gray eminence

At first just a gray eminence working behind the scenes while Clarence pounded the pavement, he gradually grew in prominence, reaching a fun spy-movie throwback sweet spot last episode.

That he’s now the current longest-running network host is as funny as any joke Kimmel has ever delivered — we all woke up one day and Kimmel became the gray eminence, the old guard, that guy who hosts the Oscars.

A gray eminence of the avant-garde theater world, Iván disdains the bourgeois sensibilities of Félix’s fans and the kind of work he does to entertain them.

The Israeli writer Amos Oz, who died on December 28th, at the age of seventy-nine, was a cultural hero in the old sense, an acolyte who patiently made himself the gray eminence of a lost, or losing, cause: Labor Zionism, a vision that once qualified as a movement.

“Is it the long-term enmity showing itself again? He’s not a kid. He’s a gray eminence by now,” said Lester D. Friedman, emeritus professor of cinema at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the author of “Citizen Spielberg,” which examines the filmmaker’s career.