Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Movies

      Eleonore Von Trapp Campbell, of the ‘Sound of Music’ Family, Dies at 90

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      She was a member of the Trapp Family Singers, which toured internationally, though she herself was not depicted in the musical or the film.Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, the second daughter of Maria von Trapp, whose Austrian family was depicted in the stage musical and the beloved movie “The Sound of Music,” died on Sunday in Northfield, Vt. She was 90.The death was confirmed by Day Funeral Home in Randolph, Vt.Ms. Campbell was a younger half sister to the von Trapp children who were depicted in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music” and its hugely successful 1965 movie adaptation. Both were based loosely on a 1949 autobiographical book by Maria von Trapp, who died in 1987.“The Sound of Music” tells the story of an Austrian governess (played by Julie Andrews in the film) who marries her employer, a widower (Christopher Plummer in the film), and then teaches his seven children music. The movie won the Academy Award for best picture.Ms. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Ms. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.“The life of singing on tour is one that involves an extraordinary amount of discipline and hard work,” Ms. Campbell’s daughter Elizabeth Peters said, “and my mother lived as a teenager singing lead soprano, night after night after night, and toured much of the year, and it really shaped who she was.”Ms. Campbell stopped touring in 1954 when she married Hugh David Campbell, a coach and teacher. They lived in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where she raised seven daughters, teaching them to cook, bake, garden, sew, knit, darn and make butter and ice cream from scratch. In 1975, the family moved to Waitsfield, Vt.Later in life she traveled to festivals with her instruments and told children about her music career.Eleonore von Trapp, who went by Lorli, was born on May 14, 1931, in Salzburg, Austria, on the border of Germany. After fleeing the country, her family settled in Vermont in the early 1940s and opened a ski lodge in Stowe, where Ms. Campbell’s two surviving siblings, Johannes and Rosmarie von Trapp, live.In 1996 the family became engaged in a bitter dispute over money and control of the lodge, a 93-room Austrian-style resort on 2,200 acres. Johannes and several siblings bought out the others in 1995; Ms. Campbell and the rest said their shares were worth more than the price they had received.“He acts as though I’m the chief instigator, and I’m not,” Ms. Campbell told Vanity Fair in 1998, speaking of her brother. “I’m sad at the situation, which was completely unnecessary.”In addition to her two siblings and Ms. Peters, Ms. Campbell’s survivors include five other daughters, 18 grandchildren and six great-grandsons.One daughter, Hope McAndrew, said that while she and her siblings knew every word from “The Sound of Music” as they were growing up, they also knew the songs the Trapp Family Singers had sung on tour long before the musical.The New York Times contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      Val Bisoglio, Oft-Cast Character Actor, Dies at 95

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      He was seen on “Quincy, M.E.” and “The Sopranos.” He also memorably played John Travolta’s father in “Saturday Night Fever.”By 1986, after 30 years in the business, Val Bisoglio had made such an impression as a character actor that Danny Arnold, a producer casting a new police series called “Joe Bash,” wrote in a casting notice for a particular part simply that he was looking for “a Val Bisoglio-type.”Mr. Bisoglio saw the notice and figured that he was probably as good a Val Bisoglio-type as anybody. He called Mr. Arnold and landed the role, a desk sergeant.“Joe Bash” was short-lived, but the anecdote shows just how much Mr. Bisoglio was able to do with an Everyman-ish face, a distinctive voice and a versatility that enabled him to play cops, tough guys, bartenders, judges, fathers.He was perhaps best known for portraying the father of John Travolta’s character in the film “Saturday Night Fever” in 1977 (he whacks Mr. Travolta upside the head several times in a memorable dinner scene) and the owner of a restaurant preferred by the title character, a medical examiner played by Jack Klugman, on the television drama “Quincy, M.E.” from 1976 to 1983. But from the 1960s through the ’80s, television viewers were likely to encounter him in a seemingly endless list of guest roles.“If it was a popular TV show,” his wife, Bonnie (Ray) Bisoglio, said in a phone interview, “he was on it.”Mr. Bisoglio, right, with Jack Klugman in an episode of “Quincy, M.E.” He played the owner of a restaurant, and Mr. Klugman played a medical examiner. “Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant.”United Archives via Getty ImagesMr. Bisoglio died on Oct. 18 at his home near Los Olivos, Calif. He was 95.His wife said the cause was late-onset Lewy body dementia, which had been diagnosed a year ago.In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”Italo Valentino Bisoglio (pronounced bee-ZOL-yoh) was born on May 7, 1926, in Manhattan. His father, Mario, was a greengrocer during the Depression, then worked in construction, and his mother, Virginia (Gallina) Bisoglio, did piecework sewing. Both had emigrated from the Piedmont region of northern Italy.Growing up in New York, he said, he was more interested in going to vaudeville and other theaters than in going to school; he dropped out after 10th grade and at 16 made his way to Los Angeles, where he lived for a while, also spending time in Las Vegas. But he came to acting late; first he worked at various jobs, including, in his early 20s, selling water-softening devices, which made him a significant amount of money.“It went through my hands faster than water could soften it,” he told The News, largely because he developed a fondness for gambling.Ms. Bisoglio said that migraine headaches helped drive her husband to take acting classes as a form of tension-relieving therapy. He studied with Jeff Corey, a character actor who after being blacklisted in the 1950s became a well-regarded acting teacher, and by the early ’60s Mr. Bisoglio was back in New York and establishing himself as a theater actor.At the Off Broadway Sheridan Square Playhouse in 1965, he was part of a production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” that also included Robert Duvall, Jon Voigt, Susan Anspach and Richard Castellano, all then still early in their careers. The next year he made his only Broadway appearance, in Frederick Knott’s “Wait Until Dark,” playing a con man (Mr. Duvall played another).He began to find television work as well, appearing in episodes of “Bonanza” and “Mayberry R.F.D.,” among other shows, and in 1969 he landed a recurring role on the soap opera “The Doctors.” By the ’70s he had residences on both coasts to accommodate his increasingly busy TV and stage careers.Mr. Bisoglio tended to be offered roles as mobsters and other heavies — he held up Archie Bunker and family in a 1972 episode of “All in the Family” — but, as his wife said, “he yearned for roles where he could show something else,” and he turned down the thug parts when he could. Partly, he said, that was because they stereotyped a particular sort of Italian, one not representative of his family’s origins; his mother bristled whenever he took such a part.“She doesn’t cook much pasta,” he told United Press International in 1977. “We northern Italians in the Po Valley area eat mostly rice. We’re from peasant stock.”But, he told The Daily News, he also disliked such roles because they reminded him of his time as a gambler.“When I was a New York gambler I had to mix with those tough guys,” he said. “God, they were tough. Their arms were like iron. Their necks were like iron. Now it’s embarrassing for me to play them.”That said, his final credits were in three episodes of “The Sopranos” in 2002, playing a character named Murf who was part of Junior Soprano’s crew. But Mr. Bisoglio said he always enjoyed the chance to play comic roles.In the early 1980s, for instance, he was in several episodes of “M*A*S*H,” playing a cook named Pernelli. In one, Alan Alda’s Hawkeye lectures him at length on how to delicately prepare the perfect French toast. Mr. Bisoglio then ignores him and dumps all the ingredients, including the bread, into a giant pot.Another role that took Mr. Bisoglio a long way from Italian stereotypes came in 1979, when he played an erudite Indian chief named Gray Cloud in the comic western “The Frisco Kid,” with Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford. George American Horse, an actual American Indian, was an adviser on the film, and in 1978 he told The New York Times that, the uncomfortable cross-cultural casting notwithstanding, Mr. Bisoglio’s portrayal was a welcome change from “the stoic Indian sitting on his pony with his arms crossed and wearing war paint.”Mr. Bisoglio’s marriage to Joyce Haden was brief and ended in divorce. He and Ms. Bisoglio married in 1996. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Joseph Bisoglio and Scott Chapman. More

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      in Theater

      Martha Henry, a Leading Stage Actress in Canada, Dies at 83

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      For decades her performances at the Stratford Festival drew acclaim. She gave her last performance just days before her death.For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.She died of the disease on Thursday at her home in Stratford, the festival announced. She was 83.The effort Ms. Henry put into her final role — A is a dying woman, mean and prone to bursts of both laughing and crying — was, by all accounts, something to see. The performance “shows the veteran actor at her monstrous best,” J. Kelly Nestruck, the chief theater critic for The Globe and Mail of Toronto, wrote in August.“It’s unforgettable — which I mean both as praise and as a warning,” he added. “You might not want the woman she plays stuck in your head.”Ms. Henry had been known for memorable performances at Stratford for decades. She first appeared there in 1962 in a production of “The Tempest,” and her association with the festival continued, with a few gaps, to the present. She acted in more than 70 productions and directed 14 others.“Her sense of responsibility to the theater was so profound that it enabled her to endure pain and face down her terminal disease to complete an astoundingly truthful performance as a dying woman in ‘Three Tall Women,’” Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director, said in a statement. “Her life became art.”Ms. Henry with Brian Bedford in “Much Ado About Nothing,” a Stratford Festival production staged at New York City Center in 1998. She acted in more than 70 Stratford productions and directed 14 others.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMartha Kathleen Buhs was born on Feb. 17, 1938, in Detroit. Her parents, Lloyd and Kathleen (Hatch) Buhs, divorced when she was 5. Her mother was a pianist who played cocktail lounges and was often working at night, so Martha was raised by her grandparents until she was 14. She was interested in acting at a young age.“I joined a Brownie troop because they were doing a play,” she told The Pittsburgh Press in 1968.As a teenager she rejoined her mother, who had become part of a traveling entertainment troupe. She would often go on the road with her, enjoying the company of the other performers.“On the same bill there’d be a comic — my mother would fill in as the straight woman — a ventriloquist, a snake charmer, a tap dancer,” Ms. Henry told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta in 1996, when she was playing the same role in “Three Tall Women” in an Edmonton production. “I grew up with show people. They were so good to me.”She enrolled at what is now the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama in Pittsburgh, choosing it over several other colleges because, as she told The Press, “it was the only one that held auditions, to see what you could really do.”The drama department did four Shakespeare plays while she was there, she said, but this future star of numerous Shakespeare productions didn’t get into any of them. After graduating in 1959, she did summer stock in Ontario and worked with the Crest Theater in Toronto. Then she enrolled in the National Theater School in Montreal when it was established in 1960, and went on to become its first acting graduate: Halfway through the three-year course, as she told The Press, the directors told her that she was ready for a professional career.Six weeks later she was a member of the Stratford troupe; her debut there was as Miranda in “The Tempest.” One critic called her “the find of the season.”She had married a fellow student at the theater school, Donnelly Rhodes Henry. The marriage didn’t stick, but the last name did (though not for him — he performed professionally as Donnelly Rhodes). A later marriage, to the actor Douglas Rain in 1968, ended in divorce in 1988. In 1989 she married the actor Rod Beattie, who survives her, along with a daughter from her second marriage, Emma Rain.At Stratford, Ms. Henry’s Isabella in “Measure for Measure” in 1975, her Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1998 and her Mary in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1994 were among her most acclaimed performances. She was also artistic director of the Grand Theater in London, Ontario, from 1988 to 1994.Ms. Henry made the occasional film or television appearance and performed on many stages beyond Stratford, including some in New York. But she said she was never tempted, as a young actress, to try to make it in Manhattan.“I knew exactly what would happen there,” she told The Journal. “I wasn’t exactly shy, but I wasn’t pushy. I was no great beauty. I could see myself getting an apartment and just staying in it.”Canada offered what she wanted, she said.“I just wanted to work, and I felt that any country that could produce a Stratford had to be the most wonderful place. And I was right.” More

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      in Movies

      Mort Sahl, Whose Biting Commentary Redefined Stand-Up, Dies at 94

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      A self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy, he revolutionized comedy in the 1950s by addressing political and social issues.Mort Sahl, who confronted Eisenhower-era cultural complacency with acid stage monologues, delivering biting social commentary in the guise of a stand-up comedian and thus changing the nature of both stand-up comedy and social commentary, died on Tuesday at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., near San Francisco. He was 94.The death was confirmed by Lucy Mercer, a friend helping to oversee his affairs.Gregarious and contentious — he was once described as “a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily” — Mr. Sahl had a long, up-and-down career. He faded out of popularity in the mid-1960s, when he devoted his time to ridiculing the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; then, over the following decades, he occasionally faded back in. But before that he was a star and a cult hero of the intelligentsia.He had regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with audiences full of celebrities. He recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record,” the album “At Sunset.” (Though recorded in 1955, it was not released until 1958, shortly after the release of his official first album, “The Future Lies Ahead.”) By 1960, he had starred in a Broadway revue, written jokes for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, hosted the Academy Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and been cast in two movies (he would later make a handful of others).An inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom of all sorts. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine he declared that Brooks Brothers stores didn’t have mirrors; customers just stood in front of one another to see how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: “Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes.”“The Future Lies Ahead,” released in 1958, was Mr. Sahl’s first official album, although he had previously recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record.”J.P. Roth CollectionBut more than anything else, it was politicians who were the fuel for his anger. For that reason he was often compared to Will Rogers, whose death in 1935 had left the field of political humor essentially barren, though Mr. Sahl had none of Rogers’s homeyness and detested the comparison.“I never met a man I didn’t like until I met Will Rogers,” he once said, turning the famous Rogers line against him, despite never having met him. He described Rogers as a man who pretended to be “a yokel criticizing the intellectuals who ran the government,” whereas Mr. Sahl himself pretended to be “an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government.”In December 1953, when Mr. Sahl first took the stage at the hungry i — the hip nightclub in San Francisco that he helped make hip, where he would routinely be introduced as “the next president of the United States” — American comedy was largely defined by an unadventurous joke-book mentality. Bob Hope, Milton Berle and Henny Youngman may have been indisputably funny, but the rimshot gag was the prevailing form, the punch line was king, and mother-in-law insults were legion. It was humor for a self-satisfied postwar society.“Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming,” Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny,” his book-length 2003 study of comedy in the 1950s and ’60s. “When he arrived, the revolution had not yet begun. Sahl was the revolution.”Blazing a TrailMr. Sahl was a shock to the comedy system. Other groundbreaking comedians — Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Richard Pryor among them — would pour into his wake, seizing on the awareness that audiences were hungry for challenge rather than palliation. And for social commentators who took to the airwaves in the half-century after he began to speak his mind — from Dick Cavett to Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart — Mr. Sahl was their flag bearer as well.(If a younger generation of comedians considered Mr. Sahl an inspiration, he did not return their love. He said in a 2010 interview that he found their comedy “kind of soft” and urged them to “take more chances.”)“He just doesn’t bring to mind any other performer in the history of show business,” Mr. Cavett said after watching Mr. Sahl perform in 2004.In 1973 Mr. Sahl, left, visited the New York radio talk-show host Don Imus, one of many people who considered him an influence, to promote his album “Sing a Song of Watergate.”Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFor one thing, he looked different from other comics of the time, eschewing the expected jacket and tie in favor of a more collegiate, informal look in an open-necked shirt and a V-neck sweater. And he peppered his routines with the language of youth and jazz — he was bugged, he dug this or that, he dated a lot of chicks. He took the stage carrying a rolled-up newspaper, a prop that was also a prompt; in Mr. Sahl’s performances, he talked about, anguished over and ranted at the news, spinning it with sardonic digressions, cryptic asides and blistering zingers.“I’m for capital punishment,” he declared. “You’ve got to execute people — how else are they going to learn?”In a vitriolic riff on the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States — Mr. Sahl was virulently anti-Soviet — he spoke of an encounter between Mr. Khrushchev and Adlai Stevenson: “Khrushchev said to Stevenson, ‘If you want to be president, I want to tell you how to seize power,’ and Stevenson admonished him and said to him, ‘You know, that’s not the way we do things in this country,’ but several members of the Democratic advisory council who were present admonished Stevenson to keep quiet and listen to this man!”Over the years he directed a venomous wit against Democrats and Republicans alike, famously supporting Kennedy in his presidential campaign against Richard Nixon and then lampooning him after his election: In choosing Kennedy, he said, the country was “searching for a son figure.”His own political leanings were difficult to track. The left wanted to claim him, especially early in his career, but they couldn’t quite do so. Among other things, he could be crudely sexist and, though he supported civil rights, he was acerbic in confrontation with knee-jerk liberal dogma on the subject. Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He said he had voted for Ross Perot; he praised Ron Paul and defended Sarah Palin; he cast a skeptical eye on Barack Obama’s presidency and was as scathing about Hillary Clinton as he was about Donald Trump.“Are there any groups I haven’t offended?” he was wont to ask from the stage. If nothing else he was a pure iconoclast.“If you were the only person left on the planet, I would have to attack you,” he once said. “That’s my job.”The Barbs BeginMorton Lyon Sahl was born in Montreal on May 11, 1927. His father, Harry, ran a tobacco shop, though he had grown up in New York as an aspiring playwright, and by the time Mort was 7, Harry Sahl had moved the family to Los Angeles and found work as a clerk for the Department of Justice. At 15, Mort joined the R.O.T.C. and left high school, lying about his age to join the Army; after two weeks, his mother, Dorothy, got him out.After high school, he enlisted again and served in the Army Air Forces in Alaska, where his anti-authoritarian impulse first flowered. He edited a base newspaper called Poop From the Group, which needled military structure and routine and which earned him, he said, 83 straight days of mess-hall duty.Following his discharge, he attended Compton Junior College and the University of Southern California, earning a degree in city management, and then followed a young woman — Sue Babior, whom he would eventually marry — to Berkeley. Prompted by Ms. Babior, he approached the owner of the hungry i, Enrico Banducci, for a performing gig, though it was mostly a music club. He got a tryout.“I didn’t tell anyone, but I didn’t think he was so great,” Mr. Banducci recalled in “Seriously Funny.” He added: “I really looked at him and said, ‘Poor kid, he looks so skinny.’ I thought for 75 bucks a week he can’t hurt the place.”Mr. Sahl’s early performances stayed away from politics. But within weeks he was commenting on the national scene, and that’s when his audience began to build.He twitted Dwight D. Eisenhower for his dullness. Senator Joseph McCarthy became a favorite target: “Joe McCarthy doesn’t question what you say so much as your right to say it.” Lines from his act began appearing in newspaper columns, and when Herb Caen, the powerful San Francisco Chronicle columnist, gave Mr. Sahl’s act his imprimatur, his popularity took off.He made record albums. He played college concerts. He appeared on television with Steve Allen and Jack Paar.Mr. Sahl in costume for a sketch in the 1962 television special “The Good Years.”United Press InternationalIt was after Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 election that Mr. Sahl’s career first veered off track. He wrote barbed political one-liners for Kennedy the candidate, but when he turned his wit on the president-elect, tweaking him for his youth and for his family’s money and power, liberals who had loved his criticism of conservatism became notably cool.On the occasion of Kennedy’s presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Mr. Sahl remarked slyly to a crowd estimated at 100,000 that Nixon had sent a congratulatory telegram to Joseph P. Kennedy, the president’s father: “You haven’t lost a son, you’ve gained a country.”Whether Mr. Sahl was the victim of Kennedy family wrath or a blackball from liberal Hollywood, as he sometimes claimed, or whether his own thorniness was to blame — he bickered with producers and missed a number of engagements, and he was fired from a starring role in a 1964 Broadway play, Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” — gigs were fewer and farther between in the 1960s. In 1966, his attempt to open his own nightclub in Los Angeles failed when, he said, backers vanished after press previews.“My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,” he said from the stage at one preview. “The same people who like jokes about John Foster Dulles and Goldwater suddenly freeze when they hear satirical humor about Vietnam or the war on poverty.”Sahl the ‘Disturber’Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence, secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don’t think Gene McCarthy is bad company. I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company.“I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.”Mr. Sahl in performance at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley, Calif., in 2014. He continued to perform there regularly until last year.Josh Edelson/ReutersMr. Sahl was married and divorced four times, first to Ms. Babior; then to China Lee, the first Asian American model to be a Playboy centerfold, from whom he was divorced for the second time in 1991; and finally to Kenslea Motter, from whom he was divorced in 2009. Mr. Sahl and his second wife had a son, Mort Jr., who died in 1996 of a drug overdose. No immediate family members survive.Though he never reclaimed his central place in the entertainment firmament, Mr. Sahl was somewhat resurgent in the 1970s, partly because Watergate had reinvigorated the public appetite for derision aimed at politicians. He recorded an album, “Sing a Song of Watergate”; was booked by television hosts like Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and David Frost; and continued to do college concerts.“I’m not 18 anymore,” he lamented in “Heartland,” “but I’m the angriest man on any campus I visit.”Indeed, Mr. Sahl never lost his fervor for pointing out life’s ironies and the hypocrisies of public figures. In 1987, in the wake of Jackie Mason’s successful one-man show, “The World According to Me!” he reappeared on Broadway in one of his own, “Mort Sahl on Broadway,” and he continued to perform in clubs long after that.In recent years, feisty as ever despite deteriorating health, he had been performing one night a week in Mill Valley, where he had moved after four decades in Beverly Hills. His performances, at the Throckmorton Theater, were also streamed online and continued until the onset of the pandemic.Mr. Sahl with his fellow comedian Robin Williams backstage at the Throckmorton Theater in an undated photo.Reuters“I work as a disturber,” Mr. Sahl said in a Times interview after a 2004 performance, a reminder of lines from other decades and how little he had changed.Even at the height of his fame, in 1960, he was sardonic, bitterly ironic, unsparing.“I’m the intellectual voice of the era,” he said to Time magazine, “which is a good measure of the era.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      Sonny Osborne, Bluegrass Innovator, Is Dead at 83

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      He and his brother, Bobby, pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing that broke with bluegrass tradition. He was also an influential banjo player.NASHVILLE — Sonny Osborne, the banjo player and singer who, with his older brother, Bobby, led one of the most innovative and beloved bands in bluegrass music, died on Sunday at his home in nearby Hendersonville, Tenn. He was 83.His death, after a series of strokes, was confirmed by his friend and protégé Lincoln Hensley.Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.Addressing the group’s critics in a 2000 interview with the music magazine No Depression, Mr. Osborne recalled the allegations of betrayal that were leveled against the band for “going electric” — censure redolent of that heaped on Bob Dylan for appearing with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.“They thought, ‘Oh, they’ve changed, they did this, they did that, they’ve changed’ — well, we didn’t,” Mr. Osborne insisted. “We played the same things we normally played. We just added this stuff all around us.”Despite — or perhaps because of — their unorthodox approach, the Osbornes emerged as one of the few bluegrass bands of the 1950s and ’60s to consistently place recordings on the country charts. In 1971 they were named vocal group of the year by the Country Music Association, a rare distinction for a bluegrass ensemble.The Osbornes’ repertoire was as expansive as their sonic palette, encompassing “Old Kentucky Home,” by Randy Newman, and “Midnight Flyer,” a song written by Paul Craft (who also wrote the 1976 Bobby Bare hit, “Dropkick Me, Jesus”) and popularized by the Eagles shortly after the Osbornes recorded it in the early ’70s.The album “Yesterday, Today & the Osborne Brothers,” released in 1968, connected bluegrass’s past with its future.In 1968 they released “Yesterday, Today & the Osborne Brothers,” an album that connected bluegrass’s past with its future, broadening the idiom’s vocabulary while serving as a harbinger of intrepid inheritors like Newgrass Revival and Alison Krauss & Union Station.The first side of the original LP consisted of traditional fare associated with the bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe. The second side was steeped in material arranged in a more contemporary vein, including “Rocky Top,” a song written by the husband-and-wife team of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant (best known for their Everly Brothers hits).A Top 40 country hit spurred by hurtling instrumental solos by both Osborne brothers, “Rocky Top” was later adopted as an official song by the state of Tennessee. Like “Tennessee Hound Dog,” another Top 40 country hit written for the Osbornes by the Bryants, “Rocky Top” was an unabashed paean to the mountain culture of the brothers’ childhood:Rocky Top, you’ll always beHome sweet home to me.Good ol’ Rocky TopRocky Top, TennesseeRocky Top, Tennessee.Sonny Osborne was born on Oct. 29, 1937, in Thousandsticks, an Appalachian enclave near Hyden, Ky., where he and his brother grew up. Their parents, Robert and Daisy (Dixon) Osborne, were schoolteachers; their father supplemented the family income by working in his parents’ general store.Mr. Osborne took up the banjo at 11, after the family had moved to Dayton, Ohio. He and his brother started their own band in 1953, while Sonny, still in high school, also played briefly with Bill Monroe. In 1954 the brothers made a half-dozen recordings with the flamboyant bluegrass bandleader Jimmy Martin.“We didn’t want to be farmers,” Mr. Osborne said in his No Depression interview. “Music was the only thing we wanted to do, that’s it.”The Osbornes joined the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, W.Va., in 1956 and remained there for the rest of the decade. Among their most acclaimed recordings from this period were “Ruby, Are You Mad?,” a barnburner, featuring both Osborne brothers on banjo, written by the old-timey singer Cousin Emmy (a.k.a. Cynthia May Carver), and “Once More,” an old-fashioned love song. Both were released by MGM Records in the late 1950s and credited to the Osborne Brothers and Red Allen, who was featured on tenor vocals and acoustic guitar in early incarnations of the group.The Osbornes became the first bluegrass band to perform on a college campus, appearing in 1960 at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio before taking their Appalachian “folk” music to places in the northeast like New York University and Club 47 in Boston.The Osbornes signed with the Nashville division of Decca Records, then headed by the celebrated producer Owen Bradley, in 1963. A year later they joined the Grand Ole Opry. They also began bucking bluegrass tradition in earnest by, among other things, supplementing their performances with drums and dobro.The Osbornes recorded extensively for Decca (which later became MCA) before they left the label in 1974, disappointed over not having had more than middling success on country radio. A return to a more traditional approach rejuvenated their career, securing their reputation over the next three decades as bluegrass elders alongside giants like Flatt & Scruggs, Mr. Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. They were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1994.From left, Bobby Osborne, Sonny Osborne and Daryl Mosley in concert in 2002.John Dunham/The Messenger-Inquirer, via Associated PressMr. Osborne retired from performing in 2005 after suffering a shoulder injury. He nevertheless remained active in bluegrass circles by promoting his own line of banjos and writing “Ask Sonny Anything,” a weekly column for Bluegrass Today that brimmed with the same energy and wit he had once flashed onstage.Besides his brother, Mr. Osborne is survived by his wife of 63 years, Judy Wachter Osborne; his sister, Louise Williams; a son, Steven; a daughter, Karen Davenport; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.In 1965 Mr. Osborne began experimenting with a special tuning that gave his banjo a timbre redolent of that of an electric instrument, or even at times of horns or a steel guitar. What he discovered, fed by his omnivorous taste in music, did more than shape his approach to banjo-playing, which became more wide-ranging; it also shaped the sonic directions the Osbornes would take for the remainder of the decade — and beyond.“The notes themselves came from constant listening to every other kind of music that you can imagine,” Mr. Osborne explained in 2000. “Steel guitars and electric guitars, horns, saxophone, trumpet, piano — if you listened to all that stuff, if you were to be a huge fan of the kind of music that I listened to, you’d hear a little bit of everything in there.“There’s some of everybody in the notes that I played, but when you put them on the banjo, then it’s a whole different ballgame.” More

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      Dee Pop, Drummer and Downtown New York Fixture, Dies at 65

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      Initially known for his tight and soulful playing with the celebrated post-punk band Bush Tetras, he later became an entrepreneur of avant-garde music.Dee Pop, a drummer who first found grimy rock stardom as a founding member of the underground New York band Bush Tetras during the no wave and post-punk scene of the late 1970s, and who later became an elder statesman of the city’s alternative music scene, died on Oct. 9 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 65.His brother, Tom Papadopoulos, said the cause was heart failure.Some 40 years ago, an avant-garde punk movement was rumbling from the underground scene below 14th Street. Bands like the Contortions, Liquid Liquid, D.N.A. and 8 Eyed Spy led the charge, playing nightly at venues like the Mudd Club, Tier 3 and CBGB. Amid the fray emerged the moment’s must-see band, Bush Tetras, who disbanded just four years later but left a profound impact on the scene.The female-fronted quartet, often clad in headbands and leopard-print scarves, played a danceable breed of post-punk rooted in jagged guitar hooks and funky rhythms. Key to the band’s dub-struck groove was their leather-jacketed drummer, Dee Pop, whose tight playing laced some soul into the nihilism of the no wave era.“The funk part of it,” Mr. Pop recently told The Village Sun, “became central to our sound. I guess I kind of destroyed no wave by putting a 4/4 beat to it. That’s what made the Bush Tetras a little more accessible.”The band’s other members were the vocalist Cynthia Sley, the guitarist Pat Place and the bassist Laura Kennedy (who died in 2011). The group’s “Too Many Creeps,” a punk anthem about the frustration of having to dodge being hassled by men on city streets, was released in 1980 and became a dance-floor hit. The rock critic Robert Christgau wrote at the time that it “summed up the Lower East Side circa 1980.”Thurston Moore, the singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth, said that in his 20s he admired what he described as the band’s abiding Downtown cool.“When Bush Tetras first started playing out I was extremely impressed,” Mr. Moore said in an email, “and very envious.” Bush Tetras gradually started performing beyond the underground scene, at venues like the Roseland Ballroom and Irving Plaza, and shared bills with bands including X, Bad Brains and Gang of Four. They were a supporting act for the Clash during the band’s storied 1981 run at Bond’s International Casino in Times Square, and the Clash’s drummer, Topper Headon, produced their EP, “Rituals.” But before the group could record a full album, they disbanded in 1983.“When I first left Bush Tetras in ’83, one reason was that I felt we’d gone as far as we could,” Mr. Pop told The Village Sun. “I was very dissatisfied and looked at all of my influences — my love for Béla Bartók or King Oliver or 1940s and ’50s R&B — and that wasn’t what Bush Tetras was about.”Indeed, Mr. Pop’s musicianship stood out as more than a gutsy punk-rock attitude.“He was a very versatile player, and that’s not something that can be said of many drummers who came out of the East Village post-punk scene,” Andy Schwartz, the editor and publisher of New York Rocker magazine, the scene’s bible at the time, said in a phone interview. “He could play blues, jazz, free jazz, post-punk. He never seemed to stop learning.”After Bush Tetras broke up, Mr. Pop drummed across genres.He first joined the Los Angeles punk band the Gun Club, then played with artists like Richard Lloyd and Jayne County. He was a member of Radio I-Ching, an experimental outfit that dabbled in blues and Americana and incorporated unusual stringed instruments like the lotar and the glissentar. He went on to jam with free-jazz luminaries like Roy Campbell Jr., Eddie Gale and William Parker.Mr. Pop performing with Bush Tetras at a 40th-anniversary show in New York in 2020. The band broke up in 1983 and reunited three decades later, after Mr. Pop had worked across genres with several other bands.Sherry RubelDee Pop was born Dimitri Constantin Papadopoulos on March 14, 1956, in the Forest Hills section of Queens. His father, Dino Papadopoulos, was a vascular surgeon; his mother, Gigi (Bakalis) Papadopoulos, was a homemaker and artist.She was also a jazz enthusiast and introduced him early on to drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. While his friends at school listened to Jethro Tull, Dimitri favored John Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He graduated from St. Paul’s School on Long Island in 1974 and studied journalism at the University at Buffalo.In addition to his brother, he is survived by his mother; a sister, Tara Papadopoulos; a daughter, Nikki Ziolkowski; a son, Charlie Papadopoulos; and a granddaughter. Two marriages, to Elizabeth Vogdes and the musician known as Deerfrance, ended in divorce.In the late 1990s, Mr. Pop began hosting a weekly performance series that roamed the East Village showcasing live avant-garde music. He started it at a tiny coffeehouse called the Internet Cafe before moving on to CBGB, where he secured the club’s basement space on Sundays.“I wanted diversity,” he said of the series. “I wanted to challenge people.”After CBGB closed in 2006, Mr. Pop moved the series to Jimmy’s No. 43, and The Village Voice called him an “avant guardian.” In recent years he held shows at Troost, a bar near his apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.Around 2015, Bush Tetras reunited. The group recorded an EP, “Take the Fall,” in 2018, and then put out a single, “There Is a Hum,” on Third Man Records. A boxed set, “Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras,” is to be released next month on Wharf Cat Records.Mr. Pop died the night before a release party was held at the Howl! Happening arts space in the East Village. The gathering turned into a memorial.As video clips featuring Mr. Pop’s furious drumming played on a projector screen, Pat Place and Cynthia Sley stood up in front of the crowd, holding each other as they remembered their bandmate.“He lived to drum,” Ms. Sley said. “He loved the Bush Tetras.”She choked up.“Bush Tetras,” she added, “is a force that cannot be stopped.” More

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      Jay Black, Soaring Lead Singer of the Americans, Dies at 82

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      His majestic baritone was the key to hits like “Only in America,” “Come a Little Bit Closer” and his signature song, “Cara, Mia.”Jay Black, whose majestic voice on songs like “Cara, Mia” and “Only in America” made Jay and the Americans a potent force in pop music in the 1960s, died on Friday in Queens. He was 82.His son Jason Blatt said the cause was pneumonia that led to cardiac arrest. He also had dementia, his family said.Jay and the Americans began to thrive before the arrival of the Beatles in the United States in 1964. With Mr. Black as their lead singer, the group’s first major hit was “Only in America,” which peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1963. That was followed the next year by “Come a Little Bit Closer,” which rose to No. 3, and “Let’s Lock the Door (and Throw Away the Key),” which hit No. 11.In 1965, their version of “Some Enchanted Evening,” from the musical “South Pacific,” peaked at No. 13.Mr. Black — whose original name was David Blatt — was the second “Jay” to front the Americans. He replaced Jay Traynor in 1963, a year after the group’s first hit, “She Cried,” climbed to No. 5 on the chart.Mr. Black’s signature song was “Cara, Mia,” a romantic ballad that peaked at No. 4 in 1965. Mr. Black, who had an impressive vocal range, opened the song slowly, almost operatically, before the melody turned upbeat. Memorably, he held certain notes for long, extended beats.He said two singers had warned him that he was endangering his voice by stretching it to its limits: Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons and Frank Sinatra.“So you’re the ‘Cara, Mia’ guy?” Mr. Black recalled Sinatra saying in 1977 when they were filming “Contract on Cherry Street” (1977), a television movie in which Mr. Black had a rare acting role. In an interview with The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 2010, Mr. Black said that Sinatra had advised him, “You better lower your key or you’re going to lose your voice.”That voice sustained him as a solo oldies act long after Jay and the Americans broke up in 1973. But in 2017, during one of his last performances, Mr. Black apologized to fans at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., for struggling to reach his former vocal heights.“I’m not hitting any notes,” he said, explaining that he had not sung in more than a year. “I can’t sing.”David Blatt was born on Nov. 2, 1938, in Astoria, Queens, and grew up in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents, Herman and Francis (Smith) Blatt, brought him up in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. David first sang publicly in the choir at Temple Beth-El.But he said he was thrown out of New Utrecht High School and three yeshivas.“I was a bad kid,” he told The Forward in 2014. “I was a wise guy. When I graduated from eighth grade, I was the class comedian. I was always a troublemaker.”Mr. Black began his singing career with two doo-wop groups, the Two Chaps and the Empires. Marty Kupersmith, who performs as Marty Sanders, had been in both groups with him before becoming one of the Americans; when Mr. Traynor left, he invited Mr. Black to replace him. Mr. Black was selling shoes at Thom McAn at the time.Although he had agreed to change his name to Jay, Mr. Blatt did not become Jay Black until he appeared on Mike Douglas’s talk show. He said that when Mr. Douglas asked him his last name, he misheard “Blatt” as “Black,” and from then on he was Jay Black.Mr. Black did not just have a stunning voice; he was also good-looking and could be as funny as a borscht belt comedian. But he was a heavy gambler, an addiction that started in high school and grew as he became more successful. He had also been a close friend of the mobster John Gotti since they were young men.Mr. Black in the mid-1960s. He was selling shoes at Thom McAn in 1963 when he was asked to replace the original “Jay” as lead singer of the Americans.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“I went to his trial,” Mr. Black told The New York Times in 1994. “I took some heat about it. I got death threats. But I love the family. I sang at this daughter’s wedding. I sang at his son’s wedding.”Mr. Black landed in bankruptcy court in 2005. He owed $500,000 in back taxes dating to 1993 because of his gambling addiction. Although he won a battle to continue to perform under his name the next year, he could not prevent the court from auctioning off the name “Jay and the Americans” to one of the group’s founding members, Sandy Yaguda (known professionally as Sandy Deanne).“Having an impostor group go out, that bothers me,” Mr. Black told Newsday after the court allowed him to keep his name. “I don’t know who’s going to be singing these songs. Even if someone does a great impersonation of me, it’s still not me.”Mr. Yaguda formed a new version of Jay and the Americans in late 2006, reuniting with two other original members, Mr. Sanders and Howie Kane, and adding a third “Jay”: Jay Reincke, whose given name is John.“We shared both wonderful and very contentious times,” the group said in a statement on Facebook after Mr. Black’s death, “and much like an ex-wife, we are so proud of the beautiful children we created. We’ll always remember The Voice.”In addition to his son Jason, Mr. Black is survived by two other sons, William and Beau; a daughter, Samantha; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; a sister, Gail Decker; and a brother, Norman Blatt. His marriages to Marsha Garbowitz, Kathy Izzo and Andi Francis ended in divorce. He died in a hospital.In February 1964, two days after the Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Jay and the Americans and the Righteous Brothers opened for them at their first concert in the United States, at the Washington Coliseum. When the fans loudly chanted “We want the Beatles!” while the Americans were performing, Mr. Black felt he had to react.“Jay, being who he is,” Mr. Yaguda told the Vinyl Dialogues blog in 2020, “went out and said, ‘Hey, man, I’m glad you all came out to see us tonight.’ And they all cracked up. That won them over, so they shut up and listened to us and, when we were done, gave us a big round of applause.” More

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      Dorothy Steel, Whose Big-Screen Career Had a Late Start, Dies at 95

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      She was cast in “Black Panther” at 90, not long after she began acting professionally. “As soon as we saw her,” the movie’s casting director said, “we wanted her.”Dorothy Steel was 90 and had been acting professionally for little more than a year when her agent asked her, in late 2016, if she wanted to audition for a role in “Black Panther,” the Marvel Studios film set in the fantastical African nation of Wakanda.She was uncertain. So she said no.“I said, ‘There is no way I’m going to be in no comic strip at my age,’” she recalled telling her agent, Cindy Butler, when she appeared on Steve Harvey’s television show in 2018. “But she’s very persistent. I have to give her credit. She said, ‘Miss Dorothy, you can do this.’”She relented after getting an extra push from her grandson, Niles Wardell.“She was on the fence about it,” Mr. Wardell said in a phone interview, “and when she brought it to my attention, I said: ‘Grandma, you always talk about stepping out on faith and doing the things you love. This is your opportunity.’”He added, “She wasn’t so much concerned that it was a comic-strip movie, but that the role was too big for her.”Before she auditioned, Ms. Steel studied videos of Nelson Mandela on YouTube to help her develop a credible accent. She then auditioned on video for the role of a tribe leader, reading lines from the script. Ms. Butler emailed the video to Sarah Finn, the film’s casting director, who quickly agreed to hire her.“We found her late in the process,” Ms. Finn said by phone. “She was extraordinary. As soon as we saw her, we wanted her. She had an incredible spirit, warmth, humor and intelligence. We were thrilled to cast her.”She was in a few scenes but said only one line, to T’Challa, the king of Wakanda and the movie’s title character, played by Chadwick Boseman: “Wakanda does not need a warrior right now. We need a king.”Ms. Steel died on Oct. 14 in a hospital in Detroit at 95. She had completed most of her filming for the “Black Panther” sequel, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” when she got sick. She was flown home by Marvel to Detroit, where she had been living for the last year.Her grandson, her only immediate survivor, confirmed the death.Dorothy May Steel was born on Feb. 23, 1926, in Flint, Mich. She worked for many years as a senior revenue officer for the Internal Revenue Service in Detroit. Her marriage to Warren Wardell ended with his death.After retiring in 1984, she lived for 20 years in the Caribbean, on St. Croix, before moving to Atlanta to be near her grandson and her son, Scott, who died in 2018.Ms. Steel began acting in her 80s in the annual plays staged at the Frank Bailey Senior Center in Riverdale, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. She had never acted before “and wanted to try something new to see if she could do it,” said Elaine Jackson, the former manager of the center, who wrote the plays, including one in which Ms. Steel played a teenager.Ms. Butler said that while Ms. Steel was playing the voice of God in one of the plays, Greg Alan Williams, an actor and drama teacher, happened to be there and was impressed enough to offer her free lessons. Another student, a client of Ms. Butler’s, suggested that Ms. Steel sign with Ms. Butler.“So she came in one day and I said, ‘Spend a day with me,’” Ms. Butler said. “After that meeting I had to sign her. She was going to work.”Within weeks, Ms. Butler had found work for Ms. Steel. It was her presence, Ms. Butler said, that brought her jobs.“When she spoke, she spoke with authority,” she said. “Her voice was strong. And at her age she was memorizing lines without a problem.”Ms. Steel’s credits also include “Merry Christmas, Baby” (2016), a television movie; “Daisy Winters” (2017), a feature film; and four episodes of the prime-time soap opera “Saints & Sinners” in 2016, as well as a commercial for the South Carolina Lottery and a public service announcement for the DeKalb County Board of Health.Acting provided her with a “protective cubicle,” Ms. Steel told The Washington Post in 2018. “You’re protected from the world,” she said. “And that’s the first time in my life I felt absolutely secure.”On the set of “Black Panther,” she recalled, she became a grandmotherly presence to the cast, and each day she would get a hug and kiss from Mr. Boseman, who died in 2020.“We were one big melting pot of Black people, and we knew we were doing something special that had never been done before,” Ms. Steel told WSB-TV in Atlanta in 2018. “You know?” More