Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Catherine Spaak, Darling of Italian Cinema in the ’60s, Dies at 77

      by

      Born in France, she moved to Italy as a teenager and began a long acting career, which extended to Hollywood in the movie “Hotel.”Catherine Spaak, a French-born actress who made her name crossing genres in Italian, French and occasionally American films, acting alongside stars like Jane Fonda and Rod Taylor, died on April 17 in Rome. She was 77.Her son, Gabriele Guidi, confirmed her death.Born outside Paris, Ms. Spaak went to Italy as a teenager and began a long film career there. Her first major role in a feature film was as a 17-year-old student who has an affair with a middle-aged man in “Sweet Deceptions,” from 1960 (originally “Dolci Inganni”).Four years later she appeared as a Parisian shopgirl in “La Ronde,” a French drama about marital infidelity directed by Roger Vadim, in which she acted alongside Ms. Fonda (who went on to marry Mr. Vadim). The film, a remake of Max Ophuls’ 1950 version based on an 1897 Arthur Schnitzler play, was released and dubbed in the United States as “Circle of Love.”Ms. Spaak became an onscreen sex symbol as a young actress, winning the attention of many international magazines, including Playboy. With her long, straight hair and blunt-cut bangs, she also became something of a style-setter in the 1960s.Her first film role in the United States came in “Hotel” (1967), an adaptation of the Arthur Hailey novel, starring Mr. Taylor. She played the mistress of an investor (Kevin McCarthy) who wants to buy a landmark New Orleans hotel. Variety called her performance “charming and sexy.”In 1968 she had top billing, alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant, in “The Libertine” (originally “La Matriarca”) playing “a restless young widow” who “skips in and out of various sexual encounters,” as Howard Thompson wrote in an unenthusiastic review in The New York Times.She had another leading role in 1971, in Dario Argento’s murder mystery thriller “The Cat O’Nine Tails,” performing alongside Karl Malden and the television star James Franciscus. In 1975 she took on a different genre playing a prostitute in “Take a Hard Ride,” an Italian-American “spaghetti western” that also starred Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef.Ms. Spaak pursued a parallel singing career in the 1960s and ’70s, recording a handful of albums. She was often likened to the French chanteuse Françoise Hardy, some of whose songs Ms. Spaak covered.Later in her career she hosted a popular Italian talk show called “Harem.”Catherine Spaak was born on April 3, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris area, to Charles Spaak, a screenwriter, and Claudie Clèves, an actress. After moving to Italy as a teenager, she remained there for the rest of her life and became a naturalized citizen.She was married four times. Her first husband was the Italian actor and producer Fabrizio Capucci; her second, Johnny Dorelli, was also an actor, and he and Ms. Spaak recorded music together, including the album “Promesse … Promesse …” (1970). She later married Daniel Rey, an architect, and, in 2013, Vladimiro Tuselli.In addition to Mr. Guidi, she is survived by a daughter, Sabrina Capucci, and her sister, Agnes Spaak. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Jacques Perrin, French Film Star and Producer, Is Dead at 80

      by

      He was a heartthrob in the musical “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” a photojournalist in the thriller “Z,” and a world-weary director in the hit “Cinema Paradiso.”Jacques Perrin, a comely and soft-spoken veteran French actor — he didn’t smolder so much as twinkle — who went from starring in musical and dramatic films to directing and producing them, most notably the political thrillers of Costa-Gavras and his own poetic documentaries about the natural world, died on April 21 in Paris. He was 80.His son, Mathieu Simonet, confirmed the death. No cause was given.Mr. Perrin was a lonely and gallant teenager in the Italian melodrama “Girl With a Suitcase” (1961), in which he tries to rescue a down-and-out beauty played by Claudia Cardinale who has been ditched by his lout of an older brother.He was a dreamy sailor in Jacques Demy’s “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” a giddy, candy-colored 1967 French musical (now considered a camp classic) that starred Catherine Deneuve and her sister, Francoise Dorléac, as a pair of twins looking for love and finding it with Mr. Perrin, his hair bleached like straw (and looking rather like a young David Hockney) and Gene Kelly. (Ms. Dorléac died in a car crash shortly after the film was made.)That same year, Mr. Perrin and Natalie Wood appeared as chaste young lovers whose elders urge them to get on with it in “All the Other Girls Do,” an Italian farce.Mr. Perrin with Francoise Dorléac in “The Young Girls Of Rochefort,” a giddy, candy-colored 1967 French musical.Mary Evans/AF Archive/Cinetext Bildarchiv/Everett CollectionMr. Perrin went on to play an opportunistic photojournalist who discovers his conscience in “Z,” a 1969 political thriller by Costa-Gavras, the Greek-born director. Mr. Perrin also produced the movie, a feat of “accounting acrobatics,” as he put it, since no one else would touch the film. (It is about the real-life assassination of a Greek politician.) Altogether, Mr. Perrin appeared in some 100 films, and produced close to 40.To American audiences, however, he was best known for his role in “Cinema Paradiso” (1988). He played Salvatore, a world-weary film director who was once a wide-eyed 8-year-old nicknamed Toto. In flashback, Toto is seen in thrall to the movies he watches at a theater in a small postwar Sicilian village and under the wing of the father figure Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the philosophical projectionist who slices out the naughty bits — the on-screen kisses — on the orders of the village priest.The final scene was a humdinger: Mr. Perrin, weeping gorgeously in a darkened theater, once more in thrall. Critics were dry-eyed, but audiences were not, and it was a smash hit that won all sorts of awards, including the Oscar for best foreign film and a Golden Globe.Mr. Perrin played a similar role in “The Chorus” (2004), which he also produced, about orphaned boys in a grim boarding school who are rescued by a singing teacher who helps them form a choir. It, too, was a hit, at least in France, inspiring a frenzy of amateur singing, just as “High School Musical” did a few years later in the United States. Mr. Perrin, speaking to The New York Times, described “The Chorus” as “a fragile and precious movie about childhood memories.”Other films were less successful. He produced and starred in “The Roaring Forties,” a 1982 drama about a sailor on a nonstop solo race around the world, based on the real-life adventures of Donald Crowhurst, a British sailor who disappeared while attempting a solo circumnavigation in 1969. Though Julie Christie, an otherwise reliable box-office draw, was his co-star, the film did so poorly — a “shipwreck,” as Le Monde put it — that it took Mr. Perrin 10 years to pay off the debt he accrued while making it.“He worked on what was interesting to him,” Mr. Simonet, who is also an actor, director and producer, and who often collaborated with his father, said in a phone interview. “His purpose was not to make blockbusters, even if some of his films have become blockbusters. He bet his life all the time. He followed his dreams, with no limit.”Jacques André Simonet was born on July 13, 1941, in Paris. His father, Alexandre Simonet, was the manager of La Comédie-Française, Paris’s centuries-old state run theater; his mother, Marie Perrin, was an actress, and Jacques took her last name as his stage name. He left school at 15 and worked as a grocery clerk before studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique.In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Valentine Perrin, who has also produced films; their sons, Maxence and Lancelot; and a sister, Janine Baisadouli. His first marriage, to Chantal Bouillaut, ended in divorce.Mr. Perrin with Eurasian cranes on the set of the documentary “Winged Migration” (2001), described as “a sweeping global tour from a bird’s-eye view.”Patrick Chauvel/Sony Pictures ClassicsMr. Perrin, an ardent environmentalist, made hypnotic films about the natural world. “Microcosmos” (1996), is all about insects. “Oceans” (2009) dives underwater. “Winged Migration” (2001) takes to the skies as it tracks a year in the life of migrating birds, like cranes, storks and geese, as they fly thousands of miles through 40 countries and all seven continents. In The Times, Stephen Holden called it “a sweeping global tour from a bird’s-eye view.”“Winged Migration” was made under extraordinary circumstances over three years, with 14 cinematographers flying with the birds in ultralight aircraft built for that purpose. Balloons, remote control gliders and other devices were also used to film among the birds, half of which were trained at Mr. Perrin’s house in Normandy.These birds were exposed to and imprinted with the aircraft as chicks — as Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian animal zoologist and ornithologist, once famously discovered, chicks will become attached to the first large moving object they encounter — so that once they took flight, the crews could accompany them, like members of the flock.“Birds don’t normally fly beside aircraft, nor can they be trained like circus animals,” Patricia Thomson wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 2003. “So Perrin began what would become the largest imprinting project ever. Over 1,000 eggs — representing 25 species — were raised by ornithologists and students at a base in Normandy where Perrin also rented an airfield. During incubation and early life, the chicks were exposed to the sound of motor engines and the human voice, then were trained to follow the pilot — first on foot, then in the air. These birds would be the main actors, the heroes of flight. The rest of the footage would involve thousands of wild birds, filmed in their natural environments.”Mr. Perrin wanted moviegoers to feel as the birds did and to feel, as Mr. Simonet said, that they could reach out and touch them.The ultralight aircraft weren’t easy to fly, Mr. Perrin told James Gorman of The Times. Two crashed, leaving the pilot and the cameraman with minor injuries; no winged creatures were hurt.“Sometimes at 10,000 feet a bird would land on a cinematographer’s lap and have to be nudged off with one hand while he held a heavy 35-millimeter film camera in the other,” Mr. Gorman wrote. “One rule was absolute: No filmmakers with vertigo need apply.”The scientific consultants on the film were so moved by the experience of flying with the flocks that when they landed, many burst into tears.“They don’t say so splendid words,” Mr. Perrin told Mr. Gorman. “They cry.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      José Luis Cortés, Trailblazing Cuban Bandleader, Dies at 70

      by

      He was trained in the classics and jazz, but he helped popularize a new, danceable genre known as timba.José Luis Cortés, a Cuban musician who with his popular band, NG La Banda, helped establish the lively genre of music known as timba and spread the sound with well-regarded albums and rollicking shows that had concertgoers dancing in the arenas and afterward in the streets, died on April 18 in Havana. He was 70.The Instituto Cubano de la Música posted news of his death on its Facebook page and said the cause was “a hemorrhagic encephalic accident.” The post called him “one of the most important figures in contemporary Cuban music.”Mr. Cortés, a flutist who graduated from the National School of Art, was an admired figure in Cuban music for decades, although he had recently been the subject of abuse allegations by a former vocalist with his band. He brought a combination of serious musicianship and showmanship to the street music of Cuba when he founded NG La Banda in 1988. He had earlier played in Los Van Van, the famed dance band of Juan Formell, and Irakere, the pianist Chucho Valdés’s genre-straddling group of virtuoso players.He drew on those influences as the leader of NG La Banda, a large ensemble partial to danceable songs.“The best way to understand his style is that he brought to dance music the complexity of big-band jazz,” Raul A. Fernandez, emeritus professor of Chicano and Latin studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of books including “From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz” (2006), said by email.The “NG” stood for Nueva Generación, and the band aimed for a young audience, with driving percussion, streetwise lyrics and a brass section known as “los metales del terror.”“There’s raw power in those terrifying horns, and in the forceful, nasal singing, but sophistication in the arrangements and rhythmic adventurousness,” The Miami Herald wrote in 1992, assessing “En La Calle” (“On the Street”), an album that solidified the group’s reputation. “Dense, driving, dance party music.”NG La Banda’s 1992 album “En La Calle” (“On the Street”) solidified the group’s reputation.That album included “La Expresiva,” a song that, as Professor Fernandez put it, “paid homage to the barrios of Havana,” which is where the band’s music particularly resonated. That sound was first called salsa cubana but soon had its own name, timba. Professor Fernandez and Anita Casavantes Bradford described the music in an academic paper, “Cuba’s Second Golden Age of Popular Music, 1989-2005.”“Fast, loud, and characterized by its multiple overlapping rhythms and deep booming bass lines,” they wrote, “timba was also recognizable for its insistent percussion and dense, rushing-note horn patterns.”It is, they added, “a highly technical style of music, and holding one’s own in a timba orquesta, especially in the horns, or ‘metales,’ section, remains an accomplishment boasted by only the most rigorously trained and disciplined musicians.”The sound Mr. Cortés and his players perfected, the Spanish-language Florida newspaper El Nuevo Herald wrote in 1994, “has breathed new life into dance music, stimulating the listener’s senses while challenging those who venture onto the dance floor.”José Luis Cortés was born on Oct. 5, 1951, in Villa Clara, Cuba. His musical education, he said, emphasized classical and jazz.“You couldn’t play popular Cuban music in school,” he said in a 1998 interview with The Miami Herald.He spent the 1970s in Los Van Van, which was breaking new ground by incorporating elements of funk and rock into mainstream Cuban dance music. For much of the 1980s he was in Irakere, an influential group whose aim was, as Mr. Valdés once put it, “bringing together jazz and the ancestral forms.”Mr. Cortés’s nickname was El Tosco, “the Rough One.” Certainly the lyrics in NG La Banda’s songs could be rough, with vulgarity and what some listeners construed as misogyny. He defended those choices.“Popular music comes from the people,” he told The Observer of Britain in 1993. “I test my songs in the streets; if they like it, it’s a hit.”He also defended timba as a genre.“The intellectuals say that timba is crap,” he told The Miami Herald in 1998. “But this is a racist concept. Cuban popular music has always been the music of the people, of the poor barrios, where there are very few whites.”Some scholars linked the emergence of timba to the difficult economic times Cuba experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, a time often referred to as the “special period.” The genre’s energy and blunt lyrics, they suggested, spoke to a generation that came of age during the hardships of the 1990s.The group was popular enough that when it made its New York debut, in 1997, it played Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.“When the band did what it does best,” Peter Watrous wrote in a review in The New York Times, “playing long, structurally complicated tunes that mixed funk, stop-time parts, drum sections and Afro-Cuban dance music, all with wild choreography, the audience was up on its feet and screaming.”Mr. Cortés’s career, though, ended under a cloud. In 2019 Dianelys Alfonso, who had been a singer in the band and had had a romantic relationship with him for a time, said he had repeatedly assaulted her. That year The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cortés had not responded to the accusations, but that Ms. Alfonso had received both widespread support for coming forward and abusive messages from Mr. Cortés’s admirers.Information on Mr. Cortés’s survivors was not immediately available. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Cynthia Albritton, Rock’s ‘Plaster Caster,’ Dies at 74

      by

      She gained fame making sculptures of male rockers’ genitals, an attention-getting gimmick that she grew to regard as art and that became part of rock ’n’ roll lore.“Do I have a favorite?” the artist Cynthia Albritton once said of her signature works. “No, I love them all.”But, she added, in a 1995 interview with The Evening Standard of London, “other people are most interested in the Hendrix.”The Hendrix, also sometimes referred to as the Penis de Milo, is a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix’s genitalia. Ms. Albritton, better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, made the piece in 1968, an early entry in what would become a series of more than 50 phallic casts, most of rock musicians, and ultimately part of rock ’n’ roll lore.There are songs about her, including Kiss’s “Plaster Caster.” That was also the title of a 2001 documentary film about her work. In addition to Hendrix, Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin’ Spoonful, Eric Burdon of the Animals, Wayne Kramer of the MC5 and Jon Langford of the Mekons are among those represented in her collection.Ms. Albritton died on April 21 at a care facility in Chicago. She was 74. Chris Hellner, a close friend, said the cause was cerebrovascular disease.What became her claim to fame started as an assignment for an art class she was taking at the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois in 1966. The professor told students that their homework was to make a cast of “something that could retain its shape, something solid,” as Ms. Albritton put it in a 2012 video interview with Rock Scene Magazine.Accounts have varied, but most say that her first subjects were two male friends. Soon, though, she had moved on to rockers, since she was, as she acknowledged, one of those fans who liked to chase the famous.“Originally I saw it as a great ruse to divert rock stars from the other girls,” she told The Evening Standard. “Only by accident did it become an art form. I take it seriously, though there is an absurd side. But I’m laughing with them, not at them.”In the anything-goes era of the late 1960s, Ms. Albritton didn’t have much trouble finding rockers willing to be immortalized, especially after Frank Zappa heard about what she was doing and promoted her efforts (though declining to be cast himself). She did, however, have trouble finding the right medium, trying a variety of substances and methods before hitting on dental mold.If the sculptures started out as a lark, the subjects who cooperated with her saw something more in her efforts.“Hers was a revolutionary art in a time that demanded revolutionary work,” Mr. Kramer, who had his sculptural session in the late 1960s, said by email. “She smashed the barriers of sexual conversation and helped open up people’s minds to the endless possibilities of art.”Mr. Langford, who was cast about 20 years after Mr. Kramer and is an artist as well as a musician, had a similar assessment.“I think Cynthia was a brilliant conceptual artist who made her art with great humor, a deep love of music and a reckless disregard for societal norms,” he said, also by email. “It was fun and deadly serious at the same time — a mad science experiment, really.”Ms. Albritton, whose works were eventually taken seriously enough to be exhibited at galleries, acknowledged that technical difficulties left her collection not as complete as it might have been.“I’m sorry to say I’ve had some mold failures on some very groovy people,” she said in the 2012 interview.Mr. Kramer related some details of his casting session.“Personally, I thought being asked signaled my arrival as a bona fide member of the rock and roll community,” he said. “A real career milestone! Sadly, on the night of my casting, Cynthia was ‘short handed’” — that is, the assistant whose job was to make sure the penises were erect wasn’t there.“Timing was crucial, and on this night it all fell apart,” Mr. Kramer said. “I was left to attempt to reach my full manliness alone, and I failed miserably. My finished cast ended up as a small plaster representation, a mere shell of what could have been. I think it’s one of the funniest of the collection, as do so many others. And, no matter, I’m proud to be included.”Cynthia Dorothy Albritton was born on May 24, 1947, in Chicago. Her father, Edward, was a postal clerk, and her mother, Dorothy (Wysocki) Albritton, was a secretary. For decades Ms. Albritton would not give her last name in interviews because she didn’t want her mother to know what she was up to.She grew up in Chicago, a big stop on the circuit for touring rock bands major and minor. She was particularly drawn to the British bands, she said — “cute British boys with long hair and tight pants.” Pamela Des Barres, in her 1987 memoir, “I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie,” wrote that Ms. Albritton seemed an unlikely person to get zippers unzipped.“She was painfully shy,” she wrote, “and I couldn’t imagine her with the alginate and plaster, buried in Eric Burdon’s crotch area, but I saw the casts for myself, and was wowed by the artistry involved.”Ms. Albritton, in a 2005 interview with The Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, said Zappa’s backing was key.“Frank was just the most important person in my life, my mentor and my supporter and my dear friend and shoulder to cry on,” she said. “He was the first person in the world to tell me I was an artist.”But her connection to Zappa, who died in 1993, resulted in a court case. At one point, after her home was burglarized, Ms. Albritton turned her sculptures over for safekeeping to Herb Cohen, a music industry figure who had business dealings with Zappa. She had to sue him to get them back, a case she won in 1993.She leaves no immediate survivors.Ms. Albritton continued to make male sculptures over the years — the actor Anthony Newley was among the nonmusicians in her collection — and eventually added women’s breasts to her repertory.“Breasts have been ignored for too long,” she said in the 1995 interview, possibly satirically. Her breast subjects included Sally Timms of the Mekons and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. In 2009, the conceptual artist Rob Pruitt presented her with the Rob Pruitt Award at an irony-heavy performance event called “The First Annual Art Awards” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.Ms. Albritton said that in recent, less exploratory decades, finding willing subjects had gotten more difficult. But she remained interested.“As long as there are talented musicians with appendages,” she said in a video in 2011, “I’ll be available for my casting call.” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Sid Mark, Disc Jockey Devoted to Sinatra for Six Decades, Dies at 88

      by

      He hosted four radio shows that focused on the singer, who at one concert singled him out in the audience and said, “I love him.”Sid Mark, a longtime disc jockey in Philadelphia who made Frank Sinatra’s songs the center of his musical universe for more than six decades, died on April 18 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 88.His daughter, Stacey Mark, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not cite the cause.Mr. Mark brought a warm, conversational style to his broadcasts. Between selections from his trove of vinyl albums and CDs, he offered bits of his aficionado’s knowledge, told stories about hanging out with Sinatra and played snippets of interviews with him.He hosted three shows on various Philadelphia radio stations: “Friday With Frank,” “Sunday With Sinatra” and the syndicated “The Sounds of Sinatra,” which has run for 43 years and at its height was heard on 100 stations. He also hosted a fourth, “Saturday With Sinatra,” on stations in New York.In 1966, Sinatra’s office invited Mr. Mark to Las Vegas to see him perform as a reward for helping to stoke sales in Philadelphia of the singer’s newly released live album, “Sinatra at the Sands,” by playing it nonstop for a week.While there, he dined with Sinatra and a group of other stars, including Jack Benny, Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. Afterward, Mr. Mark recalled, Sinatra told him, “I’ll see you at the show,” but Mr. Mark said that he and his wife, Loretta, did not have tickets.“He thought that was pretty funny, as did everyone at the table,” Mr. Mark told Vice.com in 2009, “and he gave me a little pinch on the cheek and said, ‘No, you’re sitting at our table.’ I walked in with all these celebrities and everyone knew who everyone was, but they had no idea who we were. Like ‘Who’s that with the pope?’”It was the start of a friendship that lasted until Sinatra’s death in 1998. Mr. Mark attended many of Sinatra’s performances and would sometimes visit him at his suite at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan. At times, during a concert, Sinatra would single him out from the audience.“I love him, and I say that publicly, I love him,” Sinatra said in 1991 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. “He’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life.”Mr. Mark in a recent photo hosting “Sunday With Sinatra,” which was on the air for more than 40 years.Family photoSidney Mark Fliegelman was born on May 30, 1933, in Camden, N.J. His father, Aaron, and his mother, Sylvia (Pfeffer) Fliegelman, owned a variety store in Camden. The family lived above the store, where Sid got his first taste of Sinatra’s music by listening to his sister Norma’s records. He hoped to one day get a job in radio.He entered the Army in 1953 and served at Camp Polk (now Fort Polk) in Louisiana. His admiration for Sinatra’s music swelled when he listened to his records on the radio at night in the barracks. “Somehow his voice got to me and I realized he knew exactly what he was singing about,” he told Vice. “If he was singing about lonely, he knew what lonely was. If he was singing about love, he knew what love was about.”Mr. Mark stopped using his surname early in his career but never changed it legally.After his discharge in 1955, Mr. Mark got a job at the Red Hill Inn, a jazz club in Pennsauken, N.J., as a talent coordinator. His responsibilities included driving artists like Count Basie and Duke Ellington to and from their hotels. They would often talk about Sinatra, further stoking Mr. Mark’s interest in his music. More important, he was hired around that time as a disc jockey at WHAT-AM, a jazz station in Philadelphia. He hosted a one-hour show called “Sounds in the Night.”One night in 1955, when the station’s overnight D.J. did not show up, Mr. Mark was asked to fill in.“It was a show called ‘Rock and Roll Kingdom,’ and I wasn’t going to do that,” he told The New Yorker in 2021. He asked his audience what they wanted to hear, and one fan suggested playing an hour of Sinatra’s music. “The all-night guy got fired for not coming in, and they kept me on.” Several months later, in 1956, the show formally began its run as “Friday With Frank.”By the early 1960s, Mr. Mark’s popularity in Philadelphia was growing. He was hosting “Friday With Frank” and a daily six-hour jazz show, “Mark of Jazz,” which would run for nearly two decades, on WHAT. He also had a weekly jazz program on local public television.Mr. Mark hosted “Friday With Frank” for 54 years, “Saturday With Sinatra” for about 17 and “Sunday With Sinatra” for more than 40. “The Sounds of Sinatra” will remain on the air and present archival shows, said his son Brian Mark, the executive producer.In addition to his daughter and his son Brian, Mr. Mark is survived by his wife, Judy (Avery) Mark; two other sons, Eric and Andy Fliegelman; and two grandchildren. His marriage to Loretta Katz ended in divorce.The playlists of Mr. Mark’s Sinatra shows did not consist entirely of solo recordings by Sinatra. He also played duets Sinatra recorded with singers like Liza Minnelli, Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as records by Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and Davis.There have been other Sinatra devotees on the radio over the years. William B. Williams emphasized Sinatra’s music on his “Make Believe Ballroom” on WNEW-AM in New York (and gave him his nickname Chairman of the Board). Jonathan Schwartz was known for his loyalty to Sinatra on several New York stations. But with four Sinatra shows, Mr. Mark was probably singular in his commitment.“D.J.s can often be disappointing in person, which was not the case with Sid,” James Kaplan, the author of a two-volume biography of Sinatra — “Frank: The Voice” (2010) and “Sinatra: The Chairman” (2015) — said in a phone interview. “He was physically impressive, a tall, striking-looking guy who had a real warmth. He didn’t have a phony atom in his body, and he had a true love of Sinatra and everything about Sinatra. His enthusiasm was real.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Chris Bailey, Who Gave Australia Punk Rock, Dies at 65

      by

      He and the Saints introduced the country (and later the world) to their own raw sound just as the Sex Pistols were emerging in London and the Ramones in New York.Chris Bailey, an Australian singer who with his band, the Saints, introduced their country to the raw, fast-tempo sounds of punk rock in the mid-1970s, just as the Sex Pistols were spiking their hair in London and the Ramones were donning their leather jackets in New York City, died on April 9 in Haarlem, the Netherlands. He was 65.His wife, Elisabet Corlin, confirmed the death, of natural causes, but did not provide details.Mr. Bailey and the Saints did not borrow from the sounds emanating out of Britain and the United States. Rather, in a case of parallel evolution, they emerged simultaneously, shaped in their native Brisbane by some of the same forces at work in the Northern Hemisphere: high unemployment, stifling social conservatism and grungy political radicalism.They released their first hit, “(I’m) Stranded,” in September 1976, two months before the Sex Pistols debuted with “Anarchy in the U.K.” and one month before the Damned released “New Rose,” widely considered Britain’s first punk single.“(I’m) Stranded,” which the Saints produced themselves, is as pure a punk anthem as one can find, with buzz saw guitar and driving rhythms punctuating Mr. Bailey’s fast-paced snarl of a voice, singing about youthful ennui and failed romance.That single shot the Saints to national and then global attention among the underground cognoscenti, even though it caused only the shallowest ripple in the charts. Until then, no label was interested in the stringy-haired foursome from Queensland; suddenly, everyone was.The Saints — with Mr. Bailey on vocals, Ed Kuepper on guitar, Ivor Hay on drums and Kym Bradshaw on bass — signed with EMI and moved to London in 1977, just as punk was hitting its stride.They were a part of the scene there and separate from it, both sonically — they incorporated horns, for one thing — and ideologically: To them, punk, ostensibly a cri de coeur against consumer society, was already a commodified part of it. Mr. Bailey called it a “marketing gimmick.”Unlike the typical pointy-haired British punks, the Saints kept their look low-key, more like a 1990s American grunge band (and, not coincidentally, many a latter-day Seattle band noted the Saints as an inspiration).Nevertheless, they thrived. Their single “This Perfect Day” reached No. 34 on the U.K. charts, and their first two albums, “(I’m) Stranded” (1977) and “Eternally Yours” (1978), are considered punk classics. The second album included “Know Your Product,” an anti-consumer, anti-punk song that sent fans raving.But like punk itself, the Saints had a short shelf life, though by their third album, the R&B-spiked “Prehistoric Sounds,” they were starting to transcend the genre. Released in late 1978, it fizzled, EMI dropped them and a few months later Mr. Kuepper and Mr. Hay left the band.The Saints’ legacy cannot be measured by record sales; they influenced generations of Australian rockers, as well as bands emerging from the early 1980s metal scene along the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, like Guns N’ Roses.Nick Cave, another Australian musician who came up in the punkish underground of the 1970s, said in a memorial statement on the website Red Hand Files, “I can only simply repeat, for the record, that, in my opinion, the Saints were Australia’s greatest band, and that Chris Bailey was my favorite singer.”Christopher James Mannix Bailey was born on Nov. 29, 1956, in Nanyuki, Kenya, where his father, Robert Bailey, was stationed with the British Army. His mother, Bridget (O’Hare) Bailey, was a homemaker.The family returned to the Baileys’ native Belfast, Northern Ireland, when Christopher was young. But with political unrest brewing and Australia opening its doors to immigrants, the family soon moved to Brisbane, where Robert found work as a night watchman in a factory.Along with his wife, Mr. Bailey is survived by his brother, Michael, and his sisters, Mary, Carol and Margaret Bailey and Maureen Schull.Mr. Bailey onstage during the 2012 Homebake Music Festival in Sydney.Don Arnold/WireImageAfter the Saints’ original lineup split up, Mr. Bailey reconstituted the band and recorded a series of albums under the same name and later as a solo act. He moved away from punk toward roots-driven rock, folk and austere instrumentation that showed off his room-filling rich voice.He moved to Sweden in the 1990s, and then to the Netherlands in 1994, where he continued to write and record. Bruce Springsteen covered one of his songs, “Just Like Fire Would,” on his 2014 album “High Hopes.”While the musician Bob Geldof reportedly said that “rock music of the ’70s was changed by three bands: the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Saints,” Mr. Bailey was unbothered by the Saints’ name recognition relative to those others.“This is the world in which we live,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1998. “Bitter and twisted is something I don’t see any advantage in being.” More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Jimmy Wang Yu, Seminal Figure in Kung Fu Films, Dies at 79

      by

      He changed the nature of Asian martial arts movies, which had been relying on sword fighting and fantasy, by bringing hand-to-hand combat to the fore.Jimmy Wang Yu, who in the 1960s, in movies like “The One-Armed Swordsman,” became the biggest star of Asian martial arts cinema until the emergence of Bruce Lee, died on April 5 in Taipei, Taiwan. He was 79.His daughter Linda Wong announced the death, in a hospital, but did not give the cause. Mr. Yu had reportedly had strokes in 2011 and 2016.As a seminal figure in martial arts, known for bringing hand-to-hand combat into the forefront, Mr. Yu paved the way for stars like Mr. Lee and Jackie Chan who found great success outside Asia. After Mr. Yu’s death, Mr. Chan said on Facebook, “The contributions you’ve made to kung fu movies, and the support and wisdom you’ve given to the younger generations, will always be remembered in the industry.”Mr. Yu worked in the 1960s for the major Hong Kong studio owned by the Shaw brothers, starring in their films “The One-Armed Swordsman” in 1967 and “Golden Swallow” and “The Sword of Swords” in 1968.In that period, Mr. Yu said in a 2014 interview with Easternkicks, a website devoted to Asian cinema, he was frequently in the news for getting into fights, often with police officers.“How did I get popular in Hong Kong?” he said. “I think one reason — it’s because I’m a street fighter.” He added, “I think maybe a lot of people say, ‘I see you fight in the movie, is he really a good fighter or not?’”Mr. Yu, left, played the title role in the hit 1967 Hong Kong movie “The One-Armed Swordsman.” Qiao Qiao played his master’s daughter.Film Society of Lincoln Center“The Chinese Boxer” (1970) — which Mr. Yu directed, and in which he starred as a man who takes revenge on Japanese thugs who have destroyed a Chinese kung fu school — was probably his most influential film. With its focus on hand-to-hand combat rather than the sword fighting and fantasy elements that were then commonplace in Hong Kong action movies, it helped transform the genre.In a 2020 essay on the website of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, Quentin Tarantino, who directed the martial arts films “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” (2003) and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” (2004), wrote that “The Chinese Boxer” was groundbreaking because it meant that “the hero taking on an entire room full of ruffians, whether it be in a teahouse, casino or dojo, would become as much a staple of the genre as the western barroom brawl or the fast-draw showdown.”“The Chinese Boxer” became a challenge to Mr. Lee, who had been working in Hollywood on “The Green Hornet” and other television series before moving back to Hong Kong, where he had been raised.“Jimmy Wang Yu was the biggest action star in Hong Kong, and Bruce had his sights on him,” Matthew Polly, the author of “Bruce Lee: A Life” (2018), said in a phone interview. “They didn’t like each other and had to be kept out of the same room.”He added, “In a way, Jimmy Wang Yu was responsible for Bruce Lee’s success, because ‘The Chinese Boxer’ established the template for the kung fu movie and Bruce used that as his model for ‘Fist of Fury,’ which is more or less a rip-off of ‘The Chinese Boxer.’” “Fist of Fury,” released in 1972, made Mr. Lee a major star in Hong Kong.Mr. Lee came out with only two more films before he died in 1973. His final movie, “Enter the Dragon” (1973), established him as an international star and secured his popularity to this day.Mr. Yu in the 1975 film “Master of the Flying Guillotine.”Pathfinder PicturesMr. Yu was born Wang Zhengquan on March 28, 1943, in Shanghai and moved with his family to Hong Kong when he was young. Before his movie career began, he was a swimming champion and served in the Chinese Army.After “The Chinese Boxer,” Mr. Yu tried to break his exclusive contract with the Shaw Brothers to make films elsewhere, but they sued him successfully, which effectively got him blacklisted in Hong Kong. He moved to Taiwan, where he resumed his career with Golden Harvest and other studios.In 1975, Mr. Yu starred in “The Man From Hong Kong,” also released in the United States as “The Dragon Flies,” in which he played a respected detective sent to Australia to extradite a dope smuggler.Reviewing “The Dragon Flies” in The Boston Globe, George McKinnon wrote that Chinese studio chiefs’ frantic search to find a successor to Mr. Lee might have ended with Mr. Yu, then 32. “Underneath that impeccable Hong Kong tailoring,” he wrote, “lies a ferocious dragon.” But unlike Mr. Lee and Mr. Chan, Mr. Wu did not become a star in the United States.George Lazenby, who co-starred with Mr. Yu in both “The Dragon Flies” and “International Assassin” (1976), had trained in martial arts for four months in anticipation of making a movie with Mr. Lee. After Mr. Lee died, Mr. Lazenby pivoted to working with Mr. Yu and performed his own stunts.“It was really more stunts than dialogue,” Mr. Lazenby, who is best known for playing James Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), said in a phone interview. “Jimmy was a genuine fighter — if he hit you, you’d feel it. You just had to trust that he wouldn’t hit you.”Mr. Yu continued to work regularly until the early 1990s and, after a long hiatus, appeared in four films between 2011 and 2013.Mr. Yu in “Dragon” (2011). After a long hiatus, he appeared in four films between 2011 and 2013.RADiUS-TWCComplete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Yu received lifetime achievement awards from the New York Asian Film Festival in 2014 and the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan in 2019.After Mr. Yu’s death, the Academy Award-winning Taiwanese director Ang Lee told the China News Agency: “For many fans like me, he represents the vibe of a certain era. His films and his heroic spirit will be deeply missed.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Mikhail Vasenkov Dies at 79; His Spy Ring Inspired ‘The Americans’

      by

      He and his wife were among 10 Soviet sleeper agents who blended into American society before being exposed and deported in 2010. The TV series sprung from the episode.Mikhail Vasenkov, the most senior of 10 Soviet sleeper agents who posed as ordinary citizens in the United States as they scouted potential recruits, and whose mass arrest and deportation in 2010 inspired the TV series “The Americans,” died on April 6. He was 79.His death was announced by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The agency did not specify how or where he died, but he was interviewed as recently as December 2020 in Moscow.When they were arrested, Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, a journalist, had been living undercover in a Soviet-owned two-story brick and stucco house in suburban Yonkers, N.Y., since immigrating from her native Peru in 1985.The house in Yonkers, N.Y., where Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, lived undercover.Daniel Barry for The New York TimesThey and eight others, part of a network of so-called illegals, were rounded up in a multiyear F.B.I. investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, and pleaded guilty to failing to register as agents of a foreign government. They were then deported, flown to Europe on July 9, 2010, and swapped for four Russians who had been imprisoned in Moscow on charges of spying for the United States and Britain.The arrests of the sleeper agents, including several couples with children and a self-styled New York socialite, Anna Chapman, generated the concept for “The Americans,” which was broadcast on FX beginning in 2013.“That was absolutely the inspiration for the series,” Joe Weisberg, who developed the series with Joel Fields, told Time magazine in 2010.Over six seasons, the drama, set in the 1980s, followed two Soviet undercover agents masquerading as a suburban Washington couple, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), in a Cold War cat-and-mouse contest with federal agents.A scene from the sixth season of the FX television show “The Americans,” which was inspired by the arrest of Mr. Vasenkov and nine others as spies. From left, Lev Gorn with Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, who played married Soviet agents at the center of the show. Patrick Harbron/ FXMr. Vasenkov, operating as Juan Lazaro Sr., conducted what sounded more like a cat-and-slouch competition with federal counterintelligence agents. He and Ms. Pelaez didn’t shade their anti-American views, and they apparently neither collected nor delivered any secrets to Moscow.When the spies were rounded up, the F.B.I. said that while “their intent from the start was serious, well-funded by the S.V.R.” — the Soviet intelligence service — “and far-ranging,” they “never got their hands on any classified documents.”Whether for the benefit of eavesdroppers or because he was getting paid regardless, Mr. Vasenkov was recorded by federal agents telling his wife matter-of-factly that his Soviet handlers “say my information is of no value,” adding, “If they don’t like what I tell them, too bad.”He was apparently the first of the Soviet agents to have been compromised, captured on tape as early as 2003 blithely instructing his wife on how to communicate with Moscow.“When you go to Peru, I am going to write in invisible,” he said, according to a transcript, “and you’re going to pass them all of that in a book.” To which Ms. Pelaez replied, “Oh, O.K.”When he was arrested, he told investigators that he “would not violate his loyalty” to the S.V.R. — “even for his son,” a teenager whom he would leave behind when he and his wife were deported.When the 10 agents arrived in Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent who was prime minister at the time, greeted them by lustily leading them in patriotic anthems and offering them a “bright life” in Mother Russia with a pension and a monthly stipend.But Mr. Vasenkov, the senior spy among them, said no, thank you. He had not been looking forward to his return. He had not lived in his native Russia for decades (by then he spoke Russian with a Spanish accent), and his wife had never visited the country. And so within weeks of landing in Moscow he decided instead to resume his false identity and return with his wife to Peru.They did, in 2013.In “Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West” (2012), Edward Lucas wrote that while the infiltration by sleeper agents posed a serious threat to U.S. national security, “it is easy to mock the pointlessness of these people, apparently the least serious of the illegals, sent at vast trouble and expense of a foreign country in order to carry out tasks that most people manage with a mouse click.”Nonetheless, in announcing Mr. Vasenkov’s death, the Russian security agency praised him in an obituary.“At work in special conditions since 1975,” the obituary said, “he created and headed an illegal residency, which obtained valuable political information, which was highly appreciated.”The agency openly identified him as a “former Russian spy and sleeper agent” — a covert infiltrator assigned to scout potential spies, assess vulnerable targets and stand ready to be activated in a crisis even decades later.The S.V.R. said that Mr. Vasenkov had reached mandatory military retirement with the rank of colonel in 2004, without elaborating on why he had remained in New York for six more years before he was betrayed, the agency said, by a Soviet defector.The agency’s announcement listed the medals and other commendations that Mr. Vasenkov had been awarded and characterized him as “a hardworking, honest and modest employee” who had been “prone to work associated with risk” and had shown “will, courage and resourcefulness.”The couple’s son, Juan Lazaro Jr., who was 17 at the time of their arrest and already an accomplished pianist, declined to accompany them back to Russia. He was finishing his studies at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan at the time. According to a résumé, he later graduated from the Juilliard School and studied at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan, part of the New School, and still lives in New York.Ms. Pelaez’s stepson from a previous relationship, Waldo Mariscal, an architect who was 38 at the time, also remained in the United States. He now lives in Peru with his mother, according to her lawyer, Carlos Moreno. She and her sons are among Mr. Vasenkov’s survivors, Mr. Moreno said.Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov was born on Oct. 9, 1942, into what his obituary described as a family of workers in Kuntsevo, a town outside Moscow. (Stalin had a dacha there.) The family moved to Siberia some time after the German invasion during World War II.Mikhail graduated from the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School. Trained in English and Spanish, he flew from Madrid to Lima in 1976 on a Uruguayan passport under the name of Juan Jose Lazaro Fuentes, an identity he had stolen from a Uruguayan who had died of respiratory failure in 1947 at the age of 3.Described as a freelance news photographer with a black belt in karate, he was granted Peruvian citizenship in 1979. In 1983, “with the sanction” of the spy service, according to the Russian security service, he married Ms. Pelaez, a television reporter.Two years later, they emigrated to the United States, where she went to work as a journalist for the Spanish-language daily newspaper El Diario/La Prensa.Mr. Vasenkov earned a doctorate in political science at the New School, wrote approvingly of the leftist Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru and, in 2008, taught Latin American and Caribbean politics for a semester as an adjunct professor at Baruch College in Manhattan, part of the City University of New York.Despite the recording of Mr. Vasenkov’s instructions about invisible ink, Ms. Pelaez insisted that she had not known that her husband was a Soviet agent until the arrests. And in interviews, her stepson — who remained loyal to the couple, saying, “We believe in the integrity of our parents”— vouched for her.“My mother barely speaks English,” he said. “She’s going to speak Russian? The only Russian thing my mother likes is vodka.” More