title: Starfox (comics)

text: In "Thanos: The Infinity Siblings", after sleeping with different women on Titan, Eros is suddenly teleported into the future by his future self and is left stranded on a prehistoric world. Following a number of years, in the year 2079, his handmade radio finally caught a signal of a ship which rescued Eros. Then in the year 2125 Eros is forced to do an emergency landing due to his ship being damaged. He landed on the planet Zelchia which is ten times the size of Earth with a much higher gravity. Being unable to fly Eros is knocked out by the savage natives who plan to eat him. Thankfully, he is saved by the owl-like mutant native with teleporting powers named only Ghost. Ghost took Eros to his tribe, with the latter promising Ghost to technologically advance his people. After a year Eros bid them farewell and left Zelchia and went to the planet of Shangranna. He trained on the planet for a number of years until in the year 3812 he set this entire world ablaze. Then, in the year 4012, he encounters Kang the Conqueror, whose ship was partially destroyed by the stygian darkness of an omnipotent Thanos from the year 4657. After some negotiating, Kang tells Eros about the omnipotent Thanos losing to Hunger. Eros uses Kang time traveling technology to go back to the point he was originally transported to the future and sending his past self to the same future. After recruiting Pip to this cause, he then goes to Thanos and tells him about his omnipotent future self. He then proposes to Thanos a plan to avoid the darkness from destroying all of reality. After that, Eros and Pip go through time and arrived to the point where Eros first met Kang and stole some of Kang's time-travelling technology. They use the technology to go to the point where Eros departed Zelchia and offers Ghost and his people even more advanced weaponry from the Shi'ar. After a year, Eros manages to unite the planet's three main races in order to fight the threat of Thanos and his army, which was really all part of his plan. As Thanos and his army are about to attack the people of Zelchia, Eros teleports in front of Thanos and uses some drug to make him appear like Thanos killed him. After regaining himself and berating Thanos for the change of plans, he, Pip, and Ghost return to the present, not knowing that he was secretly manipulated by the future Omnipotent Thanos this whole time.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: In "Thanos: The Infinity Conflict", after Eros had Isaac miniaturize Kang's technology for easier transport, Eros secretly put a tracking device, utilizing Kang's technology, on an unsuspecting Thanos when the latter and his army were searching for him. After Thanos and his army leave, Adam Warlock and Pip arrive on Titan before Adam is killed by a missile launched by Thanos. After Eros and Pip inform each other on what is going on, they go to Zelchia the day before Thanos arrives so they can find out what Thanos is planning, but they find that the time line had changed and the planet is completely dead. They then go to Mistress Death's Realms, where they witness Thanos absorbing Death itself. In order to find what Thanos' plan is, Eros and Pip go one year into the future, where they see that Thanos had already absorbed the majority of the cosmic beings. They then decide to go even further into the future, where they find out that nearly all life of the universe has died out, because of Thanos. Eros decides that the only way to end the Mad Titan's nihilism is to go back to the day Thanos was born and kill the infant before he becomes a threat. However, just as Eros is about to suffocate the baby, Adam arrives and stops Eros from proceeding, telling him that Thanos' death would all be in vain since he was instrumental in the defeat of Magus. They then return to the present where Adam kills Eros so his soul could go to Mistress Death's realm. Believing that Eros is planning alongside Thanos, she banishes him from her realm, causing him to be resurrected. When Eros realizes that he now has become a person "out of the norm" just like Thanos and Adam, he lashes out at Adam, but Warlock tells him it was necessary, since Eros would be instrumental in defeating Thanos.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: In "Thanos: The Infinity Ending", when the three arrive at the domain of the Above-All-Others, they found out that they are already too late since future Thanos has already absorbed the Living Tribunal and Above-All-Others. However, thanks to Eros now existing outside the norm, the omniscient omnipresent Thanos could not clearly see him or Adam at that moment. After escaping the realm, unwillingly leaving Adam behind, Eros and Pip go to the present Earth, where Eros uses a backpack to keep Pip as near him as possible, thinking that despite, his newfound power, Thanos is still unable to track them down as long as they keep moving through space and time. They go to Thanos' starship, where they witness Thanos erasing the Outriders, Proxima Midnight, Corvus Glaive from existence, confirming his suspicion that Thanos is now erasing from existence anyone who might interfere with his plan. They decide to go into the future to the point where the universe ends. Upon arriving, they witness future Thanos committing suicide and taking everything in the Multiverse with him. After returning to the present and the destruction of Isaac by Thanos, Eros decides to go to key points in Thanos' life and remind him that he had a brother and that he was loved. This eventually proves to be all in vain because Thanos simply does not care; however, this does allow present Thanos, who had been trapped within the psyche of his future self, to use that little access of power to talk to Eros through his past selves and formulate a plan to stop his future omnipotent self. They go inside the psyche of future Thanos and try to free present Thanos but are finally discovered by future Thanos and assimilated into his universe. Thankfully, Kang, on behalf of Adam, goes to the point when Eros and Pip are about to go talk to Thanos' past selves and fetches them in his ship. This causes future Thanos to get distracted right as he is about to end everything, which allows present Thanos to take control and reset everything prior to the machinations of his future self. With everything back to normal, Eros is seen drunk at Starlin's Bar at Knowhere, seemingly with no recollection of all of this ordeal, after Kang went through time to prevent Eros from accessing his technology.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: In the aftermath of the "Infinity Wars" story line, Starfox is present at Thanos' funeral. He shows all the guests a recording of Thanos stating that he uploaded his consciousness into a new body before his death. The funeral is attacked by the Black Order, who steals Thanos's body and rips open a hole in space, sending everyone into the rip. Everyone is saved by the arrival of Gladiator and the Shi'ar Empire. Starfox begins to recruit warriors to find Gamora, the most likely candidate to be Thanos's new body, as they form the Dark Guardians, which causes Cosmic Ghost Rider to side with them. Wraith brings up the issue of the Black Order, but Starfox assures they are searching for them, and Nebula states that the team should track down Nova to find Gamora's location. The Dark Guardians find Nova and ambush him, wounding him enough to crash land onto a planet. Wraith demands Nova to tell Gamora's location, stating the fact he does not want to harm him if does not have to. When Gladiator and Cosmic Ghost Rider order him to back off, Nova takes the chance to fly off, but the team plans to track him down again.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: After finding Gamora by following Nova and fighting off the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Dark Guardians captured her and brought her to Starfox who ordered Gladiator to kill her. However, Gamora's execution was interrupted by the Asgardian goddess of death Hela and the Black Order who subdued the Dark Guardians in short time. Hela then reveals that Thanos is not going to come back in Gamora but in Starfox. Moments later, Thanos' consciousness takes over Starfox's body and goes with Hela and the Black Order to Knowhere, where his body is being kept. Thanos laments that Starfox would not survive the transference of his consciousness into his body.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: The Guardians and remaining Dark Guardians stormed Knowhere using Lockjaw's teleportation ability. To stop Thanos' resurrection, Gamora feels she has no choice but to kill Starfox. Apologizing to him, Gamora uses her sword to kill her adoptive uncle, who speaks briefly before dying. However, Starfox's death only causes Thanos to be resurrected with a broken mind. Thanos, Hela, and Knowhere are later sucked up by a black hole generated by Hela while the Guardians and Dark Guardians successfully flee using Lockjaw.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: Starfox is later revealed to have been resurrected but kept as an inmate in the Exclusion, a key location for the Eternals, located between "six artificial molecules" beneath the South Pole in Antarctica. Sersi is able to employ Jack of Knives to help her into release Starfox from his prison in order to help against the Progenitor's judgment of Earth.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: Starfox is a member of the long-lived offshoot of humanity known as the Eternals. His body has been enhanced by cosmic energy to the point that it ages far more slowly than most humanoids and is superhumanly strong and resistant to harm and immune to terrestrial diseases. He can withstand impacts, such as falling from several stories or being repeatedly struck with superhuman force, that would severely injure or kill an ordinary human being with little to no injury to himself. However, he is far from invulnerable and can be injured by weapons, such as bullets or knives, composed of conventional materials. His overall resistance to injury is somewhat lower than that of the average Eternal but, like any Eternal, he possesses exceptional healing capabilities. He can harness his cosmic powers to enable himself to fly at supersonic speed. Through the gravimetric potential of his body, which is related to his ability to fly, a tiny shell of air constantly clings to his body. While he needs to breathe like an ordinary human being, he has a reduced need for oxygen allowing him to survive travel through both open space and underwater unaided.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: Starfox can psionically stimulate the pleasure centers in nearby people's brains, making them calm and open to suggestion using his persuasion skill. It has been suggested that when in physical contact, and there is direct line of sight between the subject and the target, Starfox can use this euphoria effect to cause a person or persons to become infatuated with him, objects, or people of his choosing or simply to make others feel good while in his presence. Notably, the euphoria power does not work on his brother, Thanos. His psionic powers are possessed to some degree by all Eternals, but he developed them in his own unique manner. Starfox's mental powers do not work on beings whose brains do not have pleasure centers. These powers were later shut off at Eros' request to prevent them from being abused, but somehow returned prior to "Avengers: Rage of Ultron".


title: Starfox (comics)

text: In the series "Captain Marvel", Starfox also showed the ability to manipulate gravity, simulating psychokinesis. Starfox has limited mastery of 500 extraterrestrial languages.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: In the mini-series event "Judgment Day", where the Eternals went to war with the mutants of Krakoa, Starfox refers to himself as a "mutant". His brother, Thanos, was always referred to as a mutant of the Titan Eternals.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: Though an Eternal, Starfox is not as powerful as his Earthborn cousins because the original Titanian Eternals separated from their Earth brethren before Kronos' experiments augmented the Eternals' energies. Starfox, at least, can join an existing Uni-Mind with the other Eternals, even though Titanian Eternals have thus far proven to be unable to form their own.


title: Starfox (comics)

text: A zombified Starfox appears in "Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness", alongside Hercules, She-Hulk, and Firestar, each of them infected. He is actually infected by the zombie Avengers when they sent out a bogus "Avengers Assemble" message and he is unaware it was really a trap.


title: Indo-Aryan peoples

text: Indo-Aryan peoples are a diverse collection of Indo-European peoples speaking Indo-Aryan languages in the Indian subcontinent. Historically, Aryan were the Indo-European pastoralists who migrated from Central Asia into South Asia and introduced Proto-Indo-Aryan language. The Indo-Aryan language speakers are found across South Asia.


title: Indo-Aryan peoples

text: The introduction of the Indo-Aryan languages in the Indian subcontinent was the result of a migration of Indo-Aryan people from Central Asia into the northern Indian subcontinent (modern-day Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). These migrations started approximately 1,800 BCE, after the invention of the war chariot, and also brought Indo-Aryan languages into the Levant and possibly Inner Asia.


title: Indo-Aryan peoples

text: The Proto-Indo-Iranians, from which the Indo-Aryans developed, are identified with the Sintashta culture (2100–1800 BCE), and the Andronovo culture, which flourished ca. 1800–1400 BCE in the steppes around the Aral Sea, present-day Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The Proto-Indo-Aryan split off around 1800–1600 BCE from the Iranians, moved south through the Bactria-Margiana Culture, south of the Andronovo culture, borrowing some of their distinctive religious beliefs and practices from the BMAC, and then migrated further south into the Levant and north-western India. The migration of the Indo-Aryans was part of the larger diffusion of Indo-European languages from the Proto-Indo-European homeland at the Pontic–Caspian steppe which started in the 4th millennia BCE. The GGC, Cemetery H, Copper Hoard, OCP, and PGW cultures are candidates for cultures associated with Indo-Aryans.


title: Indo-Aryan peoples

text: The Indo-Aryans were united by shared cultural norms and language, referred to as "aryā" 'noble'. Over the last four millennia, the Indo-Aryan culture has evolved particularly inside India itself, but its origins are in the conflation of values and heritage of the Indo-Aryan and indigenous people groups of India. Diffusion of this culture and language took place by patron-client systems, which allowed for the absorption and acculturation of other groups into this culture, and explains the strong influence on other cultures with which it interacted.


title: Indo-Aryan peoples

text: While the Indo-Aryan linguistic group occupies mainly northern parts of India, genetically, all South Asians across the Indian subcontinent are descendants of a mix of South Asian hunter-gatherers, Iranian hunter-gatherers, and Central Asian steppe pastoralists in varying proportion. Additionally, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burmese speaking people contributed to the genetic make-up of South Asia.


title: Indo-Aryan peoples

text: Indigenous Aryanism propagates the idea that the Indo-Aryans were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages spread from there to central Asia and Europe. Contemporary support for this idea is ideologically driven, and has no basis in objective data and mainstream scholarship.


title: Human skin color

text: Human skin color ranges from the darkest brown to the lightest hues. Differences in skin color among individuals is caused by variation in pigmentation, which is the result of genetics (inherited from one's biological parents and or individual gene alleles), exposure to the sun, natural and sexual selection, or all of these. Differences across populations evolved through natural or sexual selection, because of social norms and differences in environment, as well as regulations of the biochemical effects of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the skin.


title: Human skin color

text: The actual skin color of different humans is affected by many substances, although the single most important substance is the pigment melanin. Melanin is produced within the skin in cells called melanocytes and it is the main determinant of the skin color of darker-skin humans. The skin color of people with light skin is determined mainly by the bluish-white connective tissue under the dermis and by the hemoglobin circulating in the veins of the dermis. The red color underlying the skin becomes more visible, especially in the face, when, as consequence of physical exercise or sexual arousal, or the stimulation of the nervous system (anger, embarrassment), arterioles dilate. Color is not entirely uniform across an individual's skin; for example, the skin of the palm and the sole is lighter than most other skin, and this is especially noticeable in darker-skinned people.


title: Human skin color

text: There is a direct correlation between the geographic distribution of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) and the distribution of indigenous skin pigmentation around the world. Areas that receive higher amounts of UVR, generally located closer to the equator, tend to have darker-skinned populations. Areas that are far from the tropics and closer to the poles have lower intensity of UVR, which is reflected in lighter-skinned populations. Some researchers suggest that human populations over the past 50,000 years have changed from dark-skinned to light-skinned and vice versa as they migrated to different UV zones, and that such major changes in pigmentation may have happened in as little as 100 generations (≈2,500 years) through selective sweeps. Natural skin color can also darken as a result of tanning due to exposure to sunlight. The leading theory is that skin color adapts to intense sunlight irradiation to provide partial protection against the ultraviolet fraction that produces damage and thus mutations in the DNA of the skin cells. In addition, it has been observed that females on average are significantly lighter in skin pigmentation than males. Females need more calcium during pregnancy and lactation. The body synthesizes vitamin D from sunlight, which helps it absorb calcium. Females evolved to have lighter skin so their bodies absorb more calcium.


title: Human skin color

text: The social significance of differences in skin color has varied across cultures and over time, as demonstrated with regard to social status and discrimination.


title: Human skin color

text: Melanin is produced by cells called melanocytes in a process called melanogenesis. Melanin is made within small membrane–bound packages called melanosomes. As they become full of melanin, they move into the slender arms of melanocytes, from where they are transferred to the keratinocytes. Under normal conditions, melanosomes cover the upper part of the keratinocytes and protect them from genetic damage. One melanocyte supplies melanin to thirty-six keratinocytes according to signals from the keratinocytes. They also regulate melanin production and replication of melanocytes. People have different skin colors mainly because their melanocytes produce different amount and kinds of melanin.


title: Human skin color

text: The genetic mechanism behind human skin color is mainly regulated by the enzyme tyrosinase, which creates the color of the skin, eyes, and hair shades. Differences in skin color are also attributed to differences in size and distribution of melanosomes in the skin. Melanocytes produce two types of melanin. The most common form of biological melanin is eumelanin, a brown-black polymer of dihydroxyindole carboxylic acids, and their reduced forms. Most are derived from the amino acid tyrosine. Eumelanin is found in hair, areola, and skin, and the hair colors gray, black, blond, and brown. In humans, it is more abundant in people with dark skin. Pheomelanin, a pink to red hue is found in particularly large quantities in red hair, the lips, nipples, glans of the penis, and vagina.


title: Human skin color

text: Both the amount and type of melanin produced is controlled by a number of genes that operate under incomplete dominance. One copy of each of the various genes is inherited from each parent. Each gene can come in several alleles, resulting in the great variety of human skin tones. Melanin controls the amount of ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun that penetrates the skin by absorption. While UV radiation can assist in the production of vitamin D, excessive exposure to UV can damage health.


title: Human skin color

text: Loss of body hair in Hominini species is assumed to be related to the emergence of bipedalism some 5 to 7 million years ago. Bipedal hominin body hair may have disappeared gradually to allow better heat dissipation through sweating.


title: Human skin color

text: The emergence of skin pigmentation dates to about 1.2 million years ago, under conditions of a megadrought that drove early humans into arid, open landscapes. Such conditions likely caused excess UV-B radiation. This favored the emergence of skin pigmentation in order to protect from folate depletion due to the increased exposure to sunlight. A theory that the pigmentation helped counter xeric stress by increasing the epidermal permeability barrier has been disproved.


title: Human skin color

text: With the evolution of hairless skin, abundant sweat glands, and skin rich in melanin, early humans could walk, run, and forage for food for long periods of time under the hot sun without brain damage due to overheating, giving them an evolutionary advantage over other species. By 1.2 million years ago, around the time of "Homo ergaster", archaic humans (including the ancestors of "Homo sapiens") had exactly the same receptor protein as modern sub-Saharan Africans.


title: Human skin color

text: This was the genotype inherited by anatomically modern humans, but retained only by part of the extant populations, thus forming an aspect of human genetic variation. About 100,000–70,000 years ago, some anatomically modern humans ("Homo sapiens") began to migrate away from the tropics to the north where they were exposed to less intense sunlight. This was possibly in part due to the need for greater use of clothing to protect against the colder climate. Under these conditions there was less photodestruction of folate and so the evolutionary pressure working against the survival of lighter-skinned gene variants was reduced. In addition, lighter skin is able to generate more vitamin D (cholecalciferol) than darker skin, so it would have represented a health benefit in reduced sunlight if there were limited sources of vitamin D. Hence the leading hypothesis for the evolution of human skin color proposes that:


title: Human skin color

text: The genetic mutations leading to light skin, though partially different among East Asians and Western Europeans, suggest the two groups experienced a similar selective pressure after settlement in northern latitudes.


title: Human skin color

text: The theory is partially supported by a study into the SLC24A5 gene which found that the allele associated with light skin in Europe "determined […] that 18,000 years had passed since the light-skin allele was fixed in Europeans" but may have originated as recently as 12,000–6,000 years ago "given the imprecision of method" , which is in line with the earliest evidence of farming.


title: Human skin color

text: Research by Nina Jablonski suggests that an estimated time of about 10,000 to 20,000 years is enough for human populations to achieve optimal skin pigmentation in a particular geographic area but that development of ideal skin coloration may happen faster if the evolutionary pressure is stronger, even in as little as 100 generations. The length of time is also affected by cultural practices such as food intake, clothing, body coverings, and shelter usage which can alter the ways in which the environment affects populations.


title: Human skin color

text: One of the most recently proposed drivers of the evolution of skin pigmentation in humans is based on research that shows a superior barrier function in darkly pigmented skin. Most protective functions of the skin, including the permeability barrier and the antimicrobial barrier, reside in the stratum corneum (SC) and the researchers surmise that the SC has undergone the most genetic change since the loss of human body hair. Natural selection would have favored mutations that protect this essential barrier; one such protective adaptation is the pigmentation of interfollicular epidermis, because it improves barrier function as compared to non-pigmented skin. In lush rainforests, however, where UV-B radiation and xeric stress were not in excess, light pigmentation would not have been nearly as detrimental. This explains the side-by-side residence of lightly pigmented and darkly pigmented peoples.


title: Human skin color

text: Population and admixture studies suggest a three-way model for the evolution of human skin color, with dark skin evolving in early hominids in Africa and light skin evolving partly separately at least two times after modern humans had expanded out of Africa.


title: Human skin color

text: For the most part, the evolution of light skin has followed different genetic paths in Western and Eastern Eurasian populations. Two genes however, KITLG and ASIP, have mutations associated with lighter skin that have high frequencies in Eurasian populations and have estimated origin dates after humans spread out of Africa but before the divergence of the two lineages.


title: Human skin color

text: The understanding of the genetic mechanisms underlying human skin color variation is still incomplete; however, genetic studies have discovered a number of genes that affect human skin color in specific populations, and have shown that this happens independently of other physical features such as eye and hair color. Different populations have different allele frequencies of these genes, and it is the combination of these allele variations that bring about the complex, continuous variation in skin coloration we can observe today in modern humans. Population and admixture studies suggest a 3-way model for the evolution of human skin color, with dark skin evolving in early hominids in sub-Saharan Africa and light skin evolving independently in Europe and East Asia after modern humans had expanded out of Africa.


title: Human skin color

text: For skin color, the broad sense heritability (defined as the overall effect of genetic vs. nongenetic factors) is very high, provided one is able to control for the most important nongenetic factor, exposure to sunlight. Many aspects of the evolution of human skin and skin color can be reconstructed using comparative anatomy, physiology, and genomics. Enhancement of thermal sweating was a key innovation in human evolution that allowed maintenance of homeostasis (including constant brain temperature) during sustained physical activity in hot environments. Dark skin evolved "pari passu" with the loss of body hair and was the original state for the genus Homo. Melanin pigmentation is adaptive and has been maintained by natural selection. In recent prehistory, humans became adept at protecting themselves from the environment through clothing and shelter, thus reducing the scope for the action of natural selection on human skin. Credit for describing the relationship between latitude and skin color in modern humans is usually ascribed to an Italian geographer, Renato Basutti, whose widely reproduced "skin color maps" illustrate the correlation of darker skin with equatorial proximity. More recent studies by physical anthropologists have substantiated and extended these observations; a recent review and analysis of data from more than 100 populations (Relethford 1997) found that skin reflectance is lowest at the equator, then gradually increases, about 8% per 10° of latitude in the Northern Hemisphere and about 4% per 10° of latitude in the Southern Hemisphere. This pattern is inversely correlated with levels of UV irradiation, which are greater in the Southern than in the Northern Hemisphere. An important caveat is that we do not know how patterns of UV irradiation have changed over time; more importantly, we do not know when skin color is likely to have evolved, with multiple migrations out of Africa and extensive genetic interchange over the last 500,000 years (Templeton 2002).Regardless, most anthropologists accept the notion that differences in UV irradiation have driven selection for dark human skin at the equator and for light human skin at greater latitudes. What remains controversial are the exact mechanisms of selection. The most popular theory posits that protection offered by dark skin from UV irradiation becomes a liability in more polar latitudes due to vitamin D deficiency (Murray 1934). UVB (short-wavelength UV) converts 7-dehydrocholesterol into an essential precursor of cholecaliferol (vitamin D3); when not otherwise provided by dietary supplements, deficiency for vitamin D causes rickets, a characteristic pattern of growth abnormalities and bony deformities. An oft-cited anecdote in support of the vitamin D hypothesis is that Arctic populations whose skin is relatively dark given their latitude, such as the Inuit and the Lapp, have had a diet that is historically rich in vitamin D. Sensitivity of modern humans to vitamin D deficiency is evident from the widespread occurrence of rickets in 19th-century industrial Europe, but whether dark-skinned humans migrating to polar latitudes tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago experienced similar problems is open to question. In any case, a risk for vitamin D deficiency can only explain selection for light skin. Among several mechanisms suggested to provide a selective advantage for dark skin in conditions of high UV irradiation (Loomis 1967; Robins 1991; Jablonski and Chaplin 2000), the most tenable are protection from sunburn and skin cancer due to the physical barrier imposed by epidermal melanin.


title: Human skin color

text: All modern humans share a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa. Comparisons between known skin pigmentation genes in chimpanzees and modern Africans show that dark skin evolved along with the loss of body hair about 1.2 million years ago and that this common ancestor had dark skin. Investigations into dark-skinned populations in South Asia and Melanesia indicate that skin pigmentation in these populations is due to the preservation of this ancestral state and not due to new variations on a previously lightened population.


title: Human skin color

text: For the most part, the evolution of light skin has followed different genetic paths in European and East Asian populations. Two genes, however, KITLG and ASIP, have mutations associated with lighter skin that have high frequencies in both European and East Asian populations. They are thought to have originated after humans spread out of Africa but before the divergence of the European and Asian lineages around 30,000 years ago. Two subsequent genome-wide association studies found no significant correlation between these genes and skin color, and suggest that the earlier findings may have been the result of incorrect correction methods and small panel sizes, or that the genes have an effect too small to be detected by the larger studies.


title: Human skin color

text: A number of genes have been positively associated with the skin pigmentation difference between European and non-European populations. Mutations in SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 are believed to account for the bulk of this variation and show very strong signs of selection. A variation in TYR has also been identified as a contributor.


title: Human skin color

text: Research indicates the selection for the light-skin alleles of these genes in Europeans is comparatively recent, having occurred later than 20,000 years ago and perhaps as recently as 12,000 to 6,000 years ago. In the 1970s, Luca Cavalli-Sforza suggested that the selective sweep that rendered light skin ubiquitous in Europe might be correlated with the advent of farming and thus have taken place only around 6,000 years ago; This scenario found support in a 2014 analysis of mesolithic (7,000 years old) hunter-gatherer DNA from La Braña, Spain, which showed a version of these genes not corresponding with light skin color. In 2015 researchers analysed for light skin genes in the DNA of 94 ancient skeletons ranging from 8,000 to 3,000 years old from Europe and Russia. They found c. 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary were dark skinned while similarly aged hunter gatherers in Sweden were light skinned (having predominately derived alleles of SLC24A5, SLC45A2 and also HERC2/OCA2). Neolithic farmers entering Europe at around the same time were intermediate, being nearly fixed for the derived SLC24A5 variant but only having the derived SLC45A2 allele in low frequencies. The SLC24A5 variant spread very rapidly throughout central and southern Europe from about 8,000 years ago, whereas the light skin variant of SLC45A2 spread throughout Europe after 5,800 years ago.


title: Human skin color

text: A number of genes known to affect skin color have alleles that show signs of positive selection in East Asian populations. Of these, only OCA2 has been directly related to skin color measurements, while DCT, MC1R and ATRN are marked as candidate genes for future study.


title: Human skin color

text: Tanning response in humans is controlled by a variety of genes. "MC1R" variants "Arg151Sys" (rs1805007), "Arg160Trp" (rs1805008), "Asp294Sys" (rs1805009), "Val60Leu" (rs1805005) and "Val92Met" (rs2228479) have been associated with reduced tanning response in European and/or East Asian populations. These alleles show no signs of positive selection and only occur in relatively small numbers, reaching a peak in Europe with around 28% of the population having at least one allele of one of the variations. A study of self-reported tanning ability and skin type in American non-Hispanic Caucasians found that "SLC24A5 Phe374Leu" is significantly associated with reduced tanning ability and also associated "TYR Arg402Gln" (rs1126809), "OCA2 Arg305Trp" (rs1800401) and a 2-SNP haplotype in "ASIP" (rs4911414 and rs1015362) to skin type variation within a "fair/medium/olive" context.


title: Human skin color

text: Oculocutaneous albinism (OCA) is a lack of pigment in the eyes, skin and sometimes hair that occurs in a very small fraction of the population. The four known types of "OCA" are caused by mutations in the "TYR", "OCA2", "TYRP1", and "SLC45A2" genes.


title: Human skin color

text: In hominids, the parts of the body not covered with hair, like the face and the back of the hands, start out pale in infants and turn darker as the skin is exposed to more sun. All human babies are born pale, regardless of what their adult color will be. In humans, melanin production does not peak until after puberty.


title: Human skin color

text: The skin of children becomes darker as they go through puberty and experience the effects of sex hormones. This darkening is especially noticeable in the skin of the nipples, the areola of the nipples, the labia majora in females, and the scrotum in males. In some people, the armpits become slightly darker during puberty. The interaction of genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors on skin coloration with age is still not adequately understood, but it is known that men are at their darkest baseline skin color around the age of 30, without considering the effects of tanning. Around the same age, women experience darkening of some areas of their skin.


title: Human skin color

text: Human skin color fades with age. Humans over the age of thirty experience a decrease in melanin-producing cells by about 10% to 20% per decade as melanocyte stem cells gradually die. The skin of face and hands has about twice the amount of pigment cells as unexposed areas of the body, as chronic exposure to the sun continues to stimulate melanocytes. The blotchy appearance of skin color in the face and hands of older people is due to the uneven distribution of pigment cells and to changes in the interaction between melanocytes and keratinocytes.


title: Human skin color

text: It has been observed that females are found to have lighter skin pigmentation than males in some studied populations. This may be a form of sexual dimorphism due to the requirement in women for high amounts of calcium during pregnancy and lactation. Breastfeeding newborns, whose skeletons are growing, require high amounts of calcium intake from the mother's milk (about 4 times more than during prenatal development), part of which comes from reserves in the mother's skeleton. Adequate vitamin D resources are needed to absorb calcium from the diet, and it has been shown that deficiencies of vitamin D and calcium increase the likelihood of various birth defects such as spina bifida and rickets. Natural selection may have led to females with lighter skin than males in some indigenous populations because women must get enough vitamin D and calcium to support the development of fetus and nursing infants and to maintain their own health. However, in some populations such as in Italy, Poland, Ireland, Spain and Portugal men are found to have fairer complexions, and this has been ascribed as a cause to increased melanoma risk in men. Similarly, studies done in the late 19th Century/early 20th Century in Europe also conflicted with the notion at least in regards to Northern Europeans. The studies found that in England women tend to have darker hair, eyes, and skin complexation than men, and in particular women darken in relation to men during puberty. A study in Germany during this period showed that German men were more likely to have lighter skin, blond hair, and lighter eyes, while German women had darker hair, eyes and skin tone on average.


title: Human skin color

text: The sexes also differ in how they change their skin color with age. Men and women are not born with different skin color, they begin to diverge during puberty with the influence of sex hormones. Women can also change pigmentation in certain parts of their body, such as the areola, during the menstrual cycle and pregnancy and between 50 and 70% of pregnant women will develop the "mask of pregnancy" (melasma or chloasma) in the cheeks, upper lips, forehead, and chin. This is caused by increases in the female hormones estrogen and progesterone and it can develop in women who take birth control pills or participate in hormone replacement therapy.


title: Human skin color

text: Uneven pigmentation of some sort affects most people, regardless of bioethnic background or skin color. Skin may either appear lighter, or darker than normal, or lack pigmentation at all; there may be blotchy, uneven areas, patches of brown to gray discoloration or freckling. Apart from blood-related conditions such as jaundice, carotenosis, or argyria, skin pigmentation disorders generally occur because the body produces either too much or too little melanin.


title: Human skin color

text: Some types of albinism affect only the skin and hair, while other types affect the skin, hair and eyes, and in rare cases only the eyes. All of them are caused by different genetic mutations. Albinism is a recessively inherited trait in humans where both pigmented parents may be carriers of the gene and pass it down to their children. Each child has a 25% chance of being albino and a 75% chance of having normally pigmented skin. One common type of albinism is oculocutaneous albinism or OCA, which has many subtypes caused by different genetic mutations.


title: Human skin color

text: Albinism is a serious problem in areas of high sunlight intensity, leading to extreme sun sensitivity, skin cancer, and eye damage.


title: Human skin color

text: Albinism is more common in some parts of the world than in others, but it is estimated that 1 in 70 humans carry the gene for OCA.


title: Human skin color

text: The most severe type of albinism is OCA1A, which is characterized by complete, lifelong loss of melanin production, other forms of OCA1B, OCA2, OCA3, OCA4, show some form of melanin accumulation and are less severe. The four known types of "OCA" are caused by mutations in the "TYR", "OCA2", "TYRP1", and "SLC45A2" genes.


title: Human skin color

text: Albinos often face social and cultural challenges (even threats), as the condition is often a source of ridicule, racism, fear, and violence. Many cultures around the world have developed beliefs regarding people with albinism. Albinos are persecuted in Tanzania by witchdoctors, who use the body parts of albinos as ingredients in rituals and potions, as they are thought to possess magical power.


title: Human skin color

text: Vitiligo is a condition that causes depigmentation of sections of skin. It occurs when melanocytes die or are unable to function. The cause of vitiligo is unknown, but research suggests that it may arise from autoimmune, genetic, oxidative stress, neural, or viral causes. The incidence worldwide is less than 1%. Individuals affected by vitiligo sometimes suffer psychological discomfort because of their appearance.


title: Human skin color

text: Aside from sun exposure and hormones, hyperpigmentation can be caused by skin damage, such as remnants of blemishes, wounds or rashes. This is especially true for those with darker skin tones.


title: Human skin color

text: The most typical cause of darkened areas of skin, brown spots or areas of discoloration is unprotected sun exposure. Once incorrectly referred to as liver spots, these pigment problems are not connected with the liver.


title: Human skin color

text: On lighter to medium skin tones, solar lentigenes emerge as small- to medium-sized brown patches of freckling that can grow and accumulate over time on areas of the body that receive the most unprotected sun exposure, such as the back of the hands, forearms, chest, and face. For those with darker skin colors, these discolorations can appear as patches or areas of ashen-gray skin.


title: Human skin color

text: Melanin in the skin protects the body by absorbing solar radiation. In general, the more melanin there is in the skin the more solar radiation can be absorbed. Excessive solar radiation causes direct and indirect DNA damage to the skin and the body naturally combats and seeks to repair the damage and protect the skin by creating and releasing further melanin into the skin's cells. With the production of the melanin, the skin color darkens, but can also cause sunburn. The tanning process can also be created by artificial UV radiation.


title: Human skin color

text: There are two different mechanisms involved. Firstly, the UVA-radiation creates oxidative stress, which in turn oxidizes existing melanin and leads to rapid darkening of the melanin, also known as IPD (immediate pigment darkening). Secondly, there is an increase in production of melanin known as melanogenesis. Melanogenesis leads to delayed tanning and first becomes visible about 72 hours after exposure. The tan that is created by an increased melanogenesis lasts much longer than the one that is caused by oxidation of existing melanin. Tanning involves not just the increased melanin production in response to UV radiation but the thickening of the top layer of the epidermis, the stratum corneum.


title: Human skin color

text: A person's natural skin color affects their reaction to exposure to the sun. Generally, those who start out with darker skin color and more melanin have better abilities to tan. Individuals with very light skin and albinos have no ability to tan. The biggest differences resulting from sun exposure are visible in individuals who start out with moderately pigmented brown skin: the change is dramatically visible as tan lines, where parts of the skin which tanned are delineated from unexposed skin.


title: Human skin color

text: Modern lifestyles and mobility have created mismatch between skin color and environment for many individuals. Vitamin D deficiencies and UVR overexposure are concerns for many. It is important for these people individually to adjust their diet and lifestyle according to their skin color, the environment they live in, and the time of year. For practical purposes, such as exposure time for sun tanning, six skin types are distinguished following Fitzpatrick (1975), listed in order of decreasing lightness:


title: Human skin color

text: The following list shows the six categories of the Fitzpatrick scale in relation to the 36 categories of the older von Luschan scale:


title: Human skin color

text: Dark skin with large concentrations of melanin protects against ultraviolet light and skin cancers; light-skinned people have about a tenfold greater risk of dying from skin cancer, compared with dark-skinned persons, under equal sunlight exposure. Furthermore, UV-A rays from sunlight are believed to interact with folic acid in ways that may damage health. In a number of traditional societies the sun was avoided as much as possible, especially around noon when the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight is at its most intense. Midday was a time when people stayed in the shade and had the main meal followed by a nap, a practice similar to the modern siesta.


title: Human skin color

text: Approximately 10% of the variance in skin color occurs within regions, and approximately 90% occurs between regions. Because skin color has been under strong selective pressure, similar skin colors can result from convergent adaptation rather than from genetic relatedness; populations with similar pigmentation may be genetically no more similar than other widely separated groups. Furthermore, in some parts of the world where people from different regions have mixed extensively, the connection between skin color and ancestry has substantially weakened. In Brazil, for example, skin color is not closely associated with the percentage of recent African ancestors a person has, as estimated from an analysis of genetic variants differing in frequency among continent groups.


title: Human skin color

text: In general, people living close to the equator are highly darkly pigmented, and those living near the poles are generally very lightly pigmented. The rest of humanity shows a high degree of skin color variation between these two extremes, generally correlating with UV exposure. The main exception to this rule is in the New World, where people have only lived for about 10,000 to 15,000 years and show a less pronounced degree of skin pigmentation.


title: Human skin color

text: In recent times, humans have become increasingly mobile as a consequence of improved technology, domestication, environmental change, strong curiosity, and risk-taking. Migrations over the last 4000 years, and especially the last 400 years, have been the fastest in human history and have led to many people settling in places far away from their ancestral homelands. This means that skin colors today are not as confined to geographical location as they were previously.


title: Human skin color

text: According to classical scholar Frank Snowden, skin color did not determine social status in ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome. These ancient civilizations viewed relations between the major power and the subordinate state as more significant in a person's status than their skin colors.


title: Human skin color

text: Nevertheless, some social groups favor specific skin coloring. The preferred skin tone varies by culture and has varied over time. A number of indigenous African groups, such as the Maasai, associated pale skin with being cursed or caused by evil spirits associated with witchcraft. They would abandon their children born with conditions such as albinism and showed a sexual preference for darker skin.


title: Human skin color

text: Many cultures have historically favored lighter skin for women. Before the Industrial Revolution, inhabitants of the continent of Europe preferred pale skin, which they interpreted as a sign of high social status. The poorer classes worked outdoors and got darker skin from exposure to the sun, while the upper class stayed indoors and had light skin. Hence light skin became associated with wealth and high position. Women would put lead-based cosmetics on their skin to whiten their skin tone artificially. However, when not strictly monitored, these cosmetics caused lead poisoning. Other methods also aimed at achieving a light-skinned appearance, including the use of arsenic to whiten skin, and powders. Women would wear full-length clothes when outdoors, and would use gloves and parasols to provide shade from the sun.


title: Human skin color

text: Colonization and enslavement as carried out by European countries became involved with colorism and racism, associated with the belief that people with dark skin were uncivilized, inferior, and should be subordinate to lighter-skinned invaders. This belief exists to an extent in modern times as well. Institutionalized slavery in North America led people to perceive lighter-skinned African-Americans as more intelligent, cooperative, and beautiful. Such lighter-skinned individuals had a greater likelihood of working as house slaves and of receiving preferential treatment from plantation owners and from overseers. For example, they had a chance to get an education. The preference for fair skin remained prominent until the end of the Gilded Age, but racial stereotypes about worth and beauty persisted in the last half of the 20th century and continue in the present day. African-American journalist Jill Nelson wrote that, "To be both prettiest and black was impossible," and elaborated:


title: Human skin color

text: We learn as girls that in ways both subtle and obvious, personal and political, our value as females is largely determined by how we look. ... For black women, the domination of physical aspects of beauty in women's definition and value render us invisible, partially erased, or obsessed, sometimes for a lifetime, since most of us lack the major talismans of Western beauty. Black women find themselves involved in a lifelong effort to self-define in a culture that provides them no positive reflection.


title: Human skin color

text: A preference for fair or lighter skin continues in some countries, including Latin American countries where whites form a minority. In Brazil, a dark-skinned person is more likely to experience discrimination. Many actors and actresses in Latin America have European features—blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. A light-skinned person is more privileged and has a higher social status; a person with light skin is considered more beautiful and lighter skin suggests that the person has more wealth. Skin color is such an obsession in some countries that specific words describe distinct skin tones - from (for example) ""jincha"", Puerto Rican slang for "glass of milk" to ""morena"", literally "brown".


title: Human skin color

text: In South Asia, society regards pale skin as more attractive and associates dark skin with lower class status; this results in a massive market for skin-whitening creams. Fairer skin-tones also correlate to higher caste-status in the Hindu social order—although the system is not based on skin tone. Actors and actresses in Indian cinema tend to have light skin tones, and Indian cinematographers have used graphics and intense lighting to achieve more "desirable" skin tones. Fair skin tones are advertised as an asset in Indian marketing.


title: Human skin color

text: Skin-whitening products have remained popular over time, often due to historical beliefs and perceptions about fair skin. Sales of skin-whitening products across the world grew from $40 billion to $43 billion in 2008. In South and East Asian countries, people have traditionally seen light skin as more attractive, and a preference for lighter skin remains prevalent. In ancient China and Japan, for example, pale skin can be traced back to ancient drawings depicting women and goddesses with fair skin tones. In ancient China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, pale skin was seen as a sign of wealth. Thus skin-whitening cosmetic products are popular in East Asia. Four out of ten women surveyed in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea used a skin-whitening cream, and more than 60 companies globally compete for Asia's estimated $18 billion market. Changes in regulations in the cosmetic industry led to skin-care companies introducing harm-free skin lighteners. In Japan, the geisha have a reputation for their white-painted faces, and the appeal of the , or "beautiful white", ideal leads many Japanese women to avoid any form of tanning. There are exceptions to this, with Japanese fashion trends such as ganguro emphasizing tanned skin. Skin whitening is also not uncommon in Africa, and several research projects have suggested a general preference for lighter skin in the African-American community. In contrast, one study on men of the Bikosso tribe in Cameroon found no preference for attractiveness of females based on lighter skin color, bringing into question the universality of earlier studies that had exclusively focused on skin-color preferences among non-African populations.


title: Human skin color

text: Significant exceptions to a preference for lighter skin started to appear in Western culture in the mid-20th century. However a 2010 study found a preference for lighter-skinned women in New Zealand and California. Though sun-tanned skin was once associated with the sun-exposed manual labor of the lower class, the associations became dramatically reversed during this time—a change usually credited to the trendsetting Frenchwoman Coco Chanel (1883–1971) presenting tanned skin as fashionable, healthy, and luxurious. , though an overall preference for lighter skin remains prevalent in the United States, many within the country regard tanned skin as both more attractive and healthier than pale or very dark skin. Western mass media and popular culture continued to reinforce negative stereotypes about dark skin, but in some circles pale skin has become associated with indoor office-work while tanned skin has become associated with increased leisure time, sportiness and good health that comes with wealth and higher social status. Studies have also emerged indicating that the degree of tanning is directly related to how attractive a young woman is.


title: Joel Grey

text: Joel Grey (born Joel David Katz; April 11, 1932) is an American actor, singer, dancer, photographer and theatre director. He is best known for portraying the Master of Ceremonies in the musical "Cabaret" on Broadway as well as in the 1972 film adaptation. He has won an Academy Award, a Tony Award, and a Golden Globe Award.


title: Joel Grey

text: He also originated the role of George M. Cohan in the musical "George M!" in 1968 and the Wizard of Oz in the musical "Wicked". He also starred as Moonface Martin and Amos Hart in the Broadway revivals of "Anything Goes" and "Chicago", respectively.


title: Joel Grey

text: Grey was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Goldie "Grace" (née Epstein) and Mickey Katz, an actor, comedian, and musician. Both his parents were Jewish. He attended Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, California.


title: Joel Grey

text: Grey started his career, at age 10, in the Cleveland Play House's Curtain Pullers children's theatre program in the early 1940s, appearing in productions such as "Grandmother Slyboots", "Jack of Tarts" and a lead role in their mainstage production of "On Borrowed Time". By 1952, at age 20, he was appearing as a featured performer at the Copacabana nightclub in New York.


title: Joel Grey

text: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Grey appeared in several TV westerns including "Maverick" (1959), "Bronco" (1960) and "Lawman" (3 times in 1960 and 1961).


title: Joel Grey

text: Grey originated the role of the Master of Ceremonies in the Broadway musical "Cabaret" in 1966 for which he won a Tony Award. Additional Broadway credits include "Come Blow Your Horn" (1961), "Stop the World – I Want to Get Off" (1962), "Half a Sixpence" (1965), "George M!" (1968), "Goodtime Charley" (1975), "The Grand Tour" (1979), "Chicago" (1996), "Wicked" (2003), and "Anything Goes" (2011). In November 1995, he performed as the Wizard in "", a staged concert of the popular story at Lincoln Center to benefit the Children's Defense Fund. The performance was originally broadcast on Turner Network Television (TNT) in November 1995, and released on CD and video in 1996.


title: Joel Grey

text: Grey won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in March 1973 for his performance as the Master of Ceremonies in the 1972 film version of "Cabaret". His victory was part of a "Cabaret" near-sweep, which saw Liza Minnelli win Best Actress and Bob Fosse win Best Director, although it lost the Best Picture Oscar to "The Godfather." For that role, Grey also won a BAFTA award for "The Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles" and Best Supporting Actor awards from the Golden Globes, Kansas City Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, National Society of Film Critics, and a Tony Award for his original stage performance six years prior, making him one of only ten people who have won both a Tony Award and an Academy Award for the same role.


title: Joel Grey

text: He has performed at The Muny in St. Louis, Missouri, in roles such as George M. Cohan in "George M!" (1970 and 1992), the Emcee in "Cabaret" (1971), and Joey Evans in "Pal Joey" (1983). At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Grey played the title role in their production of "Platonov" (1977).


title: Joel Grey

text: Grey appeared as a panelist for the television game show "What's My Line?" in the 1967 season, as well as being the first Mystery Guest during its syndication in 1968. He was the guest star for the fifth episode of "The Muppet Show" in its first season in 1976, singing "Razzle Dazzle" from "Chicago" and "Willkommen" from "Cabaret". He also played Master of Sinanju Chiun, Remo's elderly Korean martial arts master in the movie "" (1985), a role that garnered him a Saturn Award and a second Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Chiun's character was popular for the lines "Meat of cow kills", and "You move like a pregnant yak", from the movie. In 1991, he played Adam, a devil, in the final episode of the television series "Dallas" (1991). That same year, Grey also appeared in the American Repertory Theatre's production of "When We Dead Awaken" at the "Sao Paulo Biennale". In 1993 he starred in New York Stage & Film's production of John Patrick Shanley's "A Fool and Her Fortune" and received an "Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series" Emmy nomination for his recurring role as Jacob Prossman on the television series "Brooklyn Bridge". In 1995, he made a guest appearance on "" as an aging rebel seeking to free his (deceased) wife from prison. In 1999, he starred in Brian Friel's "Give Me Your Answer, Do!" mounted by Roundabout Theatre Company.


title: Joel Grey

text: In 2000, Grey played Oldrich Novy in the film "Dancer in the Dark" and had recurring television roles on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (as the evil reptilian demon Doc, 2001), "Oz" (as Lemuel Idzik, 2003) and "Alias" (as "Another Mr. Sloane", 2005). He played a wealthy, paroled ex-convict on "" (episode "", 2003). Grey also originated the role of the Wizard of Oz in the hit Broadway musical "Wicked". He also appeared on the shows "House" and "Brothers & Sisters" (2007), on the latter of which he played the role of Dr. Bar-Shalom, Sarah and Joe's marriage counselor. He appeared as Izzie's high school teacher who needs treatment for dementia in "Grey's Anatomy" (2009).


title: Joel Grey

text: Grey returned to Broadway in spring 2011 as Moonface Martin in the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of "Anything Goes" at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. He also played Ned in the 1985 Off-Broadway production of Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart", and went on to co-direct the Tony Award-winning revival in 2011.


title: Joel Grey

text: In 2018, Grey directed a Yiddish-language production of "Fiddler on the Roof", which originated at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, then transferred to Stage 42 Off-Broadway. The production became a surprise hit, running for over a year and winning the 2019 Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for Best Musical Revival.


title: Joel Grey

text: In 1958, Grey married Jo Wilder; they divorced in 1982. Together, they had two children: actress Jennifer Grey (star of the film "Dirty Dancing") and chef James Grey.


title: Joel Grey

text: He is a photographer; his first book of photographs, "Pictures I Had to Take", was published in 2003; its follow-up, "Looking Hard at Unexpected Things", was published in 2006. His third book, "1.3 – Images from My Phone", a book of photographs taken with his camera phone, was published in 2009. An exhibition of his work was held in April 2011 at the Museum of the City of New York, titled "Joel Grey/A New York Life." His fourth book, "The Billboard Papers: Photographs by Joel Grey", came out in 2013 and depicts the many-layered billboards of New York City.


title: Joel Grey

text: In January 2015, Grey discussed his sexuality in an interview with "People", stating: "I don't like labels, but if you have to put a label on it, I'm a gay man." Grey writes about his family, his acting career, and the challenges of being gay in his 2016 memoir, "Master of Ceremonies".


title: Joel Grey

text: He was presented with a lifetime achievement award on June 10, 2013, by The National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene.


title: Joel Grey

text: Grey won the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre on December 5, 2016, presented by the York Theatre Company in New York City. The theatre said, in part: "we are thrilled to celebrate the extraordinary Joel Grey, whose artistry — for over half a century — has become an indelible part of Broadway history."


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion", as well as the "play for voices" "Under Milk Wood". He also wrote stories and radio broadcasts such as "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog". He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. In 1931, when he was 16, Thomas, an undistinguished pupil, left school to become a reporter for the "South Wales Daily Post". Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager. In 1934, the publication of "Light breaks where no sun shines" caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara. They married in 1937 and had three children: Llewelyn, Aeronwy, and Colm.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: He came to be appreciated as a popular poet during his lifetime, though he found earning a living as a writer difficult. He began augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention, and he was frequently used by the BBC as an accessible voice of the literary scene.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas first travelled to the United States in the 1950s. His readings there brought him a degree of fame, while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in the United States cemented his legend, and he went on to record to vinyl such works as "A Child's Christmas in Wales". During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma. He died on 9 November 1953 and his body was returned to Wales. On 25 November 1953, he was interred at St Martin's churchyard in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Although Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language, he has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. He is noted for his original, rhythmic, and ingenious use of words and imagery. His position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, and he remains popular with the public.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea the son of Florence Hannah ("née" Williams; 1882–1958), a seamstress, and David John Thomas (1876–1952), a teacher. His father had a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth, and ambitions to rise above his position teaching English literature at the local grammar school. Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles (1906–1953), who was eight years his senior. The children spoke only English, though their parents were bilingual in English and Welsh, and David Thomas gave Welsh lessons at home. Thomas's father chose the name Dylan, which could be translated as "son of the sea" after Dylan ail Don, a character in "The Mabinogion". His middle name, Marlais, was given in honour of his great-uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles. Dylan, pronounced [ˈdəlan] (Dull-an) in Welsh, caused his mother to worry that he might be teased as the "dull one". When he broadcast on Welsh BBC early in his career, he was introduced using this pronunciation. Thomas favoured the Anglicised pronunciation and gave instructions that it should be Dillan .


title: Dylan Thomas

text: The red-brick semi-detached house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (in the respectable area of the Uplands), in which Thomas was born and lived until he was 23, had been bought by his parents a few months before his birth.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas has written a number of accounts of his childhood growing up in Swansea, and there are also accounts available by those who knew him as a young child. Thomas wrote several poems about his childhood and early teenage years, including "Once it was the colour of saying" and "The hunchback in the park", as well as short stories such as "The Fight" and "A Child’s Christmas in Wales".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas' childhood also featured regular summer trips to the Llansteffan peninsula, a Welsh-speaking part of Carmarthenshire, In the land between Llangain and Llansteffan, his mother's family, the Williamses and their close relatives, worked a dozen farms with over a thousand acres between them. The memory of Fernhill, a dilapidated 15-acre farm rented by his maternal aunt, Ann Jones, and her husband, Jim Jones, is evoked in the 1945 lyrical poem "Fern Hill", but is portrayed more accurately in his short story, "The Peaches". Thomas also spent part of his summer holidays with Jim's sister, Rachel Jones, at neighbouring Pentrewyman farm.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: A few fields south of Fernhill lay Blaencwm, a pair of stone cottages to which his mother’s Swansea siblings had retired, and with whom the young Thomas and his sister, Nancy, would sometimes stay. A couple of miles down the road from Blaencwm is the village of Llansteffan, where Thomas used to holiday at Rose Cottage with his aunt, Anne Williams, his mother’s half-sister who had married into local gentry.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas' paternal grandparents, Anne and Evan Thomas, lived at The Poplars in Johnstown, just outside Carmarthen. Anne was the daughter of William Lewis, a gardener in the town. She had been born and brought up in Llangadog, as had her father, who is thought to be “Grandpa” in Thomas's short story "A Visit to Grandpa's", in which Grandpa expresses his determination to be buried not in Llansteffan but in Llangadog.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Evan worked on the railways and was known as Thomas the Guard. His family had originated in another part of Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire, in the farms that lay around the villages of Brechfa, Abergorlech, Gwernogle and Llanybydder, and which the young Thomas occasionally visited with his father. His father's side of the family also provided the young Thomas with another kind of experience; most lived in the towns of the South Wales industrial belt, including Port Talbot, Pontarddulais and Cross Hands.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas had bronchitis and asthma in childhood and struggled with these throughout his life. He was indulged by his mother, Florence, and enjoyed being mollycoddled, a trait he carried into adulthood, becoming skilful in gaining attention and sympathy. But Florence would have known that child deaths had been a recurring event in the family's history, and it's said that she herself had lost a child soon after her marriage. But if Thomas was protected and spoilt at home, the real spoilers were his many aunts and older cousins, those in both Swansea and the Llansteffan countryside. Some of them played an important part in both his upbringing and his later life, as Thomas’s wife, Caitlin, has observed: “He couldn't stand their company for more than five minutes... Yet Dylan couldn't break away from them, either. They were the background from which he had sprung, and he needed that background all his life, like a tree needs roots.”.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas's formal education began at Mrs Hole's dame school, a private school on Mirador Crescent, a few streets away from his home. He described his experience there in "Reminiscences of Childhood":


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime – the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Alongside dame school, Thomas also took private lessons from Gwen James, an elocution teacher who had studied at drama school in London, winning several major prizes. She also taught “Dramatic Art” and “Voice Production”, and would often help cast members of the Swansea Little Theatre (see below) with the parts they were playing. Thomas's parents’ storytelling and dramatic talents, as well as their theatre-going interests, could also have contributed to the young Thomas’s interest in performance.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In October 1925, Thomas enrolled at Swansea Grammar School for boys, in Mount Pleasant, where his father taught English. He was an undistinguished pupil who shied away from school, preferring reading and drama activities. In his first year one of his poems was published in the school's magazine, and before he left he became its editor. Thomas' various contributions to the school magazine can be found here:


title: Dylan Thomas

text: During his final school years he began writing poetry in notebooks; the first poem, dated 27 April (1930), is entitled "Osiris, come to Isis". In June 1928, Thomas won the school's mile race, held at St. Helen's Ground; he carried a newspaper photograph of his victory with him until his death.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In 1931, when he was 16, Thomas left school to become a reporter for the "South Wales Daily Post", where he remained for some 18 months. After leaving the newspaper, Thomas continued to work as a freelance journalist for several years, during which time he remained at Cwmdonkin Drive and continued to add to his notebooks, amassing 200 poems in four books between 1930 and 1934. Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these years.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: The stage was also an important part of Thomas’s life from 1929 to 1934, as an actor, writer, producer and set painter. He took part in productions at Swansea Grammar School, and with the YMCA Junior Players and the Little Theatre, which was based in the Mumbles. It was also a touring company that took part in drama competitions and festivals around South Wales. Between October 1933 and March 1934, for example, Thomas and his fellow actors took part in five productions at the Mumbles theatre, as well as nine touring performances. Thomas continued with acting and production throughout his life, including his time in Laugharne, South Leigh and London (in the theatre and on radio), as well as taking part in nine stage readings of "Under Milk Wood". The Shakespearian actor, John Laurie, who had worked with Thomas on both the stage and radio thought that Thomas would “have loved to have been an actor” and, had he chosen to do so, would have been “Our first real poet-dramatist since Shakespeare.”


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Painting the sets at the Little Theatre was just one aspect of the young Thomas’s interest in art. His own drawings and paintings hung in his bedroom in Cwmdonkin Drive, and his early letters reveal a broader interest in art and art theory. Thomas saw writing a poem as an act of construction “as a sculptor works at stone,” later advising a student “to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone...hew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them...” Throughout his life, his friends included artists, both in Swansea and in London, as well as in America.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In his free time, Thomas visited the cinema in Uplands, took walks along Swansea Bay, and frequented Swansea's pubs, especially the Antelope and the Mermaid Hotels in Mumbles. In the Kardomah Café, close to the newspaper office in Castle Street, he met his creative contemporaries, including his friend the poet Vernon Watkins and the musician and composer, Daniel Jones with whom, as teenagers, Thomas had helped to set up the "Warmley Broadcasting Corporation". This group of writers, musicians and artists became known as "The Kardomah Gang". This was also the period of his friendship with Bert Trick, a local shopkeeper, left-wing political activist and would-be poet, and with the Rev. Leon Atkin, a Swansea minister, human rights activist and local politician.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas was a teenager when many of the poems for which he became famous were published: "And death shall have no dominion", "Before I Knocked" and "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". "And death shall have no dominion" appeared in the "New English Weekly" in May 1933. When "Light breaks where no sun shines" appeared in "The Listener" in 1934, it caught the attention of three senior figures in literary London, T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson and Stephen Spender. They contacted Thomas and his first poetry volume, "18 Poems", was published in December 1934. "18 Poems" was noted for its visionary qualities which led to critic Desmond Hawkins writing that the work was "the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years". The volume was critically acclaimed and won a contest run by the "Sunday Referee", netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, in part a vanity publisher that did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. A similar arrangement was used by other new authors including Philip Larkin.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In September 1935, Thomas met Vernon Watkins, thus beginning a lifelong friendship. Thomas introduced Watkins, working at Lloyds Bank at the time, to his friends, now known as The Kardomah Gang. In those days, Thomas used to frequent the cinema on Mondays with Tom Warner who, like Watkins, had recently suffered a nervous breakdown. After these trips, Warner would bring Thomas back for supper with his aunt. On one occasion, when she served him a boiled egg, she had to cut its top off for him, as Thomas did not know how to do this. This was because his mother had done it for him all his life, an example of her coddling him. Years later, his wife Caitlin would still have to prepare his eggs for him.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In December 1935, Thomas contributed the poem "The Hand That Signed the Paper" to Issue 18 of the bi-monthly "New Verse". In 1936, his next collection "Twenty-five Poems", published by J. M. Dent, also received much critical praise. Two years later, in 1938, Thomas won the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry; it was also the year in which New Directions offered to be his publisher in the United States. In all, he wrote half his poems while living at Cwmdonkin Drive before moving to London. It was the time that Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: By the late 1930s, Thomas was embraced as the "poetic herald" for a group of English poets, the New Apocalyptics. Thomas refused to align himself with them and declined to sign their manifesto. He later stated that he believed they were "intellectual muckpots leaning on a theory". Despite this, many of the group, including Henry Treece, modelled their work on Thomas's.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: During the politically charged atmosphere of the 1930s, Thomas's sympathies were very much with the radical left, to the point of holding close links with the communists, as well as decidedly pacifist and anti-fascist. He was a supporter of the left-wing No More War Movement and boasted about participating in demonstrations against the British Union of Fascists. Bert Trick has provided an extensive account of an Oswald Mosley rally in the Plaza cinema in Swansea in July 1933 that he and Thomas attended.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In early 1936, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara (1913–1994), a 22-year-old dancer of Irish and French Quaker descent. She had run away from home, intent on making a career in dance, and aged 18 joined the chorus line at the London Palladium. Introduced by Augustus John, Caitlin's lover, they met in The Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place in London's West End. Laying his head in her lap, a drunken Thomas proposed. Thomas liked to comment that he and Caitlin were in bed together ten minutes after they first met. Although Caitlin initially continued her relationship with John, she and Thomas began a correspondence, and in the second half of 1936 were courting. They married at the register office in Penzance, Cornwall, on 11 July 1937.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In May 1938, they moved to Wales, renting a cottage in the village of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. They lived there intermittently for just under two years until July 1941, and did not return to live in Laugharne until 1949. Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January 1939.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In 1939, a collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since 1934, appeared as "The Map of Love". Ten stories in his next book, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" (1940), were based less on lavish fantasy than those in "The Map of Love" and more on real-life romances featuring himself in Wales. Sales of both books were poor, resulting in Thomas living on meagre fees from writing and reviewing. At this time he borrowed heavily from friends and acquaintances. Hounded by creditors, Thomas and his family left Laugharne in July 1940 and moved to the home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield near Chippenham in Gloucestershire. There Thomas collaborated with Davenport on the satire "The Death of the King's Canary", though due to fears of libel the work was not published until 1976.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: At the outset of the Second World War, Thomas was worried about conscription, and referred to his ailment as "an unreliable lung". Coughing sometimes confined him to bed, and he had a history of bringing up blood and mucus. After initially seeking employment in a reserved occupation, he managed to be classified Grade III, which meant that he would be among the last to be called up for service. Saddened to see his friends going on active service, he continued drinking and struggled to support his family. He wrote begging letters to random literary figures asking for support, a plan he hoped would provide a long-term regular income. Thomas supplemented his income by writing scripts for the BBC, which not only gave him additional earnings but also provided evidence that he was engaged in essential war work.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the Luftwaffe in a "three nights' blitz". Castle Street was one of many streets that suffered badly; rows of shops, including the Kardomah Café, were destroyed. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". Thomas later wrote a feature programme for the radio, "Return Journey", which described the café as being "razed to the snow". The programme, produced by Philip Burton, was first broadcast on 15 June 1947. The Kardomah Café reopened on Portland Street after the war.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In five film projects, between 1942 and 1945, the Ministry of Information (MOI) commissioned Thomas to script a series of documentaries about both urban planning and wartime patriotism, all in partnership with director John Eldridge: "Wales: Green Mountain, Black Mountain", "New Towns for Old", "Fuel for Battle", "Our Country" and "A City Reborn."


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In May 1941, Thomas and Caitlin left their son with his grandmother at Blashford and moved to London. Thomas hoped to find employment in the film industry and wrote to the director of the films division of the Ministry of Information. After being rebuffed, he found work with Strand Films, providing him with his first regular income since the "South Wales Daily Post". Strand produced films for the MOI; Thomas scripted at least five films in 1942, "This Is Colour" (a history of the British dyeing industry) and "New Towns For Old" (on post-war reconstruction). "These Are The Men" (1943) was a more ambitious piece in which Thomas's verse accompanies Leni Riefenstahl's footage of an early Nuremberg Rally. "Conquest of a Germ" (1944) explored the use of early antibiotics in the fight against pneumonia and tuberculosis. "Our Country" (1945) was a romantic tour of Britain set to Thomas's poetry.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In early 1943, Thomas began a relationship with Pamela Glendower; one of several affairs he had during his marriage. The affairs either ran out of steam or were halted after Caitlin discovered his infidelity. In March 1943, Caitlin gave birth to a daughter, Aeronwy, in London. They lived in a run-down studio in Chelsea, made up of a single large room with a curtain to separate the kitchen.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: The Thomas family also made several escapes back to Wales. Between 1941 and 1943, they lived intermittently in Plas Gelli, Talsarn, in Cardiganshire. Plas Gelli sits close by the River Aeron, after whom Aeronwy is thought to have been named. Some of Thomas’s letters from Gelli can be found in his "Collected Letters". The Thomases shared the mansion with his childhood friends from Swansea, Vera and Evelyn Phillips. Vera's friendship with the Thomases in nearby New Quay is portrayed in the 2008 film, "The Edge of Love".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In July 1944, with the threat in London of German flying bombs, Thomas moved to the family cottage at Blaencwm near Llangain, Carmarthenshire, where he resumed writing poetry, completing "Holy Spring" and "Vision and Prayer".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In September that year, the Thomas family moved to New Quay in Cardiganshire (Ceredigion), where they rented Majoda, a wood and asbestos bungalow on the cliffs overlooking Cardigan Bay. It was there that Thomas wrote the radio piece "Quite Early One Morning", a sketch for his later work, "Under Milk Wood". Of the poetry written at this time, of note is "Fern Hill", believed to have been started while living in New Quay, but completed at Blaencwm in mid-1945. Thomas' nine months in New Quay, said first biographer, Constantine FitzGibbon, were "a second flowering, a period of fertility that recalls the earliest days…[with a] great outpouring of poems", as well as a good deal of other material. His second biographer, Paul Ferris, agreed: "On the grounds of output, the bungalow deserves a plaque of its own." Thomas’ third biographer, George Tremlett, concurred, describing the time in New Quay as “one of the most creative periods of Thomas’s life.” Professor Walford Davies, who co-edited the 1995 definitive edition of the play, has noted that New Quay "was crucial in supplementing the gallery of characters Thomas had to hand for writing "Under Milk Wood"."


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Although Thomas had previously written for the BBC, it was a minor and intermittent source of income. In 1943, he wrote and recorded a 15-minute talk titled "Reminiscences of Childhood" for the Welsh BBC. In December 1944, he recorded "Quite Early One Morning" (produced by Aneirin Talfan Davies, again for the Welsh BBC) but when Davies offered it for national broadcast BBC London turned it down. On 31 August 1945, the BBC Home Service broadcast "Quite Early One Morning" and, in the three years beginning in October 1945, Thomas made over a hundred broadcasts for the corporation. Thomas was employed not only for his poetry readings, but for discussions and critiques.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In the second half of 1945, Thomas began reading for the BBC Radio programme, "Book of Verse", broadcast weekly to the Far East. This provided Thomas with a regular income and brought him into contact with Louis MacNeice, a congenial drinking companion whose advice Thomas cherished. On 29 September 1946, the BBC began transmitting the Third Programme, a high-culture network which provided opportunities for Thomas. He appeared in the play "Comus" for the Third Programme, the day after the network launched, and his rich, sonorous voice led to character parts, including the lead in Aeschylus's "Agamemnon" and Satan in an adaptation of "Paradise Lost". Thomas remained a popular guest on radio talk shows for the BBC, who regarded him as "useful should a younger generation poet be needed". He had an uneasy relationship with BBC management and a staff job was never an option, with drinking cited as the problem. Despite this, Thomas became a familiar radio voice and within Britain was "in every sense a celebrity".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: By late September 1945, the Thomases had left Wales and were living with various friends in London. In December, they moved to Oxford to live in a summerhouse on the banks of the Cherwell. It belonged to the historian, A.J.P. Taylor. His wife, Margaret, would prove to be Thomas’s most committed patron.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: The publication of "Deaths and Entrances" in February 1946 was a major turning point for Thomas. Poet and critic Walter J. Turner commented in "The Spectator", "This book alone, in my opinion, ranks him as a major poet".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: The following year, in April 1947, the Thomases travelled to Italy, after Thomas had been awarded a Society of Authors scholarship. They stayed first in villas near Rapallo and then Florence, before moving to a hotel in Rio Marina on the island of Elba. On their return, Thomas and family moved, in September 1947, into the Manor House in South Leigh, just west of Oxford, found for him by Margaret Taylor. He continued with his work for the BBC, completed a number of film scripts and worked further on his ideas for "Under Milk Wood", including a discussion in late 1947 of "The Village of the Mad" (as the play was then called) with the BBC producer Philip Burton. He later recalled that, during the meeting, Thomas had discussed his ideas for having a blind narrator, an organist who played for a dog and two lovers who wrote to each other every day but never met.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In March 1949 Thomas travelled to Prague. He had been invited by the Czech government to attend the inauguration of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union. Jiřina Hauková, who had previously published translations of some of Thomas's poems, was his guide and interpreter. In her memoir, Hauková recalls that at a party in Prague, Thomas "narrated the first version of his radio play "Under Milk Wood"." She describes how he outlined the plot about a town that was declared insane, mentioning the organist who played for sheep and goats and the baker with two wives.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: A month later, in May 1949, Thomas and his family moved to his final home, the Boat House at Laugharne, purchased for him at a cost of £2,500 in April 1949 by Margaret Taylor. Thomas acquired a garage a hundred yards from the house on a cliff ledge which he turned into his writing shed, and where he wrote several of his most acclaimed poems. He also rented "Pelican House" opposite his regular drinking den, Brown's Hotel, for his parents who lived there from 1949 until 1953.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In October, the New Zealand poet, Allen Curnow, came to visit Thomas at the Boat House, who took him to his writing shed and "fished out a draft to show me of the unfinished "Under Milk Wood"" that was, says Curnow, titled "The Town That Was Mad". This is the first known sighting of the script of the play that was to become "Under Milk Wood".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: American poet John Brinnin invited Thomas to New York, where in February 1950 they embarked on a lucrative three-month tour of arts centres and campuses. The tour, which began in front of an audience of a thousand at the Kaufmann Auditorium of the Poetry Centre in New York, took in about 40 venues. During the tour, Thomas was invited to many parties and functions and on several occasions became drunk – going out of his way to shock people – and was a difficult guest. Thomas drank before some of his readings, though it is argued he may have pretended to be more affected by it than he actually was. The writer Elizabeth Hardwick recalled how intoxicating a performer he was and how the tension would build before a performance: "Would he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party? Would he be offensive, violent, obscene?" Caitlin said in her memoir, "Nobody ever needed encouragement less, and he was drowned in it."


title: Dylan Thomas

text: On returning to Britain, Thomas began work on two further poems, "In the white giant's thigh", which he read on the "Third Programme" in September 1950, and the incomplete "In country heaven". In October, Thomas sent a draft of the first 39 pages of 'The Town That Was Mad' to the BBC. The task of seeing this work through to production as "Under Milk Wood" was assigned to the BBC's Douglas Cleverdon, who had been responsible for casting Thomas in 'Paradise Lost'.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Despite Cleverdon's urgings, the script slipped from Thomas's priorities and in January 1951 he went to Iran to work on a film for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, an assignment which Callard has speculated was undertaken on behalf of British intelligence agencies. Thomas toured the country with the film crew, and his letters home vividly express his shock and anger with the poverty he saw around him. He also gave a reading at the British Council and talked with a number of Iranian intellectuals, including Ebrahim Golestan whose account of his meeting with Thomas has been translated and published. The film was never made, with Thomas returning to Wales in February, though his time in Iran allowed him to provide a few minutes of material for a BBC documentary, 'Persian Oil'.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Later that year, Thomas published two poems, which have been described as "unusually blunt." They were an ode, in the form of a villanelle, to his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night", and the ribald "Lament".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Although he had a range of wealthy patrons, including Margaret Taylor, Princess Marguerite Caetani and Marged Howard-Stepney, Thomas was still in financial difficulty, and he wrote several begging letters to notable literary figures, including T. S. Eliot. Taylor was not keen on Thomas taking another trip to the United States, and thought that if he had a permanent address in London he would be able to gain steady work there. She bought a property, 54 Delancey Street, in Camden Town, and in late 1951 Thomas and Caitlin lived in the basement flat. Thomas would describe the flat as his "London house of horror" and did not return there after his 1952 tour of America.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas undertook a second tour of the United States in 1952, this time with Caitlin – after she had discovered he had been unfaithful on his earlier trip. They drank heavily, and Thomas began to suffer with gout and lung problems. The second tour was the most intensive of the four, taking in 46 engagements. The trip also resulted in Thomas recording his first poetry to vinyl, which Caedmon Records released in America later that year. One of his works recorded during this time, "A Child's Christmas in Wales", became his most popular prose work in America. The original 1952 recording of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" was a 2008 selection for the United States National Recording Registry, stating that it is "credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: A shortened version of the first half of "The Town That Was Mad" was published in "Botteghe Oscure" in May 1952, with the title "Llareggub. A Piece for Radio Perhaps". Thomas had been in Laugharne for almost three years, but his half-play had made little progress since his time living in South Leigh. By the summer of 1952, the half-play’s title had been changed to "Under Milk Wood" because John Brinnin thought the title "Llareggub" would not attract American audiences. On November 6, 1952, Thomas wrote to the editor of "Botteghe Oscure" to explain why he hadn't been able to "finish the second half of my piece for you." He had failed shamefully, he said, to add to "my lonely half of a looney maybe-play".


title: Dylan Thomas

text: On 10 November 1952 Thomas's last collection "Collected Poems, 1934–1952", was published by Dent; he was 38. It won the Foyle poetry prize. Reviewing the volume, critic Philip Toynbee declared that "Thomas is the greatest living poet in the English language". Thomas's father died from pneumonia just before Christmas 1952. In the first few months of 1953, his sister died from liver cancer, one of his patrons took an overdose of sleeping pills, three friends died at an early age and Caitlin had an abortion.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: In April 1953, Thomas returned alone for a third tour of America. He performed a "work in progress" version of "Under Milk Wood", solo, for the first time at Harvard University on 3 May. A week later, the work was performed with a full cast at the Poetry Centre in New York. He met the deadline only after being locked in a room by Brinnin's assistant, Liz Reitell, and he was still editing the script on the afternoon of the performance; its last lines were handed to the actors as they were putting on their makeup.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: During this penultimate tour, Thomas met the composer Igor Stravinsky who had become an admirer after having been introduced to his poetry by W. H. Auden. They had discussions about collaborating on a "musical theatrical work" for which Thomas would provide the libretto on the theme of "the rediscovery of love and language in what might be left after the world after the bomb." The shock of Thomas's death later in the year moved Stravinsky to compose his "In Memoriam Dylan Thomas" for tenor, string quartet and four trombones. The first performance in Los Angeles in 1954 was introduced with a tribute to Thomas from Aldous Huxley.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas spent the last nine or ten days of his third tour in New York mostly in the company of Reitell, with whom he had an affair. During this time, Thomas fractured his arm falling down a flight of stairs when drunk. Reitell's doctor, Milton Feltenstein, put his arm in plaster and treated him for gout and gastritis.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: After returning home, Thomas worked on "Under Milk Wood" in Laugharne. Aeronwy, his daughter, noticed that his health had “visibly deteriorated...I could hear his racking cough. Every morning he had a prolonged coughing attack...The coughing was nothing new but it seemed worse than before.”


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas sent the original manuscript to Douglas Cleverdon on 15 October 1953. It was copied and returned to Thomas, who lost it in a pub in London and required a duplicate to take to America. Thomas flew to the States on 19 October 1953 for what would be his final tour. He died in New York before the BBC could record "Under Milk Wood". Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast in 1954, and was joined by Elizabeth Taylor in a subsequent film. In 1954, the play won the Prix Italia for literary or dramatic programmes.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Thomas left Laugharne on 9 October 1953 on the first leg of his fourth trip to America. He called on his mother, Florence, to say goodbye: "He always felt that he had to get out from this country because of his chest being so bad." Thomas had suffered from chest problems for most of his life, though they began in earnest soon after he moved in May 1949 to the Boat House at Laugharne – the "bronchial heronry", as he called it. Within weeks of moving in, he visited a local doctor, who prescribed medicine for both his chest and throat.


title: Dylan Thomas

text: Whilst waiting in London before his flight, Thomas stayed with the comedian Harry Locke and worked on "Under Milk Wood". Locke noted that Thomas was having trouble with his chest, "terrible" coughing fits that made him go purple in the face. He was also using an inhaler to help his breathing. There were reports, too, that Thomas was also having blackouts. His visit to the BBC producer Philip Burton, a few days before he left for New York, was interrupted by a blackout. On his last night in London, he had another in the company of his fellow poet Louis MacNeice.