Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Conrad Janis, Father on ‘Mork & Mindy’ and Much More, Dies at 94

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      His role on the hit sitcom was just one of more than 100 film and television credits; he was also a fine jazz trombonist and co-owner of an art gallery.Conrad Janis, an actor familiar to television viewers as Mindy’s father on the hit sitcom “Mork & Mindy” who was also a skilled jazz musician and a gallerist well known in the New York art world, died on March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 94.Dean A. Avedon, his business manager, confirmed the death.Mr. Janis, a child of the noted art collectors and gallerists Sidney and Harriet (Grossman) Janis, moved easily between the worlds of high art, jazz and acting, sometimes switching one hat for another in the same evening.“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”The key to juggling three areas of expertise, Mr. Janis told Newsday, was keeping his personas separate.“It just wouldn’t do to tell a knowledgeable art patron that ‘man, I dig Picasso the wildest,’” he said.Mr. Janis, an accomplished trombonist as well as a busy actor, peformed regularly with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band. Among the other members of the band, seen in performance in 1980, was his fellow actor George Segal, who played banjo and sang.Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via AlamyConrad Janis was born on Feb. 11, 1928, in Manhattan. His parents had a successful shirt-making business early in their married life, which gave them the wherewithal to begin collecting art and, in 1948, open the Sidney Janis Gallery, which became, as The New York Times put it in Sidney Janis’s obituary in 1989, “a major pacesetter for the art world in the 1950s and ’60s.”Harriet Janis also wrote books with the jazz historian Rudi Blesh, including “They All Played Ragtime” (1950). That connection led to Conrad’s musical expertise. Mr. Blesh’s daughter played trombone in her school’s marching band but lost interest; the spare trombone ended up in Conrad’s hands. He particularly studied the music of the influential New Orleans trombonist and bandleader Kid Ory.“I memorized a lot of what he did,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.His acting developed alongside his musicianship. When he was 13, a classmate at the Little Red School House in Manhattan told him that “Junior Miss,” a popular Broadway comedy about a teenage girl, was holding auditions for a road company. He auditioned, got in, and spent two years with the tour, advancing to a leading juvenile role. He started doing radio voice work at the same time.“I played kids of 14 and old men of 40” on the radio, he told The New York Times in a 1945 interview.He landed a role in the pre-Broadway run of “The Dark of the Moon,” which got him noticed by a Hollywood talent scout. He remained with the play when it went to New York, making his Broadway debut in March 1945, but within a few months he was on the West Coast to make his first film, the comedy “Snafu,” in which he played a teenager who lies about his age to enlist.It was the first of more than 100 film and television credits. In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagan Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles took advantage of his familiarity with musical instruments.“All through the ’50s,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1981, “I was in so many TV shows as a young musician on drugs, desperately trying to kick the habit, that I’m sure I helped cement in the public’s mind a relationship between musicians and dope. All they cast me in were shows in which I did or didn’t kick the habit. I was always saying, ‘Hey, man, I just got to have a fix.’”He continued to play small parts on TV in the 1960s and ’70s before landing his best-known role, Mindy’s father. His character operated a music store, but although “Mork & Mindy” ran for four seasons, he never got a chance to play his trombone on the show, something he regretted.“The producers wouldn’t go for it,” he told The Albany Democrat-Herald of Oregon in 1990. “We had a really cute script where I got together with my old Dixieland jazz band, but they didn’t think it was funny enough.”Mr. Janis with Thomas Scott, left, and Steven Scott in the 1996 movie “The Cable Guy.”He continued to work in television after “Mork,” with appearances on “St. Elsewhere,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Frasier” and other shows. His later movie appearances included small roles in “Mr. Saturday Night” (1992) and “The Cable Guy” (1996). He sometimes collaborated with his wife, Maria Grimm, including directing two movies she wrote, “The Feminine Touch” (1995) and “Bad Blood” (2012).Mr. Janis’s acting career also included a dozen Broadway credits, among them the Gore Vidal play “A Visit to a Small Planet” in 1957 and a revival of “The Front Page” in 1969.Throughout his musical and acting adventures, Mr. Janis also kept a hand in the art world.Arne Glimcher, the founder and chairman of Pace Gallery and a friend of Mr. Janis’s for almost 60 years, said Mr. Janis worked for his father at the Sidney Janis Gallery and was responsible for certain artists there, including Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann.“His knowledge of 20th-century art and Modernism was really encyclopedic,” Mr. Glimcher said in a phone interview.When Sidney Janis reached 90, he turned the Janis Gallery over to Conrad and his brother, Carroll, who kept it going until 1999.Mr. Janis’s first marriage, to Vicki Quarles, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Ronda Copland. Ms. Grimm, whom he married in 1987, died in September. He is survived by his brother; two children from his first marriage, Christopher and Carin Janis; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Glimcher said that in recent years some of Mr. Janis’s old jazz pals would come to his home in Beverly Hills on Thursdays and play. When his wife died, Mr. Glimcher said, Mr. Janis gave her a jazz funeral, then changed the location of those jam sessions.“Every Thursday,” Mr. Glimcher said, “he took the jazz band to her mausoleum and played there.” More

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      in Theater

      Tony Walton, Award-Winning Stage and Screen Designer, Dies at 87

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      He worked with the directors Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse and Jerry Zaks, winning three Tony Awards and an Oscar for “All That Jazz.”Tony Walton, a production designer who brought a broad visual imagination to the creation of distinct onstage looks for Broadway shows over a half-century, earning him three Tony Awards, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.His daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, whose mother is Julie Andrews, said the cause was complications of a stroke.In more than 50 Broadway productions, Mr. Walton collaborated on designing the sets (and sometimes, the costumes) with directors like Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse and Jerry Zaks, winning Tonys for “Pippin,” “The House of Blue Leaves” and “Guys and Dolls.”He also worked in film, where he shared the Oscar for the art and set decoration of Mr. Fosse’s “All That Jazz” (1979); years earlier, Mr. Walton designed the interior sets and the costumes for “Mary Poppins” (1964), starring Ms. Andrews, to whom he was then married.Mr. Walton’s television work included “Death of Salesman” (1985), which starred Dustin Hoffman, Kate Reid and John Malkovich, for which he won an Emmy.Before the opening of his final Broadway show, “A Tale of Two Cities,” in 2008, Mr. Walton described his process of conceiving a production’s design.“These days, I try to read the script or listen to the score as if it were a radio show and not allow myself to have a rush of imagery,” he told Playbill. “Then, after meeting with the director — and, if I’m lucky, the writer — and whatever input they may want to give, I try to imagine what I see as if it were slowly being revealed by a pool of light.”Mr. Walton with Julie Andrews and their daughter, Emma, in 1963.Associated PressDonald Albrecht, the curator of an exhibition of Mr. Walton’s theater and film work at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1989, told The New York Times in 1992: “He never puts a Walton style on top of the material. He comes from within the work out.”Mr. Walton worked with Mr. Zaks on many Broadway shows, including “Guys and Dolls,” a revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Anything Goes.”“I started directing because I liked working with actors,” Mr. Zaks said in a phone interview. “I had no appreciation for what a set could for a production. Tony pushed me to visualize the different possibilities that might be used to create a set.”For the 1986 revival of John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” about a family in Sunnyside, Queens, on the day Pope Paul VI visited New York City in 1965, Mr. Zaks recalled what Mr. Guare wrote in the actor’s edition of the play.“He referred to Manhattan as Oz to the people who lived in Queens,” Mr. Zaks said, “and out of that he came up with a set that always had Manhattan in the distance.”In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich described the impact of Mr. Walton’s set as a “Stuart Davis-like collage in which the Shaughnessys’ vulgar domestic squalor is hemmed in by the urbanscape’s oppressive brand-name signs.”Four years later, Mr. Zaks added: “I said, ‘Tony, we could do ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ with two sofas and a Kandinsky.’ He said, ‘Trust that, believe that,’ and he made me a better director.”The double-sided Kandinsky hung over the two red sofas on the stage in the play by Mr. Guare, about a mysterious young Black con man.Anthony John Walton was born on Oct, 24, 1934, in Walton-on-Thames, England. His father, Lancelot, was an orthopedic surgeon. His mother, Hilda (Drew) Walton was a homemaker.Ann Reinking in the 1979 film “All That Jazz.” Mr. Walton shared the Oscar for art and set decoration on the film.Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchiveHe traced his love of theater to a night during World War II when he was 5 or 6. His parents had just seen the musical “Me and My Girl,” he said in the Playbill interview, and “they had paper hats and little hooters — and had obviously had a few bubbles to cheer them along the way — and they woke my sister and me up and taught us ‘The Lambeth Walk.’”His interest in the theater blossomed at Radley College, which is near Oxfordshire, where he acted, directed and put on marionette shows. After serving in the Royal Air Force in Canada, he studied art and design at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. While there, he was a part-time actor and stagehand at the Wimbledon Theater.After graduating in 1955, he moved to Manhattan where he got a job sketching caricatures for Playbill. His first significant theater project in the United States was an Off Broadway revival of the Noël Coward musical, “Conversation Piece” in 1957.Four years later, after commuting to London where he designed productions for various shows, he was hired for his first Broadway play, “Once There Was a Russian,” set in 18th-century Crimea; it closed on opening night.His next show, the original production of “A Funny Thing,” ran for more than two years, and used his idea to project various sky images onto a curved screen across the stage.For the next 47 years, he toggled between musicals, comedies and dramas like a 1973 Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” For one of its stars, Lillian Gish, he had designed an eggplant-colored dress that she rejected, telling him that “Russian peasants only wore beautiful pastel colors,” according to Ms. Walton Hamilton. “He said, ‘Of course, Miss Gish,’” she said, then he had it dyed one shade darker with each subsequent cleaning.On the set of “The House of Blue Leaves” at the Lincoln Center Theater in 1986. From left: Christine Baranski, Swoosie Kurtz and John Mahoney.Brigitte LacombeIn the 1990s, he began directing at the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan, the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., and the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor in New York, which his daughter helped found. At Bay Street, he was also the production designer of a 2003 revival of “The Boy Friend,” which was Ms. Andrews’s directorial debut.Mr. Walton also illustrated the 12 children’s books about Dumpy the Dump Truck, and “The Great American Mousical,” that were written by Ms. Andrews and Ms. Walton Hamilton.“Tony was my dearest and oldest friend,” Ms. Andrews, who met Mr. Walton when she was 12 and he was 13, said in a statement. “He taught me to see the world with fresh eyes, and his talent was simply monumental.”In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Genevieve LeRoy-Walton; his stepdaughter, Bridget LeRoy; five grandchildren; his sisters, Jennifer Gosney and Carol Hall; and his brother, Richard.In 1989, Mr. Zaks recalled being uncertain about the type of hotel for the setting for the farce “Lend Me a Tenor.” Mr. Walton sketched one that had a Victorian style, then another, more compelling one, with an Art Deco design.“The beauty of the Art Deco sketch just blew me away,” he said, “and I knew right away that when things got amok onstage, when people started slamming doors within a beautiful piece of Art Deco architecture, it would be much funnier.” More

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      in Television

      Mitchell Ryan, Who Played the Villain in ‘Lethal Weapon,’ Dies at 88

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      Mr. Ryan, who appeared in the TV series “Dark Shadows,” played a brutal businessman in “Santa Barbara” and a wealthy father in the sitcom “Dharma & Greg.”Mitchell Ryan, an actor known for his role in the gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows” and who played a heroin-dealing retired general in the action movie “Lethal Weapon,” died at his home in Los Angeles on Friday. He was 88.The cause was heart failure, Ro Diamond, who represented Mr. Ryan for more than 40 years, said on Saturday.With his square jawline and slicked-back hair, Mr. Ryan entertained moviegoers and television fans in a career that spanned more than 50 years, beginning with an uncredited part in the movie “Thunder Road” (1958).His breakout performance came in 1966 when he landed a role in “Dark Shadows,” a popular soap opera about the adventurous lives of the affluent Collins family. Set in the fictional town of Collinsport, Maine, the family experiences supernatural events and are tormented by strange beings, such as ghosts, witches and zombies.Mr. Ryan played Burke Devlin, an ex-convict who returns to Collinsport and seeks revenge on the family.“It was a wonderfully written Gothic kind of melodrama and Burke was this marvelous, mysterious character,” Mr. Ryan recalled decades later in an interview. “And actually, there wasn’t a whole lot to do with it except bring a lot of my passion to it and just allow it to come out.”He was fired from the show because of his alcoholism.Mr. Ryan, second from left, with Joan Bennett, left, and Louis Edmonds, second from right, in “Dark Shadows” in 1966.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHe recalled in his memoir, “Fall of a Sparrow,” how grateful he was to have overcome his struggles with sobriety. “I’m blessed that, 30 years a drunk, I’ve managed to live a working actor’s life to be envied,” he wrote.He added that “sober for the next 30 years, I’m told I’ve come out of it all a good and a useful human being.”Another major role came in 1987, when he played an antagonist in “Lethal Weapon,” which starred Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Mr. Ryan recalled in an interview that people involved with the film initially believed it was destined to flop.“It was a total scary mess for everybody,” he said, noting that the script was constantly being rewritten. “Nobody knew what was going on.”Mr. Ryan played a retired general-turned-heroin smuggler who delivers commands in a calm and collected cadence but is inclined to raging outbursts.The film would gross more than $100 million worldwide at the box office.“We were all absolutely totally shocked and dumbfounded when it turned out to be an enormous hit,” Mr. Ryan said.He joked that the series of films that followed made everybody richer, except him because his character, Gen. Peter McAllister, was in a vehicle that was struck by a bus. “Poor Mitch, I got killed,” he said.Mr. Ryan continued to play parts in more than two dozen television series but found that his ego was getting inflated. He wrote on his website that “the more successful I became, the easier it was to take credit for what ‘I’ accomplished.”Mr. Ryan, left, star of Arthur Miller’s play “The Price,” with Lee Marvin, right, and Mr. Marvin’s wife, Pamela, backstage at the Playhouse Theater in New York in 1979.Dan Grossi/Associated PressIt was a behavior that he believed would be “deadly in the long run and not in accordance with reality,” he wrote.Still, in interviews, he would frequently say that he was grateful for his long acting career, which, as a child, seemed unlikely.Mitchell Ryan was born on Jan. 11, 1934, in Cincinnati and raised in Louisville, Ky., by his mother, who was a writer, and his father, who was a salesman. Information about survivors was not immediately available on Saturday.He said that, as a boy, he would often invent people he could be one day and had no idea that he was “acting a role, as it was all real to me.”He served in the U.S. Navy and then pursued work in theater. “I can’t count the number of plays I have done, but it could easily be over one hundred,” he wrote.For 15 years, he acted in a play almost every night in road shows, on Broadway and Off Broadway. Even while working on “Dark Shadows,” he was still performing plays at night after leaving the television set, which, he said, was “not a very good idea.”In 1989, he played Anthony Tonell, a brutal businessman, in “Santa Barbara,” a television series about several wealthy families in California. From 1997 to 2002, he portrayed Edward Montgomery, a wealthy and eccentric father, in the sitcom “Dharma & Greg.”In the preface of his memoir, Mr. Ryan wrote: “A young man became an actor because someone thought he had the right look for a part. A pleasing voice. And he wasn’t doing something else just then.”“And he stayed an actor,” he added, “because, remarkably, he was good at it.” More

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      in Music

      Joni James, Heartfelt Chanteuse of the 1950s, Dies at 91

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      A top-selling artist known as the “Queen of Hearts,” she had a voice tinged with longing and melancholy and was an early influence on Barbra Streisand.Joni James, a best-selling chanteuse whose records climbed the Billboard charts in the 1950s and who was an early influence on Barbra Streisand, died on Feb. 20 in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 91. Her family announced the death, in a hospital, in an online obituary. No cause was specified.Known to her fans as the “Queen of Hearts,” Ms. James had an intimate vocal style tinged with longing and melancholy. She recorded nearly 700 songs and sold more than 100 million records — 24 going platinum and 12 gold.“I always sang from the heart,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1996. “I always sang about life and how it affected me. I’m Italian. Italians are passionate people.”Her debut single, “Why Don’t You Believe Me,” reached No. 1 on the three Billboard charts in 1952 (in those days there were separate charts for sales, radio play and jukebox play) and made her an overnight sensation.Her next showstoppers included “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a cover of the Hank Williams hit, which helped Ms. James establish herself as one of the first pop singers to bring country into the pop mainstream.In the mid-1950s, she had four Top 10 charted hits, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Have You Heard?,” which sold more than three million records, and “How Important Can It Be?,” which sold more than four million.In May 1959, she was among the first pop singers to perform a solo concert at Carnegie Hall, where she was backed by a 100-piece orchestra and 30 singers.It was Ms. James’s recording of “Have You Heard?” that drew Ms. Streisand to her. “My favorite singer while I was growing up was Johnny Mathis,” Ms. Streisand told The New York Times in 1985. “I also listened a lot to Joni James records and sang her hit ‘Have You Heard?’ at club auditions, but I didn’t really want to sound like her.”Whether she wanted to or not, some early Streisand recordings did recall those of Ms. James, at least to the ear of the Times critic Stephen Holden, who wrote in 1991, “Without having developed a rounded vibrato, she sounded a lot like her childhood idol, Joni James, a singer with only rudimentary technique who infused early-’50s pop ballads with a waiflike plaintiveness.”There was enough of a connection between the two singers that Ms. James was invited to be part of a star-studded cast for the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award tribute to Ms. Streisand in 2001. Onstage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Ms. James performed one of Ms. Streisand’s signature songs, “The Way We Were,” accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch on piano.Ms. James recorded nearly 700 songs in her career and sold more than 100 million records, but she largely left the music scene in 1964. Giovanna Carmella Babbo was born in Chicago on Sept. 22, 1930. Her father, Angelo Babbo, who sang operatic arias when he was a shepherd boy in Italy, had come to America at 18. He died at 36, when Giovanna was 5. That left her mother, Mary Chereso, struggling to raise six children by herself during the Depression.Giovanna babysat and worked in a bakery to help the family and to raise money to train as a ballerina. A petite woman — she stood 5 feet tall and wore a size 4 shoe — she dreamed of going to New York and dancing with the American Ballet Theater.That didn’t happen. After graduating from high school, she toured Canada with a local dance group, then took a job as a chorus girl at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. By then she had changed her first name, after her high school newspaper kept misspelling it. Later, when she worked as a model, her managers told her to find a new surname; Ms. Babbo promptly turned to the phone book and picked “James” at random.While she was focused on dance, singing was second nature to her. She grew up singing in the school choir and said her influences were the blues and Gregorian chants. Later, when she sang in nightclubs and entered talent contests, audiences always reacted warmly to her, but she didn’t consider herself a real singer like her idols, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Doris Day.Ms. James was finally noticed by MGM Records, which signed her to a contract in 1952. Her first single had been written as “You Should Believe Me,” but she tweaked the lyrics and the title, making it “Why Don’t You Believe Me.” She paid for and organized the recording session, which included a 23-piece orchestra. The song was an instant hit and sold more than two million copies.She married Anthony Acquaviva, her manager, arranger and conductor, in 1956 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Mr. Acquaviva, known as Tony, oversaw sessions on which she was accompanied by strings, which helped define her lush sound.She appeared on all the major television variety shows, including those hosted by Ed Sullivan, Perry Como and Andy Williams. She was in demand around the world and became the first American to record at Abbey Road Studios in London, where she made five albums.But at the height of her fame, her husband developed diabetes, and she largely left the music scene in 1964 to care for him. She told The Los Angeles Times that this included washing one of his legs six times a day to prevent it from getting gangrene and being amputated. He died in 1986.Though she still performed occasionally while he was still living, she had stepped so far away from the limelight that the newspapers called her “The Garbo of Song.”She then met Bernard A. Schriever, a retired Air Force general who oversaw the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They married in 1997, and with his encouragement she eased her way back onstage, performing memorable concerts in New York at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall.“I was a bent-wing sparrow,” she told The Oakland Tribune, “and he pushed me to come back.”Ms. James is survived by her son, Michael Acquaviva; her daughter, Angela Kwoka; her brothers, Angelo Babbo and Jimmy Contino; her sisters, Clara Aerostegui and Rosalie Ferina; and two grandchildren. General Schriever died in 2005.Asked by The Daily News in 2000 why she sang so many sad songs, Ms. James had a simple answer: “Because I know what they mean.” More

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      in Theater

      Andrei Belgrader, Director Who Influenced Future Stars, Dies at 75

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      His Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater productions included early work by Cherry Jones, Mark Linn-Baker and more, and he directed starry Off Broadway shows.Andrei Belgrader, who directed numerous high-profile stage productions off Broadway and in regional theaters and was an important influence in the careers of John Turturro, Cherry Jones, Tony Shalhoub and other respected actors, died on Feb. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 75.His wife, Caroline Hall, said the cause was lung cancer.Mr. Belgrader, who emigrated from his native Romania in the 1970s after chafing at the artistic censorship there, caught the eye of Robert Brustein, founder of the Yale Repertory Theater, who by the end of the 1970s had him directing there. When Mr. Brustein, who had also been dean of the Yale School of Drama, moved to Harvard University and founded the American Repertory Theater there in 1980, Mr. Belgrader began directing productions there as well.Both A.R.T. and Yale Rep were proving grounds for young actors, and Mr. Belgrader challenged them in ways that had a lasting effect.“He would make odd but incredibly imaginative requests of you as an actor and would be delighted when you could fulfill these requests,” Mark Linn-Baker, who was Touchstone in Mr. Belgrader’s 1979 “As You Like It” at Yale Rep while still a student at the Yale drama school, said by email.Four years later Mr. Linn-Baker, who would soon find television fame on the long-running ABC series “Perfect Strangers,” played Vladimir, one of the leads (John Bottoms was Estragon, the other of Beckett’s famous tramps), in “Waiting for Godot” at A.R.T. directed by Mr. Belgrader. Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe called the production “a perfect Beckettian vaudeville act on the precipitous edge of the void.” Also in that production, in the supporting role of Pozzo, was Mr. Shalhoub, now an Emmy and Tony Award winner.“One of his great skills was bringing people out of their comfort zones in terms of their performances,” Mr. Shalhoub, who two decades later would recruit Mr. Belgrader to direct episodes of his hit TV series, “Monk,” said in a phone interview. “He had a way of instilling courage and moments of abandon.”Mr. Belgrader, who was partial to Beckett, revisited “Godot” in 1998 at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan, with Mr. Shalhoub elevated to the role of Vladimir and playing opposite Mr. Turturro as Estragon, and Christopher Lloyd as Pozzo. Mr. Turturro, who had studied under Mr. Belgrader decades earlier at Yale, worked frequently with him over the years, including in an acclaimed staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at Classic Stage in 2011. Ben Brantley of The New York Times named it one of the 10 best productions of the year. “Andrei Belgrader’s funny, sad and freshly conceived interpretation opened the walls between Chekhov’s then and our now,” he wrote.Mr. Turturro, in a phone interview, said Mr. Belgrader excelled at helping actors mine playwrights like Beckett and Chekhov for the deepest meanings and emotions in their work. The key, he said, was that he gave the actors time to make the discoveries.“I remember many times in rehearsals you would think, ‘This is terrible,’ and he would just be very, very patient,” Mr. Turturro said.It was something Mr. Turturro experienced in 2008 in a Belgrader-directed production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in which the character he played, Hamm, has a particularly difficult monologue.“He worked me to death in that monologue,” Mr. Turturro said. “He wasn’t unsatisfied, but he knew you could go further, and then one day you did.”John Turturro and Dianne Wiest in Mr. Belgrader’s 2011 staging of “The Cherry Orchard,” which Ben Brantley of The Times called one of the best productions of the year.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAndrei Belgrader was born on March 31, 1946, in Oravita, Romania. His father, Tiberiu, was an economist, and his mother, Magdalena (Gross) Belgrader, was a translator.He began training to be an engineer but didn’t like it and instead gained entry to the Institute of Theater and Film in Bucharest, where he began directing.“In Romania, theater was more important, I think, than in the West,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “It was really the only form where, in a hidden way, things could be discussed.”Well, up to a point. Romania was under Communist rule, and Mr. Belgrader had his first run-ins with censors while still a student.“They banned almost everything, even Romanian comedies,” he said. “Our trick was to do classical plays, because it was hard to say Shakespeare was anti-Communist.”But battles with censors eventually wore him down, and in the late 1970s he left the country. Ms. Hall said he spent time in a refugee camp in Greece and eventually, with the help of a charity, was able to come to New York, where he stayed with other Romanians and drove a cab to improve his sparse English.“Cabbies in New York don’t speak English and they don’t know where they’re going,” he told The Chronicle. “I was one of them.”Somehow he managed to mount two small theater productions, Buchner’s “Woyzeck” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The second is the one that caught Mr. Brustein’s eye.Mr. Belgrader was still not particularly fluent when he began directing at Yale Rep.“It was very peculiar,” Thomas Derrah, who was in the cast of the 1979 “As You Like It” with Mr. Linn-Baker, told The Globe in 1998. “He was trying to communicate what he wanted me to do, and there wasn’t a whole lot of English in there.”A year later, at A.R.T. in Cambridge, he mounted another production of the same play and essentially started the career of Ms. Jones, who had only recently graduated from the drama program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when she was cast as Rosalind.“In June 1980 I was the last audition of the last day of auditions for Andrei’s ‘As You Like It’ at the A.R.T.,” Ms. Jones, now a multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner, said by email. “Andrei was unlike any director or man I’d ever seen. And with an accent I’d never heard. In an instant he transformed the trajectory of my life.”Stanley Tucci, Elaine Stritch, Oliver Platt, Dianne Wiest and Marisa Tomei are also on the long list of actors directed by Mr. Belgrader over the years. When he wasn’t directing, he was teaching — at Yale, Juilliard, the University of California at San Diego and, at his death, the University of Southern California.He gravitated toward challenging plays that had dark elements, but that also had humor.“He’s a great farceur,” Mr. Brustein once said of him. “He finds that area where farce and dreams meet.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2001, Mr. Belgrader is survived by a daughter, Grace, and a sister, Mariana Augustin. He lived in Los Angeles.On a 2005 episode of “Monk,” Mr. Belgrader showed that he could direct even the most inexperienced actors. In the episode, “Mr. Monk and the Kid,” a beloved one to fans of the series, Mr. Shalhoub’s obsessive-compulsive title character gets help solving a crime from a 22-month-old boy (played by 2-year-old twins, Preston and Trevor Shores). The toddler character had a lot of screen time, placing particular demands on Mr. Belgrader.“It was a tricky episode,” Mr. Shalhoub said, “and he knocked it out of the park.”Ms. Jones said that Mr. Belgrader liked to demonstrate that his dog, Hector, could sing along to Janis Joplin.“Before he put the recording on he told me not to laugh during Hector’s truly astonishing howls,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You must respect the artist.’ And he meant it. Whether a dog or an actor.” More

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      Alan Ladd Jr., Hitmaking Film Executive, Dies at 84

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      When other studios didn’t want it, he took on the project that became “Star Wars.” He later guided “Chariots of Fire,” “Young Frankenstein” and numerous other movies.Alan Ladd Jr., who as a producer and studio executive was a guiding hand behind scores of successful films, none bigger than “Star Wars,” which he championed when its young director, George Lucas, was having trouble getting it made, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84.Kathie Berlin, who worked with him for years at his production company and at MGM, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Ladd was vice president for creative affairs at 20th Century Fox in 1973 when Mr. Lucas’s agent, Jeff Berg, began talking with him about Mr. Lucas’s still-evolving concept for what became “Star Wars.” Mr. Lucas had just made “American Graffiti,” but it had yet to be released (once it was, it would become one of 1973’s biggest movies), and so Mr. Lucas’s idea for a space movie wasn’t getting much respect; United Artists and Universal weren’t interested.Mr. Ladd, though, was. He knew movies and audiences — his father was an actor who had been in more than 100 films and TV shows — and he understood the appeal of Mr. Lucas’s vision.“It took me back to the old Saturday matinees,” he told The New York Times in 1977 as “Star Wars,” released a few months earlier, was smashing box-office records. “I used to go crazy over Superman and Flash Gordon. When I heard Universal had passed on it, I thought, ‘They’re crazy!’ So I took an option on it.”From left, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” (1977), which Mr. Ladd agreed to make when other studios weren’t interested.Lucas FilmsIt wasn’t the first time Mr. Ladd had seen potential where others did not. A few years earlier Mel Brooks was shopping his idea for “Young Frankenstein,” but Columbia balked when he insisted on shooting the movie in black and white. Mr. Brooks then sat down with Mr. Ladd.“We all hit it off at our first meeting because the first thing Laddie” — Mr. Ladd’s nickname — “said was, ‘You’re absolutely right. It should be made in black and white,’” Mr. Brooks wrote in his book “All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business” (2021).“I knew right then and there,” Mr. Brooks added, “that I had finally met a studio chief that I could really trust.”Mr. Brooks went on to make several other movies with Mr. Ladd, including the “Star Wars” parody “Spaceballs” in 1987, when Mr. Ladd was chairman of MGM. By then Mr. Brooks was box-office gold, thanks in part to “Young Frankenstein,” which had earned more than $100 million, and, as he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, he could have taken “Spaceballs” to just about any major studio.“But I’ve known Laddie for years,” he said. “And I’m not so wise, so old or so powerful that I can resist a lot of gut-level help all the way down the line — and especially emotional support — which is something Laddie has always provided.”Gene Wilder, left, and Peter Boyle in Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein” (1974). Mr. Ladd supported Mr. Brooks’s insistence on making the film in black and white.20th Century FoxMr. Ladd, who at various times held top positions at 20th Century Fox and MGM/UA as well as running the Ladd Company, which he founded in 1979, was known for a relatively laid-back style in a business full of intrusive executives. In a 1999 interview with The New York Times, the director Norman Jewison recalled his experience working with Mr. Ladd on the 1987 hit “Moonstruck,” which won three Oscars.“I gave him a price of what I thought I could do the film for,” Mr. Jewison said, “and told him I was going to go after Cher to play the lead. No other major stars. And he called me up and said, ‘OK.’ And I never saw him again, until I told him that the film was finished and I wanted him to see it. That doesn’t happen anymore.”Ms. Berlin said that while Mr. Ladd’s championing of “Star Wars” may be his calling card, he also deserved credit for backing films like “Moonstruck,” “Julia” (1977) and “Thelma and Louise” (1991) that had strong female characters. He is generally credited with suggesting that the lead character in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979), originally written as a man, be changed, giving Sigourney Weaver a chance to create a memorable sci-fi heroine.“I am always asking, ‘Can this role be more interesting if it’s played by a woman rather than a man?’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.Mr. Ladd in 2007. He was known for a relatively laid-back style in a business full of intrusive executives.Misha Erwitt for The New York TimesAlan Walbridge Ladd Jr. was born on Oct. 22, 1937, in Los Angeles to Alan Ladd, best known as the star of the 1953 western “Shane,” and his first wife, Marjorie Jane Harrold.Alan Jr. studied at the University of Southern California, was called up as an Air Force reservist during the Berlin crisis of the early 1960s and, once released, went to work in the mailroom of the talent agency Creative Management Associates. He soon became an agent, representing, among others, Judy Garland.In the early 1970s he formed a producing partnership in London with several others and produced his first movies, including “The Nightcomers” (1971), which starred Marlon Brando.Returning to the United States, he became a vice president at Fox in 1973. In 1976 he became the company’s president. Three years later he announced that he was leaving to form his own company.Mr. Ladd was a top executive at MGM twice. In 1985 he was brought in to run one of its movie divisions; soon after that he was named president and chief operating officer, and then chairman. He left in 1988 with the company undergoing ownership and organizational changes. He was leading the movie division of Pathé Communications when that company acquired MGM, and in 1991 he became chief executive. He was forced out in 1993 in another ownership change.Among the movies the Ladd Company had a hand in was “Chariots of Fire” (1981), which won the best-picture Oscar. “Braveheart” (1995), another Ladd Company project, won the same award.But “Star Wars” was almost certainly Mr. Ladd’s biggest triumph. He was still unsure about whether the film would work when he attended the premiere in San Francisco — until he heard the tidal wave of applause at the end.“It kept going on; it wasn’t stopping,” he recalled later. “And I just never had experienced that kind of reaction to any movie ever. Finally, when it was over, I had to get up and walk outside because of the tears.”Mr. Ladd’s marriage to Patricia Beazley ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Cindra Pincock. He is survived by three children from his first marriage, Kelliann Ladd, Tracy Ladd and Amanda Ladd Jones; a brother, David; a sister, Carol Lee Veitch; and six grandchildren. A daughter from his second marriage, Chelsea Ladd, died in 2021. More

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      Farrah Forke, Who Played a Helicopter Pilot on ‘Wings,’ Dies at 54

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      Forke, the namesake of a not-yet-famous family friend named Farrah Fawcett, played Alex Lambert on three seasons of the popular sitcom, a fixture of the NBC schedule in the 1990s.Farrah Forke, the actress who catapulted to fame playing a helicopter pilot on the NBC sitcom “Wings,” died at her home in Texas on Friday. She was 54.Her death was confirmed by her mother, Beverly Talmage, who said in a statement that her daughter had had cancer for several years.Forke played the alluring pilot Alex Lambert on three seasons of “Wings,” which aired from 1990 to 1997 and followed the adventures of the offbeat characters at a small airport on Nantucket.Her character’s affections were battled over by Joe and Brian Hackett (Tim Daly and Steven Weber), brothers who ran a one-plane airline.On Instagram, Weber described Forke as “every bit as tough, fun, beautiful and grounded as her character ‘Alex’ on Wings.”Farrah Rachael Forke was born on Jan. 12, 1968, in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Chuck Forke and Beverly (Mendleski) Forke. She was named after Farrah Fawcett, a family friend who wasn’t a well-known actress at the time Forke was born.“They just liked the name,” Forke told The Dallas Morning News in 1993.Forke began her acting career with a role in a Texas production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” In 1989, she moved to New York, where she studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute in Manhattan.Her acting career took off when she joined “Wings” as the smart and saucy Alex.“I don’t mind playing pretty women,” Forke told The Dallas Morning News. “But I do mind playing bimbos. Alex is definitely a sexy woman. But she’s also focused, and there’s a lot of qualities about her that people will admire.”The show, which was created by the “Cheers” and “Frasier” writers David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee, ran for 172 episodes and was a mainstay of the NBC schedule for years. The show also starred Crystal Bernard, Tony Shalhoub and Thomas Haden Church.From 1994 to 1995, Forke had a recurring role as the lawyer Mayson Drake on “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” on ABC.Her other television acting roles included “Dweebs,” “Mr. Rhodes” and “Party of Five.” After making her film debut in “Brain Twisters” in 1991, she appeared in “Disclosure” (1994), directed by Barry Levinson, and “Heat” (1995), directed by Michael Mann.Later in her career, she supplied the voice of Big Barda on the DC Animated Universe television series “Batman Beyond” and “Justice League Unlimited.”Forke had health problems related to leakage from her silicone breast implants, which she had implanted in 1989. She had them removed in 1993 and then filed a lawsuit a year later against the manufacturer and her doctor for damages, noting that neither the implant makers nor her doctor properly warned her of possible complications, according to The Associated Press.In addition to her mother, Forke is survived by her twin sons, Chuck and Wit Forke; her stepfather, Chuck Talmage; and three sisters, Paige Inglis, Jennifer Sailor and Maggie Talmage.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Bappi Lahiri, India’s ‘Disco King,’ Dies at 69

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      He helped popularize the genre with some of the country’s biggest hits of all time, including “I Am a Disco Dancer.”Bappi Lahiri, an Indian film composer who combined the melodrama of Bollywood film plots with the flamboyance of disco’s electronic orchestra sound, setting off a pop craze in India that earned him the nickname “Disco King,” died on Feb. 15 in Mumbai. He was 69.The cause was obstructive sleep apnea, said his son, Bappa, who was his arranger, manager and bandmate.Mr. Lahiri was an up-and-coming pop musician in 1979 when he traveled to the United States to play a series of gigs for Indian American audiences. While there, he toured nightclubs in San Francisco, Chicago and New York and caught the final months of American disco fever. In New York, he bought a Moog synthesizer, multiple drum machines and so much other music equipment that it filled two taxis.On returning home, his experiments with those instruments culminated with a career-making soundtrack to a hit movie, “Disco Dancer” (1982). It was a musical in a disco style — insistent bass lines under soaring horns and strings — and a declaration of love to the genre. In one scene, a frenzied crowd and the protagonist, a superstar disco musician, spell out the word “disco” and chant it.“Disco Dancer,” which traces the rise to stardom of a young street urchin named Jimmy and his fights with a family of thuggish plutocrats, became the first Indian movie to earn 1 billion rupees (about $230 million in today’s dollars), and its soundtrack helped fuel disco mania in India.It also supercharged the career of its sad-eyed, bouffant-wearing star, Mithun Chakraborty, and produced two of the catchiest dance tunes in the history of Indian pop, each sung by Mr. Chakraborty onscreen: “I Am a Disco Dancer” and “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja.”Long after the movie was shown in theaters, those songs endure across India. At weddings they’re known to inspire everyone from aging aunties to pals of the groom to boogie onto the dance floor.Mr. Lahiri would undergird many of his disco songs with a recognizably Indian melody, and he soon realized that he had hit on a winning formula, leading to 1980s hits like “I Am a Street Dancer,” “Super Dancer” and “Disco Station Disco.” He earned a place in the Limca Book of Records, which notes worldwide achievements by Indians, by recording the soundtracks to 37 movies in 1987 alone.He also developed a mega-celebrity’s fashion sense inspired by his boyhood reverence for Elvis. The look included tinted sunglasses worn indoors and out, velvet track suits and shiny jackets swaddling his pillowy bulk, and a mound of gold jewelry hanging from his neck.“I remember once a man refused to accept that I am Bappi Lahiri,” he once told The Times of India, “because I was wearing a coat to protect myself from cold and he couldn’t see my gold chain.”Bappi Lahiri was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on Nov. 27, 1952. His parents, Aparesh Lahiri and Bansur (Chakravarty) Lahiri, were singers who met while performing for the public broadcaster All India Radio. As a child Bappi showed talent playing the tabla, a traditional Indian drum, and, at the recommendation of the popular singer Lata Mangeshkar, he studied with the tabla master Samta Prasad.His family moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) when he was a teenager to further Bappi’s career. There he found a powerful ally in the family’s spiritual guru, Amiya Roy Chowdhury, who gave him a letter of introduction to the Bollywood star Dev Anand.Mr. Lahiri’s decades-long composing career ranged beyond disco to encompass Indian classical forms like ghazal as well. In all, he is believed to have composed about 9,000 songs that appeared in 600 or so movies. In his most productive periods he would book four studios in a single day and use as many as 100 musicians for one song.The funeral parade for Mr. Lahiri in Mumbai earlier this month. By the end of his life, he is believed to have composed around 9,000 songs for 600 or so movies.Vijay Bate/Hindustan Times via Getty ImagesIn addition to his son, Mr. Lahiri is survived by his wife, Chitrani (Mukherjee) Lahiri, whom he married in 1977; his mother; a daughter, Rema Bansal; and two grandsons.Though interest in disco had faded in the United States by the time Mr. Lahiri gained fame, he became a central part of the disco phenomenon elsewhere, particularly the Soviet Union. “Disco Dancer” was among the most popular films in the U.S.S.R., and Mr. Lahiri’s songs still serve as standards in musical shows on Russian television.During the 2018 soccer World Cup in Russia, a journalist with India’s Express News Service found the country full of “Jimmy” fans.“Everyone knows him where I come from,” one local fan, identified only as Yuri, was quoted as saying as he took out his phone. “Let me show you which of his songs is my favorite.” More