Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Taylor Hawkins, Foo Fighters’ Drummer, Dies at 50

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      Hard-hitting and charismatic, he was direct about his hopes for the group’s future, even after two decades. “I want to be the biggest band in the world,” he said.Taylor Hawkins, the hard-hitting, charismatic drummer for Foo Fighters, the enduring Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band that has won 12 Grammys and released seven platinum albums, has died at 50.A statement posted to the band’s social media late Friday and sent by its representative confirmed the death. According to the attorney general’s office of Colombia, Mr. Hawkins had been staying in a hotel in northern Bogotá, where the band had been scheduled to play a show Friday night. The office said that preliminary tests showed Mr. Hawkins had several substances in his system, including opioids, marijuana and benzodiazepines; the cause of death was still under investigation.pic.twitter.com/ffPHhUKRT4— Foo Fighters (@foofighters) March 26, 2022
      Recognizable for his flailing limbs, surfer’s good looks and wide, childlike grin, Mr. Hawkins became a member of the band led by Dave Grohl for its third album, “There Is Nothing Left to Lose,” released in 1999, and played on the group’s subsequent seven albums. He drew on two distinct styles: the fundamentals of Roger Taylor from Queen and the intricacy of Stewart Copeland from the Police. He added the muscle of punk and metal, the precision of drum machines and a gift for explosive momentum.Foo Fighters’ most recent album, “Medicine at Midnight,” arrived last year as the group was celebrating its 25th anniversary, and in an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Hawkins was direct about his hopes for its future. “I want to be the biggest band in the world,” he said.Mr. Hawkins was born in Fort Worth on Feb. 17, 1972, and raised in Southern California. He started to play drums at age 10, and said that his mother gave him the confidence to dream big: “When I first got drums, she was the one who would watch me play. She was a big supporter and told me I’d make it,” he said in an interview last year.Attending a Queen show in 1982 confirmed that music was his passion. “After that concert, I don’t think I slept for three days,” he said in a 2021 interview with the metal magazine Kerrang. “It changed everything, and I was never the same because of it. It was the beginning of my obsession with rock ’n’ roll, and I knew that I wanted to be in a huge rock band.”After Mr. Hawkins played in a local California band called Sylvia and backing the Canadian rock vocalist Sass Jordan, his first mainstream break came in 1995, when he joined Alanis Morissette’s band as she toured behind her blockbuster album “Jagged Little Pill.” (He appeared in the video for her breakout hit “You Oughta Know,” flipping his blond mane behind the drum kit.)Foo Fighters in performance in New York last year.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMr. Grohl, then still primarily known for his role as the drummer for Nirvana, recalled meeting Mr. Hawkins backstage at a radio station concert in the 1990s and feeling an immediate kinship.“I was like, ‘Wow, you’re either my twin or my spirit animal or my best friend,’” Mr. Grohl said in an interview last year. “When it was time to look for a drummer, I kind of wished that he would do it, but I didn’t imagine he would leave Alanis Morissette, because at the time she was the biggest artist in the world.”But when Mr. Grohl called him later looking for a drummer, he recalled, Mr. Hawkins said, “I’m your guy.”“I think it had more to do with our personal relationship than anything musical,” he added. “To be honest, it still does. Our musical relationship — the foundation of that is our friendship, and that’s why when we jump up onstage and play, we’re so connected, because we’re like best friends.”Mr. Grohl, Foo Fighters’ lead singer and one of its songwriters and guitarists, had played drums on the band’s first album in 1995, and he took over again for its second, “The Colour and the Shape,” when a replacement failed to stick. In joining the band, Mr. Hawkins was charged with assuming the seat of one of contemporary rock’s most distinct, powerful and beloved drummers. His colorful flair and good humor helped him carve out his own place in the band, and he adapted to Mr. Grohl’s creative process: “He writes in rhythms, not only in melodies but in rhythms, so I have to meet him there,” Mr. Hawkins said.Recorded in a Virginia basement, far from the prying eyes of a record label, “There Is Nothing Left to Lose” went on to win the band’s first Grammy, for best rock album.Foo Fighters were scheduled to perform at this year’s Grammys, to be held on April 3. “Medicine at Midnight” is nominated for three awards, including best rock performance (for the song “Making a Fire”), best rock song (“Waiting on a War”) and best rock album.Foo Fighters were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year, recognized for their “rock authenticity with infectious hooks, in-your-face guitar riffs, monster drums and boundless energy.” At the induction ceremony, Mr. Hawkins told Mr. Grohl, “Thank you for letting me be in your band.”Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters spoke when the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in October. Paul McCartney, who gave the induction speech, was behind Mr. Grohl, and Mr. Hawklns was next to Mr. McCartney.David Richard/Associated PressOn songs like “Times Like These,” the 2003 hit that has become an anthem of perseverance and renewal, Mr. Hawkins is a hard-driving force, punctuating the verses with rat-a-tat fills. On “Best of You,” another fist-pumping, heartstring-tugging signature song, his snare pounds provide the chorus’s steadily building drama. And on “Rope,” a single from the band’s 2011 album, “Wasting Light,” Mr. Hawkins’s precisely syncopated work on the verses gives way to eruptions of fills.In addition to his drumming, Mr. Hawkins went on to contribute as a songwriter to Foo Fighters albums, even singing lead vocals on occasion. Beginning in 2006, he released three albums with a side project, the cheekily named Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders. He also played in a cover band called Chevy Metal and a prog-rock band called the Birds of Satan. Last year he teamed with the guitarist Dave Navarro and the bassist Chris Chaney to form a band called NHC; the group’s debut EP, “Intakes & Outtakes,” was released in February.On recent Foo Fighters tours, Mr. Hawkins would swap places with Mr. Grohl to sing a cover of Queen’s 1981 hit with David Bowie, “Under Pressure,” or Queen’s “Somebody to Love,” emerging from behind the kit in his signature shorts to pay homage to the act that set him on his path. He’d also take the spotlight for drum solos that stretched several minutes, smiling as he became a whirl of limbs atop his riser, smashing his cymbals and bashing a timpani.Although he has been referred to as “a sideman with a frontman’s flair,” Mr. Hawkins admitted over the years to feeling some self-doubt about filling Mr. Grohl’s seat behind the drum kit. “A lot of my insecurities — which led to a lot of my drug use — had to do with me not feeling like I was good enough to be in this band, to play drums with Dave,” he told Spin in 2002.In 2001, he overdosed in London and was briefly comatose. “Everyone has their own path, and I took it too far,” Mr. Hawkins told Kerrang, adding that he once believed the “myth of live hard and fast, die young.”He added, “I’m not here to preach about not doing drugs, because I loved doing drugs, but I just got out of control for a while and it almost got me.”In a 2018 conversation with the online radio station Beats 1, Mr. Hawkins said, “There’s no happy ending with hard drugs.” But he declined to explain how he stayed sober: “I don’t really discuss how I live my life in that regard. I have my system that works for me.”Mr. Hawkins is survived by his wife, Alison, whom he married in 2005, and their three children, Oliver, Annabelle and Everleigh.Jon Pareles More

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      John Korty, Director of ‘Miss Jane Pittman,’ Is Dead at 85

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      He was best known for a series of ambitious television movies that examined racism, disability and other social issues.John Korty, a director best known for ambitious made-for-television projects, including the 1974 film “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” which won nine Emmy Awards, died on March 9 at his home in Port Reyes Station, Calif. He was 85.His brother, Doug Korty, said the cause was vascular dementia.“Miss Jane Pittman,” a CBS presentation based on the Ernest J. Gaines novel in which a Black woman recounts more than a century’s worth of memories, featured an acclaimed performance by Cicely Tyson as the title character. John J. O’Connor, reviewing the film in The New York Times, called it “a splendid night for television.”“John Korty’s direction is cool and restrained,” he added, “never underlining and always avoiding what could easily be mawkish.”The Emmys the film won included one for Mr. Korty for best directing of a single program, comedy or drama.Mr. Korty on the set of the 1974 television movie  “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” which went on to win nine Emmy Awards, including one for Mr. Korty.via Korty Family Cicely Tyson as the title character, a woman who recounts more than a century’s worth of memories, in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”Bettmann via GettyMr. Korty also won both an Oscar and an Emmy for “Who Are the Debolts? And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?,” a documentary about a couple whose many children included hard-to-place adopted ones with disabilities or other challenges. American television networks weren’t interested in the documentary when Mr. Korty first offered it; it was initially released as a film in Japan, then shown at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1977, where it received a standing ovation.That brought it an Oscar for best documentary feature, but Mr. Korty still wanted to get it in front of TV audiences. With some persuasion from Henry Winkler, whose role as Fonzie on “Happy Days” had made him one of the network’s biggest stars, ABC finally broadcast a cut-down version in late 1978; that version won the Emmy for outstanding individual achievement for an informational program.Although Mr. Korty also directed lighter fare and the occasional Hollywood feature, including “Oliver’s Story,” the 1978 follow-up to the hit 1970 movie “Love Story,” he gravitated toward television movies that touched on social issues.In addition to “Miss Jane Pittman,” which covered a century’s worth of the Black experience, he directed “Go Ask Alice” (1973), about teenage drug addiction; “Farewell to Manzanar” (1976), about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; “Second Sight: A Love Story” (1984), about a blind woman; “Resting Place” (1986), about a family’s attempt to have a Black officer who was killed in Vietnam buried in his hometown’s all-white cemetery; and “Eye on the Sparrow” (1987), about a blind couple trying to adopt.“I wouldn’t give up television movies,” Mr. Korty told The Times in 1986. “There is nothing like the response you get. Fifty million people saw ‘Jane Pittman’ in one night. That’s very different from even the biggest hit movie.”Mr. Korty on the set of “Farewell to Manzanar,” his 1976 TV movie about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.via Korty FamilyIn the best of his television work, Mr. Korty sought to illuminate subjects and perspectives not often addressed in the mainstream. In an essay he wrote for The San Francisco Examiner in 1978, he said that was his hope for the “Debolts” film, in which he showed the children’s disabilities in unflinching detail, rare for TV at the time.“It seems that most physically handicapped people have their greatest struggles not with their crutches, but with their identities — being accepted as individuals rather than as a distasteful class of outcasts,” he wrote. “We hope that by the end of our film the audience will forget who is on crutches and who isn’t.”John Van Cleave Korty was born on June 22, 1936, in Lafayette, Ind. His father, Richard, was an engineer, and his mother, Mary (Van Cleave) Korty, was a nurse.“I started drawing when I was 5 years old,” Mr. Korty said at a 2013 panel discussion of his work, “and for many, many years I thought I was going to be what you’d call a commercial artist.”But in 11th grade a teacher showed the class some of the innovative animated films of Norman McLaren, and Mr. Korty found a new interest. He soon made his first animated film, but, as he told The Abilene Reporter-News of Texas in 1986, he couldn’t afford new film stock. Instead he somehow obtained a reel of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and dumped bleach on it in his parents’ bathtub to erase the images, then hand-painted images on its 2,600 frames. The trick worked, he said, but it took him a week to scrub the bathtub clean.He earned a bachelor’s degree at Antioch College, where he continued to experiment with animation. In about 1963 he settled in the Bay Area, where he set up his own studio. One of his earliest professional efforts, “Breaking the Habit,” a documentary about smoking produced in cooperation with the American Cancer Society, was nominated for the short-subject documentary Oscar in 1965.Mr. Korty directed the independent features “The Crazy-Quilt” (1966), “Funnyman” (1967) and “riverrun” (1968) before he made his first television movies, drawing some critical acclaim and the attention of other young filmmakers who were interested in working outside the Hollywood system. Among them were Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, who came to visit his setup in 1968.“They showed up in two station wagons, and when Francis walked in, his mouth dropped open,” Mr. Korty told The Marin Independent Journal in 2011. “He said, ‘My God, you’ve done exactly what we want to do: get out of Hollywood and set up a studio. If you can do it, we can do it.’”A year later Mr. Coppola and Mr. Lucas would found their American Zoetrope studio in San Francisco. Mr. Korty had an office there for several years and went on to work with Mr. Lucas. He and Charles Swenson directed “Twice Upon a Time,” an animated feature made with Mr. Lucas’s Lucasfilm company in 1983, and the next year Mr. Korty directed “Caravan of Courage,” a Lucasfilm TV movie based on the Ewok creatures from the “Star Wars” movie “Return of the Jedi.”“I wouldn’t give up television movies,” Mr. Korty said in 1986. “There is nothing like the response you get. Fifty million people saw ‘Jane Pittman’ in one night. That’s very different from even the biggest hit movie.”via Korty FamilyThough the success of “Miss Jane Pittman” brought Mr. Korty offers to direct Hollywood films, he rarely accepted. “Oliver’s Story,” which he directed in 1978, was an exception. It was a bigger-budget movie than he normally attempted, with big stars — Ryan O’Neal, Candice Bergen — and Mr. Korty wasn’t entirely comfortable.“It’s the first movie I’ve ever made that I’ve felt not a part of,” he told The Sacramento Bee in December 1978 as the early reviews, many of them unflattering, were coming in. “I know I put things in this movie that I liked and the audience wouldn’t — and vice versa.”Mr. Korty’s marriages to Carol Tweedie in 1959 and Beulah Chang in 1965 ended in divorce. In 1989 he married Jane Silvia, who survives him, along with his brother; a sister, Nancy Korty; two sons from his second marriage, Jonathan and David; a son from his third marriage, Gabriel; and three grandchildren. More

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      in Music

      William Kraft, Percussionist and Force in New Music, Dies at 98

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      A mainstay of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he also composed music that elevated overlooked instruments like the timpani.Lamenting the abundance of what he called “rat-a-tat, boom-boom” music for drums, William Kraft set out to create more sophisticated offerings that would bring greater respect to instruments he felt were too often taken for granted in orchestras.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” he wrote in 1968. “The last of orchestral families to be exploited, they have come of age in the 20th century.”Mr. Kraft, who as both a composer and a percussionist became a force in contemporary music, elevating overlooked instruments like the timpani and developing a style that drew on jazz and Impressionism, died on Feb. 12 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. He was 98.His wife, the composer Joan Huang, said the cause was heart failure.A spirited performer, Mr. Kraft was acclaimed for his work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he spent 26 years, 18 of them as principal timpanist.But he was perhaps best known as a composer. A frequent collaborator with Igor Stravinsky, Mr. Kraft helped lend legitimacy to contemporary music in the United States, founding ensembles to showcase modern composers at a time when many classical musicians were skeptical of straying too far from the traditional canon.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” Mr. Kraft wrote.Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesPlaying his music — deliberate yet freewheeling, flashy but spiritual — became a rite of passage for percussionists, and his works were heard in band rooms and concert halls alike.William Kraft was born in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1923, the son of Louis and Florence (Rogalsky) Kashareftsky, Jewish immigrants from Russia. (His father changed the family name from Kashareftsky to Kraft upon arriving in the United States.) When William was 3, the family moved to San Diego, where his parents opened a delicatessen and, at his mother’s urging, he began studying piano.While he adored the music of French Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel (“my great idols,” friends say he called them), he did not initially anticipate making composition a career.“I just thought they were gods and not to be touched,” he said in a 2020 interview with Ching Juhl, a producer and violist. “They were influences, but I never thought I could write the style.”During World War II, when he worked as a drummer and pianist in American military bands stationed in Europe, he began exploring composition more seriously.His roommate at the time, a trumpet player, asked him to produce an arrangement of the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Stardust.” Mr. Kraft agreed, but he wanted to do it his way, composing an elaborate introduction based on the musical interval of the fourth.Mr. Kraft earned a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University in 1954. He joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic the next year and rose through the ranks, becoming principal timpanist in 1963. On the side, he continued writing his own works, including percussion pieces in the style of Baroque suites and a series of compositions that he called “Encounters,” pairing percussion with a variety of other instruments, including trumpet and harp. He called himself an “American Impressionist.”Mr. Kraft, center, in Los Angeles in 2008 after a concert by the ensemble Southwest Chamber Music honoring him on his 85th birthday. He was joined by the ensemble’s John Schneider, left, and Ricardo Gallardo.Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesZubin Mehta, who served as the Philharmonic’s music director from 1962 to 1978, described Mr. Kraft as a nimble musician. He recalled Mr. Kraft rearranging the timpani part for Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for one player, rather than two as was standard, making it easier for the Philharmonic to perform while on tour.“He knew the pieces so well,” Mr. Mehta said in an interview. “It just came naturally.”Mr. Mehta elevated Mr. Kraft to the post of assistant conductor, which he held from 1969 to 1972. Mr. Kraft sold his instruments and retired from playing in the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1981 to become the orchestra’s composer in residence.Stravinsky, who moved to California in the 1940s, had a significant influence on Mr. Kraft. (Mr. Kraft once said hearing “The Rite of Spring” for the first time as a teenager “changed my life.”) The two men worked together often. Mr. Kraft played timpani in Stravinsky’s ensembles and helped edit the percussion parts for Stravinsky’s musical play “The Soldier’s Tale.”Mr. Kraft’s music, with its emphasis on rhythmic freedom, often seemed to pay homage to Stravinsky. Mr. Kraft was also fond of virtuosic feats; one of his concertos demands the performer play 15 timpani.“He was one of the few atonal composers who really somehow wrote very uplifting music,” said the composer Paul Polivnick, a friend. “While he had his mathematical formulas, he let his music be based in creating a sense of emotional and dramatic power.”In 1956 he organized the First Percussion Quartet, made up of players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The ensemble, which later grew in size and changed its name to the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble and Chamber Players, promoted works by composers including Stravinsky, Alberto Ginastera and Edgard Varèse.In 1981, Mr. Kraft founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. He also had a busy teaching career, serving as chairman of the composition department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1991 to 2002.“He put Los Angeles on the map as a hot spot for contemporary music,” said Joseph Pereira, the current principal timpanist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “We are still reaping the benefits of Kraft’s impact on the Philharmonic, and on the new music community.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Kraft is survived by a son, Patrick; a daughter, Jennifer; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.He composed until the end of his life, sitting at the piano each day to sketch out ideas. At his death he was working on a piece called “Kaleidoscope” as well as a rearrangement of a piano concerto.The day before he died, Ms. Huang said, Mr. Kraft asked about his unfinished pieces, and she promised to complete them.“He just loved composing,” she said. “It was his language.” More

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      in Television

      Av Westin, Newsman Behind ABC’s ‘20/20,’ Dies at 92

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      After nearly 20 years at CBS News, he went to a rival network and helped turn its answer to “60 Minutes” into a frequent Emmy Award winner.Av Westin, an influential television producer who rose from copy boy at CBS News for Edward R. Murrow in the 1940s to help make ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine a perennial winner of Emmy Awards, died on March 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.His wife, Ellen Rossen, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Westin had spent a year as the executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight” when he took over at “20/20” in 1979. Over the next seven years, the program won more than 30 news and documentary Emmy Awards, including 11 in 1981.Looking to differentiate “20/20” from the entertainment shows it competed with in prime-time, as well as from CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Westin mixed ambitious investigative reports with celebrity profiles, lifestyle features and “process pieces” about artistic endeavors like the making of a new album of standards by Linda Ronstadt.A documentarian at heart, Mr. Westin also ordered a series of features called “Moment of Crisis,” which looked back at news events like the disastrous explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the efforts to save President Ronald Reagan’s life after he was wounded in an assassination attempt.“20/20,” which was hosted by Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs in the 1980s, had an A-list group of correspondents that included Sylvia Chase, Lynn Sherr, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Jarriel, Bob Brown and Sander Vanocur.Mr. Brown recalled that Mr. Westin gave correspondents and producers considerable leeway to cover a story as they chose.“But when the piece was screened, Av took over and was at his best,” Mr. Brown said in a phone interview. “He could break apart a story and make you see everything you’d done wrong and let you know what you had to do to fix it. He had a genius for going straight to a problem.”Mr. Westin’s time at “20/20” came to an end in February 1987, when he circulated an 18-page memo within ABC News and to its top executives at its parent company, Capital Cities/ABC, criticizing news-gathering procedures and calling the division inefficient and in need of a new focus.He said that he had been quietly asked by a Capital Cities executive to critique ABC News, whose president was Roone Arledge.“Cap Cities had essentially decided that Roone was not their guy anymore,” Mr. Westin said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2011. The executive told him that “Roone’s tenure was going to end, and I was likely to be the preferred candidate of management.”“What I wrote was accurate,” Mr. Westin added, “but obviously it was inflammatory.”The memo led Mr. Arledge to suspend him and take him off “20/20.” But the suspension did not last long, and Mr. Westin went on to work on projects like “The Blessings of Liberty,” about the U.S. Constitution at its centennial, until he left the network in 1989.It was not the first time the two men clashed. In 1985, Mr. Arledge killed a “20/20” segment about the death of Marilyn Monroe and her ties to the Kennedys, calling it “gossip-column stuff.” Mr. Westin objected, and Mr. Rivera angrily told the gossip columnist Liz Smith that he and others at “20/20” were appalled that Mr. Arledge “would overturn a respected, honorable, great newsman like Av.”Mr. Westin with the “20/20” host Hugh Downs in 1981. He recruited an A-list group of correspondents for the program.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesAvram Robert Westin was born on July 29, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, Elliot, was a vice president of a commercial baking company. His mother, Harriet (Radin) Westin, was a homemaker. Av Westin graduated from New York University in 1949. He had begun his studies as a pre-med student, but an experience during a summer job as a copy boy at CBS in 1947 altered his direction, to English and history.“A bulletin moved that a ship was sinking off Newfoundland,” he told the Television Academy, and he promptly carried the teletype copy to an editor. “I was the only person at CBS News headquarters who knew that information,” he said. “I was the ultimate insider. That’s the epiphany.”Mr. Westin was a writer, director, reporter and producer for 18 years at CBS, during which he earned a master’s degree in Russian and East European studies at Columbia University in 1958. He won an Emmy in 1960 as a writer for the documentary “The Population Explosion,” and in 1963 created and produced “CBS Morning News” with Mike Wallace.He left CBS in 1967, spent two years as executive director of the noncommercial Public Broadcasting Laboratory and joined ABC News in 1969 as the executive producer of its evening newscast, then anchored by Frank Reynolds. It was an era when “ABC Evening News” trailed CBS and NBC’s nightly news operations in prestige, ratings and financial resources.“My target is ‘H and B,’” Mr. Westin told The Indianapolis News in 1969, referring to NBC’s co-anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “I think people are getting tired of them, and if they’re shopping around, I want them to look at us before they automatically turn to Walter” Cronkite.The broadcast journalist Ted Koppel, who was a correspondent on the evening news program, said of Mr. Westin in a phone interview, “He probably elevated the ‘ABC Evening News’ as much as anyone until Roone Arledge,” adding, “Av was a very ambitious man, who thought he should have been ABC News president.”While at ABC News, Mr. Westin ran its “Close-Up” documentary unit, for which he won a Peabody Award in 1973. He won another Peabody the next year, for producing and directing the documentary “Sadat: Action Biography,” about the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat.He left ABC News in 1976 in a dispute with Bill Sheehan, the president of the division, but returned two years later at Mr. Arledge’s request “to get rid of” the incompatible, feuding “Evening News” anchor team of Ms. Walters and Harry Reasoner.“The day I arrived back at ABC, one of the producers who was in the Reasoner camp came up to me and said, ‘You know, she owes us 5 minutes and 25 seconds,’” Mr. Westin told the Television Academy, referring to how much more Ms. Walters had been on the air than Mr. Reasoner over the past year.After returning as the executive producer of “Evening News,” Mr. Westin collaborated with Mr. Arledge on an overhaul in 1978 that transformed the show into the faster-paced, graphics-oriented “World News Tonight,” with three anchors: Mr. Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson in Chicago and Peter Jennings in London.A year later, Mr. Arledge moved Mr. Westin to “20/20.”After leaving ABC News, Mr. Westin was an executive at King World Productions, Time Warner and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’s foundation.In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Mark. His previous marriages to Sandra Glick and Kathleen Lingo ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.To Mr. Westin, evening news programs, which cannot provide much depth in 22 minutes of airtime, have a clear mandate.“I believe the audience at dinner time wants to know the answers to three very important questions,” he said, explaining a rule he had at ABC News. “Is the world safe? Is my hometown and my home safe? If my wife and children are safe, what has happened in the past 24 hours to make them better off or to amuse them?” More

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      in Movies

      Peter Bowles, Actor in ‘To the Manor Born,’ Dies at 85

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      In a six-decade career in TV, film and onstage, he played comedy and drama, hapless heroes and villains, often with the air of the archetypal English gent.Peter Bowles, a dapper British character actor who was best known for his role as an arriviste in the popular British television sitcom “To the Manor Born,” died on Thursday. He was 85. The cause was cancer, according to a statement to the BBC from his agent. No further information was available.In a six-decade career, Mr. Bowles, who was the son of servants and grew up without indoor plumbing, appeared in a merry-go-round of productions in television, film and onstage, alternating between comedy and drama, hapless heroes and villains. Whatever character he played, he often projected the air of what his agent called “the archetypal English gent.”Mr. Bowles’s well-known television credits included roles in “Rumpole of the Bailey,” “The Bounder,” “Only When I Laugh” and the recent series “Victoria.” He wrote and starred in “Lytton’s Diary,” about the life of a newspaper gossip columnist. And he achieved success in “The Irish R.M.,” in which he played a British Army officer sent to Ireland as a resident magistrate. The New York Times called the show “devilishly hilarious.”But he was best known for his portrayal of Richard DeVere in “To the Manor Born.” DeVere, the son of Czech-Polish émigrés, is the nouveau-riche owner of a supermarket who buys a grand English manor house from its original owner, Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, played by Penelope Keith. She moves to a nearby small cottage, from which she eyes DeVere’s activities with considerable disapproval.In a 1981 photo, Mr. Bowles and Penelope Keith, who played the original owner of the country mansion in “To the Manor Born.”United News/Popperfoto via Getty Images“The show was a reflection of the disruptions to the English class system by the recently elected Margaret Thatcher, a shopkeeper’s daughter who had poshed up her voice but was committed to social mobility,” Mark Lawson wrote in an appreciation of Mr. Bowles in The Guardian on Thursday.“The casting of the charming Bowles,” he added, “helped to offset the potentially nasty snobbery of the premise.”The sitcom aired from 1979 to 1981 in Britain, where it routinely drew audiences of 20 million, astronomical by British standards. Like other British series he was in, it later aired in the United States on PBS.Peter Bowles was born in London on Oct. 16, 1936. His father, Herbert Reginald Bowles, was a valet and chauffeur to a son of the Earl of Sandwich; his mother, Sarah Jane (Harrison) Bowles, was a nanny employed by the family of the Duke of Argyll in Scotland. (The two met when they both worked for the family of Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper baron and cabinet minister under Winston Churchill.)During World War II, when Peter was 6, the family moved to one of the poorest working-class districts of Nottingham, in the English Midlands, where their house had an outside toilet and no bath.After appearing in amateur plays in Nottingham, Peter won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where his fellow actors included Alan Bates, Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney, with whom he shared a flat.Mr. Bowles started onstage with the Old Vic Company in 1956 with small parts in Shakespeare dramas. Over time, he starred in 45 theatrical productions. He was seen in the early 1990s by the director Peter Hall, who then cast him in a string of plays in London’s West End.Mr. Bowles and Judi Dench in 2006 in a London revival of Noël Coward’s “Hay Fever.” Over a long career, he bounced from the stage to television to the movies. Catherine AshmoreAfter Mr. Bowles left the theater for television and comedy, the BBC famously pronounced that he would never work again in drama. But after several television successes, he defied that prediction and returned to the theater as Archie Rice, a failing music-hall performer, in John Osborne’s “The Entertainer” in 1986; he was the first actor to play the part in London since Laurence Olivier in 1957.Other stage roles included his portrayal of the art dealer Joseph Duveen in “The Old Masters” (2004), a play by Simon Gray about Duveen and the art critic Bernard Berenson, directed by Harold Pinter; and of the “seriously posh, clipped-voice husband” Peter Bliss, as The Times described him, in Peter Hall’s 2006 London revival of Noël Coward’s comedy of manners, “Hay Fever” (also set in an English country house).He continued to act in movies, too, with roles in: “Eyewitness” (1970, released in the U.S. as “Sudden Terror”); “The Steal” (1995); “Color Me Kubrick” (2005) and “The Bank Job” (2008).He is survived by his wife, the actor Susan Bennett, and three children, Guy, Adam and Sasha. More

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      Jack Willis, TV Producer and Empathetic Filmmaker, Dies at 87

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      A survivor of a crippling accident, his documentaries and news coverage for public television focused on poverty, race and other social issues.Jack Willis, a journalist and television executive who won several Emmys and a Polk Award for his innovative films and news and documentary programming during the embryonic years of cable and public broadcasting, died on Feb. 9 in Zurich. He was 87.He underwent assisted suicide at a clinic there, his wife, Mary Pleshette Willis, said. He lived in Manhattan.When he was in his late 30s, Mr. Willis broke his neck in a body surfing accident that temporarily left him a quadriplegic before he miraculously recovered, his wife said, inspiring a television movie. But after a half century, the injuries were taking their toll. Six years ago, he broke his hip and began using a wheelchair, she said.From 1971 to 1973, Mr. Willis was director of programming and production for WNET, the public television station in New York, where he introduced innovative local news coverage as executive producer of “The 51st State,” a program that took its name from the zany 1969 mayoral campaign of the author Norman Mailer, who proposed that New York City secede from New York State.The program, which won an Emmy Award, focused on communities rather than the more traditional fare of the nightly local news.Patrick Watson, center, the anchor of the WNET program “The 51st State,” moderated a discussion of racial tensions in New York City in 1971. Mr. Willis was the program’s executive producer. WNET records, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries“He pioneered in-depth local coverage of New York’s outer boroughs on WNET, focusing on long-ignored and disenfranchised minorities and immigrants, often letting them speak for themselves,” said Stephen B. Shepard, former editor in chief of Business Week and founding dean of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. “For Jack, it was always about the people affected by government decisions.”Mr. Willis was an executive producer of another Emmy-winning series, “The Great American Dream Machine,” a weekly 90-minute program on PBS. The television critic John J. O’Connor of The New York Times, writing in 1971, said the program had been conceived as “a free‐form program that could offer the viewer worthwhile bits and pieces of humor, controversy, entertainment, investigative reporting, opinion, documentary and theatrical sketches.”“It has been called a hodgepodge of the brilliant and the trite,” he added, but concluded that it was “one of the most exciting and imaginative segments of television to come along this season.”Looking back, Mr. Willis himself told The Times in 2020: “It was a great time in public television. If you thought it, you could do it.”Marshall Efron, left, and Andy Rooney, two of the stars of the PBS program “The Great American Dream Machine,” in 1972. Mr. Willis was its executive producer. WNETIn 1963, he directed his first documentary, “The Streets of Greenwood,” a 20-minute film about a voter-registration drive in the Mississippi Delta. Collaborating with two friends, Phil Wardenburg and John Reavis, Mr. Willis shot it with a camera he had borrowed from the folk singer Pete Seeger, whose concert in a cotton field was featured in the film.In 1979, Mr. Willis shared the George Polk Award for best documentary with Saul Landau for “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang.” The film focused on the journalist Paul Jacobs’s investigation of radiation hazards from atomic testing in Nevada in the 1950s and ’60s and the federal government’s efforts to suppress information on its threat to public health.Two other films he produced — “Lay My Burden Down” (1966), about the plight of tenant farmers in rural Alabama, and “Every Seventh Child” (1967), questioning tax subsidies and other government benefits for Catholic education — were shown at the New York Film Festival.Mr. Willis wrote, directed and produced “Appalachia: Rich Land Poor People” (1968), which exposed grinding poverty largely caused, the film argued, by corporate greed, racism and ineffective local government.Mr. Willis’s commitment to civil rights was reflected in his enduring friendship with the singer Harry Belafonte, an activist in the movement, who described Mr. Willis in an email as “a soul brother” whose “intellect and humor, combined with his courageousness, make him one of the most precious people I have ever known.”“For those on the political left,” Mr. Belafonte added, “he was living proof of the proverb, ‘You can cage the singer but not the song.’”Jack Lawrence Willis was born on June 20, 1934, in Milwaukee to Louis Willis, a manufacturer of women’s shoes, and Libbie (Feingold) Willis, a homemaker. The family moved to California when he was 9.He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1956 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also played shortstop on the varsity baseball team. He liked to recall that he was recruited by a Boston Red Sox minor-league team.Mr. Willis dropped out of U.C.L.A. School of Law to serve in the Army for two years, then graduated in 1962 and moved to New York, where he hoped to connect with a job teaching in Africa or the Middle East.While waiting for a job abroad that never materialized, he worked briefly in television for Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera” and David Susskind’s “Open End.”He ran a movie production company in California, then was hired as vice president for programming and production at CBS Cable, a short-lived but well-received performing arts channel.From 1990 to 1997, Mr. Willis was president of KTCA, the public television station in Minneapolis-St. Paul, then returned to New York, where, working for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, he developed a media program. In 1999, he was a founder of Link TV, a nonprofit satellite TV network. He retired in 2011.Jack Willis in an undated photo. via Mary WillisIn addition to his wife, he is survived by their two daughters, Sarah Willis and Kate Willis Ladell; three grandchildren; and his brother, Richard.Mr. Willis and his wife wrote a book, “… But There Are Always Miracles” (1974), about his body-surfing accident in 1969 off Southampton, N.Y. They had been planning to marry when a crashing wave broke his neck and left him paralyzed from the chest down. He was told he would never walk again.After two operations and six months of inpatient rehabilitation, he walked out of Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan. The couple married a year later.His story was adapted into a TV film, “Some Kind of Miracle” (1979), with a screenplay by the couple. They wrote and produced other films together.Shortly before he died, Ms. Willis said, her husband told her that the accident had “taught me to put everything in perspective — including the fear of failure.” He admitted to no regrets, she said, “except,” she quoted him as saying, “for taking that wave and turning down the Boston Red Sox.” More

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      Timmy Thomas, Singer Whose Biggest Hit Was an Antiwar Anthem, Dies at 77

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      His “Why Can’t We Live Together” rose to the top of the Billboard charts in 1973. He could never match its success.In the summer of 1972, the singer and keyboardist Timmy Thomas was watching the “CBS Evening News” and heard Walter Cronkite tick off the day’s death count of American and Vietcong soldiers.“I said, ‘what?!’ You mean that many mothers’ children died today?” Mr. Thomas told Spin magazine in 2015. “In a war that we can’t come to the table and sit down and talk about this, without so many families losing their loved ones?’ I said, ‘Why can’t we live together?’”His question became the title of his best-known song: a soulful, plaintive statement against the Vietnam War which he sang to his own accompaniment on the electric organ and drum machine. With a sentiment similar to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” from a year earlier, Mr. Thomas sang on “Why Can’t We Live Together”:No more wars, no more wars, no more warUmm, just a little peace in this worldNo more wars, no more warAll we want is some peace in this worldEverybody wants to live togetherWhy can’t we live together?The song, released on the Glades label, a subsidiary of the Miami-based TK Records, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 3 on its Hot 100 chart in early 1973 and sold upward of a million copies.Mr. Thomas never again had a hit anywhere as big as “Why Can’t We Live Together,” but the song had a lasting impact. Forty-two years later, Drake sampled it on “Hotline Bling,” his hit about late-night cellphone calls from a former lover, which rose to No. 1 on the Billboard rap chart and No. 2 on the Hot 100.“He had an opportunity to use Snoop Dogg beats, Dre beats, all these new beats,” Mr. Thomas told Miami New Times in 2018. “He went all the way back … and used my original.”“Why Can’t We Live Together” has also been covered by artists including Sade, Joan Osborne, Santana, Steve Winwood and Iggy Pop, who recorded it with the jazz organist Lonnie Smith for Mr. Smith’s 2021 album, “Breathe.”Mr. Thomas died on Friday at a hospital in Miami. He was 77.His wife, Lillie (Brown) Thomas, said the cause was cancer.Timothy Earle Thomas was born on Nov. 13, 1944, in Evansville, Ind. His father, Richard, was a minister, and his mother, Gwendolyn (Maddox) Thomas, was a homemaker. By the time he was 10, he told Blues & Soul magazine, he was playing organ at his father’s church. “I always had a good ear for music,” he said. “I was one of 12 kids and most of them were into music, but I guess I pushed a little harder.”After graduating from high school in 1962, he spent a week studying at a Stan Kenton summer music clinic at Indiana University, Bloomington, where his teachers included the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and the trumpeter Donald Byrd.While attending Lane College in Jackson, Tenn., from which he would graduate in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in music, Mr. Thomas recorded a few songs in Memphis for the Goldwax label and was a session musician at Sun and Stax Records.Even as he pursued a career in music, he worked as a financial aid director at Lane and a vice president of development at Jarvis Christian College, in Hawkins, Texas, and Florida Memorial University, in Miami Gardens.He later shifted his focus to teaching. In 1993 he became the choir master at Miami Norland High School, and from 1996 to 2005 he taught music at Shadowlawn Elementary School in Miami. He earned a master’s degree in mental health counseling from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale in 1997.Mr. Thomas in 2017. His 1973 hit has been covered by Sade, Steve Winwood and others.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for BMIIn addition to his wife, Mr. Thomas is survived by his daughters, Tamara Wagner-Marion and Li’Tina Thomas; his sons, Tremayne and Travis; 12 grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; his sisters, Diane Winton, Mary Davis and the Rev. Velma Thomas; and his brothers, Ray, Kenneth, Roland, Jerome and the Rev. Jeffery Thomas.More than a dozen of Mr. Thomas’s songs landed on the Hot R&B chart between 1973 and 1984, but the outsize success of “Why Can’t We Live Together” cast him as a one-hit wonder. And he understood that it was difficult to replicate the success of his megahit.He recalled that he once asked Henry Stone, the co-founder of TK Records, what he thought the problem was.“He said, ‘Timmy, your major problem was what you said was so profound that you could never back it up,’” Mr. Thomas said, recalling the conversation to Spin magazine. He added, “I thought about it, I said, ‘You know, that’s tough. … ’ I had some nice regional records after that, but nothing that worldwide.” More

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      William Hurt, Oscar-Winning Leading Man of the 1980s, Dies at 71

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      A four-time Academy Award nominee, he starred in such films as “Body Heat,” “The Big Chill,” “Children of a Lesser God” and “Broadcast News.”William Hurt, who burst into stardom as the hapless lawyer Ned Racine in “Body Heat” and won an Oscar for best actor for “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” portraying a gay man sharing a Brazilian prison cell with a revolutionary, died at his home in Portland, Ore., on Sunday. He was 71.A son, Alexander Hurt, said the cause was complications of prostate cancer.Mr. Hurt, tall, blond and speaking in a measured cadence that lent a cerebral quality to his characters, was a leading man in some of the most popular films of the 1980s, including “The Big Chill” (1983), “Children of a Lesser God” (1986), “Broadcast News” (1987) and “The Accidental Tourist” (1988).In later years, Mr. Hurt transitioned from leading man to supporting roles, and was nominated for an Academy Award a fourth time for “A History of Violence” (2005).Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1985 of the “brilliant achievement” of Mr. Hurt and his co-star, Raul Julia, in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”“Mr. Hurt won a well-deserved best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for a performance that is crafty at first, carefully nurtured and finally stirring in profound, unanticipated ways,” she wrote. “What starts out as a campy, facetious catalog of Hollywood trivia becomes an extraordinarily moving film about manhood, heroism and love.”Despite his successes as a leading man in Hollywood, he told The Times in 1990 that “theater is a language I speak better or am more tuned into than English.”“Even one moment onstage is a glacier of comprehension,” he added. “That’s where the work is. And it’s as fascinating to study as any other science.”In a 2009 interview with The Times, he explained: “I don’t have to be the star, physically. My greatest offering is my concept. It isn’t my face.”His approach, he said, was to “basically try to make my body as much a matter of Silly Putty as I can, and in some sense sculpt that to be perfectly appropriate to themes and the metaphors that are in the play at hand.”A full obituary is being prepared.Christine Chung More