Persona

HOLLYWOOD -- It was a little disconcerting to see Sacha Baron Cohen without his Borat mustache. When the lanky comedian showed up the other day for his first newspaper interview as himself since the inception of Borat-mania last fall, Cohen looked a little smaller than life, especially compared with the outsize character who caused such a sensation in Borat. Sipping hot lemon tea at a coffee shop in Santa Monica, Cohen had the air of a man who had shed a layer of skin that had been worn to a frazzle.

To Hope! A Celebration, the Mass by Dave Brubeck that a small army of singers and musicians will perform Sunday at Morgan State University, almost didn't get written. "I'm not a Catholic. I've never been to a Mass," Brubeck says he told Ed Murray, then the editor of the Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor, who pressed him for two years in the late 1970s to write a Mass. "I don't know anything about it. You should get somebody that's really familiar [with it]. "He said: `No, I want somebody who will look at it in a different way and bring a new light to it.'" Brubeck finally gave in. "I told him I'll write three parts of the Mass and you send it to the top Catholic musician that you know would be the most critical and if they like it ... then I'll continue.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will face the toughest challenge of his long and storied military and political career today: the forced evacuation of the remaining Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip and a few enclaves in the northern West Bank. For Israel's right wing, Mr. Sharon's "disengagement" amounts to heresy, a destruction of Zionism and a security folly. For the left, it offers a chance to consolidate Israel's democracy and its Jewish majority, albeit on a smaller slice of Middle East territory.

In halls of science, Albert Einstein is worshiped for reinventing space and time. In the hallways of retailers, the shaggy-haired scientist is revered for a different reason: He's a stellar pitchman. Although Einstein died 50 years ago Monday, the man who refused to profit from celebrity in life is one hot commodity in death. Apple Computer, DaimlerChrysler, Fuji Film, Perrier and Xerox have all licensed Einstein's name or image for advertisements in recent years. Meanwhile, the scientist's droopy lids and unruly halo of hair fuel an inflating universe of Einstein action figures, neckties, coffee mugs, T-shirts and relativity-related kitsch.

TOKYO - While reports filter out of North Korea that portraits of the country's leader, Kim Jong Il, have been removed from their honored spots, the official radio and news agency are dropping the honorific "Dear Leader" from their reports on Kim, according to Radiopress, a Japanese news agency that monitors North Korea's radio. Analysts are debating whether Kim is losing his grip on power, or, more likely, quietly orchestrating the downsizing of his own personality cult. As the nation's propaganda chief in the 1970s, Kim paved his way to power by raising his father, Kim Il Sung, to demigod status as founder of the Communist state.

For years, John "Bradshaw" Layfield, a former football player from Texas, played the part of a beer-swilling, barroom-brawling good-old boy, making a good living but never quite rising beyond a middle-of-the-card act as a professional wrestler. A few months ago, though, Layfield's bosses at World Wrestling Entertainment suddenly gave him an extreme makeover. They ditched his longtime tag-team partner, converted him from a "babyface" (a wrestling good guy) to a "heel" (bad guy) and took the 6-foot-6, 290-pounder from a long-haired, goateed beer-guzzler in black T-shirt and jeans to a clean-shaven, custom-suited high-finance expert in a stretch limo.

Marlon Brando, who changed not just the face but the mind and soul of movie acting with a series of revolutionary performances in the 1950s, died Thursday at age 80 of lung failure at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. In his five decades on screen, Mr. Brando fundamentally altered Hollywood's image of a leading man, bringing out an unprecedented emotional rawness in hard-guy characters such as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, then, improbably, reviving his career a generation later as courtly Mafia don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

While a 1970s sitcom role as an obsessive-compulsive photographer sharing an apartment with a slob of a sportswriter came to define Tony Randall's persona in the public mind, it was only the second act in a life that seemed to be lived as an intelligently crafted three-act play. His was a reputation built in the movies, refined in prime-time television and then fulfilled on the stage. Along the way, while he was never a leading man, Randall, through this persona, did as much as any actor of his generation to shape and question the very notion of masculinity.

NEW YORK -- Alan King, the stand-up comedian who parlayed a Borscht Belt sense of humor, a tummler's cheek and a big appetite for the limelight into a thoroughgoing show business career that lasted more than half a century, died yesterday morning at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was 76, and lived in King's Point, N.Y. The cause was lung cancer, said his wife of 57 years, Jeanette. King was an unabashed exemplar of Jewish comedy whose sensibility, delivery -- and accent -- never migrated far from their Brooklyn roots.

Jackie Walker has been conducting style seminars all across the country for 15 years, and the audience reaction is always the same: "The women crowd around me afterward," she says. "They ask, 'Do you have a book? I want to take this information home with me.' " Now, at last, the wardrobe guru does have a book: I Don't Have a Thing to Wear: The Psychology of Your Closet (Pocket Books, $12). It is co-authored by Judie Taggart, a fashion writer. "My mission is to give women self-esteem.