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      Overlooked No More: Klaus Nomi, Singer With an Otherworldly Persona

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      His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A wide range of musical genres fueled New York’s nightclubs in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including new wave, no wave, punk and post punk. Klaus Nomi, who performed during that era, defied being categorized under any of them.“I wouldn’t give it a label,” Nomi said of his sound in a Belgian television interview. “Maybe the only label is my own label: It’s Nomi style.”His music combined opera, infectious melodies, disco beats, German-accented countertenor vocals and undeniable grandeur. He influenced everyone from the singer-songwriter Anohni to Lady Gaga; in 2009, when Morrissey was asked to select eight essential records for the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” Nomi’s version of Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” made the list.Nomi’s stage look was equally eclectic, and inseparable from his sound. The gender-fluid mix included dark, dramatically-applied lipstick as well as nail polish, the occasional women’s garment and often a giant structured tuxedo top that suggested Dada as much as sci-fi. His style influenced the fashion world as well, in collections by designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Riccardo Tisci.Nomi’s look was indisputably nonbinary, and a bit otherworldly. “He still comes across as an outrageously expressive and strange figure,” Tim Lawrence, author of the 2016 book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” said in a phone interview.“There was something about his entire being, which seemed to be queer, around makeup and voice and music and dress,” Lawrence said.Nomi — or Klaus Sperber, the name he was born with — moved to New York City from his native Germany in the early 1970s. He fell in with a group of creative friends and in late 1978 joined many of them to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, a series of quirky variety shows. The bill included a stripper, a singing dog and a performance artist dressed as a sadistic nun.Nomi, in the background at center, at the Mudd Club in Manhattan in 1979, the year he met David Bowie there.Alan KleinbergAs the closing act, Nomi sang an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” while wearing a transparent raincoat over a shiny, fitted top and pants along with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick.“He really blew people’s minds,” Ann Magnuson, who directed the shows, said in an interview. “He had all these snarky punk rockers out there who were speechless.”With the performances came a new name, inspired by the name of a magazine focused on outer space, Omni.“Klaus said, ‘I can’t go out as Klaus Sperber,’” his friend Joey Arias, the singer and performance artist, recalled by phone. “‘That’s not a star’s name.’”Soon he was performing as Klaus Nomi at tastemaker Manhattan clubs like Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah, with a set list created with the help of Kristian Hoffman, a musician who served for a time as his musical director. The material included edgy originals and unconventional takes on well-known hits. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” became an enraged dirge, for example; the chorus of “Lightnin’ Strikes” morphed into an aria. The thought was that pop songs would “catch the ear of an audience who isn’t ready for opera,” Hoffman said in an interview.As The New York Times put it in a review of one of his performances, Nomi’s music was “positively catchy, in a strange sort of way.”One night in late 1979, Nomi and Arias were at the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, when they met David Bowie there. Nomi called him later — Bowie had asked him to, scribbling his phone number with a friend’s eyeliner — and Nomi and Arias were recruited to be Bowie’s backup singers for an appearance that December as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”For the show’s three songs, they wore clinging women’s Thierry Mugler dresses, purchased at Henri Bendel. The look was extremely provocative at the time, especially on national television. Throughout, the TV cameras’ focus seemed to be as much on them as on Bowie.“It legitimized everything, because it had been sort of a private scene, and all of a sudden there it is, right in front of you on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Katy Kattelman, a designer who is known professionally as Katy K and who was a friend of Nomi’s.Soon after, Nomi signed a record deal with RCA France. His debut album, titled simply “Klaus Nomi,” was released in Europe in 1981; a second album, “A Simple Man,” came out the next year. The records sold well — “Klaus Nomi” earned gold-record status in France — and he performed abroad to packed venues.Nomi returned to New York toward the end of 1982, excited by the prospect of possible American tours and releases. But he arrived gaunt and exhausted — he had contracted AIDS. He died of complications of the illness on Aug. 6, 1983. He was 39.A scene from the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song” showing Nomi getting ready for a performance.Palm PicturesNomi at Hurrah, one of many nightclubs he performed at in New York City.Harvey WangKlaus Sperber was born on Jan. 24, 1944, in Immenstadt, a town in what was then West Germany. He was raised by his mother, Bettina, who worked odd jobs. A fling with a soldier, whom Klaus never met, resulted in his birth. When he was a child, he and his mother moved to the city of Essen, about 400 miles away. Opera music was often playing in their house, and it set Klaus on his path.“The first time I heard an opera singer on the radio I said, ‘My God, I want to sing just like that,’” he said in interview footage that is included in the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song.” As a teenager, he became equally fond of Elvis Presley.He moved to West Berlin and worked as an usher at Deutsche Oper, where he sometimes sang for colleagues after the audience had left. But he aspired to sing professionally, and, Arias said, “he felt like he was at a dead end.”“He wanted to come to New York because he felt like it would change his life,” Arias added.Nomi settled in Manhattan’s East Village. He worked for a while in the kitchen of the Upper East Side cafe and celebrity hangout Serendipity 3 and started a baking business with Kattelman called Tarts, Inc., supplying restaurants with desserts made in Nomi’s St. Marks Place apartment.Nomi was known to frequent after-hours clubs, like the Anvil and Mineshaft, where casual sex was commonplace. There were sexual encounters at home as well — Arias said he once arrived at Nomi’s apartment to find a naked Jean-Michel Basquiat toweling off.To get a green card, he married a woman, Melissa Moon, a U.S. citizen, in 1980.“I don’t think he was in any way being anything that wasn’t himself, which was pretty gay as far as I knew,” said the artist Kenny Scharf. “When you’re creating your persona, the sexuality part is obviously part of the persona. It was all part of his sense of style and him being an artist in every way.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Sinn Sisamouth, ‘King’ of Cambodian Pop Music

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      He and his singing partner, Ros Serey Sothea, drew from a wide range of Western and local influences. They disappeared after the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Before the singer-songwriter Sinn Sisamouth disappeared, he had become a fixture on radio programs and in nightclubs in Cambodia and beyond. For more than two decades, from the 1950s until the mid-’70s, fans praised his smooth voice and evocative lyrics about love and the Cambodian landscape.He and his bandmates — most notably the singer Ros Serey Sothea — stood out for their versatile repertoire of jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular Khmer ballads, among other styles. Sometimes they would use the melody of a Western song — the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” for example — while adding orchestration and writing original Khmer lyrics for it.They played a major role in defining the sound of Cambodia’s popular music industry, with Sinn Sisamouth emerging as one of the country’s most revered stars.Then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power, enacting a four-year campaign of execution, forced labor, disease and famine that killed at least 1.7 million people. The work of artists and intellectuals was brutally repressed, and Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea were among the many Cambodians who disappeared amid the violence and upheaval.Even now the circumstances of their deaths are unclear, though family members are certain they are no longer alive. Sinn Sisamouth’s granddaughter Sin Setsochhata said that, based on research by her father, her family believes that Sinn Sisamouth disappeared in the southern province of Kandal, which borders Vietnam. Some believe he died in a labor camp. The Guardian reported in 2007 that he had been shot. By some accounts, before his execution, believed to be in 1976, he pleaded to sing one last song.Many of Sinn Sisamouth’s recordings survived, however, and they still exert a deep influence on Cambodian culture.“He was a pioneer,” the Cambodian musician Mol Kamach said in “Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll,” a 2014 documentary film, by John Pirozzi, about Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Serey Sothea and other musicians. “He was an example to other professional singers that singing modern is like this.”Sinn Sisamouth was believed to have been born on Aug. 23, 1933, in the northeastern province of Stung Treng. (Some accounts list his birth year as 1932 or 1935.)His father, Sinn Leang, was a prison warden; his mother was Sib Bunloeu, according to a 1995 article in The Phnom Penh Post. At the age of 7 or 8, Sinn Sisamouth moved to the western province of Battambang, where his uncle helped him develop an early interest in playing traditional Khmer music on stringed instruments like the tro khmer, a type of fiddle, and the chapei, a lute.Sinn Sisamouth arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital, when he was 17 and enrolled in a medical school there with the goal of becoming a hospital nurse, but he never lost his love of music. He performed for sick patients to help them relax, his granddaughter said, and spent his breaks playing his mandolin under a tree.He later began performing live at the headquarters of Cambodia’s newly established national radio, and his profile rose.“When it came to singing technique, Sinn Sisamouth was king,” Prince Panara Sirivudh, a member of the Cambodian royal family, said in the documentary. “His voice was so beautiful, and he wrote very sweet songs.”Popular Western music was imported to Cambodia as early as the 1940s by the royal palace and by Cambodians who could afford to travel to Europe, and the country’s rock ’n’ roll scene began in earnest in the 1950s, according to a study by LinDa Saphan, the associate producer of the documentary and a professor of sociology at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City.The sound blended high-pitched, operatic singing with the distorted electric guitar solos that were popular in American music at the time.Sinn Sisamouth became representative of this new style because he had an ability to write both ballads and upbeat rock songs, Saphan wrote, but the voices of Ros Serey Sothea and other female vocalists on his recordings were the “final touch that made this Cambodian mix so enticing.”Early in his career, Sinn Sisamouth was invited to perform with Cambodia’s royal ballet; he appeared in dapper suits and bow ties, his hair combed back. He also traveled overseas — to India, Hong Kong and beyond — with a traditional band formed by the queen’s son, Norodom Sihanouk, a composer and saxophonist (and future king) who played a major role in developing the country’s cultural industries in the postcolonial era.It was a hopeful time in Cambodia’s history: The country had achieved independence from France in 1953 and was shaping its identity and culture.As Sinn Sisamouth’s popularity grew, his former neighbors in the countryside marveled at hearing his songs on the radio. Some referred to him as “golden voice” or the “Elvis of Cambodia.”“A medical student — how can he sing?” the villagers said at the time, his sister recalled in the documentary.He met Ros Serey Sothea when she was 17 at the national radio station and recorded with her for more than a decade.Though they were never romantically involved, “their musical conversations were love stories filled with a sense of yearning and despair, of palpable loss, yet holding out the possibility of reconciliation,” Saphan wrote.By the early 1970s, amid a scene of go-go bands, big hairdos and youthful exuberance, the duo had produced several hit songs, including a few for Cambodian films. Sinn Sisamouth also wrote and directed the 1974 film “Unexpected Song,” which included some of his original music and a performance by Ros Serey Sothea.The duo’s music has received renewed interest. Sinn Sisamouth is the subject of a forthcoming documentary film, “Elvis of Cambodia,” and Ros Serey Sothea is the subject of a graphic novel, “The Golden Voice,” which is scheduled to be published next year.Sinn Sisamouth married one of his cousins, Khao Thang Nhoth, and they had three sons and a daughter, according to The Post. One of his sons, Sin Chanchhaya, also became a musician.For all of Sinn Sisamouth’s performing prowess, he was an introvert who spent most of his time alone, his granddaughter said. Often after having dinner with his family he would retire to his studio to compose.“All the emotions — the spirit, the connection, the interior feelings — were expressed through his music,” she said. More

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      Overlooked No More: Jobriath, Openly Gay Glam Rocker in the ’70s

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      His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character. But American audiences seemed unwilling to accept his sexuality.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.On March 8, 1974, American TV viewers got their first glimpse of the American glam rocker Jobriath on the popular NBC music program “The Midnight Special.” Jobriath, who was introduced by the singer Gladys Knight as “the act of tomorrow,” made a striking debut, wearing a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume and singing a baroque-sounding number titled “I’maman.”For his second song, the electrifying “Rock of Ages,” he wore a tightfitting, one-piece purplish suit and a large, bubble helmet that, with the touch of his fingers, broke apart into petals that surrounded his head. His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character, and his swaggering sound was likened to that of Mick Jagger. Onstage he moved like a ballet dancer.“We were so excited,” the actress Ann Magnuson, then a teenager, said in a phone interview. “‘Oh, did you see that helmet?’ You would talk about that in school the next day.”But Billy Cross, who played the guitar alongside Jobriath, remembered the performance, and the audience, differently. “It was horrible,” he said in a phone interview. “They hated us, and that wasn’t fun.”Such was the complicated existence of Jobriath, who is generally regarded as the first openly gay rock star. His image came with risks: He released just two albums, and both were poorly received by an audience that was largely unwilling to accept his effeminate persona. His short-lived career became a footnote to rock ’n’ roll history, and he ultimately died alone, his body discovered by the police some time later.Jobriath performing on NBC’s “The Midnight Special” in 1974. He emerged onstage in a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesFor his second number on “The Midnight Special,” Jobriath wore a tight-fitting one-piece purplish suit.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesHe was born Bruce Wayne Campbell on Dec. 14, 1946, in Pennsylvania (accounts differ on precisely where), the second of three children of James and Marion (Salisbury) Campbell. His father came from a military background, and his mother was a homemaker who later worked as an insurance secretary. (The full name he used, Jobriath Salisbury, was “an amalgam of his teenage obsession with religion and his mother’s maiden name,” Robert Cochrane wrote in the liner notes of a 2004 Jobriath compilation.)Bruce Campbell was a musical prodigy who could sight-read any composition at the piano, said Peter Batchelder, who met him in 1964 when they were music students at Temple University.“He could play pretty much the whole first movement of the Prokofiev second piano concerto,” he said by phone. “He could handle musical data like nobody I ever met before or since.”Finding Temple’s music courses elementary, Bruce dropped out after one semester and joined the military. “He wanted to impress his father,” said his half brother, Willie Fogle. “Of course he hated it, so he ran away.”Relocating to California under the name of Jobriath Salisbury, he agreed to play the piano accompaniment for a friend who was auditioning for the 1968 Los Angeles production of “Hair.” The musical’s director, seeing Jobriath as a good fit for a production celebrating the counterculture, gave him a role. “We were all dumbfounded,” said Oatis Stephens, a friend who also acted in “Hair.” “It was like, ‘Why aren’t you playing concerts with the Philharmonic?’”Jobriath later joined the New York City company of “Hair” but was fired, by his account, for upstaging the other actors. He then found himself lost and binging on alcohol. “I was floating down in the gutter,” he told Interview magazine in 1973.He was rescued, however, by the music entrepreneur and club owner Jerry Brandt, who heard a demo tape that Jobriath had sent to CBS Records. Brandt asked to become his manager.“He could write, he could sing, he could dance,” Brandt said in the 2012 documentary “Jobriath A.D.” “I bought it. I mean, he seduced me, period.” (Brandt died in January.)At Brandt’s direction, Jobriath transformed himself from a 1960s hippie to a glittering rock star, and in interviews he took aim at musicians like Bowie and Marc Bolan, the frontman for the band T. Rex, whose personas only hinted at sexual ambiguity.“I’m a true fairy,” he would say. He told NBC Los Angeles: “There’s a lot of people running around, putting makeup on and stuff, just because it’s chic. I just want to say that I’m no pretender.”Brandt brought Jobriath to the attention of Elektra Records, which signed him for a reported $500,000, a huge sum at the time for an unknown musician, equal to almost $3 million today. (In Mick Houghton’s 2010 book “Becoming Elektra,” Jac Holzman, the label’s founder, said that the actual figure was closer to $50,000.)Jobriath in May 1983 when he performed as a cabaret musician. He was found dead that summer, from AIDS, in his room at the Chelsea Hotel.Hopkins, NYC, via the Bruce Campbell estateJobriath’s debut album, titled simply “Jobriath” and released in October 1973, was a mix of glam rock, cabaret and funk, all given sophisticated arrangements at the Electric Lady recording studios in Manhattan. His lyrics could be risqué (“I’d do anything for you or to you,” he sang in “Take Me I’m Yours”), tender (“I know the child that I am has hurt you/And I was a woman when I made you cry,” in “Be Still”) or witty (“With you on my arm Betty Grable lost her charm,” in “Movie Queen”).“The material just impressed me by its complexity, sensitivity, breadth and quirkiness,” Eddie Kramer, who co-produced the record with Jobriath, said in a phone interview. “He was a genius.”Before the album was released, Brandt mounted a heavy promotional campaign, including full-page advertisements in Rolling Stone and Vogue, posters on the sides of buses and a gigantic billboard in Times Square depicting Jobriath as a nude statue. Coinciding with the album’s release, Jobriath had planned to make his live performance debut with three shows at the Paris Opera House, where he would emerge in a King Kong costume climbing a mini replica of the Empire State Building. The production cost was estimated at an exorbitant $200,000.The ad campaign is one reason Jobriath is considered to this day to have been among the music industry’s most overhyped acts.With the gay liberation movement growing in the early 1970s, Brandt assumed that Jobriath would be readily embraced. “The kids will emulate Jobriath,” he told Rolling Stone in 1973, “because he cares about his body, his mind, his responsibility to the public as a leader, as a force, as a manipulator of beauty and art.”The album earned some positive reviews, including one from Rolling Stone, which said it “exhibits honest, personal magnetism and talent to burn.” Other publications were more mixed. In his review for The New York Times, Henry Edwards made the inevitable comparison to Bowie. “Jobriath, too, writes about ‘space clowns,’ ‘earthlings’ and ‘morning starships,’” he wrote. “The results can only be described as dismal.”Sales of the album were poor, and the Paris Opera House shows were scrapped.“When it started out,” said Cross, Jobriath’s guitarist, “it was all about the music. After Jerry Brandt got involved, it was all about the career. Then after that started to take hold, it was all about Jobriath’s sexuality. America was not ready for that.”Jobriath put out a second album, “Creatures of the Street,” in 1974 and embarked on a national tour, only to encounter homophobic slurs during a performance at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. By the next year, even after his appearance on “The Midnight Special,” Elektra had dropped Jobriath from its roster, and he and Brandt had parted ways.“He didn’t sell any records,” Brandt said in “Jobriath A.D.,” the documentary film. “What gets a record company going is the smell of money. And there was no money. He didn’t generate 50 cents.”From the late 1970s onward, Jobriath performed pop standards as a cabaret musician, calling himself Cole Berlin, and lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. In a 1979 interview, he spoke of his former alter ego in the past tense: “Jobriath committed suicide in a drug, alcohol and publicity overdose.” He was found dead at the Chelsea Hotel in the summer of 1983. He was 36. AIDS, which had reached epidemic dimensions by then, was given as the cause.In the decades since his death, Jobriath’s music has been reissued, and a number of musicians have expressed admiration for him, including Morrissey, Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott.Jobriath’s impact on L.G.B.T.Q. music history also went through a reappraisal. “He was a sexual hero,” the British singer Marc Almond wrote in The Guardian in 2012. “For all the derision and marginalization he faced, Jobriath did touch lives.”Today, those who knew Jobriath in his various guises — classical music wunderkind, glam rocker, interpreter of the Great American Songbook — remember his talent. “Whether he was composing epic symphonic music of searing intensity (and orchestrating it at 16) or brazenly appropriating the Rolling Stones’s idiom,” Batchelder, his former classmate, said in an email, “there was always beauty in his work.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Granville Redmond, Painter, Actor, Friend

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      He was known for his California landscapes. Deaf since childhood, he acted with Charlie Chaplin in silent films, an early example of deaf representation in Hollywood.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In the opening scene of the classic silent film “City Lights” (1931), Charlie Chaplin’s character, the Little Tramp, dangles comically from a statue while its sculptor watches in horror, raising his hand to his mouth in surprise and wiping his brow in distress.The actor portraying the sculptor, Granville Redmond, appeared in seven Chaplin films, recognizable by his wild mane of hair. Redmond was deaf, and his performances were early examples of deaf representation in Hollywood. Some believe Redmond even taught Chaplin, famous as a pantomime, how to use sign language.But Redmond was first and foremost an artist, one who inspired Chaplin with paintings of California’s natural beauty: quiet, brown tonal scenes; lonely rock monuments jutting off an island peninsula; tree-dotted meadows lit by a warm sun; blue nocturnal marshes under the dramatic glow of the moon. His paintings are considered today among the best examples of California Impressionism.“California Poppy Field” — Redmond  was admired for his landscapes depicting golden poppies, the state’s official flower. California School for the Deaf, Fremont, Gift of Edith RedmondThe Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier wrote in 1931 that Redmond was “unrivaled in the realistic depiction of California’s landscape.” Yet his style was never uniform: Some paintings left sections of the canvas exposed and chunky deposits of pigment, while others took on a smoother look.Above all he was known for his paintings of golden poppies, the state’s official flower. His poppies accented his renditions of the rolling meadows of the San Gabriel Valley, often accompanied by purple lupines. Sometimes they complemented a coastal scene with bursts of yellow highlights.“He painted them better than anyone else; I don’t think that can be argued,” said Scott A. Shields, who curated a show of Redmond’s work last year at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. “You can feel the seasons. You can feel when it’s spring, you can feel when it’s winter, and you can feel when it starts to become summer.”His paintings of poppies became a popular keepsake for tourists, to Redmond’s chagrin; he preferred painting scenes of solitude.“Alas, people will not buy them,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “They all seem to want poppies.”Chaplin supported Redmond’s painting career, offering him a room to paint in the loft of an unused building on his studio lot. On breaks, Chaplin would visit Redmond there and quietly watch him work.“Redmond paints solitude, and yet by some strange paradox the solitude is never loneliness,” Chaplin told Alice T. Terry in a 1920 article for The Jewish Deaf, a magazine.Redmond in his studio in 1917. Chaplin would sometimes visit him and quietly watch him work.Collection of Paula and Terry Trotter.He had such an appreciation for Redmond’s paintings that he took down the photographs of film celebrities from his walls so as not to detract from the Redmond work that he placed over his mantel.“You know, something puzzles me about Redmond’s pictures,” Chaplin was quoted as saying in 1925 in The Silent Worker, a newspaper for the deaf community. “There’s a wonderful joyousness about them all.”“Look at the gladness in that sky, the riot of color in those flowers,” he continued. “Sometimes I think that the silence in which he lives has developed in him some sense, some great capacity for happiness in which we others are lacking.”Grenville Richard Seymour Redmond was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on March 9, 1871, the oldest of five children of Charles and Elizabeth (Buck) Redmond. (He changed the spelling of his name to Granville in 1898 to differentiate himself from an uncle.) His father was a Civil War veteran in the Union Army and a laborer who worked across several trades. Redmond lost his ability to hear when he was 2, after coming down with scarlet fever. The next year his family moved to San Jose, Calif., to live near a family member who owned a ranch.“Moonlight on the Marsh” Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Stiles IIIn 1879, he enrolled in the California Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, and the Blind (now the California School for the Deaf) in Berkeley. It was there Redmond found an affinity for drawing under the instruction of another deaf artist, Theophilus Hope d’Estrella, who introduced him to a Saturday art class at the California School of Design. He went on to enroll in the school. In 1893, he was selected by the faculty to create a drawing for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.Redmond communicated through sign language and writing, but because of his focus on art he never mastered written English, a gap in his education that he came to regret. “In my early days in school I was always drawing, drawing,” he wrote.After graduation, he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian. In 1895, his painting “Matin d’Hiver” (“Winter Morning”), depicting a barge on a bank of the Seine, was admitted to the Paris Salon, a high honor for an artist at the time. He painted in France for a few more years, hoping to enter another painting at the Salon and win a medal, but he struggled financially and returned to California, depressed, in 1898.He married Carrie Ann Jean, who was from Indiana and also deaf, in 1899, and they had three children.Redmond’s paintings of poppies became popular among tourists — much to his chagrin. He preferred painting scenes of solitude. “Alas, people will not buy them,” he said. “They all seem to want poppies.”Collection of Thomas GianettoRedmond’s early works were Tonalist in nature, a nod to his training in San Francisco as well as to the artists of the 19th-century Barbizon school, whose landscape paintings he had come to know in France. Many of his paintings are scenes from Terminal Island, Catalina Island and Laguna Beach in Southern California. He returned to Northern California in 1908, living and painting in Monterey, San Mateo and Marin Counties.“A lot of newspapers would write that he could see more than the average person because his sense of vision was heightened,” Shields, the Crocker museum curator, said in a phone interview. “Redmond kind of believed that himself.”Redmond’s work was well received, but a lack of funds — partly because of an economic downturn at the beginning of World War I — led him to move back to Los Angeles and try his hand at acting.In the silent-movie era Redmond’s disability, coupled with his artistic inclination, worked to his advantage. Chaplin saw him as a natural for small parts in his films because Redmond expressed himself through gestures, Shields said. The two men communicated on the set by signing to each other.Sometimes Redmond’s deafness worked its way into plotlines. In Arthur Rosson’s “You’d Be Surprised” (1926), Redmond played a coroner pretending to be a deaf valet. Only viewers who knew sign language could follow the conversation.The movies also provided him with a new market for his art; buyers included the Hollywood elite, like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.Redmond died of complications of a heart condition on May 24, 1935. He was 64. (Chaplin died at 88 in 1977.)Alice Terry, the writer for The Jewish Deaf magazine, saw artistic commonalities in the two friends.“For more than two years now, these two have worked side by side,” she wrote in 1920, “Chaplin, silently and dramatically, by his ingenious trivialities, creating mirth and sunshine for millions of tired people; and Redmond, silently and none the less effectively, brightening the lives of all, by his radiant, appealing pictures on canvas.” More