Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Television

      Howie Cohen, Whose Alka-Seltzer Ads Spawned Catchphrases, Dies at 81

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      A copywriter, he and a partner in 1972 came up with “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.” Soon, sales were, well, fizzing.Howie Cohen, an advertising copywriter, often said he was congenitally familiar with indigestion. So perhaps it was only natural that in the 1970s, he, along with an ad agency colleague, would conjure up a catchy slogan that would not only sell more Alka-Seltzer but also become an American pop culture punchline: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”That bedside lament, spoken by the comedian and dialectician Milt Moss — he actually said that thing on camera — vaulted from a 30-second TV commercial to sweatshirts, supermarket windows and even church marquees.It proved even more popular than “Try it, you’ll like it,” the first catchphrase for Alka-Seltzer that Mr. Cohen coined with his business partner, Bob Pasqualina, an art director at the Manhattan agency Wells Rich Greene.Mr. Cohen, who helped popularize products and companies like Petco (“Where the pets go”) and the fast-food chain Jack in the Box (exploding its clown mascot in a TV commercial in announcing a new, more sophisticated menu), died on March 2 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Patti Yasutake of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Beef’ Dies at 70

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      Ms. Yasutake played Nurse Alyssa Ogawa in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”Patti Yasutake, the actress known for her roles in the hit Netflix series “Beef” and in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” died on Monday at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 70.The cause was cancer, her manager and friend of more than 30 years, Kyle Fritz, said.Ms. Yasutake had a 30-year theater career, but she is most widely recognized for her recurring role as Nurse Alyssa Ogawa in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the television show that aired from 1987 to 1994. She appeared in 16 episodes and later reprised the role in the films “Star Trek Generations” and “Star Trek: First Contact.”In an article on Startrek.com, the website’s managing editor Christine Dinh wrote that Ms. Yasutake’s Ogawa was one of two recurring ethnically Asian characters on the show at the same time, a rarity when there “were so few characters who looked like me on-screen in Western media that I could count them on one hand.”“What stands out about Alyssa Ogawa’s story is that it spoke to the Asian American experience but wasn’t about that,” Ms. Dinh wrote.More recently, she was cast in Netflix’s hit show “Beef,” a dark comedy in which Ms. Yasutake plays Fumi Nakai, the fierce and unapologetic mother-in-law of Amy Lau, played by Ali Wong.Patricia Sue Yasutake was born in Gardena, Calif., on Sept. 6, 1953. She grew up there and in Inglewood. Ms. Yasutake graduated with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a theater degree.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Walter Arlen, Holocaust Refugee and Belated Composer, Is Dead at 103

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      After fleeing Vienna, he was a music critic and teacher before returning to composing in the 1980s. His memories of Nazi barbarism inspired his music.Walter Arlen, a Viennese musical prodigy who fled to the United States after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and became a music critic and a late-in-life composer of Holocaust and Jewish-exile remembrances in song, died on Sept. 3, 2023, in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 103. The death, in a hospital, was not widely reported at the time; Howard Myers, Mr. Arlen’s husband and sole survivor, confirmed it to The New York Times only recently. Mr. Arlen and Mr. Myers, longtime residents of Santa Monica, had been companions for 65 years and were married in 2008 after California’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of same-sex marriages.Even after eight decades, Mr. Arlen’s memories remained vivid — of his father being dragged off to a concentration camp; of his mother’s nervous breakdown and suicide; of his family’s home, business and bank accounts stolen by the Nazi authorities; and of witnessing the vicious murder of an older Jew by an SS guard.The scion of a prosperous Jewish family that had owned a department store in Vienna since 1890, Mr. Arlen, whose family name was Aptowitzer, was an 18-year-old high school student in 1938, nearing graduation with a brilliant musical future ahead, when German troops invaded and absorbed German-speaking Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich in what was known as the Anschluss.As waves of Nazi violence and property expropriations crushed Jewish life across Austria, the department store was seized and “Aryanized,” the family was evicted from its apartments on the top floor, and Walter’s father was sent to a series of concentration camps, ending at Buchenwald. Walter, his mother and his younger sister, Edith, took refuge in a pensione.Mr. Arlen and his sister, Edith Arlen-Wachtel, visited Vienna, their native city, in March 2008 for the first time since their family fled Nazi-occupied Austria.Christian Fürst/Picture-Alliance/DPA, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Benjamin Luxon, British Baritone Thwarted by Hearing Loss, Dies at 87

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      A favorite of Benjamin Britten, he won acclaim in roles like Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin and Falstaff until his affliction forced him to largely give up singing.Benjamin Luxon, a warm-voiced British baritone who was admired for his singing of German and British song and his robust opera performances, but whose flourishing career was cut short by encroaching deafness, died on July 25 at his home in Sandisfield, Mass. He was 87.His son Daniel said the cause was colon cancer.At the height of his career, in the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Luxon was one of the most sought-after singers on British, American and continental operatic stages, in roles like Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin and Falstaff, as well as in the operas of Benjamin Britten.Mr. Britten created the title role of the 1971 television opera “Owen Wingrave,” based on a Henry James short story, specifically for Mr. Luxon. Mr. Luxon’s thoughtful singing of Schubert, Hugo Wolf and English song was praised by critics in England and the U.S. for its subtlety.Mr. Luxon in the English National Opera’s production of “Falstaff” in 1994, around the time he was forced to largely give up singing. “The problem is that most of my high-frequency hearing has gone,” he said at the time.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty ImagesHe moved with ease among folk song, art song and even English music hall favorites, explaining to interviewers that he had grown up singing in church and school choirs in his native Cornwall in England. “It was like breathing, it was like second nature to me,” he said.But his singing days were curtailed when, in the late 1980s, he developed a hearing affliction that led to partial deafness and some disastrous misfires on the recital stage. He bore the condition stoically, but by the mid-1990s he was forced to largely give up singing despite using a hearing aid.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Yvonne Furneaux, Cosmopolitan Actress in ‘La Dolce Vita,’ Dies at 98

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      An Oxford graduate who spoke five languages, she had an early career as a siren before finding critical acclaim in masterworks by Federico Fellini and Roman Polanski.Yvonne Furneaux, a French-born English actress known for her icy beauty and continental air who brought jet-setting panache to critically acclaimed films like Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion,” died on July 5 at her home in North Hampton, N.H. She was 98.Her son, Nicholas Natteau, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Ms. Furneaux, an Oxford University graduate who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, got her start on the British stage, including in productions of “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Macbeth.”Despite her credentials, however, she was often singled out more for her fashion model looks than for her acting prowess.In a review of a 1955 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine,” the august British theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote Ms. Furneaux off as a “buxom temptress” who was “more impressive in silhouette than in action.” The Daily News of New York described her in a 1958 headline as an “English peach.”Accordingly, after she made the transition to film, she was often cast as a siren or a damsel in distress in period adventure movies, including two starring Errol Flynn.A poster for the 1959 British horror film “The Mummy,” in which Ms. Furneaux had dual roles — as a 4,000-year-old dead princess and the wife of a late-19th-century archaeologist.Universal, via LMPC/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Richard Crawford, Leading Scholar of American Music, Dies at 89

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      American Music was a marginal subfield in the 1960s when he began his research as a student, and then as a faculty member, at the University of Michigan.Richard Crawford, a longtime professor of musicology at the University of Michigan who helped legitimize and popularize the study of American music, died on July 23 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 89.His wife, Penelope (Ball) Crawford, said the cause was congestive heart failure.“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.His timing was fortuitous: Preparations for the 1976 U.S. bicentennial celebration spurred a new public interest in reviving early American music, and Mr. Crawford helped build its scholarly infrastructure. He was a founding member of the Sonneck Society, later renamed the Society for American Music; wrote the first biography of the Revolutionary-era composer William Billings, with David P. McKay in 1975; and, through painstaking bibliographic work, excavated large swaths of repertory from the beginnings of American sacred music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Erica Ash of ‘Mad TV’ and ‘Survivor’s Remorse’ Dies at 46

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      Erica Ash started out on sketch comedy shows in the 2000s before appearing in movies like “Scary Movie V” and the satirical reality show “Real Husbands of Hollywood.”Erica Ash, an actress and comedian known for her roles in the satirical reality show “Real Husbands of Hollywood” and on the sketch comedy show “Mad TV,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 46.The cause was cancer, her mother, Diann Ash, said in a statement on Monday.Ms. Ash began her career in the 2000s as a cast member on the sketch comedy shows “The Big Gay Sketch Show” and “Mad TV,” where she impersonated celebrities like Michelle Obama and Condoleezza Rice.She went on to appear in several dozen TV shows and films, including “Scary Movie V.” She landed a recurring role on BET’s “The Real Husbands of Hollywood,” a parody of reality TV shows that starred Kevin Hart.On Starz’s “Survivor’s Remorse,” a drama-comedy about a young basketball star’s rise to fame, she played the main character’s sister. Among her last projects, Ms. Ash appeared in the Netflix horror-comedy film, “We Have a Ghost.”Erica Chantal Ash was born on Sept. 19, 1977, in Florida, according to IMDb. She attended Emory University as a pre-medicine student, but pivoted to comedy and entertainment. In an interview in 2018 with Steve Harvey, she talked about taking a year off from studying medicine and becoming a backup singer for a Japanese band.She was popular on social media, where she spoke out on politics and posted videos of herself portraying funny characters.A list of survivors was not immediately available. More

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      in Music

      Wolfgang Rihm, Prolific Contemporary Classical Music Composer, Dies at 72

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      Likened to a “court composer” for Germany, he wrote more than 500 pieces and was considered one of the most original and independent musical voices in Europe.Wolfgang Rihm, a composer whose forceful, shape-shifting output reinvigorated contemporary classical music, died on Saturday in Ettlingen, Germany. He was 72.His death, in a hospice outside the city of Karlsruhe, where he lived, was announced in a statement by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause, but Mr. Rihm had been treated for cancer since 2017. His illness and his efforts to compose despite it were the subject of a 2020 German documentary.Mr. Rihm was considered one of the most original and prolific musical voices in Europe and the most performed German composer of contemporary classical music. Among his prominent commissions was “Reminiszenz,” an “arresting, broody orchestral song cycle,” as Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it in The New York Times. The work, for a tenor and large orchestra, premiered at the 2017 opening of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg.Mr. Rihm composed more than 500 works, though the exact number remains unclear because some pieces have not yet been published.He received the 2003 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the 2010 Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale and the 2014 Robert Schumann Prize for Poetry and Music, among many other awards. He was named composer in residence for the 2024-25 season at the Berlin Philharmonic.“At times he was even like a court composer” for Germany, the music critic Manuel Brug wrote in Die Welt.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More