Biography
Valerie Bettis was born on either 19 December or 20 December 1919 in Houston, Texas. Her parents were Royal Holt Bettis and Valerie Elizabeth Bettis (McCarthy). Her father died when she was thirteen years old, after which her mother married Hugh Prather. In 1943, Bettis married Bernardo Segall, who was then her company's music director, though the marriage ended in divorce in 1955. In 1959, she married Arthur A. Schmidt who died in 1969. On 26 September 1982, Bettis died at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan at the age of 62.
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Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)