The star took leading parts in family-friendly blockbusters such as Jumanji and Flubber, but also tackled more serious topics in dramatic roles that saw him captivate audiences and surpass widely-held expectations of him as an actor.
He ran for election as mayor of Rio on a platform of dividing it into 69 self-governing sub-cities and, with the electorate finding him captivating but incomprehensible, won 0.36% of the vote.
King George III, Jefferson wrote, "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither".
I have seen him move easily in the company of senators, governors and presidents, and once, when our book on his life ("My Turn at Bat," Simon & Schuster, 1969) made the best-seller lists and we were invited to the Time-Life Building for a luncheon, watched him captivate a roomful of magazine editors with a 10-minute off-the-cuff speech that included nary a "hell" or a "damn".
Kirby, like LeVar Burton before him, captivates the audience as he resists being stripped of his name the very thing that connects him to his people and to a place he will never live to see again while being savagely whipped.
At elegant gathering spots, like New York's 21 Club, where a hamburger-and-egg dish on the menu was named after him, he captivated listeners with tales of his rugged past.
He added that it also reminded him of what captivated him about music in the first place.
His blistering words, filled with sometimes wild, Yankee-bashing invective -- like a recent claim that the American Embassy was trying to assassinate him -- captivated a broadening base of supporters among Bolivians frustrated by a deepening three-year recession.
The "dancing pig in Cuban heels", as one newspaper critic called him, has captivated viewers for 10 weekends as he stumbled his way through routines.
