(1) While the Spielberg of popular myth is Mr Nice Guy, Lean was known as an obsessive, cantankerous tyrant who didn't much like actors and was only truly happy locked away in the editing suite.
(2) He owed his late-flourishing film career to Branagh, appearing in a string of his movies: as Bardolph in Henry V (1989), Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing (1993), the old blind man in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), a cantankerous old thespian in A Midwinter's Tale (1995), Polonius in Hamlet (1996) and Sir Nathaniel in the musical Love's Labour's Lost (2000).
(3) Ken could be magnificently cantankerous, but he was generous to a fault and loved nothing more than to inspire young film-makers.
(4) Her mother the Duchess of Kent had wanted to call her Georgiana Charlotte Augusta Alexandrina Victoria, but was overruled by a cantankerous Prince Regent, the future George IV, who dictated during the ceremony that she be called Alexandrina Victoria instead in tribute to the Russian Tsar Alexander I.
(5) In my cosseted complacency, I had mistakenly believed that modern Scotland was a good place to practise the curious rituals of my cantankerous, old Catholic faith.
(6) And what a face it is: that gnarled, acne-pocked, gin-blossomed lunar landscape of ornery venom and intermittent soulfulness, out of which comes that cantankerous Texan bark.
(7) The ITV bosshas become more and more cantankerous in his dealings with the media over the past few months as the broadcaster has struggled in the advertising recession and then seen its search for a chief executive or chairman to replace him hit by a series of setbacks.
(8) I had spent my life wondering if I would ever find the elderly Jewish actor capable of "doing" the cantankerous, passionate, funny old characters of my early life.
(9) No sudden appearances from David Starkey, looming out of the historical gloaming like the ghost of a cantankerous 1930s dinner lady.
(10) He was called cantankerous, which he probably took as a badge of honour.
(11) Signature video The first Unnecessary Otter skit, introducing us to Hayes playing a sweet children's TV presenter with the aforementioned cantankerous Scottish sidekick.
(12) In 1948, the cantankerous but influential scholar FR Leavis crowned Austen mother of his great tradition of the English novel.
(13) Think of him as a cantankerous old kung-fu master whose tough love hides a deep-seated desire for his students to prosper.
(14) Like Charles Dickens, Twain achieved immense success with his first book, became his nation's most famous and best-loved author, and has remained a national treasure ever since – America's most archetypal writer, an instantly recognisable, white-haired, white-suited, folksy, cantankerous icon.
(15) In conversation, he exudes a mix of warmth and cantankerousness, idealism about humanity's potential and a weariness with the modern world – at least outside the eminently sensible shire in which he lives.
(16) Godard is the great, implacably cantankerous and difficult warrior from the new wave generation, one that still makes its mark at Cannes.
(17) The more cantankerous Senator Ted Cruz called it “Obamacare for the internet”.
(18) He’s cantankerous and eccentric but you don’t get to make a difference if you are a shrinking violet.
(19) Emerging from the gloom is Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss, excellent), a preoccupied, sensitive Sydney detective returning to her hometown to nurse her cantankerous mother, only to find herself drawn into an investigation into the abuse of a pregnant 12-year-old girl.
(20) What some saw as an eccentric masterpiece, others dismissed as an eccentric mess – a wilfully obscure meditation on the nature of globalisation from a cantankerous old genius who took a perverse delight in bamboozling his audience.
Curmudgeon
Definition:
(n.) An avaricious, grasping fellow; a miser; a niggard; a churl.
Example Sentences:
(1) It may seem curmudgeonly to sprinkle our meagre daily measure of praise upon the negation of something: the fact that a plan is not going ahead.
(2) " But Lindsay was also a curmudgeon, and he could be very difficult at times.
(3) Riva is not being curmudgeonly (well, not much), but it is easy to forget that she is not playing at being an octogenarian.
(4) The old curmudgeon might have to admit that his boy did pretty well here.
(5) Which is why every family should have at least one … Facebook Twitter Pinterest Placator or Curmudgeon?
(6) Any English speaker who has tried to tell (or fully understand) a joke in France will know the problem – just as some ancient Romans were well aware that the conquered Germans had different rules of laughter from their own ("The Germans don't laugh at vice", as one curmudgeonly Roman critic observed).
(7) The film has made converts of even the most curmudgeonly critics, grossing more than $531m (£327m) worldwide in its first four weeks.
(8) However, only the most curmudgeonly would deny that bouquets are due in particular to those who do not normally share the limelight, namely, the engineers, construction workers, architects and others who, in five years, have physically performed a modern miracle .
(9) A new Father of the Bride movie will see Steve Martin's curmudgeonly dad planning the upcoming nuptials of his gay son, according to reports on nikkifinke.com .
(10) Without appearing a curmudgeon, I worry that such kindness could be a thing of the past.
(11) "He had no education but was a very intelligent man, a great walker and birder, a curmudgeonly leftwing atheist who even back then wasn't homophobic or racist.
(12) We've grown so used to our curmudgeonly fictional coppers, whether in books or on screen, that it's easy to forget that Beck is the prototype for practically every portrayal of a policeman ever since, in this country, or America, or continental Europe.
(13) Now, that is no doubt all very exciting for texting tweenagers, and I don't want to come across here as a linguistically conservative, humourless and miserable curmudgeon.
(14) The Curmudgeon Moans and has a great line in sarcasm.
(15) Twain's cult of personality – as lecturer and novelist, commentator and social critic, travel and humour writer, gadfly and avuncular curmudgeon – was carefully judged, his folksy humour natural, but strategically deployed.
(16) The organisers call the picture a manifesto and, looking at it, it becomes easier to see the, at first rather surprising, affinity the curmudgeonly bachelor discovered in this world of girliness and frills.
(17) The veteran actor Timothy West has also joined the show as Carter's father Stan, a curmudgeonly and opinionated former Billingsgate fishmonger.
(18) Meanwhile, Woody Allen continues to make movies, Bill Murray is a loveable but curmudgeonly old fella’ and Terry Richardson is a feted photographer.
(19) Even the most Friends-phobic curmudgeon has to admit that 10 years' toil on a popular sitcom will have honed Jennifer Aniston's comic chops.
(20) A club of such means does not usually inspire fondness from neutrals, but only a curmudgeon could fail to appreciate the accomplishment of City.