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Sam Lloyd, a longtime television and film actor who appeared in the television shows “Scrubs” and “Desperate Housewives,” died at the Barlow Respiratory Hospital on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 56.Kevin Turner, a representative for Mr. Lloyd, confirmed his death on Saturday. He died of complications from lung cancer, his family said in a statement.In January 2019, Mr. Lloyd began experiencing headaches and sought medical attention, according to a GoFundMe set up for the actor.A scan revealed a mass on his brain, and he soon underwent surgery, but the tumor was “too intertwined” to be removed, the website said. Mr. Lloyd was told that the cancer in his brain had metastasized from his lungs. Additional scans showed that the cancer had spread to his liver, spine and jaw.Samuel Lloyd Jr. was born on Nov. 12, 1963, in Springfield, Vt., to Marianna McGuffin and Samuel Lloyd Sr.The son of two aspiring actors, Mr. Lloyd spent his life in theater and in music, said his sister, Laurel Lloyd.In Vermont, he was a part of their mother’s children’s theater group, the Green Mountain Trolls, and later a member of the Weston Playhouse, where he continued to act on the stage as recently as 2017.Mr. Lloyd’s sister said the actor had had an innate sense of humor that he honed over time. His deadpan comedy and pratfalls were Mr. Lloyd’s craft, his wife, Vanessa Villalovos, said, but the man she knew “was just a tender, genuine soul.”On Saturday, she praised her husband’s looks: “If he had hair,” she said, he would rival some of the most handsome actors in Hollywood.Mr. Lloyd acted in dozens of television shows and films, including 95 episodes of “Scrubs” as Ted Buckland, a sad-sack lawyer with a hangdog look and low self-esteem.Zach Braff, one of the stars of “Scrubs,” said on Twitter on Friday that Mr. Lloyd was one of the funniest actors he had worked with.“Sam Lloyd made me crack up and break character every single time we did a scene together,” he said.Mr. Lloyd also appeared in several episodes of “Desperate Housewives” as Dr. Albert Goldfine, according to IMDb; in episodes of “Seinfeld,” “Modern Family,” “The West Wing,” “Cougar Town” and “Malcolm in the Middle”; and in the films “Flubber” (1997) and “Galaxy Quest” (1999).Mr. Lloyd was also a musician, according to his talent agency, Daniel Hoff Agency.He sang in the Blanks, an a cappella group that made several appearances on “Scrubs” as the Worthless Peons, the agency said in a statement. Mr. Lloyd also played bass guitar in the Butties, a Beatles tribute band.In addition to his wife, Mr. Lloyd is survived by his son, Weston; his stepmother, Barbara Lloyd; sisters, Laurel Lloyd, Robin Lloyd and Sandy Yaple; and his uncle, the actor Christopher Lloyd.“It doesn’t feel real,” Ms. Villalovos said. “It never will. It just feels like he will walk through the door.” More

CAIRO — An Egyptian filmmaker imprisoned over a music video that mocked President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi died at a maximum-security facility on Friday after two years in detention without trial, his lawyer said.The cause of death of the filmmaker, Shady Habash, 24, was not immediately clear. But it brought new scrutiny to conditions in Egypt’s notoriously crowded prisons, where the death of an American this year caused a rare rift with the Trump administration, and which have been the subject of growing calls for a mass release of prisoners to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.Mr. Habash was imprisoned in March 2018 after he directed a music video by an exiled musician, Ramy Essam, that mocked Mr. el-Sisi as a “date.” When the video spread widely on social media, Mr. Habash was arrested and jailed, said his lawyer, Ahmed el-Khawaga.The writer of the song, Galal el-Behairy, was also arrested and charged, as was a third man who set up Mr. Essam’s Facebook page. In August 2018, a military court sentenced Mr. el-Behairy to three years’ imprisonment.Although Mr. el-Sisi has amassed greater power than any other Egyptian leader in decades, he has consistently shown little tolerance for those who dare to mock him. In 2015, a 22-year-old student was jailed for three years after posting a cartoon on Facebook that depicted the president as Mickey Mouse.In 2016, a comedian who played a prank on the police in Tahrir Square, the site of the Arab Spring protests in 2011, was arrested and remains in jail. Numerous other Egyptian actors, writers, satirists and sports stars have fled into exile to avoid Mr. el-Sisi’s wrath, and some have been prosecuted in absentia.Mr. Essam, the singer, became popular during the Arab Spring, but later fled to Sweden after he was briefly detained. He hired Mr. Habash, who had worked with other musicians, to make his video about Mr. el-Sisi.In a letter from prison in October that was later published by friends on Facebook, Mr. Habesh spoke of his despair. “Prison doesn’t kill, loneliness does,” he wrote, describing what he called his struggle to “stop yourself going mad or dying slowly because you’ve been thrown in a room two years ago and forgotten.”Political prisoners in Egypt are often held for years without trial, frequently in what rights groups say are dirty, overcrowded conditions with poor medical treatment. In March, Amnesty International called on Mr. el-Sisi to release thousands of prisoners who are vulnerable to an outbreak of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.Mr. el-Sisi released 4,000 prisoners last month, in a traditional gesture of clemency for Sinai Liberation Day, marking Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai in 1982. But those released were convicted criminals, and political prisoners were not included.Lawyers, lawmakers and translators are among those who have been arrested by the security services in recent months, including Kholoud Sayed Amer, the head of translation at the prestigious Library of Alexandria.Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent political prisoner, started a hunger strike on April 12 to protest what he called his unjust detention. He is subsisting on water and tea, said his aunt, the writer Ahdaf Soueif, who was herself arrested in March for protesting about his conditions.Although President Trump has generally offered unstinting praise to Mr. el-Sisi, the death of an imprisoned American, Moustafa Kassem, in January caused a rare chill in relations between the two countries.Mr. Kassem died after six years in prison and despite pleas from Vice President Mike Pence for his release. He had been on a hunger strike at the time of his death, and the State Department later considered cutting military aid to Egypt in retaliation for the death.Egypt sent a planeload of medical aid to the United States in late April, in what many analysts viewed as a gesture of coronavirus diplomacy. But the issue of prison conditions remains an American priority.In a call on April 23 with Egypt’s foreign minister, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “emphasized that detained U.S. citizens be kept safe and provided consular access during the Covid-19 pandemic,” a State Department spokeswoman said.Nada Rashwan contributed reporting. More

Matty Simmons, who helped launch National Lampoon magazine and was instrumental in bringing into being its most famous side project, the 1978 movie “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.His son Michael confirmed his death.In his 2012 book, “Fat, Drunk and Stupid: The Inside Story Behind the Making of ‘Animal House,’” Mr. Simmons gave a succinct version of his unusual career path: “The Diners Club begat Weight Watchers Magazine, which begat the National Lampoon, and that begat ‘Animal House.’”Mr. Simmons was a press agent in New York, with clubs and restaurants among his clients, when, in 1949, Frank McNamara, a businessman, and Ralph E. Schneider, a lawyer, asked him if he wanted to help them bring an idea they had to fruition. They envisioned a card that people could use instead of cash to pay for restaurant meals.Their Diners Club Card helped usher in the era of credit cards. Diners Club International calls it “the world’s first multipurpose charge card,” and Mr. Simmons was at the lunch with Mr. McNamara and Mr. Schneider in February 1950 when a Diners Club Card was used for the first time, at Major’s Cabin Grill in Midtown Manhattan.Mr. Simmons rose to vice president for sales of the new company and started The Diners Club Magazine. Publishing came to interest him more than sales did, so in the late 1950s he left the company and started his own, 21st Century Communications.Weight Watchers asked him to help turn their corporate publication into a general-interest magazine, which he did in 1968, to considerable success. His company, he said, had a half-share stake in the new magazine, and with the profits he began looking to invest in other magazine projects. The president of a magazine distribution company introduced him to three young men from the student publication The Harvard Lampoon: Henry Beard, Robert Hoffman and Douglas Kenney.Mr. Simmons helped them put out a parody of Life magazine, then a parody of Time. Then came National Lampoon, with Mr. Simmons as chairman. As National Lampoon grew more successful, it turned into a franchise, with stage shows, comedy albums and eventually “Animal House.”The movie, directed by John Landis (who was then largely unknown) and produced by Mr. Simmons and Ivan Reitman, involved a troublemaking fraternity, Delta Tau Chi, and its ensemble cast featured John Belushi, who had become well known from “Saturday Night Live.”“Animal House” became a cultural touchstone of sorts.“I must have had 1,000 people say to me, ‘That was based on my fraternity,’” Mr. Simmons told the Postmedia Network in 2013. “It wasn’t; it wasn’t really anyone’s fraternity. But it’s everyone.”Martin Gerald Simmons was born on Oct. 3, 1926, in Brooklyn. His father, Irving, was a sign painter, and his mother, Kate (Shapiro) Simmons, was a homemaker.He graduated from Textile High School in Manhattan in 1942 and attended the City College of New York but dropped out. He worked briefly for The New York World-Telegram and Sun before being drafted into the Army. From 1944 to 1946 he served in the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, N.J., where he produced entertainment shows.Mr. Simmons began working as a press agent after his discharge. He acknowledged that when he first heard the pitch from Mr. McNamara and Mr. Schneider about the Diners Club charge card, he wasn’t impressed.“I told them I thought it was the worst idea I’d ever heard,” he told Adweek in 1990. “I never charged anything. In those days, most people didn’t.”But the men won him over, and he embarked on the path that led to the founding of National Lampoon.The first issue of the magazine appeared in April 1970. The Lampoon, which at its peak had a circulation of more than one million, was a defining force in satire during the 1970s and ’80s, thanks to a collection of writers and editors that included P.J. O’Rourke, Bruce McCall, Tony Hendra, Sean Kelly, Anne Beatts and Michael O’Donoghue.“It was the greatest collection of humorists, over a 20-year period, since perhaps the days of the Algonquin Round Table,” Mr. Simmons wrote in “Fat, Drunk and Stupid.”The magazine soon branched out into stage shows like “National Lampoon’s Lemmings,” a 1973 revue that packed the Village Gate in Greenwich Village and featured Mr. Belushi and his future “S.N.L.” cast mate Chevy Chase. There was also “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” as well as several record albums. In 1979 came “Delta House,” a short-lived TV series based on “Animal House”; Mr. Simmons was an executive producer.He was often at odds with some of the key figures on the creative side of the National Lampoon enterprise. In 1978, for instance, he dismissed Mr. Kelly as editor of the magazine.“After ‘Animal House’ came out, Matty Simmons decided this particular goose could lay larger, better-quality gold eggs if it emulated what he saw as ‘Animal House,’ by which he meant adolescent,” Mr. Hendra complained to The New York Times in 2005.The magazine’s popularity began to wane in the 1980s. But the franchise’s movies, with Mr. Simmons as a producer or executive producer, often did well, especially “National Lampoon’s Vacation” in 1983 and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” in 1989, both starring Chevy Chase.Mr. Simmons sold his stake in the magazine in 1989.His marriages to Korky Kelley in 1945 and Lee Easton in 1952 ended in divorce. His third wife, Patti Browne, died in 2017. In addition to his son Michael, who is from his second marriage, he is survived by another son, Andrew, and a daughter, Julie Simmons-Lynch, from that marriage; a daughter from his third marriage, Kate Simmons; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.Mr. Simmons wrote several other books, including “If You Don’t Buy This Book, We’ll Kill This Dog: Life, Laughs, Love and Death at National Lampoon” (1994). (The title was a reference to an especially notorious Lampoon cover.)In “Fat, Drunk, and Stupid,” he recalled driving around Manhattan in July 1978 marveling at the long lines of people waiting to buy tickets to “Animal House.” Outside one theater he saw Walter Garibaldi, National Lampoon’s treasurer, poking at a calculator, and stopped to ask what he was doing.“I’m just figuring out how much money we make every time somebody buys a ticket,” came the answer.Mr. Garibaldi, he wrote, was still standing there hours later. “Animal House,” which was made on a budget of about $3 million, eventually raked in about $140 million. More