(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.
Irascible
Definition:
(a.) Prone to anger; easily provoked or inflamed to anger; choleric; irritable; as, an irascible man; an irascible temper or mood.
Example Sentences:
(1) I learned that the hard way: when I was younger, I played the part of the erratic, irascible drunk in order to have something to write about.
(2) All round Europe there have been political earthquakes in a volatile anti-politics age: the surprise is that Britain’s scratchy, irascible electorate hasn’t expressed its underlying anger that ordinary people paid the price for the bankers’ crash.
(3) Kaczyński is behaving like Józef Piłsudski, the brilliant but irascible prewar leader who brought Poland back to independence in 1918.
(4) The mother is irascible, the father aloof; on the other hand, the parental combination "mother and father affectionate" is more common.
(5) The ability to be a good listener, unflappable and patient enough to deal with irascible family members, mediating family spats and calming ruffled feathers also helps.
(6) But she's not bad as the partner of an Iraq-bound soldier in Timeless: perhaps a bit plummier than you might expect a squaddie's wife required to live with her irascible great-grandmother in a tiny house to be, but certainly nothing like the disaster the world has come to expect from supermodels demonstrating their polymath abilities.
(7) Nancy's novels and Jessica's memoirs offered a beguiling - and friends thought - inaccurate picture of the extraordinary life lived out chez Mitford under the irascible gaze of Lord Redesdale ("Uncle Matthew" in Love in a Cold Climate), celebrated for his dislike of foreigners and his daughters' friends, disparaged collectively as "sewers".
(8) In 1959, he starred in Carol Reed's Our Man In Havana, and a year later gave a brilliantly unpleasant Scottish impersonation of an irascible soldier in Tunes Of Glory.
(9) Known for his irascibility, the writer has in one sense softened in late middle age.
(10) Now the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, famous for giving ruthlessly short shrift to politicians, has confirmed that his irascible on-screen attitude towards Westminster is more than skin deep.
(11) But his less enthusiastic answer about Bannon comes amid reports of infighting in the Trump White House, all of which place the gruff, irascible Bannon at the center.
(12) The clinico-pathological characteristics of the case were as follows: Fibrillary gliosis of the midbrain and pontine reticular formation corresponded clinically to personality changes: The patient had formerly been irascible and became extremely mild-mannered.
(13) All good knockabout stuff and the makings of a legend - irascible, menacing, self-important, egoistical.
(14) His father was an irascible, blind barrister, the Mortimer of Mortimer on Wills, Probate and Divorce.
(15) Yet, if you speak to some at Shirebrook, she seems to portray an image that can be as irascible as charming.
(16) Though more conservative in his politics, McAvoy, with his irascible personality and his unfortunate attitude to authority, is thought to be based on the former MSNBC news host Keith Olbermann, who quit the network after a very public falling-out, going then to the upstart Current TV channel, which he left in March this year after another row with the management.
(17) Typical Munchausen behaviors such as irascibility, the desperate search for care, and pseudologia fantastica, may be understood as solutions to problems created by brain damage.
(18) Wrestling with an opponent who will not recognise the prejudice in a phrase like "hideous Jewish face" had finally pushed Rampton, who cultivates a manner of curmudgeonly irascibility, into a foul mood.
(19) What is quickly turning into a public relations nightmare for the irascible Rodman – whose fellow players looked like they would rather be anywhere but Pyongyang during his tetchy pre-game interview with CNN on Tuesday – can only have helped burnish Kim's reputation, at least at home.
(20) It was an unexpected flash of humanity from this irascible stickler for social propriety.