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      Lil Keed, Up-and-Coming Atlanta Rapper, Dies at 24

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      The musician, a protégé of Young Thug, died on Friday in Los Angeles, his label said.Lil Keed, a budding, melodic rapper from Atlanta with a delicate voice that he often stretched into a helium-high, Auto-Tuned falsetto, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 24.His death was confirmed on Saturday by a representative of his record label, 300 Entertainment, who did not specify a cause. Keed had been scheduled to perform at a music festival in Charlotte, N.C., on Saturday night.Born Raqhid Jevon Render on March 16, 1998, he hailed from the neighborhood known as Cleveland Avenue, for its main thoroughfare, where southwest Atlanta meets the suburb of East Point in Fulton County. He chronicled his turbulent upbringing there, surrounded by poverty, drugs and violence, in the three-part mixtape series “Trapped on Cleveland.” Its final installment was released in 2020.“I dig deep into my story and let everybody see what I went through, how I came up, and give them an insight on my life,” he said in an interview with Complex at the time.Lil Keed signed to 300 and Young Stoner Life Records, or YSL, in 2018, under the tutelage of his mentor, the melodic rapper Young Thug. Earlier this week, Young Thug and 27 others, including numerous rappers from the label, were charged in a major RICO indictment handed up by a grand jury in Fulton County. The indictment portrays YSL as a criminal street gang responsible for murders, robberies, drug dealing and more.Keed, who was not charged, responded in a graphic posted to social media that read: “YSL is a family, YSL is a label, YSL is a way of life, YSL is a lifestyle, YSL is not a gang.”In 2020, he was named to XXL magazine’s annual Freshman Class issue, a prominent launchpad for rappers, appearing on the cover alongside acts like Jack Harlow and Fivio Foreign. The year before, his breakout single, “Nameless,” a raunchy number with a singsong stickiness that became a regional radio hit and a streaming success, was certified gold.Keed, who released seven full-length projects in two years, worked widely with artists from his city and beyond, including Lil Yachty, Gunna, Future, Lil Uzi Vert and Roddy Ricch.His brother and frequent collaborator, the rapper Lil Gotit, reacted to his death Friday night on Instagram. “I did all my cries,” he wrote. “I know what u want me to do and that’s go hard for Mama Daddy Our Brothers.”Keed is also survived by his daughter, Naychur, and his girlfriend, known as Quana Bandz. “What am I supposed to tell Naychur?” she posted. “What am I gone tell our new baby?”Confident and winning, with a wide smile and an open-minded eagerness, Keed was frank about his ambition to grow beyond the often grim Southern street rap tales that first got him noticed. “I wanna be a megastar,” he said to XXL. “I don’t wanna be no superstar. I wanna be a megastar.”Through his unlikely friendship with the advertising executive and motivational guru Gary Vaynerchuk, whom Keed name-dropped in song, he nearly appeared in a 2019 Super Bowl commercial for Planters with Mr. Peanut and Alex Rodriguez. However, the role fell through. At a studio summit later that year, Mr. Vaynerchuk encouraged Keed to expand his presence on TikTok to reach new audiences.“I’mma do this,” Keed said, energized by the advice. “And I’ll be like, he told me.”His new music was starting to reflect that, Keed said. “Back then, I was talking about stuff like typical rappers: shooting, killing,” he told Complex of his beginnings, “because that’s what everybody wanted to hear.”He continued: “I was just talking about the stuff that happened in the streets and stuff around me. Now that I done grew from all that and I done moved myself out of that situation, I’m letting folks know why I was so trapped on Cleveland, as far as me going to the hood every day and all the shootouts. I just had to move myself out of the situation to better myself and my family.” More

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      Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, Master of the Santoor, Dies at 84

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      He single-handedly elevated a 100-string instrument little known outside Kashmir into a prominent component of Hindustani classical music.Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, an Indian musician and composer who was the foremost exponent of the santoor, a 100-string instrument similar to the hammered dulcimer, died on Tuesday at his home in Mumbai. He was 84.Indian news reports said the cause was cardiac arrest.Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Mr. Sharma became the first musician to propel the santoor onto the world stage, at concerts and recitals in India and elsewhere.Before Mr. Sharma started playing the santoor, it was little known outside Kashmir. Even there it was used only to play Sufiana Mausiqi, a genre of Kashmiri classical music with Persian, Central Asian and Indian roots.The santoor, a trapezoidal wooden instrument whose strings stretch over 25 wooden bridges, is played with slim wooden mallets. On the santoor, in contrast with the sitar, sarod or sarangi, the string instruments traditionally used in Hindustani classical music, it is difficult to sustain notes and perform the meends, or glides from one note to another, essential to the Hindustani musical tradition.That might be one reason it took Mr. Sharma so many years to be recognized for his artistry.At the beginning of his career, purists and critics derided the santoor’s staccato sound, and many urged Mr. Sharma to switch to another instrument. Instead he spent years redesigning the santoor to enable it to play more notes per octave, making it more suitable for the complex ragas, the melodic framework of Hindustani music.“My story is different from that of other classical musicians,” Mr. Sharma told The Times of India in 2002. “While they had to prove their mettle, their talent, their caliber, I had to prove the worth of my instrument. I had to fight for it.”He released several albums, beginning with “Call of the Valley” (1967), a collaboration with the acclaimed flutist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and the guitarist Brij Bhushan Kabra.Mr. Chaurasia and Mr. Sharma were close friends and frequent collaborators. Together they composed music for several successful Bollywood films in the 1980s and ’90s including “Silsila” (1981), “Chandni” (1989), “Lamhe” (1991) and “Darr” (1993). Mr. Sharma was one of the few Indian musicians who straddled the worlds of classical and popular music.In 1974, Mr. Sharma performed across North America with the sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar as part of the former Beatle George Harrison’s 45-show “Dark Horse” concert tour, bringing Indian classical music to audiences beyond South Asia alongside some of the finest classical musicians from India — Alla Rakha on tabla, Sultan Khan on sarangi, L. Subramaniam on violin, T.V. Gopalakrishnan on mridangam and vocals, Mr. Chaurasia on flute, Gopal Krishan on vichitra veena and Lakshmi Shankar on vocals.Mr. Sharma, center, in red, in 2018 in Mumbai. He was awarded some of India’s highest honors for his contributions to Indian culture.Pratik Chorge/Hindustan Times via Getty ImagesMr. Sharma was awarded some of India’s highest honors, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1986, the Padma Shri in 1991 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2001.Shiv Kumar (sometimes rendered Shivkumar) Sharma was born on Jan. 13, 1938, in Jammu, India, to Pandit Uma Devi Sharma, a classical musician who belonged to the family of royal priests of the maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir, and Kesar Devi. He began singing and tabla lessons in with his father at the age of 5, showing great promise. In “Journey With a Hundred Strings” (2002), a biography of Mr. Sharma, Ina Puri wrote that he would spend hours immersed in music, practicing various instruments.“There was an obsessive element in my attitude to music even then,” she quoted him as saying. “It was the air I breathed, the reason I lived.”By age 12 he was an accomplished tabla player, regularly performing on Radio Jammu and accompanying leading musicians who visited the city. When he was 14, his father returned from Srinagar, where he had been working, with a present: a santoor. Mr. Sharma was not happy about learning a new, unfamiliar instrument. But his father was adamant. “Mark my words, son,” he recalled his father saying. “Shiv Kumar Sharma and the santoor will become synonymous in years to come. Have the courage to start something from scratch. You will be recognized as a pioneer.”In 1955, Mr. Sharma gave his first major public performance on the santoor, at the Haridas Sangeet Sammelan festival in Bombay (now Mumbai). The youngest participant at 17, he persuaded the organizers to allow him to play both the santoor and the tabla. He was reluctantly given 30 minutes to play the instrument of his choice, but on the day of the recital he played the santoor for a full hour — to rapturous applause. The organizers called him back for another recital the next day.He soon received offers to play and act in Hindi films, but after one film, the 1955 hit “Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje,” he was determined to focus on classical music. He performed around the country in an effort to establish the santoor as a classical instrument.He moved to Bombay at 22; to make ends meet, he played the santoor on sessions for dozens of popular Hindi film songs while continuing to build his classical reputation.He is survived by his wife, Manorama; his sons, Rahul, a well-known santoor player and composer, and Rohit; and two grandchildren.After Mr. Sharma’s death, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among those paying tribute. “Our cultural world is poorer with the demise of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma Ji,” he wrote on Twitter. “He popularized the santoor at a global level. His music will continue to enthrall the coming generations.” More

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      Teresa Berganza, Charismatic Star of the Opera Stage, Dies at 89

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      The Spanish mezzo-soprano was internationally acclaimed for her dramatic performances in the works of Mozart, Rossini and Bizet.Teresa Berganza, a Spanish mezzo-soprano and contralto renowned for her roles in the operas of Rossini and Mozart and especially for the title role in Bizet’s “Carmen,” died on Friday in Madrid. She was 89.Her family confirmed the death in a statement to the newspaper El País.A dramatic figure with flashing dark eyes, Ms. Berganza was acclaimed as a coloratura mezzo and contralto, with a vocal register that was warm at its lower range and supple at its higher end. Her vast repertoire as a recitalist included German lieder, French and Italian art songs and, most notably, Spanish music — zarzuelas, arias and Gypsy ballads — which she consistently championed.In addition to exuding charisma and sensuality, Ms. Berganza embraced a disciplined, analytical approach to her roles. “For the most part, she sings exactly what is written in perfect pitch and accurate rhythm,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in a review of Ms. Berganza’s performance in Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” at the San Francisco Opera in 1969. He lauded her as “one of the most gifted of coloratura singers.”Ms. Berganza viewed her growth as a diva as a deliberate progression from Rossini to Mozart and finally to Bizet. “Rossini for his technique, agility, and Mozart for his style, his soul,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Un Monde Habité par le Chant” (“A World Inhabited by Song”), written with Olivier Bellamy and published in 2013. Only after feeling confident about works by those composers did she attempt “Carmen” — with great success. The conductor Herbert von Karajan declared her “the Carmen of the century.”Teresa Berganza Vargas was born in Madrid on March 16, 1933, to parents who reflected Spain’s deep divisions on the eve of its civil war. Her father, Guillermo Berganza, an accountant, was an atheist who favored left-wing causes. Her mother, Ascensión Vargas, a homemaker with two older children, Guillermo and Ascensión, was a deeply religious Roman Catholic, a monarchist and a supporter of the future dictator Francisco Franco.Encouraged by her mother, Teresa aspired to become a nun when she was an adolescent. She attended the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid, where she hoped her piano, organ and vocal studies would prepare her to lead a convent choir or teach music at a religious school.It was her voice tutor, Lola Rodríguez Aragón, who convinced her that she was too talented to retreat from a secular life. Under her instruction, Teresa won first prize for voice at the conservatory in 1954. She continued to consult and practice with Ms. Rodríguez Aragón throughout her career.Ms. Berganza also met her future husband, Félix Lavilla, a piano student, at the Madrid conservatory. He became her longtime accompanist at recitals. They had three children, Teresa, Javier and Cecilia, but their marriage ended after two decades.Ms. Berganza turned for spiritual guidance to José Rifá, a Spanish priest who had long admired her singing. He quit the priesthood to marry her, and he regularly introduced himself as Mr. Berganza. They divorced after 10 years.Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Berganza made her operatic debut as Dorabella in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 1957 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. In 1958, she made her first appearance at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala as Isolier in Rossini’s “Le Comte Ory.” The next year she debuted at Covent Garden in London as Rosina in Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” which would become one of her signature roles. Critics delighted in her rich, fluid contralto voice, which easily handled the complex embellishments demanded of Rossini heroines.In 1967, Ms. Berganza made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” It would become yet another popular role for her.For years, Ms. Berganza declined offers to perform the lead in “Carmen,” saying that she found the complexity of the character too intimidating. She finally agreed to take it on in 1977, at the King’s Theater in Edinburgh. In preparation, she studied the 1845 novella“Carmen,” by Prosper Mérimée, on which the opera was based, as well as the libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.She then spent weeks in southern Spain interviewing women living in the caves outside Granada to, as she put it, “better understand Gypsy life.” Rejecting the more traditional portrayal of Carmen as a prostitute, she chose to play her instead as a rebellious Gypsy. “She speaks with her heart, her body, her guts,” Ms. Berganza wrote in her autobiography.Reviewing a Carnegie Hall recital in November 1982. the Times critic Donal Henahan wrote, “The Berganza voice, always a wonder of suppleness and dark polish, has now become, if anything, more excitingly robust and dramatic.”Ms. Berganza in 2013. She continued to perform into her 70s.Alberto Aja/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Berganza, he added, had also become a superior actor. He praised her intense reading of Joseph Haydn’s “Arianna auf Naxos,” a cantata that demands frequent sudden changes in emotional expression, which she followed with a witty rendering of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Nursery” cycle, in which she alternately portrayed the child and the nurse.In the days leading up to a stage performance, Ms. Berganza would go to extremes to protect her voice. When her children were still young, she wore a scarf over her mouth to remind them she wasn’t supposed to speak. Instead, she wrote notes to answer their questions or give them instructions. At night, fearful of tobacco smoke, she avoided restaurants.When she was performing away from Madrid, she began each day singing warm-ups in her hotel bathroom. “If the notes are not there, I am in agony the whole day,” she said in a 2005 interview with Le Figaro.Fittingly, Ms. Berganza’s last opera performance, at age 57, was in “Carmen” at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, not far from the former tobacco factory that was the setting for the Carmen story. Plácido Domingo conducted and José Carreras played the role of Don José, the jilted lover who kills Carmen, in that 1992 production.Ms. Berganza would continue to give recitals into her 70s.She insisted she had no regrets about not having been born a soprano, which would have given her the opportunity for many more leading stage roles. She preferred being a mezzo, she said, just as she favored the more mellow sound of a cello over a violin. “If I could not sing,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I would want to be a cellist.” More

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      Fred Ward, Actor Who Starred in ‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘Tremors,’ Dies at 79

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      The versatile actor was known for bringing a grounded charisma to roles across a decades-long career.Fred Ward, the versatile actor who played an astronaut in “The Right Stuff,” a grizzled drifter in “Tremors” and the titular writer in “Henry and June” across a decades-long career, died on Sunday. He was 79.His publicist, Ron Hoffman, confirmed his death. He did not specify the cause of death.“The unique thing about Fred Ward is that you never knew where he was going to pop up, so unpredictable were his career choices,” Mr. Hoffman said in a statement.Mr. Ward was likely best known for his performances in “The Right Stuff,” the acclaimed 1983 adaptation of a book by Tom Wolfe, and “Tremors,” a monster movie that ascended to cult classic status since its release in 1990.But his long career included a broad range of roles in which he applied a sometimes gruff but almost always grounded charisma to parts on film and TV: among other parts, a union activist in “Silkwood,” a detective in “Miami Blues,” Henry Miller in “Henry and June,” and a motorcycle racer in “Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann.”Mr. Ward also played the lead in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” which was intended to be the first in a series but fared poorly in theaters in 1985 and drew mixed reviews.In an interview with The New York Times in 1990, Mr. Ward explained how he chose some roles, saying, “I look for change, a person that changes — he’s on a voyage.”He said he was drawn to the part of Henry Miller because, “I’m part of a generation that, I think, was heavily influenced by Henry Miller, Paris, the ideals there: liberation, a kind of personal and benevolent anarchy that sings through all his pages.”He is survived by his wife, Marie-France Ward, and his son, Django Ward. More

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      Susan Nussbaum, 68, Who Pressed for Disability Rights in Her Plays, Dies

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      In a wheelchair after being hit by a car in her 20s, she became an advocate for people with disabilities in her writing for the stage and as a novelist.Susan Nussbaum, a playwright and novelist whose work reflected her concern for the rights of people with disabilities, died on April 28 at her home in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. She was 68.Her sister, Karen Nussbaum, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.Ms. Nussbaum began using a wheelchair after being hit by a car at age 24 and soon became an integral part of Chicago’s burgeoning disability-rights scene.Incensed by a lack of accessibility in the city for theater people with disabilities, she wrote her own plays, starring herself and other disabled actors.“If the dominant culture was saturated with backward concepts of who we were, I would answer back with my own collection of disabled characters,” she wrote in a 2012 essay published in The Huffington Post.Ms. Nussbaum began her playwriting career with “Staring Back,” which was performed on the Second City’s E.T.C. stage in 1983. She then collaborated with Mike Ervin, a disability activist who writes a column for Progressive.org, on a series of satirical sketches about disability. Titled “The Plucky and Spunky Show,” it was presented at the Remains Theater.The first reading of her acerbic comic play “Mishuganismo” was in 1992 in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune, in an article about that reading, called it “a mad-sad-glad whirl of politics, activism, love, need, sex and other items.”Directed by her father, Mike Nussbaum, an actor, and based on her own letters, the play took its title from a term that one of Ms. Nussbaum’s friends coined, meaning “a syndrome when a Jewish woman goes crazy for a Latin guy.” The play was later published in the 1997 anthology “Staring Back: The Disability Experience From the Inside Out.”Her last major play, “No One as Nasty,” which documented the relationship between a disabled woman and her paid caretaker, was performed in 2000 at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.As a member of the Chicago-based disability rights organization Access Living, Ms. Nussbaum campaigned to make theaters more accessible to wheelchair users and participated in other protests, including efforts to make public transit in the city accessible.After decades of work in theater, she turned to fiction. Her novel “Good Kings Bad Kings,” which follows workers and residents in a Chicago care institution for people with disabilities, earned acclaim for its candor and sensitivity and won the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.The book’s title came from reporting in The New York Times about Jonathan Carey, an autistic boy who was killed by an employee of the Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center, near Albany, where Jonathan was living. “I could be a good king or a bad king,” the man told the boy as he asphyxiated him, according to court documents.That line stuck with Ms. Nussbaum, she said in a 2013 interview with the website Bitch Media. “It became the title because it reminded me how, when it comes to kids, the adults have all the power. And when the adult in question has no emotional connection to the child, and the child’s welfare is turned over to that adult — as is the case in institutions — terrible things can happen.”She continued: “The disabled characters we’re presented with usually fit one or more of the following stereotypes: victim, villain, saint, monster. The fate of the disabled character is usually miraculous cure, death or institutionalization.”In writing the novel, as in her other work, Ms. Nussbaum said, “It was really important to me to give disabled characters — more than one — their own voices, and the agency to represent themselves and their own perspective on what happens.”Susan Ruth Nussbaum was born on Dec. 2, 1953, in Chicago to Mike and Annette (Brenner) Nussbaum. Her mother worked in public relations. She grew up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and attended Highland Park High School, graduating in 1972.Interested in theater from a young age after running lines with her father, she began writing plays in high school. After graduating, she took drama classes at the Goodman School of Drama (now The Theatre School at DePaul University) in Chicago.She was on her way to an acting class when she was struck by a car. She spent seven months in the hospital.She then navigated through life as a wheelchair user, becoming angry at the lack of accessibility. At one job, as she recounted in a 2013 Psychology Today article, the workplace did not have accessible bathrooms. Finding no ramps on public transportation, she and other wheelchair users began taking an ambulance to and from work. These experiences galvanized her to join Access Living and begin writing plays.Her activism extended outside Chicago as well. A longtime leftist, Ms. Nussbaum visited Nicaragua and Cuba as a member of coalitions on disability rights. Later in life she founded Empowered Fe Fes, a Chicago organization for disabled young women seeking to explore their sexuality.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her father; a brother, Jacob Nussbaum; and a daughter, Taina Rodriguez. More

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      Joanna Barnes, Actress in ‘The Parent Trap’ and Its Remake, Dies at 87

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      In 1961, she played a vixenish fortune hunter. In 1998, she played the character’s mother. In between, she kept busy on TV and also wrote novels.Joanna Barnes, whose many screen roles included the conniving fiancée of a divorced father in the 1961 film “The Parent Trap” and, 37 years later, the character’s mother in the remake — and who, while still enjoying success as an actress, embarked on a successful second career as a writer — died on April 29 at her home in The Sea Ranch, Calif. She was 87.The cause was cancer, her friend Sally Jackson said.Ms. Barnes’s role in the hit Disney movie “The Parent Trap” was part of her busy first five years in Hollywood, which began in television on series including “Playhouse 90” and “Cheyenne” and then advanced to supporting roles in “Auntie Mame” (1958), opposite Rosalind Russell, and “Tarzan, the Ape Man” (1959), which starred Denny Miller in the title role.Ms. Barnes, as Jane, in the 1959 film “Tarzan, the Ape Man,” with Denny Miller, left, in the title role and Cesare Danova.FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty ImagesLife magazine featured Ms. Barnes in a photo spread that promoted “Tarzan.”“The silk-clad debutante, above, and the barelegged tree climber at right are the same — Miss Joanna Barnes of Boston and Hollywood,” the article said in part. “She is the latest and, MGM insists, the brainiest of the 20 girls who have played Jane, the genteel Englishwoman in the Tarzan films.”In “The Parent Trap” (1961), starring Hayley Mills in the dual role of long-separated twin sisters who meet and conspire to reunite their divorced parents, Ms. Barnes played the vixenish fortune hunter dating the girls’ father, played by Brian Keith. When the film was remade 37 years later with Lindsay Lohan as its star, Ms. Barnes played the mother of her former character, who was portrayed by Elaine Hendrix.“She had no judgment about being in a remake,” Nancy Meyers, the director of the film, said in a phone interview. “And she was one of those people who, after you say, ‘Cut!’ you want to keep talking to her.”Ms. Barnes never became a major star, and in the 1960s she began to find diversions from acting.In 1967 she hosted the ABC television series “Dateline: Hollywood,” on which she took viewers behind the scenes on studio tours and interviewed stars. She wrote a syndicated column, Touching Home, and a book, “Starting From Scratch” (1968), about interior decorating.Her first novel, “The Deceivers” (1970), was a sexy Hollywood exposé that swirled around a former child actress and the powerful people in her orbit.Ms. Barnes’s first novel, published in 1970, was a sexy Hollywood exposé. She went on to write three others.“Joanna Barnes is Jacqueline Susann with a brain,” the critic John Leonard wrote in The New York Times, referring to the author of the saucy 1966 saga “Valley of the Dolls.” He added, “A few of the characters in ‘The Deceivers’ seem to have been stamped out of stale Saltines; the sex grows like grass between each block of plot; and, as in too many first novels, everything gets resolved at a big party. But Miss Barnes is an excellent guide for tourists in the land of the plastic cactus.”She also wrote the novels “Who Is Carla Hart?” (1973); “Pastora” (1980), about a 19th-century woman’s rise in San Francisco society, which was a New York Times paperback best seller; and “Silverwood” (1985).“Acting and writing feed each other,” she told The Associated Press, adding, “When I’m beginning to feel confined at writing, I take time out for acting.”And socializing. In 1971, she briefly dated Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser at the time. When Maxine Cheshire of The Washington Post reported that she and Mr. Kissinger had attended a party in Hollywood together, she noted that Ms. Barnes had written “The Deceivers,” “which Kissinger hasn’t read.”Ms. Barnes was born in Boston on Nov. 15, 1934, and raised in Hingham, Mass. Her father, John, was an insurance executive, and her mother, Alice (Mutch) Barnes, was a homemaker. She studied English at Smith College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1956 — the year she earned her first screen credit in the TV series “Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers.”In 1961, she was booted from the Boston Social Register, which, she told The St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay) Times, did not approve of actors. She had just been in the hit movie “Spartacus,” starring Kirk Douglas.“Played a degenerate Roman lady,” she said. “Delicious part.”Over the next three decades she was seen on many TV series, including “Bachelor Father,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Love American Style,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Trapper John, M.D.” In the 1965-66 season she was a regular on “The Trials of O’Brien,” a short-lived series about a defense lawyer, played by Peter Falk. She played his ex-wife.She is survived by her stepdaughters, Laura and Louise Warner; her stepson, John Warner; and her sisters, Lally Barnes Freeman and Judith Barnes Wood. Her marriages to Richard Herndon and Lawrence Dobkin ended in divorce; her marriage to Jack Lionel Warner ended with his death in 2012.For all her success on the screen, her interest in acting had faded — until the remake of “The Parent Trap” came along.“Her part was small but memorable, and I definitely didn’t need to tell her how to play it,” Ms. Meyers wrote in an email. “She knew exactly what to do and played it to the hilt.” More

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      Bruce MacVittie, Ubiquitous Character Actor, Dies at 65

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      A co-founder of the Naked Angels troupe in New York, he was a familiar face in Off Broadway theater, in movies and on TV, often playing tough guys with tormented souls.Bruce MacVittie, one of New York City’s quintessential character actors, who made his Broadway debut in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” opposite Al Pacino in 1983 and was a mainstay on Off Broadway stages for over 40 years, as well as a familiar face on television and in film, died on May 7 in Manhattan. He was 65.His wife, Carol Ochs, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Mr. MacVittie excelled at playing tough guys with tormented souls, revealing a tenderness at the heart of his characterizations. His casting type was low-life and street-smart, but he himself ran in rarefied acting circles. In the mid-1980s, he helped found Naked Angels, a troupe of young film and theater hipsters (including Matthew Broderick and Marisa Tomei) who immediately dazzled New York with the celebrity wattage and social conscience of their theatrical endeavors.“Naked Angels was the club that was too cool to let me in,” the actress Edie Falco recalled in an interview. “I was just hanging around on the fringes, dying to get my foot in the door, but Bruce was already in. Bruce and I traveled through our actor travails together. We were young together and got less young together.”Mr. MacVittie in the thriller “Killer Among Us” (2021), one of his numerous film roles.Vertical EntertainmentMr. MacVittie’s career began in 1980 at Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan with a lead in Edward Allan Baker’s “What’s So Beautiful About a Sunset Over Prairie Avenue?”In 1988, after bit parts on the series “Barney Miller” and “Miami Vice,” he got his first big television job, partnering with Stanley Tucci in “The Street,” a vérité slice of blue-collar cop life set in the Newark Police Department. Claiming to be “the first television series shot entirely in New Jersey,” the show churned out 40 episodes in 40 days but lasted only a season. Still, it cast a stylistic shadow over future TV crime dramas.“Bruce’s background was working class, like me,” said Frances McDormand, another longtime friend. “There was something about celebrating this in our work that was important to both of us. Bruce had a pride about where he’d come from that he carried with him and was even cocky about. It was very charismatic.”Bruce James MacVittie was born in Providence, R.I., on Oct. 14, 1956. His father, John James MacVittie, was a worker at the Narragansett Electric Company; his mother Olive (Castergine) MacVittie, was a homemaker.Bruce grew up in Cranston, R.I., where he began to act in high school, and went on to graduate from Boston University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He moved to New York in 1979. Four years later, after understudying for the role of Bobby in the Pacino revival of “American Buffalo,” Mr. MacVittie took over the part on Broadway and ultimately performed it on a national tour and in the West End of London.“Bruce carried this currency, especially for young actors then, like me, that he’d worked onstage with Pacino,” recalled the actor Bobby Cannavale. “The fact that he’d elevated to that role as a ‘cover’ made it even more heroic.”In 2011, after over 75 film and television appearances, including 11 different roles on various “Law and Order” franchises, guest spots on “The Sopranos,” “Sex in the City” and “Homicide,” innumerable theatrical roles, like his acclaimed performance as a displaced Cuban immigrant in Eduardo Machado’s “Havana is Waiting,” 10 seasons at the Eugene O’Neill Center Playwrights Conference in Connecticut and an equal number of summers at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, Mr. MacVittie set aside his acting career to train as a nurse. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Hunter College in Manhattan in 2013.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Sophia Oliva Ochs MacVittie. His first marriage ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.Mr. MacVittie returned to acting in his last years, including in a featured role on Ava DuVernay’s lauded Netflix series, “The Way They See Us.” He confined his nursing activities to the palliative care of friends in need.“I loved Bruce MacVittie,” Mr. Pacino said in an interview. “His performances were always glistening and crackling; a heart and a joy to watch. He was the embodiment of the struggling actor in New York City, and he made it work. We will miss him.” More

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      Susan Jacks, Who Sang ‘Which Way You Goin’ Billy?,’ Dies at 73

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      Released in 1969, the song, by her group the Poppy Family, was one of the biggest hits to come out of Canada to that point.Susan Jacks, a Canadian vocalist known for her 1969 hit with the Poppy Family, “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?,” one of the top-selling records Canada had produced to that point, died on April 25 in Surrey, British Columbia. She was 73.Her brother Rick Pesklevits said in a Facebook post on behalf of the family that the cause was kidney disease. He said she died at a hospital and had been on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, which would have been her second.As a teenager, Ms. Jacks was a regular on the Canadian show “Music Hop” when, in 1966, she needed an accompanist for a show at an Elks Club and turned to Terry Jacks, who had played guitar on the show. Soon they had married, formed the Poppy Family and cut “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?,” a song that Mr. Jacks, who wrote it, said was inspired by the spectacle of young men going off to fight in Vietnam.Ms. Jacks in 1969 with the other members of the Poppy family, from left: Satwant Singh, Terry Jacks and Craig McCaw.“Which way you goin’, Billy?,” Ms. Jacks sang. “Can I go too? Which way you goin’, Billy? Can I go with you?”The song hit No. 1 in Canada and, soon after, No. 2 in the United States.The Poppy Family and the Jackses’ marriage dissolved after a few years, and later there were dueling stories about “Billy.” The song was originally envisioned as “Which Way You Goin’, Buddy?,” but Ms. Jacks said she suggested that Mr. Jacks instead use the first name of one of her brothers. Mr. Jacks, though, said in interviews that he took “Billy” from a song by a group he admired, the Beau-Marks, called “Billy, Billy Went a Walking.”What is indisputable is that Ms. Jacks’s brother Billy played a unique role for her: He donated the organ for her first kidney transplant, in 2010, an operation that gave her a new lease on life.“I had rosy cheeks for the first time in many years,” she told The Vancouver Sun a year after the surgery, when she was giving a fund-raising concert in Coquitlam, British Columbia, for the Kidney Foundation of Canada. Raising awareness about kidney disease and donations had become a cause for her.“I knew nothing about kidney failure” until she was affected herself, she said. “I knew nothing about transplants. I was so uneducated about how important it is and how much it means to people.”Ms. Jacks around 1970 with her husband, Terry, who wrote the group’s biggest hit, “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesSusan Elizabeth Pesklevits was born on Aug. 19, 1948, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Janette and Dick Pesklevits. She began singing as a child, performing with school bands. She said her mother saw an audition notice for “Music Hop,” and by 1964 she was a regular on it. She toured with a stage version of the show as well.“Sue, as she is fondly called by members of the group, can swing with a hip tune as well as croon with sentimental ballads such as ‘Summertime,’” The Nanaimo Daily News of British Columbia wrote of a performance by the “Music Hop” road troupe in 1966.The Poppy Family had a few other minor hits before breaking up. Ms. Jacks released a few solo albums, including “Ghosts” (1980). In 1983 she moved to Nashville with her second husband, Ted Dushinski, working as a songwriter and running a pirogi restaurant for a time. She moved back to Vancouver in 2004.Mr. Dushinski died of cancer in 2005, about the same time that Ms. Jacks learned her kidneys were failing.She is survived by a son from her second marriage, Thad Dushinski, and six siblings, Rick, Gerry, Wayne, Bill, Cathy and Jim. More