Deaths (Obituaries)

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    Diana Oh, Passionate Voice for Queer Liberation in Theater, Dies at 38

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    Mx. Oh’s politically provocative and often playful works, including the Off Broadway production “{my lingerie play},” asserted the right to be oneself while having fun.Diana Oh, a glitter-dusted experimental artist-activist whose theater works intertwined political provocation with profound compassion in rituals of communion with audiences, died on June 17 at their home in Brooklyn. Mx. Oh, who used the pronouns they and them, was 38.The death was confirmed by Mx. Oh’s brother Han Bin Oh, who said the cause was suicide.A playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and musician, Mx. Oh created art that didn’t fit neatly into categories. Mx. Oh was best known for the outraged yet disarmingly gentle Off Broadway show “{my lingerie play},” a music-filled protest against male sexual violence; it was performed in a series of 10 installations around New York City.A concert-like play — with Mx. Oh singing at its center — “{my lingerie play}” percolated with an angry awareness of the ways restrictive gender norms and society’s policing of sexual desire can leave whole groups vulnerable. It was an emphatic and loving assertion of the right to be oneself without worrying about abuse.“I was born a woman, to immigrant parents,” Mx. Oh said in the show. “That’s when my body became political. That’s when I became an artist.”Mx. Oh’s Infinite Love Party, which the Bushwick Starr theater in Brooklyn produced in 2019, was not a show but rather a structured celebration with a sleepover option. It was a handmade experience, including music and aerial silks, designed to welcome queer people, people of color and their allies.Mx. Oh in The Infinite Love Party, which was not a show but rather a structured celebration with music.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMx. Oh in 2019 during The Infinite Love Party, which had a sleepover option.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jack Kleinsinger, Impresario Behind a Marathon Jazz Series, Dies at 88

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      A lawyer by day, he created Highlights in Jazz, bringing together artists both famous and unknown in more than 300 concerts over 50 years.Jack Kleinsinger, a lawyer by day who in his evening hours indulged his passion for music by creating and running Highlights in Jazz, one of New York’s longest-running concert series, for which he arranged and hosted more than 300 shows over a 50-year run, died on June 11 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.His cousin, Elizabeth Elliot, said the cause was complications of a fall.Mr. Kleinsinger spent 30 years as a government lawyer, first for New York City and then, from 1970 to 1991, as an assistant attorney general for the State of New York.But his real life began after he punched out every afternoon. Seven times a year, he presented Highlights in Jazz, a roaming concert series that featured some of the country’s best musicians playing alongside a host of promising young artists.Beginning in 1973, at a time when interest in jazz was at its ebb and nightclubs were shutting down, Mr. Kleinsinger nonetheless drew packed crowds. His shows often sold out; any tickets he didn’t sell, he donated to performing-arts high schools around the city.Mr. Kleinsinger’s first shows, in 1973, were such a hit that he immediately began planning. He ended up presenting concerts in various venues around Manhattan.Tribeca Performing Arts CenterHe could count on a core audience of about 350, many of whom took pride in attending virtually every one of his shows. He built on that base with a mailing list of 5,000, which he curated by hand.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jonathan Mayers, a Founder of the Bonnaroo Music Festival, Dies at 51

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      He helped bring crowds of music fans to a remote Tennessee cow farm with Bonnaroo, and to San Francisco with the Outside Lands festival.Jonathan Mayers, a founder of the Bonnaroo music festival, a star-studded annual extravaganza held on a poplar-dotted Tennessee farm, and Outside Lands, a three-day musical gathering in the foggy mists of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco that has been called a love letter to its host city, has died. He was 51.His death was confirmed in a social media post by Outside Lands. The post did not say where he died or cite a cause.Mr. Mayers grew up outside New York City and, after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1995, got his start on that city’s storied music scene. He worked with Tipitina’s, the nationally famous music venue, and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as Jazz Fest.In 1996, he joined Rick Farman, Kerry Black and Richard Goodstone to found Superfly, a music promotion company. Their first concert, in New Orleans, featured the Meters, the venerable funk band; the saxophonist Maceo Parker; and the Rebirth Brass Band.Bonnaroo started in 2002, the result of Superfly’s partnership with Ashley Capps, of the concert promotion company AC Entertainment, and Coran Capshaw, the founder of Red Light, a music management and promotion company. The festival’s name, inspired by the Dr. John song “Desitively Bonnaroo,” meaning roughly “a really good time” or “good stuff” in Louisiana slang.Ben Harper performed on the second day of the first Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn., in June 2002.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      P. Adams Sitney, Leading Scholar of Avant-Garde Film, Dies at 80

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      He championed works of cinema that were destined never to have a commercial breakthrough — which, to him, was the whole point.P. Adams Sitney, who pioneered the study of avant-garde film, helping to focus attention on a rarefied corner of American filmmaking, died on June 8 at his home in Matunuck, R.I. He was 80.His daughter Sky Sitney said the cause was cancer.In books and magazine articles, and at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which he helped found, and Princeton University, where he taught film history and other subjects in the humanities for over 35 years, Mr. Sitney championed a type of film that is largely unknown to the cinema-going public, but which forms a distinctive part of the American artistic canon.His passion was mostly short films that had nothing to do with narrative or characters and everything to do with light, images, objects and dreams. His book “Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde,” which has gone through three editions since first being published in 1974, is still regarded as the leading study of the genre.Mr. Sitney’s “Visionary Film,” originally published in 1974, is still regarded as the leading study of the genre.Oxford University PressHe championed the work of avant-garde pioneers like Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka, several of whom helped him found Anthology Film Archives, the East Village bastion of avant-garde cinema, in 1970. He saw their films as pure experiments toward achieving one of cinema’s true vocations: the mirror of the dream state.“Fragmentation brought the imagery to the brink of stasis, so that after some hours hovering around that threshold, the image of a couple walking into a Japanese garden had the breathtaking effect of the reinvention of cinematic movement,” he wrote of an episode in Mr. Markopoulos’s 80-hour, 22-part 1991 epic, “Eniaios.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gailard Sartain, Character Actor and ‘Hee Haw’ Regular, Dies at 81

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      Though best known for comedy, he also played serious roles, including a sinister sheriff in “Mississippi Burning.” The director Alan Rudolph cast him in nine films.Gailard Sartain, a character actor who moved easily between comedy, as a cast member on the variety series “Hee Haw”; music, as the Big Bopper singing “Chantilly Lace” in “The Buddy Holly Story”; and drama, as a racist sheriff in “Mississippi Burning,” died on Thursday at his home in Tulsa, Okla. He was 81.His wife, Mary Jo (Regier) Sartain, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Mr. Sartain spent 20 years on “Hee Haw,” the country equivalent of “Laugh-In,” hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, which combined cornpone sketches with music. The characters he played included a bumbling store employee, a chef at a truck stop and Officer Bull Moose. At the same time, he also developed a movie career that began with “Nashville” (1975), Robert Altman’s improvisational drama set against the background of the country music industry.In that film, Mr. Sartain played a man at an airport lunch counter talking to Keenan Wynn. “I just said, ‘Ask Keenan what he’s doing in Nashville,’ and he did,” Alan Rudolph, the assistant director of the film, said in an interview. But Mr. Rudolph saw something special in Mr. Sartain and went on to cast him in nine films he directed over the next two decades, including “Roadie” (1980) and “Endangered Species” (1982).“I only wish I could have fit him into another nine,” he said. “Gailard had a certain silly magic about him. Most of my films are serious and comedic at the same time. In ‘Roadie,’ he was opposite Meat Loaf, as beer truck drivers, and that was about 700 pounds in the front of a beer truck. That should be funny.”One of Mr. Sartain’s most notable roles was in “Mississippi Burning” (1988), Alan Parker’s film about the F.B.I.’s investigation into the murders in 1964 of the civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were buried in an earthen dam. Mr. Sartain played Ray Stuckey, a county sheriff whose deputy was among the Ku Klux Klansmen who killed the men.Mr. Sartain played a racist Southern sheriff in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.” “Nobody likes to be typecast as a barefooted hillbilly,” he said, “so when I had the opportunity to do other roles, I happily did it.”Orion PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mick Ralphs, of Mott the Hoople and Bad Company, Dies at 81

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      A guitarist and songwriter, he ditched glam rock at its peak and scored with meatier stadium-rock anthems like “Can’t Get Enough” and “Feel Like Making Love.”Mick Ralphs, a British guitarist and songwriter who glittered at the peak of glam rock with Mott the Hoople before joining forces with the vocalist Paul Rodgers to form Bad Company, the hard-rock quartet that rode high in the feathered-hair 1970s with anthems like “Can’t Get Enough” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy,” has died. He was 81.His death was announced on Monday in a statement on the official Bad Company site, which noted that he had suffered a stroke days after his final performance with the group in October 2016 and had remained bedridden until his death. The statement did not say where or when he had died, or give a specific cause.Bad Company, scheduled to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in November, combined muscular stadium rock with infectious hooks to become one of the most commercially successful groups of its era.Bad Company in 1973, from left: Boz Burrell, Paul Rodgers, Mr. Ralphs and Simon Kirke.Gems/Redferns, via Getty ImagesFormed in 1973, the group originally consisted of Mr. Ralphs (late of Mott the Hoople, known for the 1972 hit “All the Young Dudes”); Mr. Rodgers and the drummer Simon Kirke, both previously of Free, whose arena-shaking “All Right Now” was a No. 4 hit in 1970; and the bassist Boz Burrell, a veteran of King Crimson.Bad Company became an FM radio force. It sold more than a million copies of its first three albums, starting with its 1974 debut, called simply “Bad Company,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and featured “Can’t Get Enough,” a bluesy thumper written by Mr. Ralphs that soared to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marcia Resnick, Whose Camera Captured New York’s ‘Bad Boys’, Dies at 74

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      Marcia Resnick, a fine arts photographer who in the late 1970s pivoted from conceptual work to capture her febrile milieu, New York City’s downtown demimonde, in a series of intimate portraits, mostly of men, including the last studio photos taken of John Belushi, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 74.The cause of death, at a hospice facility, was lung cancer, her sister, Janice Hahn, said.New York City was lurching out of its fiscal crisis as Ms. Resnick began careening through Manhattan’s after-hours spots, notably Max’s Kansas City, CBGB and the Mudd Club. She was living the life, to be sure, but also scouting for subjects.Despite her madcap persona and punk-Lolita uniform — pleated schoolgirl skirts, thigh-high stockings and combat boots, beribboned pigtails and kohl-smudged eyes — she was deadly serious about her craft and her mission. Ms. Resnick was a skilled, CalArts-trained photographer determined to capture the scene that was swirling around her.Ms. Resnick’s 1979 photograph of Chris Stein and Debbie Harry, sprawled on a bed in their Manhattan apartment.Marcia Resnick/Getty ImagesShe photographed Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of the band Blondie sprawled on their bed in their 58th Street penthouse, looking like children at a sleepover.She found the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn and Steve Rubell, the Studio 54 impresario, slumped on a sofa at the Mudd Club after sharing a quaalude; in her photo, Mr. Cohn radiates malevolence, while Mr. Rubell, his head resting on the other man’s shoulder, looks joyful and beatific.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lynn Hamilton, a Steady Presence on ‘Sanford and Son,’ Dies at 95

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      A former Broadway actress, she was a no-nonsense foil for the unruly Fred Sanford. She also warmed hearts with a recurring role on the “The Waltons.”Lynn Hamilton, who became a familiar presence in American living rooms in the 1970s playing Donna Harris, the elegant and unflinching girlfriend of Redd Foxx’s irascible Fred Sanford, on “Sanford and Son,” and Verdie Foster, a dignified matriarch, on “The Waltons,” died on Thursday at her home in Chicago. She was 95.Her death was confirmed by her former manager and publicist, the Rev. Calvin Carson.Before landing her breakout television roles, Ms. Hamilton had considerable experience onstage and onscreen. She made her Broadway debut in 1959 in “Only in America,” in a cast that also included Alan Alda. She appeared in John Cassavetes’s first film as a director, “Shadows” (1958); two films starring Sidney Poitier, “Brother John” (1971) and “Buck and the Preacher” (1972); and “Lady Sings the Blues,” the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic starring Diana Ross.Still, almost no experience could have prepared her for working with Mr. Foxx, a hallowed comedian who grew up on the streets — he palled around Harlem with the young Malcolm X during their hustler days — and made his name with nightclub routines that were socially conscious and unapologetically dirty.“Sanford and Son,” a groundbreaking NBC hit, broke racial barriers. A predominantly Black sitcom, it starred Mr. Foxx as Fred Sanford, a cantankerous and wholly unfiltered Los Angeles junk man, and Demond Wilson as Lamont, his sensible, long-suffering son.Ms. Hamilton was originally cast, as a landlady, for only one episode during the show’s first season. She made enough of an impact to earn a regular role later that season as Donna, Fred’s girlfriend and, eventually, fiancée.Ms. Hamilton’s character and Mr. Foxx’s came close to getting married, but they never did. Tandem Productions/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bobby Sherman, Easygoing Teen Idol of the 1960s and ’70s, Dies at 81

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      First on TV and then on the pop charts, he became so popular so young, he once said, that he “didn’t really have time to have an ego.”Bobby Sherman, an actor and singer who became an easygoing pop-music star and teen idol in the late 1960s, and who continued performing until well into the 1980s, has died. He was 81. His wife, Brigitte Poublon, announced his death on Tuesday morning on Instagram, providing no other details. She revealed in March that Mr. Sherman had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, though she did not specify the type of cancer.Mr. Sherman was 25 when he was cast in the comedy western that made him a star. On “Here Come the Brides,” a one-hour ABC series, he played a bashful 19th-century Seattle lumberjack. George Gent, reviewing the show for The New York Times, declared Mr. Sherman “winning as the shy and stuttering youngest brother,” although he predicted only that the show “should be fun.”“Here Come the Brides” ran for only two seasons (1968-70), but that was more than long enough for Mr. Sherman to attract a following: He was said to be receiving 25,000 pieces of fan mail every week.He had already become a successful recording artist, beginning with “Little Woman,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 and proved to be his biggest hit. He went on to score three other Top 10 singles in 1969 and 1970: “La La La (If I Had You),” “Easy Come, Easy Go” and “Julie, Do Ya Love Me.”By the end of 1972 he had seven gold singles, one platinum single and 10 gold albums.When TV Guide in 2005 ranked the 25 greatest teen idols, Mr. Sherman took the No. 8 spot, ahead of Davy Jones and Troy Donahue. (David Cassidy was No. 1.) He appeared countless times on the cover of Tiger Beat, a popular magazine for adolescent girls. Even Marge Simpson, leading lady of the long-running animated series “The Simpsons,” had a crush on Bobby Sherman, as she confessed to her daughter Lisa in one episode.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More