Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Eileen Ryan, Actress of Stage and Screen, Dies at 94

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      She put her career on hold for a time to raise her sons, the actors Sean and Chris Penn and the musician Michael Penn.Eileen Ryan, a stage, television and film actress who paused her career to raise her sons, the actors Sean and Chris Penn and the musician Michael Penn, then later racked up dozens of acting credits, sometimes working with her sons and her husband, the director Leo Penn, died on Sunday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 94.Her family announced her death through a spokeswoman.Ms. Ryan was in her late 20s and appearing in “The Iceman Cometh” at Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village in 1956 when she met Mr. Penn, who stepped into a role being vacated by Jason Robards. They married soon after.Her career was going well at that point; she had already made her Broadway debut in “Sing Till Tomorrow” in 1953 and would return to Broadway in 1958 in “Comes a Day.” But she prided herself on making her own decisions — “I don’t think anybody could have felt stronger than I did about controlling my own destiny,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1986 — and soon she made a difficult one, choosing to scale back her acting.The choice, she said, began to be clear when she had a job that took her away from home and had to leave Michael, then a baby, with Leo.“I was out of town and all I did was cry,” she told The Times. “That made it very clear to me that I wanted to be home with the kids.”The family moved to the West Coast, and she still performed occasionally in the 1960s and ’70s; she appeared in episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “Bonanza” and other shows, some of them directed by Leo Penn, who, though blacklisted in the 1940s and ’50s, emerged to become a prolific television director.But, she said in 1986, for a long stretch her most important performance came in a supporting role in a home movie made by young Sean Penn and his neighbor Emilio Estevez, son of the actor Martin Sheen.“I was a background mother screaming from the kitchen,” she said.Ms. Ryan went back to acting more regularly with her appearance in the 1986 film “At Close Range,” a crime drama in which she played the grandmother of characters played by her sons Sean and Chris. Two years later she played the mother of Sean Penn’s character in the movie “Judgment in Berlin,” a drama directed by Leo Penn whose stars also included Mr. Sheen.Ms. Ryan and her husband also returned to the stage, starring in “Remembrance,” a drama by the Irish playwright Graham Reid staged in 1997 at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles, with Sean Penn as producer.Leo Penn died in 1998. Ms. Ryan continued to act, accumulating more than two dozen additional TV and film credits, most recently in the 2016 movie “Rules Don’t Apply,” directed by Warren Beatty.Eileen Rose Annucci was born on Oct. 16, 1927, in the Bronx. Her father, William, was a lawyer and a dentist. Her mother, Rose (Ryan) Annucci, was the source of the surname Eileen later adopted for her acting career.That career, or at least the aspiration to it, started early. As a child growing up in New York she would stage plays in the courtyard of her apartment complex.“I remember beating up all the little boys in my apartment building so they’d be in my plays,” she said.She earned a bachelor’s degree at New York University, then embarked on an acting career, putting her on a path to meet Mr. Penn.Once she restarted her career in the 1980s, among her first credits was Ron Howard’s comic drama “Parenthood” (1989). She played one-half of an older couple; the male half was played by Mr. Robards, the man whose departure from “Iceman” decades earlier had allowed her to meet Mr. Penn.Ms. Ryan’s son Chris died in 2006. In addition to her other sons, she is survived by three grandchildren. More

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      in Music

      Anita Kerr, an Architect of the Nashville Sound, Dies at 94

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      She and her background vocalists were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of country and pop hits recorded in the 1950s and ’60s.Anita Kerr, the prolific session singer and arranger who was an architect of the sumptuous Nashville Sound and later had a multifaceted career in pop music, died on Monday in Geneva. She was 94. Her death, at a nursing home in the city’s Carouge district, was confirmed by her daughter Kelley Kerr.Working with producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, Ms. Kerr and her quartet of background vocalists, the Anita Kerr Singers, were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of recordings made in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s. In the process, they contributed to the birth of the lush orchestral Nashville Sound, refining the rough-hewed provincial music for which the city was known into something that appealed to a wider audience.Just as important, Ms. Kerr and her ensemble helped preserve country music’s viability in the face of the commercial threat presented by the emergence of rock ’n’ roll.Ms. Kerr sang soprano and wrote and conducted arrangements for the group, which included the alto Dottie Dillard, the tenor Gil Wright and the bass Louis Nunley. Together they performed on hits by future members of the Country Music Hall of Fame like Red Foley, Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, as well as on major pop singles, including Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” (1960) and Burl Ives’s “A Little Bitty Tear” (1961).Ms. Kerr and her singers also crooned the indelible “dum-dum-dum, dooby-doo-wah” on “Only the Lonely,” a No. 2 pop hit for Roy Orbison in 1960.With the possible exception of the Jordanaires, the Southern gospel quartet featured on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline, no vocal ensemble was in greater demand for session work in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s than the Anita Kerr Singers.“At the beginning we recorded two sessions per week,” Ms. Kerr wrote on her website, describing the postwar boom in Nashville’s music industry. “Then, by 1955, we were recording eight sessions per week, plus a five-day-a-week national program at WSM with Jim Reeves.”“Gradually,” she went on, “we grew to 12 to 18 sessions per week, and I was writing as many arrangements for these sessions as was physically possible. Loving every minute of it, mind you. Tired at times, but happy.”Beginning in 1956, the group began working in New York City as well, winning a contest on the popular CBS television and radio variety show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” They soon began making regular trips to appear on the program.In 1960, another quartet led by Ms. Kerr, the short-lived Little Dippers, had a Top 10 pop hit with the dreamy ballad “Forever.”Ms. Kerr, center, with the 1970 version of the Anita Kerr Singers in Amsterdam. She, her husband and her daughters moved to Switzerland that year.Fotocollectie AnefoThe Anita Kerr Singers signed a contract with RCA Victor Records in 1961 and went on to release a series of albums of easy-listening music, some of them credited to the Anita Kerr Quartet. One, “We Dig Mancini,” which featured renditions of TV and movie themes written by Henry Mancini, won a Grammy Award for best performance by a vocal group in 1966, besting the Beatles’ “Help!” for the honor.The Kerr group won the same award the next year for their cover of “A Man and a Woman,” the theme song from the 1966 French film of the same name.During the early ’60s, the group, augmented by four additional vocalists, released several albums of contemporary pop material as part of RCA’s Living Voices series.Ms. Kerr and her ensemble also lent their voices to a number of significant R&B hits of the day, including Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” (1960), Esther Phillips’s “Release Me” (1962) and Bobby Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me” (1963).In addition, Ms. Kerr wrote and recorded jingles for some of the era’s popular AM radio stations, including WMCA in New York City and WLS in Chicago.Anita Jean Grilli was born on Oct. 13, 1927, in Memphis to William and Sofia (Polonara) Grilli, Italian immigrants who settled in Mississippi with their families as teenagers and became farm workers. Moving with his wife to Memphis, her father opened a grocery store there. Her mother, a contralto, had the opportunity to study classical music in New York but instead became a homemaker.Anita and her two older brothers studied piano at their mother’s insistence, but only Anita, who began taking lessons at the age of 4, stayed with it. By the time she was in the fourth grade at St. Thomas Catholic School, she was playing organ for the school’s Masses.At 15, she was hired as a staff musician for an after-school radio program in Memphis. She also played with local dance bands, for which she composed arrangements.She married Al Kerr in 1947 and moved to Nashville after he accepted a job as a disc jockey at the local radio station WKDA. Ms. Kerr again worked with dance bands, and she also assembled a vocal quintet that was eventually hired by WSM, the station that broadcast “The Grand Ole Opry,” to perform on its show “Sunday Down South.”A year later, Ms. Kerr and members of her group were hired as background singers for Decca Records. They changed their name, at the label’s urging, from the Sunday Down South Choir to the Anita Kerr Singers.In 1965, after almost two decades in Nashville — and after she had divorced Mr. Kerr and married Alex Grob, a Swiss businessman who became her manager — Ms. Kerr moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote orchestral scores and worked in pop, jazz, Latin and other idioms besides country music.She assembled a new edition of the Anita Kerr Singers and released a series of musically omnivorous records, including three mariachi albums credited to the Mexicali Singers. She made several records devoted to the catalogs of songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David and composed, arranged and conducted the music for “The Sea,” an album featuring the poetry of Rod McKuen. And she served as the choral director for the first season of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967.In 1970, Ms. Kerr and her husband, along with her two daughters from her first marriage, moved to Switzerland. Ms. Kerr formed yet another edition of her singing group there and continued to write, record and conduct. Two of the gospel albums she made during this period were nominated for Grammys.In 1975, she and her husband established Mountain Studios in Montreux. They later sold it to the English rock band Queen, which eventually turned it into “Queen: The Studio Experience,” a museum and exhibition benefiting the Mercury Phoenix Trust.Ms. Kerr remained active into the 1980s and beyond, writing scores for films including the 1972 drama “Limbo” and conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and other ensembles.Ms. Kerr, who wasn’t always credited for her work as an arranger and group leader in Nashville — and is still is not a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame — received a special award from the music licensing organization ASCAP in 1975, recognizing her “contributions to the birth and development of the Nashville Sound.” In 1992 she was honored by the Recording Academy with a Governors Award for her “outstanding contribution to American Music.”“Anita Kerr: America’s First Lady of Music,” a biography written by Barry Pugh with a foreword by Mr. Bacharach, was published this year.In addition to her daughter Kelley, Ms. Kerr is survived by her husband; another daughter, Suzanne Trebert; five grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.From early childhood on, Ms. Kerr said, she knew she would spend her life making music.“I did everything regarding music, I couldn’t get enough,” she wrote on her website. “I never had the problem of wondering what I was going to do when I grew up. I always knew that it would be music.” More

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      Nikki Finke, Caustic Hollywood Chronicler, Is Dead at 68

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      At newspapers and then at Deadline, the website she founded, she served up the opposite of fluff entertainment journalism.Nikki Finke, the acerbic, widely read entertainment reporter and blogger who broke Hollywood news, antagonized moguls and in 2006 founded the website Deadline Hollywood Daily, now known simply as Deadline, died on Sunday in Boca Raton, Fla. She was 68.Madelyn Hammond, a spokeswoman for her family, announced her death, saying only that it resulted from a long illness.After working for a time as a staff assistant in the Washington office of Representative Edward I. Koch, the New York Democrat who would later become mayor of New York City, Ms. Finke joined The Associated Press in 1975 as a reporter. By the early 1980s she had moved to The Dallas Morning News, and then joined Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times and other outlets before starting a column called Deadline Hollywood in LA Weekly in 2002.There, and on the Deadline website, she mixed reportage and gossip in a lively style that took no prisoners, whether scooping the world on who would host the Oscars, detailing the dealings among stars and agents or scrutinizing the deal-making of top executives.“Ms. Finke is the queen of the ritual sacrifice,” David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2013, “having roasted industry leaders like Marc Shmuger of Universal and Ben Silverman of NBC until they caught fire and ended up out of their jobs.”That was fine by her.“If there’s an open wound, I’m going to pour salt in it,” she told Jon Friedman of MarketWatch in 2006 for an article that carried the headline “In-Your-Face Finke Keeps Hollywood Honest.”Ms. Finke was the antithesis of the entertainment journalists who show up at every red-carpet event and jostle for sound-bite quotes. She was often described as reclusive, so much so that in 2009 the website Gawker offered $1,000 for a recent photograph of her.“Here’s what makes me weird,” she told MarketWatch. “I care about what happens in the boardroom, not the celebrities.”Executives weren’t her only targets. Sacred cows of all sorts, including the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, incurred her disdain.“I don’t get all aflutter at the mere mention of the Park City film festival like some media,” she wrote on Deadline in 2007. “That’s because I’m much too cynical. If you accept the premise that the film business is the folly of the filthy rich, then the independent-film business must seem the folly of the stupidly rich.”In 2015, by then out of the entertainment journalism business and working on a new venture, a fiction website called Hollywood Dementia, Ms. Finke reflected on her career and reputation in an interview with Vulture.“I am a very old-school journalist,” she said. “I believe you make the comfortable uncomfortable, and that’s the whole point of doing it.”One who was made uncomfortable was Brad Grey, chairman of Paramount Pictures during Ms. Finke’s heyday.“Like it or not, everyone in Hollywood reads her,” Mr. Grey, who died in 2017, told The New York Times in 2007. “You must respect her reach.”Nikki Jean Finke was born on Dec. 16, 1953, in Manhattan to Robert and Doris Finke.Growing up in Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island, she “ran in an Upper East Side social stratum,” as she put it in a 2005 essay in The Times lamenting the decline of the Plaza Hotel, where in the late 1950s her mother would take her and her sister for afternoon tea.“My cliquish world consisted of ladies and gents from Manhattan’s exclusive private schools and preppies down from New England boarding schools who played bit-parts on weekends and holidays,” she wrote.Her parents traveled frequently, taking Nikki and her sister, Terry, along. In another 2005 essay for The Times, Ms. Finke recalled her mother’s obsession with seeing the finest sights of Europe and staying in its finest accommodations while doing so.“In her view,” Ms. Finke wrote, “travel was a privilege not to be squandered by booking stingily or mechanically.“When I begged to be taken to Disneyland to see Cinderella’s castle,” she added, “my mother responded, ‘Why do you want to see fake castles when you’ve seen the real ones?’”Ms. Finke was a debutante, making her debut in 1971 at the International Debutante Ball in New York. She graduated from the Buckley Country Day School in North Hills, on Long Island, and the Hewitt School, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, then earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Wellesley College, where she worked on the campus newspaper, The Wellesley News.Her travels as a child prepared her well for her Associated Press job, which included covering foreign news.Her entertainment column and blog didn’t play by the same rules as mainstream journalism; she was noted for publishing rumors and innuendo and sometimes being a little ahead of events. “Toldja!” was a favorite exclamation she would use when something she had foreseen actually occurred.Starting Deadline was something of a leap of faith, coming at a time when the business model for independent online publishing ventures was unclear. But the site succeeded, and in 2009 she sold it to the Jay Penske company, now known as Penske Media Corp. She remained as editor in chief but clashed frequently with Mr. Penske, and in 2013 they parted ways.A legal clash with Mr. Penske resulted in an agreement that effectively barred her from practicing entertainment journalism, so in 2015 she started the fiction site.“There is a lot of truth in fiction,” she told The Times. “There are things I am going to be able to say in fiction that I can’t say in journalism right now.”Ms. Finke’s marriage to Jeffrey Greenberg ended in divorce in 1982. Her sister, Terry Finke Dreyfus, survives her. More

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      in Theater

      Robert Kalfin, Founder of an Adventurous Theater, Dies at 89

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      For two decades, his Chelsea Theater Center was on the cutting edge with productions that could be challenging, baffling or, sometimes, Broadway bound.Robert Kalfin, the driving force behind the Chelsea Theater Center, which for two decades beginning in 1965 presented adventurous plays that were sometimes too innovative for the theatergoing public and sometimes successful enough that they transferred to Broadway, died on Sept. 20 at a hospice center in Quiogue, a hamlet in Southampton, N.Y. He was 89.Philip Himberg, a longtime friend, said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Kalfin directed countless plays in a career that began in his mid-20s and continued into his 80s. In 1965, he started the nonprofit Chelsea Theater Center and became its founding artistic director, with David Long as managing director and George Bari as production manager.They set up shop in St. Peter’s Church in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, though a strip dance in one of its early offerings got the group tossed out of that church and forced it to move to another. Those were two of several locations it would use over the years, only some of which were in Chelsea.Mr. Kalfin thought the commercial theaters of the day were limited and unimaginative, and he strove to broaden the theatrical landscape.“The mission statement, which I came up with, which was very useful, was ‘We will do whatever nobody else is doing and what we think people ought to see,’” he said in an interview in 2014 for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project. “That gave me great leeway.”The Chelsea achieved particular prominence once it moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968. Its productions there were attention-getting, to say the least. A 1969 staging of “Slave Ship,” written by Amiri Baraka (who was then known as LeRoi Jones) and directed by Gilbert Moses, took on racism, leaving Clive Barnes of The New York Times rattled.“The play is set in the hold of a ship and the conscience of a nation,” Mr. Barnes wrote in his review.“The play ends with the symbolic destruction of white America,” he added. “Whitey is got — Black Panther banners are unfurled. This scared and horrified me. I am whitey.”In 1971, The Times wrote an article about Mr. Kalfin’s troupe that carried the headline “America’s Most Exciting New Theater?” Its productions for the rest of that decade cemented its stature as one of the scene’s leading innovators.In 1973, the Chelsea revived the Leonard Bernstein operetta “Candide,” which had failed on Broadway in the 1950s, and gave it a new book, by Hugh Wheeler. Harold Prince directed, and the result was a smash in Brooklyn that became the group’s first transfer to Broadway, where it ran for almost two years.Another great success was “Strider,” Mark Rozovsky’s play with music based on a Tolstoy story about a piebald horse that is tormented because of its appearance. Mr. Kalfin first saw it in Leningrad, and in 1979 he staged an English-language version at the Westside Theater on West 43rd Street. It drew a strong review from Mel Gussow in The Times.“We are transported by the ingenuousness and the originality of the show,” he wrote. “Looking closely, we even notice a grittiness that might have been appreciated by Brecht and Weill. The play works on two levels, as a kind of Tolstoyan ‘Black Beauty’ — downbeat but finally inspirational — and as a valid commentary on the injustices of civilization.”That show, directed by Mr. Kalfin and Lynne Gannaway, transferred to Broadway and ran there for six months.By then Mr. Kalfin was seeing a change in theater audiences, one that his company had helped bring about.“There’s a whole new generation of theatergoers, and they have become elitist in a very positive way,” he told The Times that November as “Strider” was beginning its Broadway run. “I think they’re bored to death with television, and they’re more demanding of theater now because they’re so hungry for nourishment.”A scene from the Chelsea Theater Center’s production of Amiri Baraka’s “Slave Ship” in 1969. The play’s ending, the Times critic Clive Barnes wrote, “scared and horrified me.”Deidi von Schaewen, via BAM Hamm ArchivesRobert Zangwill Kalfin was born on April 22, 1933, in the Bronx. His father, Alfred, was a real estate developer, and his mother, Hilda Shulman Kalfin, was a teacher.His childhood memories were of being taken not to the theater but to the Metropolitan Opera, where he and his parents generally ended up in the cheap seats, high up and off to the side.“My father would hold onto the back of my pants while I leaned over trying to see center stage,” he said in the oral history.He studied music at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts). As a theater major at Alfred University in central New York, he became part of an ambitious department that was staging Bertolt Brecht and other European writers and experimenting with unusual settings — he was in a production of “Androcles and the Lion” that was staged in a gymnasium transformed to look like a Roman arena.He earned his master’s degree in 1957 at the Yale School of Drama and settled into odd jobs in New York, working for a time in the shipping department at WOR-TV and as a production assistant on a children’s television show in Newark, N.J., that starred a chimpanzee.He directed his first Off Broadway production, “The Golem,” in 1959, at St. Mark’s Playhouse. His other early efforts included “The Good Soldier Schweik” in 1963, which didn’t go well — a producer interfered so intrusively that Mr. Kalfin withdrew before opening night and sought unsuccessfully to stop the production from opening. When it did, William Glover of The Associated Press called it “one of the season’s worst plays.”Mr. Kalfin, right, with Michael David, left, the executive director of the Chelsea Theater Center, and Burl Hash, the production director, in 1973.Manuel Guevaza Jr.At the Chelsea, Mr. Kalfin sometimes left audiences and critics scratching their heads. That was the case with a 1970 musical called “Tarot,” which he staged in Brooklyn. As the credits read, it was conceived by The Rubber Duck and directed jointly by “Mr. Duck” (as The Times called him, tongue in cheek) and Mr. Kalfin.Mr. Barnes hated it. “Pretentiousness is rioting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” his review began. Yet the Chelsea was respected enough by then that even in that pan, Mr. Barnes felt compelled to note that the group was facing one of its frequent financial crises at the time, and that “it simply must not be allowed to die.”The group did peter out in the mid-1980s, swamped with debt. Before it did, its other notable successes included “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story of a Jewish girl who passes as a boy; Mr. Kalfin had it adapted for the stage by Leah Napolin and directed it. It opened in Brooklyn in December 1974.It was a tough road to opening night. Mr. Kalfin clashed with Tovah Feldshuh, who played the title character, and withstood complaints from Orthodox Jewish leaders; he also had to strike a deal with Barbra Streisand, who owned the rights to the Singer story, which she would turn into a film in 1983. But the play moved to Broadway, where it ran for 223 performances.Mr. Bari, Mr. Kalfin’s life partner, died in 2013. Mr. Kalfin, who had lived in East Hampton, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.After the Chelsea gave up the ghost, Mr. Kalfin continued to direct in New York and in regional houses; he was still working until recently. One of his post-Chelsea projects in New York was directing a Yiddish version of “Yentl” produced by the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in 2002. Eleanor Reissa played the title role.“Even though he’d directed maybe a hundred shows, every time was like the first,” Ms. Reissa, who had worked with Mr. Kalfin on other shows as well, said by email. “Wide eyed and wide hearted always, infectious joyfulness.” More

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      Douglas Kirkland, Who Took Portraits of Movie Stars, Dies at 88

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      His many memorable shots included one of his earliest assignments and probably his most famous: Marilyn Monroe in bed, wrapped in a silk sheet.Douglas Kirkland, a photojournalist and portraitist whose subjects included Marilyn Monroe wrapped in a silk sheet and Coco Chanel at work in her Paris atelier, died on Oct. 2 at his home in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88.Francoise (Kemmel-Coulter) Kirkland, his wife and manager, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.For more than 60 years, Mr. Kirkland was a leading celebrity photographer, first for Look and Life magazines and then as a freelancer for various magazines, Hollywood studios and advertising agencies. Courteous and exuberant — he was no annoying paparazzo — Mr. Kirkland was welcomed into stars’ homes and hotel rooms and onto movie sets.The tall, dashing Mr. Kirkland “had this magical quality,” said Karen Mullarkey, who worked with Mr. Kirkland as director of photography at New York and Newsweek magazines. “He had this way of making people comfortable — he was so enthusiastic.” For an issue of New York, she recalled, she brought the model Kathy Ireland a bunch of peonies, and as he photographed Ms. Ireland, Ms. Mullarkey heard him saying: “Caress them! Kiss them! They’re your boyfriend!”“I am new with this magazine,” Mr. Kirkland recalled telling Elizabeth Taylor, whom he was assigned to shoot for Look. “Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”Douglas KirklandIn 1961, a year after joining Look, Mr. Kirkland had two dramatic encounters. For the first, he accompanied Jack Hamilton, a reporter, to Las Vegas for an interview with Elizabeth Taylor, then one of the biggest stars in the world. When the three met, Ms. Taylor said that she would talk but not sit for pictures.After the interview, Mr. Kirkland recalled to the website Vintage News Daily in 2021, he tried to persuade her to pose for him. He held her hand and said: “I am new with this magazine. Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”“I did not let go of her hand; she wore jungle gardenia perfume which I could smell later on,” he continued. “She thought for a while and said, ‘Come back tomorrow at 8 p.m.’”Mr. Kirkland perched himself on a balcony to photograph Marilyn Monroe.Douglas KirklandHiding everything but her face in the sheet and hugging the pillow, she was, it seemed, directing herself.Douglas KirklandThe result — a picture of Ms. Taylor in a yellow jacket, wearing spectacular diamond earrings — appeared on the cover of Look’s Aug. 15, 1961, issue.Later that year, Look sent Mr. Kirkland to Los Angeles to photograph Ms. Monroe. They met at her house, where she told him what she wanted for the shoot: a white silk sheet, Frank Sinatra records and Dom Perignon Champagne.When they met at a studio four days later, she slipped out of a robe and got into a bed, swaddled herself in a sheet and posed for Mr. Kirkland, who for part of the shoot perched himself in a balcony above her. She was, it seemed, directing, herself, with what looked like joy. She hugged the pillow, hid everything but her face in the sheet and turned her back to the camera.“I had everything technically right,” Mr. Kirkland said in an interview with “CBS This Morning” in 2012. “My Hasselblad — click, click, click — but it was Marilyn Monroe who really created these images.”Ann-Margret in Las Vegas in 1971.Douglas KirklandHe recalled that shoot in the 2020 documentary “That Click: The Legendary Photography of Douglas Kirkland,” directed by Luca Severi: “What the pillow represents is what she would like to be doing to a man, and I could have been in there and been the pillow. But I chose to keep taking pictures, because that’s how Douglas Kirkland really, bottom line, is.”Look used only one of the Monroe pictures, inside the magazine, but Mr. Kirkland collected many of them in a 2012 book, “With Marilyn: An Evening/1961.” His other books of photographs include “Light Years: 3 Decades Photography Among the Stars” (1989), “Icons” (1993) and “Legends” (1999).At Look and Life, and then as an on-set photographer, Mr. Kirkland shot pictures during the production of more than 100 films, including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “Rain Man” and several Baz Luhrmann films, starting with “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001. Mr. Luhrmann said in “That Click” that Mr. Kirkland’s photography “captures the romance of cinema.”Sophia Loren in Rome in 1972.Douglas KirklandHis career started at a time when his subjects were accessible to journalists, and it continued into a time when stars and their handlers exerted greater power over the media. “In the ’60s, there was an idea of letting the camera be revealing of truth,” he told The New York Times in 1990. “Today, it’s more like ‘Entertainment Tonight.’”Douglas Morley Kirkland was born on Aug. 16, 1934, in Toronto and raised from age 3 in Fort Erie, Ontario. His father, Morley, owned a shop where he made men’s made-to-measure clothing, and his mother, Evelyn (Reid) Kirkland, kept the books in the store.He took his first picture with a Brownie camera as a young child: his family standing at the front door of their home on Christmas Day. By 14, he was photographing weddings. After high school, he studied at the New York Institute of Photography and then returned to Canada, where he worked for two local newspapers, and then moved to Richmond, Va., to work as a commercial photographer.In 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with the designer Coco Chanel in Paris.Douglas KirklandWhile there, he wrote three letters to the influential fashion photographer Irving Penn, seeking a job. In 1957, Mr. Penn hired him as his assistant.“I was paid $50 a week, and even in those days in New York it was not too simple,” he said in an interview with the American Society of Media Photographers in 2017. “But I was with Penn and I was quickly learning.”In 1960 he joined Look. He stayed there until the magazine folded in 1971, when he was hired by Life, where he remained until it stopped weekly publication the next year. For the rest of his career he was a freelancer, working for Time, Paris Match, Sports Illustrated, Town & Country and other magazines.He received the American Society of Cinematographers’ Presidents Award in 2011 for his photographic work on film sets. The next year, he was commissioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create a series of official portraits of the Oscar nominees in the four acting categories, among them George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.One of them, Michelle Williams, had been nominated for playing Ms. Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn.” In the documentary “That Click,” she said that being photographed by the same man who had photographed Ms. Monroe a half-century earlier had been a moving experience.“Never could I have imagined this sort of circumstance,” she said.Mr. Kirkland with examples of his work at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles in 2009.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Kirkland is survived by his son, Mark, and his daughters, Karen Kirkland and Lisa Kirkland Gadway, from his marriage to Marian Perry, which ended in divorce; five grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.In August 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with Coco Chanel in Paris for Look. At first she was wary of him, permitting him to shoot only the outfits she had designed but not her. But after he showed her his first set of prints, she backed off, letting him observe her at work — always in a hat and usually surrounded by her staff. On his last day there, she suggested that they take a ride to the Palace of Versailles. He took one last picture of her, walking alone in the palace’s gardens.“It was chilly and had started to rain, even though it was August, so I gave her my raincoat,” Mr. Kirkland told The Guardian in 2015. “She put it over her shoulders and it looked almost like a fashionable cape. She said that she often liked to go there because it gave her an opportunity to get lost in time while being surrounded by the magnitude of old French culture.” More

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      in Music

      Anton Fier, Drummer Who Left Stamp on a Downtown Scene, Dies at 66

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      He worked with everyone from the Feelies to Herbie Hancock to Laurie Anderson, as well as leading the indie-rock supergroup the Golden Palominos. But there was a troubled side.Even at his musical peak in the 1980s, Anton Fier, a drummer, producer and bandleader who brought power and precision to his work with acts as diverse as the Feelies, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson and his own star-studded ensemble, the Golden Palominos, seemed to glimpse a dark end for himself.The film and music critic Glenn Kenny, in an email, remembered running into Mr. Fier in the mid-1980s at the Hoboken, N.J., nightclub Maxwell’s, then a cauldron of indie rock, and querying him about alarming details on the sleeve of the Palominos’ album “Visions of Excess.”The rear cover featured a photograph of Mr. Fier, visibly drunk, quaffing a cocktail at a rock club. With it was an acknowledgment that read, “For Jim Gordon and Bonzo,” a reference to the Derek and the Dominos drummer who murdered his own mother during a psychotic episode, and to John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer who died at 32 after consuming some 40 shots of vodka.Mr. Fier seemed to be hinting at his own grisly demise. “I don’t care,” Mr. Kenny recalled him saying. “I’m not going to live to be 35.”With anyone else, the episode might fit a familiar narrative — the self-destructive rocker in a death spiral. But throughout his life, friends said, Mr. Fier always resisted easy categorization.He was a punk-rock provocateur who could extemporize, seemingly for hours, about free-jazz pioneers and Ghanaian percussion luminaries; an artist with big ambitions and a web of platinum connections, but also a loner who shunned interviews and self-promotion; a prickly contrarian who seemed to revel in confrontation, but who was also known among friends for a kind, generous spirit.“Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop, with a hard exterior and a soft core,” the singer-songwriter Lianne Smith, a close friend who worked with him, said in a phone interview.Little wonder, then, that his death on Sept. 14 at 66 — confirmed by a cremation notice from a service in Basel, Switzerland — left as many questions as answers. The cause was rumored to be voluntary assisted dying, the location said to be in Switzerland, and suicide itself did not seem out of the question. Plagued by money troubles and waning career prospects, he had openly discussed the topic among friends in recent years. But where? When? How?He had certainly fallen on hard times. Dogged by money woes, lacking musical inspiration and, after injuring his wrists, hindered in playing drums to his own high standards, he had lost his only outlet. “He had a lot of pressures and a lot of anxieties,” Ms. Smith said. “But when he played music, he was a complete human being.”Mr. Fier in 1987. “Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop,” a friend and fellow musician said, “with a hard exterior and a soft core.”Rick McGinnisAnton John Fier III was born on June 20, 1956, in Cleveland, to Anton J. Fier Jr., an electrician and former Marine, and Ruthe Marie Fier. His parents split up when he was young, and Mr. Fier, who was known as Tony in his school days, endured a difficult relationship with his stepfather, a polka musician, he later told friends.Turning to music, he worked in a record store as a teenager and eventually drummed his way into the Cleveland proto-punk scene, recording with a version of the Styrenes and playing on the seminal 1978 EP “Datapanik in the Year Zero” by Pere Ubu, the conceptual band that calls its genre “avant garage.”Soon after, Mr. Fier followed his musical dreams to New York, where he brokered his encyclopedic knowledge of music into a job at the SoHo Music Gallery, a record store catering to the downtown music cognoscenti. There, he seemed more interested in chatting about records than selling them.Mr. Kenny recalled, “I remember walking in one day and these two cats” — Mr. Fier and the experimental saxophonist John Zorn, a fellow clerk — “were sitting up front talking about Charlie Parker, treating browsers like they were minor inconveniences.”Mr. Fier did more than talk about music. A gifted and ferocious drummer, he got his big break in 1978 when he answered an ad in The Village Voice placed by the Feelies, a cerebral indie group from New Jersey that The Voice had recently called the best underground band in New York. The group was looking for a drummer.“We asked the people who called what they thought of Moe Tucker,” Glenn Mercer, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, said, referring to the Velvet Underground’s drummer. “We were thinking in terms of very simple, primitive drumming. I think he was the only one that even knew who she was.”With a bookish air and a subversive sensibility, Mr. Fier fit the ethos of the band. His explosive drumming helped fuel the group’s first album, “Crazy Rhythms,” which the critic Robert Christgau later described as “exciting in a disturbingly abstract way, or maybe disturbing in an excitingly abstract way.”But Mr. Fier’s personality proved explosive as well, making his tenure with the band a short one. As the Feelies pulled up to a gig at one club, where the line was around the block, he gushed about how thrilled he was to be in the band. After a raucous set that had the packed house cheering, his mood inexplicably turned.“When the show was over, he was like, ‘You guys are so controlling, I can’t believe it,” Mr. Mercer recalled Mr. Fier saying. “Just like that, a 180.”Mr. Fier with the Golden Palominos in 2012.Christopher Gregory for The New York TimesEven so, Mr. Fier’s career continued to flourish. He joined the Lounge Lizards, John Lurie’s avant-jazz combo, for their first album, released in 1981, before Mr. Lurie rose to fame as an archetype of New York cool with his roles in Jim Jarmusch’s indie films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law.”His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.“The band revolved around anyone Anton liked at the time,” Syd Straw, the iconoclastic singer-songwriter who got her start with the group, said by phone. “He had pretty bizarre social skills, but he was a magnet for brainy musicians. I think that he was, at heart, an amazing casting director.”In whatever musical role, Mr. Fier was exacting. “He never ‘settled,’’’ Chris Stamey, a founder of the indie band the dB’s who performed with the Palominos, recalled in an email. “And this could be unsettling at times. But we all wanted to see that blissful smile when something finally met his high standards.”Through the 2000s and early 2010s, Mr. Fier began to focus more on producing, working on albums by Ms. Smith, Julia Brown and the guitarist Jim Campilongo, although he did continue to perform with a highly regarded combo headed by the singer, guitarist and bassist Tony Scherr, a former Lounge Lizard.He also quit alcohol, a habit that had grown prodigious, particularly since the hard-partying Hancock tour, Mr. Stamey said.Hounded by creditors, however, Mr. Fier drifted further and further off the grid, avoiding even banks. He seemed to conclude, in eerily analytical fashion, that life was no longer worth living. Ms. Smith said he told her that he wanted to “fly to Thailand, have a wonderful vacation, take a lot of drugs and walk into the ocean.”The pandemic seemed only to deepen his despair. Without work or family (his only marriage, in 1976, lasted less than a year), he began researching his options. Last fall, Mr. Stamey recalled, Mr. Fier told him that he had been burned when he paid $900 over the internet for a veterinary tranquilizer, which he had decided “was the most peaceful way to go.”A few months ago, Mr. Fier texted his friend J.P. Olsen, a filmmaker and musician who had recently moved to Indiana, asking him for his new address. Mr. Fier had some boxes he wanted to send him. On Sept. 21, word began circulating that he was dead, apparently from an assisted suicide in Switzerland. Four days later, Mr. Olsen received the boxes, which were filled with piles of Mr. Fier’s clothes.And on Oct. 1, Nicky Skopelitis, a Palominos guitarist and the executor of Mr. Fier’s estate, received the cremation notice, dated Sept. 14, along with Mr. Fier’s remains.Questions about his last days linger. But in a way, friends said, that seems fitting for a man who was only too comfortable with loose ends.Two years ago, Mr. Stamey urged Mr. Fier to write a memoir, to pull him out of his funk. Mr. Fier’s response, Mr. Stamey recalled, was curt: “He said that he wanted to be the only one who didn’t write a book.” More

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      Kitten Natividad, Movie Star in Russ Meyer’s Bawdy World, Dies at 74

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      She was top-billed in his final feature, “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.” She was also his paramour and, he said, his favorite leading lady.Kitten Natividad, who brought audacity and ample physical attributes to some of the final films of Russ Meyer, whose over-the-top sexploitation movies acquired a certain cachet in some quarters and influenced John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and other directors, died on Sept. 24 in Los Angeles. She was 74.Eva Natividad Garcia, her sister, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Ms. Natividad had little film experience and was working as a go-go dancer and stripper when, in the mid-1970s, she met Mr. Meyer, who was by then near the end of his notorious filmmaking career.In the 1960s Mr. Meyer, who died in 2004, became known for outlandish films like “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and “Vixen,” most of which featured absurd plots and insatiable naked women with large breasts.According to Jimmy McDonough’s “Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film” (2005), Mr. Meyer was already editing his 1976 feature, “Up!,” when he decided to add a part for a dancer who had been suggested to him by an actress from one of his earlier films. He asked Roger Ebert, the film critic, who was one of the writers of “Up!,” to throw together some dialogue for a character he named the Greek Chorus.“It doesn’t matter what she says,” Mr. Ebert recalled Mr. Meyer saying. “She just has to say something. And it should sound kinda poetic.”The newcomer was Ms. Natividad, and what Mr. Ebert wrote for her paraphrased the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle.“Armed with Ebert’s lofty gobbledygook,” Mr. McDonough wrote, “Meyer took the New Girl out in the woods, stripped her down, and made her recite all this complex, arcane narration while she hung from trees and hid in bushes.”Mr. Meyer also fell for Ms. Natividad, who was married at the time, and they began a relationship that lasted for the rest of the 1970s. And he made her the star of his next movie, which would be his final feature film: “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979).The movie is often described as Mr. Meyer’s riff on “Our Town” — for instance, it employed an onscreen narrator named “The Man From Small Town U.S.A.” Ms. Natividad plays a woman whose husband’s preoccupation with anal sex leaves her sexually frustrated.Ms. Natividad had little film experience when she met Mr. Meyer. It didn’t matter.via Siouxzan PerryCritics didn’t have much good to say about the movie, which Mr. Meyer wrote with Mr. Ebert.Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Ebert’s television partner on the film review show then known as “Sneak Previews,” wrote that Mr. Meyer’s “Vixen,” released in 1968, had been “an enjoyable nudie film because it featured the first joyfully aggressive woman we’d seen in a skin flick.” But he added, “Meyer hasn’t grown up in 10 years; if anything, he’s deteriorated.”“Beneath the Valley” would be Meyer’s last hurrah, but it held a special place in his heart. In a 1999 interview with Pop Cult magazine, he called Ms. Natividad his favorite leading lady.“She could just go and go and go,” he said. “It was just marvelous. You really had to measure up to this girl, or you caught hell.”Mr. McDonough said that Mr. Meyer had “met his match in Kitten Natividad.”“Meyer’s productions were mercenary boot camps, with the woman inevitably in an adversarial role,” Mr. McDonough said by email. “And in 1979’s ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,’ Meyer puts Kitten through the usual insane challenges, perching her buck naked atop mountains, in rivers at the bottom of canyons, and shot from below a metal bed frame (sans mattress) while she bounced vigorously atop metal bedsprings.“She blew through Meyer’s challenges like a marathon runner, always a wide, gung-ho smile across her face, and try as he might, Meyer could not vanquish her. That movie is a dazzling, obsessive tribute to Natividad.”Ms. Natividad in 2011. In her later years, she had small parts in mainstream movies like “Airplane!”Brian Cahn/Zuma Press, via AlamyFrancisca Isabel Natividad (she later used the first name Francesca) was born on Feb. 13, 1948, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua to Juan and Delia Davalos Natividad. In 2018, when she received the Legend of the Year award from the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, she told an audience that when she was growing up along the U.S. border, she would gather other children and make clandestine trips to a disreputable stretch of road where they would peek in on strip shows.“When I looked in there and I saw these beautiful women with the big breasts, the red lipstick, the big hairdos,” she said, “I wanted to grow up to be just like them.”Her mother later moved the family to the United States, and at 14 Ms. Natividad worked as a house cleaner for the actress Stella Stevens, getting a taste of the Hollywood crowd.She got a job as a key punch operator, but when she learned that a neighbor who worked as a stripper was making twice as much as she was, she changed careers, taking her first job as a go-go dancer in 1969 and soon moving to stripping. When an agency urged her to adopt a stage name, she chose “Kitten,” she said, because she was considered the shyest among the dancers she worked with.In 1973 she won the Miss Nude Universe title in San Bernardino, Calif.She was dancing at the Classic Cat, a club in Hollywood, when a fellow dancer, Shari Eubank, who had starred in the 1975 Meyer film “Supervixens,” suggested she introduce herself to the director. She is said to have done so by poking him in the back with her bare breasts.That got her into “Up!,” which she once described this way: “I’ll skip over the plot, which had something to do with Hitler’s daughter and sadomasochism. The film starts with me perched in a tree, nude.”Mr. Meyer paid for her to have breast augmentation, replacing an earlier enhancement. He also paid for a voice coach to help her lose her Mexican accent. (Her dialogue in “Up!” was dubbed.)When she and Mr. Meyer were together, he would revel in the attention her body and her bubbly personality brought. In 2004 Ms. Natividad joined three other Meyer favorites in a round-table discussion for The New York Times; one of them, Erica Gavin, the star of “Vixen,” recalled the couple’s entrance at her birthday party.“Kitten walked in first,” she said. “Russ loved to walk behind Kitten, because then he could see all the reactions after she passed people. She was wearing a nude-colored chiffon sheer outfit with no underwear at all.”After Mr. Meyer’s career died out, Ms. Natividad appeared in numerous other movies, including some hard-core pornography, and had small parts in “Airplane!” (1980), “My Tutor” (1983) and a few other mainstream films. She had a double mastectomy in 1999 as part of treatment for breast cancer.In the 2004 round table, Ms. Natividad reflected on her career.“I’m proud to be a Russ Meyer girl,” she said. “There are lots of beautiful women with great bodies and even bigger boobs than ours, but they didn’t get to be Russ Meyer girls. We are very, very special.”Ms. Natividad was married and divorced three times. In addition to her sister and her mother, she is survived by six half siblings, Teresa Natividad, Amelia Natividad, Diana Ramirez, Victor Ramirez, John Natividad and Estella Ramirez.Mr. McDonough, in his email, said he first saw Ms. Natividad at Show World in Manhattan, where her act consisted of splashing around naked in a baby pool while the song “Rubber Ducky” blared from the loudspeaker. Then, for a few dollars more, she’d pose for Polaroids.“Somehow Kitten made it all seem innocent,” he said. “She possessed a ferociously positive spirit, and that light always blasted through, no matter how tawdry the circumstances.” More

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      Loretta Lynn, Country Music Star and Symbol of Rural Resilience, Dies at 90

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      Her powerful voice, playful lyrics and topical songs were a model for generations of country singers and songwriters. So was her life story.NASHVILLE — Loretta Lynn, the country singer whose plucky songs and inspiring life story made her one of the most beloved American musical performers of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. She was 90.Her family said in a statement that she died in her sleep at her ranch, which had turned Hurricane Mills, about 70 miles west of Nashville, into a tourist destination.Ms. Lynn built her stardom not only on her music, but also on her image as a symbol of rural pride and determination. Her story was carved out of Kentucky coal country, from hardscrabble beginnings in Butcher Hollow (which her songs made famous as Butcher Holler).She became a wife at 15, a mother at 16 and a grandmother in her early 30s, married to a womanizing sometime bootlegger who managed her to stardom. That story made her autobiography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a best seller and the grist for an Oscar-winning movie adaptation of the same name.Her voice was unmistakable, with its Kentucky drawl, its tensely coiled vibrato and its deep reserves of power. “She’s louder than most, and she’s gonna sing higher than you think she will,” said John Carter Cash, who produced Ms. Lynn’s final recordings. “With Loretta you just turn on the mic, stand back and hold on.”Ms. Lynn performing at the Grand Ole Opry in the 1960s. She got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesHer songwriting made her a model for generations of country songwriters. Her music was rooted in the verities of honky-tonk country and the Appalachian songs she had grown up singing, and her lyrics were lean and direct, with nuggets of wordplay: “She’s got everything it takes/To take everything you’ve got,” she sang in “Everything It Takes,” one of her many songs about cheating, released in 2016.Ms. Lynn got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. She nevertheless became a voice for ordinary women, recording three-minute morality plays in the 1960s and ’70s — many written by her, some written by others — that spoke to the changing mores of women throughout America.In “Hey Loretta,” a wry 1973 hit about walking out on rural drudgery written by the cartoonist Shel Silverstein, she sang, “You can feed the chickens and you can milk the cow/This woman’s liberation, honey, is gonna start right now.” Silverstein also wrote the beleaguered housewife’s lament “One’s on the Way,” a No. 1 country hit for Ms. Lynn in 1971.“Loretta always just said exactly what she was going through right then in her music, and that’s why it resonates with us,” the country singer Miranda Lambert, one of countless younger performers influenced by Ms. Lynn, said in a 2016 PBS “American Masters” documentary, “Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl.”Jack White, the singer and guitarist of the White Stripes, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004, the year he produced Ms. Lynn’s Grammy-winning album “Van Lear Rose,” that she “was breaking down barriers for women at the right time.” Her songs, Mr. White said, had a message: “This is how women live. This is what women are thinking.” And Ms. Lynn, he added, was taking these strides “in the country realm, where a lot of women weren’t able to do what they wanted.”Ms. Lynn in 1972 with her husband, Oliver V. Lynn Jr., who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney. They had a long but tempestuous marriage. Gary Settle/The New York TimesShe drew much of her material from her marriage to Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr., who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney, the last of these nicknames a nod to his practice of selling bootleg whiskey.Ms. Lynn’s 1966 hit “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man)” was based on a confrontation she had with one of her husband’s mistresses; her 1968 single “Fist City” was born of a similar incident. The inspiration for “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” in 1966, were those times when Mr. Lynn, his libido roused after a night out, would stumble home expecting to satisfy it.“Doo would always try to figure out which line was for him, and 90 percent of the time every line in there was for him,” Ms. Lynn told the weekly Nashville Scene in 2000. “Those songs was true to life. We fought hard, and we loved hard.” The marriage lasted 48 years, until Mr. Lynn died of congestive heart failure in 1996.His drinking and womanizing notwithstanding, Mr. Lynn was one of his wife’s greatest sources of musical encouragement, certainly early in their marriage, after they moved from Kentucky to Custer, Wash., in the late 1940s. Impressed by how well she sang while doing chores at home, he bought her a guitar and a copy of Country Song Roundup, a popular magazine that included the words and chords to the latest jukebox hits.‘I Fought Back’Mr. Lynn went on to manage his wife’s career, insisting that she perform in honky-tonks and at radio stations even before she was convinced of her musical gifts. Ms. Lynn’s dependence on her husband made him as much a father figure as a spouse to her, even though he was less than six years her senior. He used the term “spanking” to describe the times he hit her. It was not until the couple moved to Nashville in the early 1960s, and Ms. Lynn befriended Patsy Cline there, that she began to stand up to her husband.“After I met Patsy, life got better for me because I fought back,” Ms. Lynn told Nashville Scene. “Before that, I just took it. I had to. I was 3,000 miles away from my mom and dad and had four little kids. There wasn’t nothin’ I could do about it. But later on, I started speakin’ my mind when things weren’t right.”Ms. Lynn’s growing assertiveness coincided with the first stirrings of the modern women’s movement. She rejected the feminist tag in interviews, but many of her songs, including the 1978 hit “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” were fiery expressions of female resolve. In that song she sang:Well, I don’t want a wall to paint, but I’m a-gonna have my say.From now on, lover-boy, it’s 50-50, all the way.Up to now I’ve been an object made for pleasin’ you.Times have changed and I’m demanding satisfaction too.Ms. Lynn’s sexual politics had already taken an emphatic turn with “The Pill” (1975), a riotous celebration of reproductive freedom written by Lorene Allen, Don McHan and T.D. Bayless. Outspoken records like that and “Rated X,” about the double standards facing divorced women, might not have been as popular with country music’s conservative-leaning audience had they not been tempered by Ms. Lynn’s playful way with a lyric. In “Rated X,” a No. 1 country hit in 1972, she wrote, “The women all look at you like you’re bad, and the men all hope you are.”Loretta Lynn in 1976, the year her memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” was published. It became the basis of an Oscar-winning movie. Waring Abbott“I wrote about my heartaches, I wrote about everything,” she said in a 2016 interview with The Times. “But when you get to hear the song, you just grin.”Her most confrontational recordings of the ’70s, in fact, corresponded with her greatest popularity. In 1972, she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association. The next year, her picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek. She became a frequent guest on late-night talk shows and the spokeswoman for Crisco shortening. With the title of her 1971 hit “You’re Lookin’ at Country” as her calling card, Ms. Lynn, in her down-home dresses, came to embody rural resilience and self-respect.Loretta Webb was born in a cabin in Butcher Hollow on April 14, 1932, the second of eight children. Her parents, Melvin Theodore Webb and Clara Marie (Ramey) Webb, liked to decorate the cabin walls with magazine photos of movie stars. Loretta was named after Loretta Young.In “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1976), her memoir written with George Vecsey of The Times, Ms. Lynn noted that her mother, a woman of Cherokee and Scots-Irish descent, had taught her to sing antediluvian ballads and instructed her in rural storytelling. Ms. Lynn and her brothers and sisters often sang in church and at other social gatherings. Three of her siblings also pursued careers in music, notably Brenda Gail, who under the name Crystal Gayle became a star in her own right in the late 1970s with crossover hits like “Talking in Your Sleep” and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”Ms. Lynn quit singing in public when she married in 1948. Wanting to get away from Appalachia, she and her husband moved to Washington the next year, when Ms. Lynn, at 16, gave birth to Betty Sue, the first of the couple’s six children. Ms. Lynn in 1972, the year she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association. Gary Settle/The New York TimesIt was a decade before Ms. Lynn performed again. Not long after she did, though, she appeared on a Tacoma, Wash., television talent show hosted by Buck Owens, and attracted the attention of Norm Burley, an executive with Zero Records, a small label based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She signed with the company and recorded four original songs for it in 1960.Success in NashvilleOn the strength of the airplay received by the single “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” the Lynns moved to Nashville, where Ms. Lynn began recording demos for the Wilburn Brothers, a popular country singing duo who became her music publishers, and helped her obtain a deal with Decca Records. She made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry in September 1960. In 1962, “Success,” about the relationship between material wealth and happiness, became her first Top 10 single.Over the next 28 years, Ms. Lynn placed 77 singles on the country charts. More than 50 of them reached the Top 10, and 16 reached No. 1, including “After the Fire Is Gone,” the first in a series of steamy hit duets she made with Conway Twitty. Virtually all of her recordings were steeped in traditional country arrangements suited to Ms. Lynn’s perky backwoods drawl; most were produced by Owen Bradley, who likened her to “a female Hank Williams.”Ms. Lynn performing at the Bonnaroo Music and Art Festival in Tennessee in 2011.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMs. Lynn wrote fewer songs as the 1970s progressed but continued to tour and record. She also established her own booking agency, music publishing company and clothing line, as well as the tourist attraction Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, a 19th-century plantation house that she and her husband bought in the late 1960s. The Hurricane Mills complex includes campgrounds, a dude ranch, a motocross course, a music shed, a replica of the cabin where Ms. Lynn grew up, a simulated coal mine and museums.The Academy of Country Music named Ms. Lynn its artist of the decade for the 1970s just as “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the 1980 movie based on her autobiography, returned her Cinderella story to the forefront of the national consciousness. The film starred Sissy Spacek, who won an Academy Award, in the title role, and Tommy Lee Jones as Doolittle Lynn.Ms. Lynn was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. Her second autobiography, “Still Woman Enough” (2002), picked up where “Coal Miner’s Daughter” had left off. She was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors the next year and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York in 2008. She received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2010. Three years later, President Barack Obama named Ms. Lynn a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.The strength of her influence in the music world was witnessed by “Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn,” a 2010 album featuring Kid Rock, Carrie Underwood, Lucinda Williams, the White Stripes and others. “Van Lear Rose” won two Grammy Awards and was ranked among the best albums of 2004, both in country music publications and in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone that cater to rock audiences.In 2007, Ms. Lynn quietly began a long-term recording project with the producer Mr. Carter Cash, Johnny Cash’s son, in the studio that had been Johnny Cash’s cabin outside Nashville. Working in the style of her ’60s and ’70s recordings, with seasoned Nashville musicians playing vintage instruments, she recorded more than 90 tracks: remakes of her past hits, Christmas and gospel songs, Appalachian songs from her childhood and a handful of new songs. The first album from those sessions, “Full Circle,” appeared in 2016, followed later that year by a Christmas album; “Wouldn’t It Be Great” was released in 2018 and “Still Woman Enough” in 2021.At her Tennessee plantation home in 2015.Kyle Dean reinford for The New York TimesIn 2020, Ms. Lynn published “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust,” a book recalling her friendship with Patsy Cline.Survivors include a younger sister, the country singer Crystal Gayle; her daughters Patsy Lynn Russell, Peggy Lynn, Clara (Cissie) Marie Lynn; and her son Ernest; as well as 17 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, and another son, Jack, died before her.She also leaves legions of admirers, women as well as men, who draw strength and encouragement from her irrepressible, down-to-earth music and spirit.“I’m proud I’ve got my own ideas, but I ain’t no better than nobody else,” she was quoted as saying in “Finding Her Voice” (1993), Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s comprehensive history of women in country music. “I’ve often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that’s the reason. I think I reach people because I’m with ’em, not apart from ’em.” More