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      Mary Alice, Tony Winner for Her Role in ‘Fences,’ Dies at 85

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      A former Chicago schoolteacher, she appeared on TV in ‘A Different World’ and ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ winning an Emmy in 1993.Mary Alice, an Emmy- and Tony-award winning actress who brought a delicate grace and a quiet dignity to her roles in Hollywood blockbusters (“The Matrix Revolutions”), television sitcoms (“A Different World”) and Broadway plays (“Fences”), died on Wednesday in her home in Manhattan. She was 85, according to the New York City Police Department.The death was confirmed by Detective Anthony Passaro, a police spokesman, who said officers responded to a 911 call and found Ms. Alice unresponsive.A former Chicago schoolteacher, Ms. Alice appeared in nearly 60 television shows and films. In 2000, she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.She first gained widespread attention in the Broadway production of August Wilson’s “Fences” in 1987. She earned a Tony Award for best featured actress for playing Rose Maxson, a housewife in 1950s Pittsburgh forced to balance duty with anger toward a philandering husband (played by James Earl Jones, who also won a Tony), who is filled with rage after a promising career as a baseball player devolved into a grueling life as a garbage hauler.“Ms. Alice’s performance emphasizes strength over self-pity, open anger over festering bitterness,” Frank Rich wrote in a review for The New York Times. “The actress finds the spiritual quotient in the acceptance that accompanies Rose’s love for a scarred, profoundly complicated man.”The role had deep resonance for Ms. Alice, who based her performance on memories of her mother, her aunts and her grandmother, women “who were not educated, living in a time before women’s liberation, and their identities were tied up in their husbands,” she said in an interview with The Times that same year.“I decided very early that I did not want — well, not so much that I did not want to get married, but that I did want to find out about the world,” she added. “I did that through college, through learning, through books and travel.”Ms. Alice, left, with Ray Aranha, center, and James Earl Jones in “Fences.” Ron ScherlMary Alice Smith was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Indianola, Miss., one of three children of Sam Smith and Ozelar (Jurnakin) Smith. When she was a small child, the family moved to Chicago, where they lived in a house on the Near North Side that was later demolished to make way for the Cabrini-Green housing project.No immediate family members survive.Viewing teaching as a path to a stable, middle-class life, she graduated from Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University) in 1965 and took a job teaching at a public elementary school.Even so, she aspired to be an actress. “It was escapism,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1986, adding: “We never lacked for anything. But my parents got up before the sun rose and worked all day. My father was tired. My mother had to cook. When I went to the movies, those people on the screen didn’t have to work.”Dropping the surname “Smith” and moving to New York City in 1967, Ms. Alice trained at the Negro Ensemble Company, landing in an advanced acting class taught by Lloyd Richards, the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater who went on to direct “Fences.” Ms. Alice, left, and Beatrice Winde in “Sparkle,” a 1976 film loosely based on the singing group the Supremes.Everett CollectionThroughout the 1970s and the early ’80s, she made numerous appearances in sitcoms like “Good Times” and “Sanford and Son,” while carving out a film presence in “Sparkle,” a 1976 musical loosely based on The Supremes, and “Beat Street,” the 1984 break-dancing film that helped nudge hip-hop culture into the mainstream.She earned praise onstage in a 1980 Off Broadway production of “Zooman and the Sign,” featuring Frances Foster and Giancarlo Esposito, as well as a 1983 Yale Rep production of “Raisin in the Sun,” featuring Delroy Lindo.After her success with “Fences,” she played Lettie Bostic, a resident director at a historically Black college who has an intriguing past, in “A Different World,” a spinoff of “The Cosby Show.” A year after that, she drew praise as the mother of Oprah Winfrey’s matriarch character in “The Women of Brewster Place,” a television mini-series based on the Gloria Naylor novel about a group of women living in a run-down housing project.By the 1990s, she had become a familiar face in film. She had roles in Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger” featuring Danny Glover, and in Penny Marshall’s “Awakenings” featuring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, in 1990; and in Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” with Denzel Washington in the title role, two years later.She also appeared in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” as the mother of a teenager struck by a car in a hit-and-run accident.Ms. Alice, right, and Jasmine Guy in a 1988 episode of the NBC sitcom “A Different World.” NBCU Photo Bank/GettyIn 1992, she was nominated for an Emmy award for outstanding supporting actress in a drama series for her role in “I’ll Fly Away,” a series starring Sam Waterston and Regina Taylor and set in a fictional Southern town in the 1950s; she won the award for the same role the following year.Ms. Alice nearly took home another Tony in 1995. She was nominated for best actress for her performance as the fiery Bessie, one of two centenarian sisters looking back on a century of life, in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Broadway adaptation of the best-selling 1994 memoir by Sarah (Sadie) L. Delany and her sister Annie Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany, written with Amy Hill Hearth.Ms. Alice replaced Gloria Foster as the Oracle in the third installment of the Matrix film series in 2003, and continued acting until 2005, when she appeared in a television reboot of the 1970s detective show “Kojak.”“Acting has been a big sacrifice,” she told The Tribune in 1986. “I sometimes think that if I had continued to be a teacher, I would be retired already. The income would have been constant. But I didn’t feel about teaching the way I do about acting. It’s my service in life. I’m supposed to use it.” More

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      Bernard Cribbins, British Actor Known for ‘Doctor Who,’ Is Dead at 93

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      Mr. Cribbins’s long career included roles on stage, film and television.Bernard Cribbins, a British actor who had roles on “Doctor Who” and “Fawlty Towers,” and whose contributions to children’s programs delighted young audiences over a career that spanned seven decades, has died, his agent said on Thursday. He was 93.In a statement, the management and talent agency, Gavin Barker Associates, did not say when or where Mr. Cribbins died.Mr. Cribbins worked well into his 90s, the agency said, in a career that influenced some of the best-known comedy, drama and children’s programs in Britain. He started acting at the age of 14 in the Oldham repertory company. This period of onstage work broadened into other media, including television and film, for which he became widely known, according to IMDB.He was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2011 for his contributions to the arts. In addition to dozens of roles in film and television, he recorded the 1960s novelty song “Right Said Fred.”For three decades, Mr. Cribbins was regularly featured on “Jackanory,” a BBC children’s program in which an actor read books to young audiences. The program, which ran between 1965 and 1996, was meant to arouse an interest in reading.In one of his more than 100 readings, of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1970, Mr. Cribbins infused the voices of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard and other characters with a full dramatic repertoire of whispers, tremors and shrieks.When he was awarded a BAFTA Special Award in 2009, he grew serious in an interview when asked about the hugely popular “Jackanory” and how it had influenced young audiences.“All you have to do,” he said, “is look down the lens, find one child, and just talk to that child. And you pull them in.”“It really works, and you think all over the country there will be little kids saying, ‘Just a minute, Mum,’ and they will be looking. And the stories, as I said before, were wonderful,” he said.Mr. Cribbins was born in Oldham, England, just outside Manchester, on Dec. 29, 1928, according to IMDB. After his early stage career, he narrated “The Wombles,” a 1970s animated television program created from a series of books about underground creatures, and joined the cast of the science-fiction TV series “Doctor Who” from 2007 to 2010. He had also appeared in a Doctor Who movie, “Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.,” in 1966.Mr. Cribbins, left, and his co-star David Tennant collected an award for “Doctor Who,” which was named most popular drama at Britain’s National Television Awards in 2010.Photo by Ian West/PA Images via Getty ImagesIn the TV series, which the producer Russell T Davies revived in 2005, Mr. Cribbins played a recurring role as the grandfather of one of the Doctor’s companions, Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate. In an Instagram post on Thursday, Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins “loved being in Doctor Who. He said, ‘Children are calling me grandad in the street!’”Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins had once “turned up with a suitcase full of props, just in case, including a rubber chicken.” He added, “He’d phone up and say, ‘I’ve got an idea! What if I attack a Dalek with a paintball gun?!’ Okay, Bernard, in it went!”Mr. Cribbins also starred in the 1970 film “The Railway Children,” based on the children’s book by Edith Nesbit. A review in The New York Times called it “a perfectly lovely little British movie” and said Mr. Cribbins was “excellent” as the stationmaster Albert Perks in a “simple tale about three children who putter around a Yorkshire village, sharing a loving kindness learned at home.”In 1975, Mr. Cribbins appeared in an episode of the comedy series “Fawlty Towers,” starring John Cleese as the hapless manager of a seaside hotel. Mr. Cribbins played a guest mistaken by Mr. Cleese’s character for a hotel inspector, who is trying to order a cheese salad for lunch and instead is served an omelet.A list of survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Cribbins’s wife, the actor Gillian McBarnet, died in October last year.In the interview after receiving the BAFTA award in 2009, Mr. Cribbins and his “Doctor Who” co-star Ms. Tate spoke about how quickly time had gone by during his long career.“I can remember a lot of things with total clarity, total recall,” he said, before adding jokingly, “I’ve got stories I haven’t even thought of yet.” More

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      Editors’ Note

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      An obituary of the actor Tony Dow was published in error. The Times based the confirmation of his death on a Facebook post by his representatives, which proved erroneous and has since been deleted. More

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      Paul Sorvino, Master of the Mild-Mannered Mobster, Dies at 83

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      A would-be singing star, he found success in Hollywood playing a variety of roles, but they were often quiet, dangerous men, like Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas.”Paul Sorvino, the tough-guy actor — and operatic tenor and figurative sculptor — known for his roles as calm and often courteously quiet but dangerous men in films like “Goodfellas” and television shows like “Law & Order,” died on Monday. He was 83. His publicist, Roger Neal, confirmed the death, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. No specific cause was given, but Mr. Neal said that Mr. Sorvino “had dealt with health issues over the past few years.”Mr. Sorvino was the father of Mira Sorvino, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995). In her acceptance speech, she said her father had “taught me everything I know about acting.”“Goodfellas” (1990), Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed Mafia epic, came along when Mr. Sorvino was 50 and decades into his film career. His character, Paulie Cicero, was a local mob boss — lumbering, soft-spoken and ice-cold.“Paulie might have moved slow,” says Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, his neighborhood protégé in the film, “but it was only because he didn’t have to move for nobody.” (Mr. Liotta died in May at 67.)Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role because he couldn’t fully connect emotionally, he told the comedian Jon Stewart, who interviewed a panel of “Goodfellas” alumni at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. When you “find the spine” of a character, Mr. Sorvino said, “it makes all the decisions for you.”Mr. Sorvino with Ray Liotta in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s mob epic “Goodfellas” in 1990. Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role.That didn’t happen, he recalled, until one day when he was adjusting his necktie, looked in the mirror and saw something in his own eyes. When he saw what he called “that lethal Paulie look,” Mr. Sorvino told The Lowcountry Weekly, a South Carolina publication, in 2019, “I knew at that moment I had embraced my inner mob boss.”He had made his mark onstage as a very different but perhaps equally soulless character in “That Championship Season” (1972), Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tragicomedy about the sad reunion of high school basketball players whose glory days are decades past. In the original Broadway production, Mr. Sorvino played Phil Romano, a small-town strip-mining millionaire arrogantly having an affair with the mayor’s wife.Mr. Sorvino received a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a play and reprised the role in a 1982 film adaptation.Paul Sorvino (1939-2022)The tough-guy actor, who was best known for his role as the mobster Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas,” died at 83.Obituary: A would-be opera singer, Paul Sorvino found success in Hollywood playing quiet but dangerous men.Remembering ‘Goodfellas’: In 2015, we asked the cast to reflect on the film’s production 25 years later. Here’s what Mr. Sorvino recalled.An Operatic Soul: “Singing allows me to be me,” Mr. Sorvino told The Times ahead of his New York City Opera debut in 2006.Paul Anthony Sorvino was born on April 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, the youngest of three sons of Fortunato Sorvino, known as Ford, and Marietta (Renzi) Sorvino, a homemaker and piano teacher. The elder Mr. Sorvino, a robe-factory foreman, was born in Naples, Italy, and emigrated to New York with his parents in 1907.Paul grew up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and attended Lafayette High School. His original career dream was to sing — he idolized the Italian American tenor and actor Mario Lanza — and he began taking voice lessons when he was 8 years old or so.In the late 1950s, he began performing at Catskills resorts and charity events. In 1963, he received his Actors Equity card as a chorus member in “South Pacific” and “The Student Prince” at the Theater at Westbury on Long Island. That same year, he began studying drama at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York.Acting jobs were elusive. Mr. Sorvino’s Broadway debut, in the chorus of the musical “Bajour” (1964), lasted almost seven months, but his next show, the comedy “Mating Dance” (1965), starring Van Johnson, closed on opening night.Mr. Sorvino worked as a waiter and a bartender, sold cars, taught acting to children and appeared in commercials for deodorant and tomato sauce. After his first child, Mira, was born, he wrote advertising copy for nine months, but the office job gave him an ulcer.“Most of the time I was just another out-of-work actor who couldn’t get arrested,” he told The New York Times in 1972. “I had confidence in my ability, and I was angry as hell when other people didn’t recognize it.”Mr. Sorvino, second from left, with other cast members of “That Championship Season,” which started Off Broadway before moving to Broadway. With him, from left, were Walter McGinn, Richard Dysart, Michael McGuire and Charles Durning.Leo FriedmanThen his luck changed. He made his film debut in “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), a dark comedy directed by Carl Reiner, in a small role as a retirement-home owner. Then “That Championship Season” came along, starting with the Off Broadway production at the Public Theater.The film role that first won him major attention was as Joseph Bologna’s grouchy Italian American father in “Made for Each Other” (1971). Mr. Sorvino, almost five years younger than Mr. Bologna, wore old-age makeup for the role.He appeared next as a New Yorker robbed by a prostitute in “The Panic in Needle Park” (1972) but did not fall victim to the cops-and-gangsters stereotype right away. In 1973. he was George Segal’s movie-producer friend in “A Touch of Class” and a mysterious government agent in “The Day of the Dolphin.”Mr. Sorvino later played an egotistic, money-hungry evangelist with a Southern accent in the comedy “Oh, God!” (1977) and God Himself in “The Devil’s Carnival” (2012) and its 2015 sequel. He was a down-to-earth newspaper reporter in love with a ballerina in “Slow Dancing in the Big City” (1978). In “Reds” (1981), he was a passionate Russian American Communist leader just before the Bolshevik Revolution.Mr. Sorvino in 2000 with castmates in “Law and Order.” With him, from left, were Chris Noth, Michael Moriarty and Richard Brooks.NBCHe was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, complete with German accent, in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995). And he played Fulgencio Capulet, Juliet’s intense father with an ancient grudge, in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996).But in a half-century screen career, Mr. Sovino’s characters were often on the wrong side of the law. He played, among others, Chubby de Coco (“Bloodbrothers,” 1978), Lips Manlis (“Dick Tracy,” 1980), Big Mike Cicero (“How Sweet It Is,” 2013), Jimmy Scambino (“Sicilian Vampire,” 2015) and Fat Tony Salerno (“Kill the Irishman,” 2011).And in at least 20 roles, he played law officers with titles like detective, captain or chief. For one season (1991-92), he was Sgt. Phil Cerreta on NBC’s “Law & Order,” but he found the shooting schedule too demanding — and difficult on his voice.Mr. Sorvino continued to sing professionally, making his City Opera debut in Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” in 2006.His personal life sometimes reinforced his tough-guy image. Most recently, in 2018, when the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was on trial for criminal sexual acts — and Mira Sorvino had accused him of harassment — Mr. Sorvino predicted that Mr. Weinstein would die in jail. “Because if not, he has to meet me, and I will kill the [expletive deleted] — real simple,” Mr. Sorvino said in a widely aired video interview. Four months later, Mr. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison.Mr. Sorvino’s final screen roles were in 2019. He played a corrupt senator in “Welcome to Acapulco,” a spy-comedy film, and the crime boss Frank Costello in the Epix series “Godfather of Harlem.” Mr. Sorvino with his daughter Mira Sorvino in 2007. Kathleen Voege/Associated PressHe married Lorraine Davis, an actress, in 1966, and they had three children before divorcing in 1988. Mr. Sorvino’s second wife, from 1991 until their 1996 divorce, was Vanessa Arico, a real estate agent. He married Dee Dee Benkie, a Republican political strategist, in 2014.Mr. Sorvino began making bronze sculpture in the 1970s and considered his nonperforming arts work particularly satisfying. “That’s why I prefer it,” he told The Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, in 2005. “No one really tells you how to finish something.”“Acting onstage is like doing sculpture,” he said. “Acting in movies is like being an assistant to the sculptor.”Mr. Sorvino is survived by his wife, Dee Dee Sorvino; three children, Mira, Amanda, and Michael; and five grandchildren.Johnny Diaz More

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      Michael Henderson, Funk Bassist Turned Crooner, Dies at 71

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      He was a sideman with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis before embarking on a successful second career as a singer of soulful, romantic ballads.Michael Henderson, a self-taught bassist who performed and recorded in the 1960s and ’70s with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, then remade himself as a soulful balladeer and songwriter, died on Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. He was 71.His son, Michael Jr., said the cause was cancer.Mr. Henderson began his career early. He was about 14 and on tour with the Detroit Emeralds, an R&B group, when he met Mr. Wonder at a theater in Chicago.“There was a piano upstairs where the dressing rooms were,” Mr. Henderson said in the liner notes to “Take Me I’m Yours: The Buddah Years Anthology” (2018), a two-CD collection of his records from the 1970s and ’80s released by Soul Music Records. “Stevie was playing something I’d heard before, so I got my bass and sat down next to him. He started playing, and I started playing right along with him.”Mr. Wonder soon hired him. For the next five years, Mr. Henderson toured with Mr. Wonder while also working as a session musician for Motown Records. He said he had learned all he could from the influential Motown bassist James Jamerson, who would sometimes come to clubs or recording sessions where Mr. Henderson was playing.“I stayed close to James’s sound but began adding in my little stuff every now and then,” he said in the “Anthology” liner notes. “I’d go up the neck and find higher notes.”Mr. Henderson’s skills had advanced enough to pique Miles Davis’s interest when he heard him play with Mr. Wonder’s band in 1970 at the Copacabana in Manhattan. Davis had already begun using electric instruments and rock rhythms on “Bitches Brew” and other albums; now he wanted to take his music in more of a funk direction and decided to hire Mr. Henderson, who was not a jazz musician, to replace Dave Holland, who was best known as an upright bassist but had begun playing the electric bass with Davis.When the show was over, Mr. Henderson recalled in a 2017 interview for the website Lee Bailey’s Eurweb, which covers urban entertainment, sports and politics, Davis came backstage and told Mr. Wonder that he was “taking” his bass player.Over the next few years, Mr. Henderson recorded a string of albums with Davis, including “A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil” and “On the Corner.” In a 1997 review of CD reissues of five Davis albums from 1969 to 1973, the New York Times critic Ben Ratliff cited “Live-Evil” and “In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall” as evidence of Mr. Henderson’s noticeable impact on Mr. Davis’s band.“Mr. Henderson made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “Instead of improvising and interacting with the band, he took a simple bass vamp and percolated it endlessly.”Mr. Henderson with Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973. One critic said that Mr. Henderson, who did not have a jazz background, had “made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic.”David Warner Ellis/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMichael Earl Henderson was born on July 7, 1951, in Yazoo City, Miss., and moved to Detroit with his mother, Rose Williams, who sang in church, and his stepfather, Earl Henderson, when he was young. During his childhood, he played cello and then switched to bass. Precociously talented, he was performing with local bands before his 12th birthday.“Mom was always cool with the noise I was making in the basement and backyard, and later as I began playing in the local bar scene,” he said in the liner notes. When he was 10 or 11, he saved enough money to take a bus to see a bill of Motown artists at the Fox Theater.“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to be onstage with all those artists,’” he said.Mr. Henderson was a sideman until 1976 — the year his time with Davis ended — when the jazz drummer and bandleader Norman Connors invited him to write and record a song for his album “Saturday Night Special.” He sang that song, “Valentine Love,” with Jean Carne. Mr. Henderson wrote and sang on the title song of Mr. Connors’s next album, “You Are My Starship,” and sang a duet with Phyllis Hyman on his song “We Both Need Each Other.”After making a deal with Buddah Records in 1976, Mr. Henderson’s transformation into a sexy crooner and songwriter continued. The cover of his 1981 album, “Slingshot,” showed him on a beach wearing a tiny aqua swimsuit.When Mr. Henderson appeared at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood in 1979, Connie Johnson, a pop critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote that he “isn’t a platinum sex symbol in the manner of Teddy Pendergrass — yet,” adding, “Currently, he’s in the same league as Peabo Bryson and Lenny Williams.”Mr. Henderson found success on the Billboard R&B chart with singles like “Take Me I’m Yours,” which hit No. 3 in 1978; “Wide Receiver,” which peaked at No. 4 in 1980, and “Can’t We Fall in Love Again,” another duet with Ms. Hyman that rose to No. 9 in 1981.After seven albums for Buddah, the last of them in 1983, he recorded “Bedtime Stories” for EMI America in 1986. That was his last solo album, although he continued to perform.In addition to his mother and a son, Mr. Henderson is survived by his daughters, Chelsea and Michelle Henderson, and his companion, DaMia Satterfield. He was separated from his wife, Adelia Thompson.In 2002, Mr. Henderson returned to Miles Davis’s music. He and several other Davis alumni, including the saxophonist Sonny Fortune and the drummer Ndugu Chancler, formed the group Children on the Corner; a year later, they released the album “Rebirth,” which reinterpreted and recreated Davis’s electric music from the 1970s.“This ain’t no smooth jazz,” Mr. Henderson told All About Jazz in 2003. “Don’t come to hear us and get ready to eat your steak and sit there and have a conversation with your old lady. It ain’t happenin’. Because when we hit the stage, we mean business. We’re going for the throat.” More

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      Shonka Dukureh, Actress Who Sang ‘Hound Dog’ in ‘Elvis,’ Dies at 44

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      She made her Hollywood debut as Big Mama Thornton, giving a performance that one castmate called “a spiritual experience.”Shonka Dukureh, who made her Hollywood debut as the celebrated blues singer Big Mama Thornton in the new Baz Luhrmann film, “Elvis,” was found dead on Thursday in Nashville. She was 44.The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department confirmed the death but did not provide a cause, saying only that no foul play was evident. One of Ms. Dukureh’s two young children found her unresponsive in her bedroom on Thursday morning and ran to alert a neighbor, who called 911, the police said.“Elvis,” Mr. Luhrmann’s highly anticipated movie about the life of Elvis Presley, with Austin Butler in the title role and Tom Hanks as Presley’s manager, Tom Parker, opened in June. Big Mama Thornton, who recorded the original version of “Hound Dog” in 1952, a year before Presley had a hit with it, was Ms. Dukureh’s first major acting role. In Thornton, she found a role that melded her booming voice with her apparently emerging acting chops.Her rendition of “Hound Dog” especially captivated audiences. She had been planning to release a studio album, titled “The Lady Sings the Blues,” according to her website.Ms. Dukureh said she was from Nashville “by way of Charlotte, N.C.,” where she was born on Sept. 3, 1977. She originally planned to become a teacher and held a master’s degree in education from Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, according to her website (which says she also held a bachelor’s degree in theater from Fisk University, also in Nashville). She instead pursued the arts. Her powerful voice was heard on international tours with Jamie Lidell and the Royal Pharaohs, and was a featured vocalist on several albums.Her performance in “Elvis” rapidly earned her fans; among them her fellow cast members. Olivia DeJonge, who played Priscilla Presley in the film, told Entertainment Weekly that watching Ms. Dukureh “was a spiritual experience.”“To watch a star essentially be born, to have something in her sort of break free, was just — it was insane to watch,” Ms. DeJonge said.Information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Taurean Blacque, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 82

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      He received an Emmy nomination for his work as Detective Neal Washington, a character he strove to portray as something other than “that hip, jive Black man.”Taurean Blacque, the actor best known for his Emmy-nominated performance as a detective on the critically acclaimed NBC drama series “Hill Street Blues,” died on Thursday in Atlanta. He was 82.His family announced the death in a statement. It did not specify a cause, saying only that he died after a brief illness.Mr. Blacque, who began his career as a stage actor in New York, had several television appearances under his belt when, in 1981, he landed his breakthrough role: the street-smart Detective Neal Washington on “Hill Street Blues,” which drew praise for its realistic portrayal of the day-to-day reality of police work and was nominated for 98 Emmy Awards in its seven seasons, winning 26.The part of Washington, Mr. Blacque later recalled, was sketchily written, and it was his choice to play the character as quiet and reflective. “I think the original concept was that hip, jive Black man, you know,” he told TV Guide. “But I wanted to turn it around a little, give him some depth, not get into that stereotype.”Mr. Blacque was nominated for a 1982 Primetime Emmy for best supporting actor in a drama series, but he lost to his fellow cast member Michael Conrad. (All the nominees in the category that year — the others were Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — were members of the “Hill Street Blues” cast.)“Hill Street Blues” ended its run in 1987, and two years later Mr. Blacque starred with Vivica A. Fox and others on the NBC soap opera “Generations.” Probably the most racially diverse daytime drama of its era, “Generations” dealt with the relationship over the years between two Chicago families, one white and one Black. Mr. Blacque played the owner of a chain of ice cream parlors.He later moved to Atlanta, where he was active on the local theater scene, appearing in productions of August Wilson’s “Jitney,” James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” and other plays. He was also involved in the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C.Taurean Blacque was born Herbert Middleton Jr. on May 10, 1940, in Newark. His father was a dry cleaner, his mother a nurse.He graduated from Arts High School in Newark but did not decide to pursue an acting career until he was almost 30 and working as a mail carrier. He enrolled at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 1969 and, he told USA Today, “Once I found out that acting was my niche, I poured all my energies into it.”He said he chose the stage name Taurean Blacque (Taurus was his astrological sign) in part as a way to get casting directors’ attention. Eventually, after several years of paying dues, he did.Work in community theater in New York led to roles with the Negro Ensemble Company and eventually to Hollywood, where he landed guest roles on “Sanford and Son,” “Taxi,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and other TV series before being cast on “Hill Street Blues.”In addition to being an actor, Mr. Blacque, who had two biological sons and adopted 11 other children, was an adoption advocate. He was the spokesman for the Los Angeles County adoption service. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him the national spokesman for adoption.Mr. Blacque’s survivors include 12 children, 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      William Hart, Driving Force Behind the Delfonics, Dies at 77

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      With hits like “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” his group pioneered the soulful Philadelphia sound.William Hart, who as the lead singer and chief lyricist of the soul trio the Delfonics helped pioneer the romantic lyrics, falsetto vocals and velvety string arrangements that defined the Philadelphia sound of the 1960s and ’70s, died on July 14 in Philadelphia. He was 77.His son Hadi said the death, at Temple University Hospital, was caused by complications during surgery.The Delfonics combined the harmonies of doo-wop, the sweep of orchestral pop and the crispness of funk to churn out a string of hits, 20 of which reached the Billboard Hot 100. (Two made the Top 10.)Almost all of them were written by Mr. Hart in conjunction with the producer Thom Bell, including “La-La (Means I Love You),” “I’m Sorry” and “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” all released in 1968, and, a year later, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” which won a Grammy for best R&B vocal by a duo or group.Alongside Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, the Philadelphia sound was a pillar of soul and R&B music in the 1960s and ’70s. More relaxed than Motown and less edgy than Stax, it drew on both the doo-wop wave of the late 1950s — especially groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Little Anthony and the Imperials — and a slowed-down version of the funk perfected by James Brown.Mr. Hart looked to all those artists, along with songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, as inspiration. He preferred to write lyrics after the melodies were in place, working around the strictures they imposed to weave stories about heartbreak, jealousy and old-fashioned romance.“I could imagine at a very early age what a broken heart was all about,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “Being a young man, I had to put myself in that position. And I found I could just write about it. It’s like imagining what it’s like to jump off a cliff — you can write about it, but you don’t have to actually jump off that cliff.”In Philadelphia, the Delfonics became mainstays of the frequent “battles of the bands” held at the Uptown Theater, the white-hot center of the city’s soul scene, going toe to toe in satin lapels to see who could be the night’s smoothest crooners.Their reach went far beyond 1960s Philadelphia. Mr. Hart’s songs have a timeless, dreamy quality, at once emotion-laden and urbane. That’s one reason they have had second and third lives: Singers have remade them, rappers have sampled them, and filmmakers have featured them on soundtracks.The New Kids on the Block remade “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in 1989, taking it to No. 8 on the Billboard pop chart. Prince covered “La-La (Means I Love You)” in 1996, the same year the Fugees released a reinterpreted version of “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” titled simply “Ready or Not.”The next year the Delfonics and Mr. Hart experienced an even bigger resurgence when Quentin Tarantino featured “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” on the soundtrack of his film “Jackie Brown” and as a plot point, using the songs’ smooth, nostalgic sound to draw together characters played by Pam Grier and Robert Forster.“I think the fact that our music is clean helps us make the crossover into the next generation,” Mr. Hart told The Philadelphia Tribune in 2008. “We sing songs that everyone of every age can enjoy. I write most of the songs, and that’s one thing I’ve always tried to do.”William Alexander Hart was born on Jan. 17, 1945, in Washington and moved with his family to Philadelphia when he was a few months old. His father, Wilson, worked in a factory, and his mother, Iretha (Battle) Hart, was a homemaker.His father gave him the nickname Poogie, which stuck with him long into adulthood.Along with his son, he is survived by his wife, Pamela; his brothers, Wilbert and Hurt; his sisters, Niecy and Peaches; his sons, William Jr., Yusuf and Champ; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.William began writing songs when he was about 11 and immediately latched onto the themes of love lost and regained that would dominate his lyrics for decades.He joined his brother Wilbert and a friend from high school, Randy Cain, in a group they at first called the Orphonics, a variation on “aurophonic,” a term William saw on a stereo box. They tweaked the name to Delfonics at the suggestion of their manager, Stan Watson.Mr. Hart was still working a day job in a barbershop when a friend put him in touch with Mr. Bell, who was already well known around Philadelphia for the lush, sensual arrangements he had done for a local label.They became a hit-making duo, the Lennon and McCartney of West Philadelphia: Mr. Bell wrote the music and Mr. Hart supplied the lyrics, often almost simultaneously. Mr. Hart claimed they wrote “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in two hours.The original Delfonics split up in 1975, but Mr. Hart continued to perform under the name, with lineups that might or might not include members of the original group. Wilbert Hart went on to tour with his own Delfonics, even after his brother won an injunction against him in 2000.In 2002 Wilbert Hart and Mr. Cain successfully sued William Hart for back royalties. The courtroom clash didn’t prevent the three of them from occasionally reuniting, at least until Mr. Cain’s death in 2009.Mr. Hart continued to tour using the Delfonics name, his falsetto a bit weaker but his presence still commanding. He also released a number of side projects, including “Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics” (2013), with Mr. Younge producing and Mr. Hart singing and sliding effortlessly back into the lyricist’s chair.“It’s like a blank canvas,” he said in a 2013 interview for the music magazine Wax Poetics. “I’m an artist; just give me the canvas, and I’ll paint the painting.” More