British actress Julie Andrews and country icon Dolly Parton will receive Grammy Awards for lifetime achievement next year.
Recipients also include the Juilliard String Quartet, jazz drummer Roy Haynes, punk pioneers the Ramones, folk revivalists the Kingston Trio, and 101-year-old gospel legend George Beverly Shea.
They will receive their statuettes at an event in Los Angeles on February 12, a day before the 53rd annual Grammy Awards ceremony is held.
With the exception of the Ramones, all the lifetime honorees have won competitive Grammys. The lifetime awards will also be posthumous for most of the founding members of the Ramones and the Kingston Trio. Two of the original members of the Juilliard String Quartet, formed in 1946, are still alive.
Andrews, 75, became one of Hollywood's biggest stars by playing prim and cheery nannies in the 1960s movie musicals “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music.” Parton, 64, a country music singer-songwriter and businesswoman with an irrepressible personality and voluptuous figure, is perhaps best known for her '70s pop crossover hits “Jolene” and “9 to 5.”
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
