the play was more a series of entertaining vignettes than a sustained, well‐plotted story. Louis Kronenberger observed, “The adaptors, doubtless wisely, went in for a kind of scene‐a‐minute technique. Their slapdash method, if wholly uncreative, did manage to make speed a kind of substitute for wit.” After Russell left the cast, Bea Lillie assumed the role, and later played it in London. The comedy was turned into the successful musical MAME (1966), which played at the Winter Garden Theatre for 1,508 performances. Lawrence and Lee adapted their own play and Jerry Herman provided the tuneful score. Angela Lansbury triumphed as Mame, and it secured her new career in musicals. Notable songs: Mame; We Need a Little Christmas; If He Walked Into My Life; Open a New Window. A 1983 Broadway revival with Lansbury failed, but the musical remains popular regionally.