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      Cliff Freeman, Adman Who Asked, ‘Where’s the Beef?,’ Dies at 80

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      His humorous touch was evident in commercials for Wendy’s, Little Caesars, Fox Sports and many other clients. “We have to win with wit,” he once said.Cliff Freeman, the award-winning copywriter and creative director behind many witty television commercials, most memorably the one for Wendy’s in which a gravelly-voiced old woman shouts, “Where’s the beef?,” at the sight of a puny hamburger patty in an oversized bun, died on Sept. 5 at his home in Manhattan. He was 80.The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Susan (Kellner) Freeman, said.In a career of nearly 40 years, Mr. Freeman’s antic sense of humor made brands stand out — first at the advertising agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample and then, starting in 1987, at his own small agency, Cliff Freeman & Partners.“Cliff has consistently done some of the funniest, smartest ads on TV,” Jim Patterson, the chairman of J. Walter Thompson’s North American operations, told The Tampa Bay Times in 2005. Mr. Freeman’s work, he added, “is always fresh and original.”For the candy bars Almond Joy and Mounds, Mr. Freeman coined the song lyrics “Sometimes you feel like a nut/Sometimes you don’t.” For Little Caesars, he scripted (and voiced) the toga-clad Roman gnome who declares, “Pizza! Pizza!” and “Cheeser! Cheeser!”For Philips, Mr. Freeman’s “Time to change your light bulb” campaign featured a commercial in which a man inadvertently flirts with a burly workman in an elevator, instead of the beautiful woman he thought was beside him before the lights went out.And for Outpost.com, an online computer retailer looking to raise its profile, gerbils (not real ones) were fired from a cannon, aimed at the second “o” in an Outpost sign.“Almost all our clients are Davids up against Goliaths,” Mr. Freeman told New York magazine in 1993. “We have to win with wit.”From left, Elizabeth Shaw, Mildred Lane and Clara Peller in what was probably Mr. Freeman’s best-known commercial: the 1989 spot for Wendy’s in which Ms. Peller asks, “Where’s the beef?”Cliff Freeman and CompanyIn 1984, Wendy’s was looking to differentiate its burger, the modestly named Single, from McDonald’s Big Mac and Burger King’s Whopper. Research found that the Wendy’s Single patty was larger than the patties of the Big Mac and Whopper.Working with the director Joe Sedelmaier, Mr. Freeman created separate commercials, one with three old women and one with three old men, scrutinizing the fluffy hamburger bun before seeing the tiny patty inside. The breakout version was the one with the women, specifically the squawky octogenarian Clara Peller, who demands to know where the beef is.“It went viral globally before the term was coined,” Dan Dahlen, the former director of national advertising for Wendy’s International, said in a phone interview. “And as we got into the election, Walter Mondale turned to Gary Hart” — during a debate among candidates for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination — “and asked, ‘Where’s the beef?’”Mr. Freeman was still at Dancer Fitzgerald a year later when he wrote another popular Wendy’s commercial, which promoted the chain’s breadth of food choices by parodying the lack of choices in Soviet society. In a faux Russian fashion show, a heavyset woman struts on a runway, modeling the same shapeless dress for day wear, evening wear (accessorized with a flashlight) and swimwear (with a beach ball).Mr. Freeman said it was his favorite ad, in part because of the response.“The entire Russian government protested it,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2003. “How much more reaction can you get than that?”In 1985, Mr. Freeman wrote another popular Wendy’s commercial, which promoted the chain’s breadth of choices by parodying the lack of them in a faux Soviet fashion show. “The entire Russian government protested it,” he said proudly.Freeman and CompanyClifford Lee Freeman was born on Feb. 14, 1941, in Vicksburg, Miss., outside Jackson, and moved with his family to St. Petersburg, Fla., when he was 6. His father, James, and his mother, Lillian (Pennebaker) Freeman, owned a dairy business and motels.After graduating from Florida State University in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in advertising, Mr. Freeman joined Liller Neal Battle & Lindsey, an Atlanta agency. He moved to McCann Erickson in 1968 and, two years later, to Dancer Fitzgerald, where he worked for 17 years.The Little Caesars pizza chain was one of the first accounts Mr. Freeman won after starting his own agency, and it remained a signature client for 11 years as it fought for market share against competitors like Pizza Hut and Domino’s.“Well, you know, pizza is a fun product,” Mr. Freeman told Luerzer’s Archive, an industry magazine, in a 1998 interview. “Everyone sits around and eats pizza together, so you’ve got to have fun when you advertise it. You certainly can’t treat it seriously.”One ad Mr. Freeman devised emphasized the stretchiness of pizza cheese, to slapstick effect (a baby goes on a wild ride in her high chair throughout the house while holding onto a slice). In another, a goofy worker for an unnamed rival chain tries to impress a customer by contorting a pizza box, origami-style, into the shape of a pterodactyl (underscoring its offering of just a pizza and a box, compared with Little Caesars’s two pizzas for one low price).Those commercials helped lift sales of Little Caesars 138 percent from 1988 to 1993. Nonetheless, after sales flattened and Little Caesars considered changing ad agencies, Mr. Freeman ended his firm’s association with the chain in 1998.Over the years, Mr. Freeman’s agency won many Clio Awards for advertising excellence. It won for commercials created for clients like Little Caesars, Philips and Outpost.com, and for a series of ads for Fox Sports’ National Hockey League coverage that demonstrated how basketball, bowling, billiards and golf would be better if they were played more physically, like hockey.Neal Tiles, a marketing executive for Fox Sports, told The New York Times in 1998 that it had chosen Mr. Freeman’s agency because it took “creative risks in a strategic way” on so many campaigns.But Cliff Freeman & Partners lasted only 11 more years. Amid a recession, executive turmoil and client departures, it shut down in 2009.In addition to his wife, Mr. Freeman is survived by his son, Scott; his sister, Chase McEwen; and his brother, Hunter. His marriage to Ann Angell ended in divorce.Mr. Freeman was well aware that markets like fast food were hypercompetitive, but he tried not to take his work too seriously; success, he maintained, often required a humorous touch.“I think when you’re slamming the competition, people find it kind of hard to take unless you do it in a way that is really fun,” he told Luerzer’s Archive. “Then they are able to accept it.” More

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      Roger Michell, Director of ‘Notting Hill,’ Is Dead at 65

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      He was an accomplished theater director as well as a filmmaker. But he was best known for his blockbuster romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.Roger Michell, the British theater and film director best known for “Notting Hill,” the wildly popular 1999 romantic comedy that somewhat overshadowed the rest of his extensive and diverse body of work, died on Wednesday. He was 65.His family announced his death in a statement released by his publicist. The statement did not say where he died or what the cause was.Mr. Michell’s first film, a 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel “Persuasion,” caught the eye of the screenwriter Richard Curtis, who had scored a major success with “Four Weddings and a Funeral” the year before. Mr. Curtis was looking for someone to direct his next screenplay, about a humble London bookseller who falls in love with a movie star.Though he found the idea of trying to match a blockbuster like “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to be daunting, Mr. Michell said yes immediately. He knew he wanted to cast Julia Roberts as the movie star, but he cast around for a male lead before settling on Hugh Grant, who had also starred in “Four Weddings.”“We toyed with the idea of casting someone else because of an anxiety about the film being seen as a retread, a sequel,” Mr. Michell told The Guardian in 1999. “Then we thought, ‘How ridiculous — we have the greatest actor in the world for this kind of material, wanting to do this film.’”Mr. Michell’s worries proved to be unwarranted: “Notting Hill” grossed $262 million worldwide, $6 million more than “Four Weddings” had. It was the top-grossing British film at the time (it has since been surpassed by the “Harry Potter” movies, among others), though Mr. Michell was ambivalent about its success.“Actually I sometimes wonder whether doing ‘Notting Hill’ was a bad thing,” he told The Birmingham Post in 2002, “because it was so successful, everybody is so surprised when I do anything different.”Julia Roberts, Huge Grant and Emma Chambers in Mr. Michell’s best-known movie, “Notting Hill” (1999).Clive Coote / Universal PicturesHe continued to notch critical and commercial successes. His next film was “Changing Lanes,” a big-budget thriller with Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson that did well at the box office, though most of his subsequent films were smaller productions, among them “The Mother” (2003), about a middle-aged woman’s affair with a younger man, and “Enduring Love” (2004), an adaptation of a novel by Ian McEwan. Both films starred Daniel Craig, one of the many actors who worked with Mr. Michell frequently.Mr. Michell was supposed to direct Mr. Craig as James Bond in “Quantum of Solace” (2008), but he backed out after he realized that the film had no script and was being rushed forward to meet the producers’ release date.He remained a popular director in London theater while continuing to work in film. He had a personal policy of directing only new plays, the exception being the work of Harold Pinter, his hero.“I have strong views about the kind of work I want to do,” he told The Financial Times in 2004. “That’s all that guides me. I don’t have any other kind of strategy. I’m ambitious — what else is there?”Mr. Michell was born on June 5, 1956, in Pretoria, South Africa, where his British father was stationed as a diplomat. As a child he moved around often; he lived in Damascus and Beirut, and he was in Prague to witness tanks rolling through during the city during the Soviet invasion of 1968.Mr. Michell’s first marriage, to the actress Kate Buffery, ended in divorce. He was separated from his second wife, the actress Anna Maxwell Martin. He is also survived by his children, Harry, Rosie, Maggie and Nancy.Mr. Michell studied English at the University of Cambridge. After graduating in 1977, he began working for a theater company in Brighton. A year later he got his first big break: a job as an assistant director at the Royal Theater Company in London.There he worked alongside old theater hands like the playwrights John Osborne and Samuel Beckett — whom he remembered, in a 2017 interview with The Sunday Star-Times, a New Zealand newspaper, as “the opposite of this sort of terrifying eagle presence that you might suspect from photographs.”He also worked with the next generation of directors and writers, including Danny Boyle, who would win an Academy Award for directing “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008), and Hanif Kureishi, an up-and-coming novelist and playwright.Mr. Michell and Mr. Kureishi later became collaborators. Mr. Michell directed a 1993 adaptation of Mr. Kureishi’s novel “The Buddha of Suburbia” (1990) as a BBC series, and Mr. Kureishi wrote the script for two of Mr. Michell’s films, “The Mother” and “Venus” (2006), starring Peter O’Toole.Mr. Michell’s most recent film is “The Duke,” a comedy about the 1961 theft of a painting of the Duke of Marlborough from the National Gallery in London, starring Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent. It was shown at film festivals in 2020 and is scheduled for general release next year.Although his success with “Notting Hill” vaulted him into the top ranks of English-language directors, Mr. Michell kept a low profile, preferring to let his actors and screenwriters shine — a quality that may explain why so many actors liked working with him.“As a species, stars are pretty frightening: they’re iconic and you’re not,” he said in the Guardian interview. “But like any other performers, they thrive on a good environment. Part of my job is to give the impression of enormous calm; it’s not necessarily how I feel.” More

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      María Mendiola, Half of a Chart-Topping Disco Duo, Dies at 69

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      “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” which she and a fellow ballet dancer recorded under the name Baccara, became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s.MADRID — María Mendiola, a member of the Spanish duo Baccara, whose “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s, died here on Sept. 11. She was 69.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her family. They did not give the exact cause, but said that she had been dealing with a blood deficiency for two decades.Baccara, the duo of Ms. Mendiola and Mayte Mateos, achieved instant fame with “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” the first song they ever recorded, which was released in 1977 and went on to become the most successful disco song by a female duo. It sold about 18 million copies worldwide and topped the charts in Britain, Japan and several other countries.Ms. Mendiola and Ms. Mateos were dancers with the company of Spain’s national television broadcaster when they met. At the suggestion of Ms. Mendiola, who thought that their careers would last longer if they switched to singing, they left to form their own act, originally called Venus, which began performing in 1976. Their debut, at a club in Zaragoza, was short-lived: The management fired them for being “too elegant” — another way of saying that they refused to do lap dances for the club’s patrons.The duo appeared for the first time on television in 1977. Their breakthrough came that same year following a chance encounter with Leon Deane of RCA Records, who saw them perform in a hotel while he was on vacation in the Canary Islands and suggested that they visit RCA’s recording studios in Hamburg.RCA agreed to produce Baccara’s first album and included “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” an English-language song whose rights the label already owned, although it had not yet assigned it to any of its artists.Baccara spent four years with RCA and released four albums, including several other songs that ranked high on the international charts, although none matched the success of their first hit. The duo also toured worldwide, including in the Soviet Union. In performance, Ms. Mendiola always dressed in white and Ms. Mateos in black.But the two singers had a major fallout in 1980 over who should be the lead voice on their song “Sleepy Time Toy.” Ms. Mendiola filed a lawsuit to block the song, which had just been released and had to be withdrawn from the market.The singers continued their feud and stopped talking to each other, and the composer of most of their songs, Rolf Soja, decided to quit working with them. In 1981, Baccara released their final album with RCA, “Bad Boys”; coming at a time when the popularity of disco music was starting to wane, it was not a big success. RCA did not renew Baccara’s recording contract, and the two singers formalized their split.María Eugenia Martínez Mendiola was born on April 4, 1952, in Madrid. Her mother, Lola Mendiola, was a homemaker; her father, Emilio Martínez, was a police official at the Madrid airport.Ms. Mendiola studied at an Italian school in Madrid and trained to be a ballet dancer at the national school there before joining the Spanish state broadcaster’s dance troupe.Even though both singers were Spanish, Baccara represented Luxembourg in the 1978 Eurovision song contest, with a song about a holiday romance called “Parlez-Vous Français?” (Ms. Mendiola spoke five languages, including French.) Luxembourg’s entry finished seventh in the competition.After Baccara broke up, the two singers pursued separate careers. In 1981, Ms. Mendiola formed another duo, New Baccara, with another former ballet dancer, Marisa Pérez. While they never came close to matching the fame of the original Baccara, one of their songs, “Call Me Up,” was a hit in Spain in 1987 and also did well in Germany.Ms. Pérez ended her career in 2008 because of an illness, and a niece, Laura Mendiola, replaced her as Ms. Mendiola’s partner. In 2010, Ms. Mendiola formed a final partnership — Baccara Featuring María Mendiola — with another singer, Cristina Sevilla, who had previously collaborated for six years with Ms. Mateos. Their most recent single, “Gimme Your Love,” was released in 2018.Ms. Sevilla said that she had planned to continue with Ms. Mendiola, but that the pandemic had put their most recent concert projects on hold.“María was a powerful woman, who was always laughing even in the difficult moments,” Ms. Sevilla said. “Apart from being my partner, she was my real friend.”Ms. Mendiola is survived by a son, Jimmy Lim, and three grandchildren.“Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” had an unexpected revival, thanks to a Scottish soccer player, Andrew Considine, who had danced to the song at his bachelor party. Last year, a video of him and other players dancing to the song went viral, which inspired a cover version of the song by a Glasgow rock band, the Fratellis. The song also became an unofficial soccer anthem in Scotland, belted out by fans in the stadium during the recent European championships.While Scotland and soccer put Baccara back in the spotlight, Ms. Mendiola told the British news media that she wasn’t impressed by the Scottish version of the chart-topping song. It was, she said, “not my cup of tea.” More

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      Carmen Balthrop, Soprano Known for Joplin Opera Role, Dies at 73

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      After winning a vocal competition in 1975, she starred in “Treemonisha,” which ended up on Broadway. She also sang for a senator.The soprano Carmen Balthrop made her Metropolitan Opera debut on April 6, 1977. Thirteen days later she made an entirely different sort of debut, in a hearing room of the United States Senate.That day Ms. Balthrop, still early in a career that would take her to opera and concert stages all over the world, was one of a number of people testifying at a meeting of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in support of funding for the arts.It was a dreary and underattended meeting, with Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon and the subcommittee chairman, the only member of the panel present. Dreary, that is, until Senator Hatfield, skeptical of the funding request, challenged Ms. Balthrop’s assertion that opera singers were a disciplined and hard-working lot.“He said, ‘Come on, are you really that disciplined?’” she told Knight-Ridder afterward. “And he said he’d like to hear some of the results. I said, ‘Why, certainly.’”She stood up and sang “Signore, ascolta” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”“He was delighted and declared a recess,” she said, “and later on, we got the money.”Ms. Balthrop, a noted Black star when opera was still early in its efforts to become more diverse, died on Sept. 5 at her home in Mitchellville, Md. She was 73.Her husband, Patrick A. Delaney, said the cause was cancer.Two years before that impromptu Senate performance, Ms. Balthrop’s career took off after she wowed audiences at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in April 1975, winning that competition. During the finals, she had sung that same “Turandot” excerpt, as well as “Che sento? O Dio!” from Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” performances that had been broadcast live on National Public Radio.“The announcement of Miss Balthrop’s victory brought cheers from the audience, which had clearly approved of her singing,” The New York Times reported.Later that year she landed perhaps her most prominent role, the title character in “Treemonisha,” Scott Joplin’s folk opera about an 18-year-old Black girl who is trying to lead her people to a better life. The opera, written before World War I, was not produced in Joplin’s lifetime, but in 1972 a version of it was staged in Atlanta, and three years later the Houston Grand Opera mounted a production with Ms. Balthrop in the lead.The opera was performed in Houston seven times as part of a free opera series, with thousands attending. At the final performance, the opera’s finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” was reprised three times for the enthusiastic crowd.That production moved to Broadway. At the time, Elizabeth McCann was managing director of Nederlander Productions, which brought the show to New York. (Ms. McCann died this month.) She told The Times that the ability of Ms. Balthrop, who was then 27, to portray a teenager was a large part of the reason.“Carmen Balthrop, who plays the title role, is just tremendous,” she said. “The part needs an enchanting and innocent girl with strength. How often do you get a combination like that?”Ms. Balthrop as Pamina in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role in 1977.James Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesCarmen Arlene Balthrop was born on May 14, 1948, in Washington. Her father, John, worked in the printing office of the Department of Justice, and her mother, Clementine (Jordan) Balthrop, was a homemaker.As Ms. Balthrop often told the story, she set her career goal early — when she was 8. Her father had a hobby: In the basement of the family home, he would tinker with radios and televisions. She had an assigned Saturday chore: to clean the house while her mother went to the market.“One Saturday I was running the vacuum cleaner, and I turned it off because I heard something very unusual coming from the basement,” where her father was testing a radio and speakers, she told “The Opera Diva Series,” a web interview program, in 2011.“I went to the top of the steps and I called out,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s opera.’”Specifically, it was the voice of Leontyne Price, the groundbreaking Black soprano.“Something was awakened in me,” Ms. Balthrop said, “and I began from that moment on to try to re-create that sound myself.”She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington in 1967 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland in 1971. The next year she received a master’s degree in music at the Catholic University of America.Her Met debut in 1977 was in “Die Zauberflöte,” in which she sang the role of Pamina. She performed with numerous other opera companies and symphonies, including Washington Opera, Deutsche Oper of Berlin and Opera Columbus in Ohio, where in 1999 she performed the title role in the world premiere of “Vanqui,” an opera about the travels of the souls of two slaves composed by Leslie Burrs and with a libretto by John A. Williams.Ms. Balthrop began a career as a teacher at the University of Maryland in 1985. She also filled administrative roles there, including coordinator of the voice and opera division.A marriage to Dorceal Duckens ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Delaney, whom she married in 1985, Ms. Balthrop is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Nicole Mosley; her daughter with Mr. Delaney, Camille Delaney-McNeil; and three grandchildren.In a blog entry on the University of Maryland website, Ms. Balthrop once wrote of being surprised by Ms. Price, who turned up unexpectedly at a rehearsal when Ms. Balthrop was preparing to perform in San Francisco.“There was no one in the hall,” she wrote of their encounter. “I was standing there with the voice that inspired me to sing. Every time I think about it, I just well up, because I don’t think people get to meet their idols very often.” More

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      Barbara Campbell Cooke, 85, Widow of the Slain Sam Cooke, Is Dead

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      They were teenage sweethearts, but their marriage turned tragic, and when she married the protégé singer Bobby Womack, the publicity was intense and the boos were loud.Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.Fifteen years later, Mr. Cooke, by then a pop superstar, was dead, murdered in a motel tryst gone awry. And only three months after his death, Barbara Campbell Cooke, his widow, would marry her husband’s protégé Bobby Womack, the gravelly-voiced soul singer and guitarist. Widely publicized, their union made them pariahs in their families, to much of the music community and to Mr. Cooke’s adoring fans.In her later years Ms. Cooke lived in relative obscurity, and when she died in April at 85, no public announcement was made, at her and her family’s wish. The death was recently confirmed by David Washington, a Detroit radio host who is close to the Cooke and Womack families. No cause was given.The Cookes’ life together and its aftermath were the stuff of Greek tragedy. Mr. Cooke, once a teenage gospel singer, was music royalty, a movie-star-handsome crooner of hits like “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World,” as well as the wrenching “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which would become a civil rights anthem.The son of a preacher, he took a firm stand in playing the American South, refusing to perform for segregated audiences. He was a canny businessman who retained the rights to his work and built a publishing and recording company to promote the work of others. He was a voracious reader, of everything from James Baldwin to William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” (Aretha Franklin, who as a young singer was often on tour with him, remembered buying the book just because he had it.)He was also a voracious womanizer. Mr. Cooke was 33 when he was shot by the manager of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles in December 1964 while chasing a prostitute who had stolen his clothes and money. Conspiracy theories still surround the death.Barbara was his teenage sweetheart but only one of many girlfriends. She had their daughter, Linda, when she was 17; three other women would also have daughters by Mr. Cooke.Barbara and Sam had married and divorced other people before marrying each other in Chicago in 1959, with Mr. Cooke’s disapproving father, the Rev. Charles Cook, performing the ceremony. The couple settled down in Los Angeles in a vine-covered Cape in the Hollywood area. (Mr. Cooke had added an “e” to his name at the start of his career.)The marriage was a hard bargain. Mr. Cooke, steely in his ambition and chronically unfaithful, went about his life while Ms. Cooke fended for herself. In his exhaustive biography “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke” (2005), Peter Guralnick noted how Ms. Cooke, whom he had interviewed at length, had tried to keep her end up, attempting to read James Baldwin at her husband’s prompting and joining a group of philanthropic African American women known as the Regalettes. And she had her own affairs, as she explained to Mr. Guralnick.In 1963, their third child, Vincent, drowned in their pool when he was 18 months old. A year later, Mr. Cooke was dead.When Mr. Cooke died, Ms. Cooke was still numb from grief over her son’s death and humiliated by the tawdry circumstances of her husband’s murder, she told Mr. Guralnick. She said she had welcomed the 19-year-old Mr. Womack into the house as a kind of protector. She was 29 at the time. At her urging, they married in early 1965.In his own memoir, “Bobby Womack: My Story” (2006), Mr. Womack likened Ms. Cooke’s proposal to a scene out of the “The Graduate,” the 1967 film in which a dazed and disillusioned young man is seduced by a friend of his parents. “If you promise to give me five years,” Ms. Cooke told Mr. Womack, by his account, “I will give you a lifetime. You know, whatever you need to do. I just need you to walk with me here.”Mr. Womack wrote of his new wife: “She could, and did, take a lot. She could endure.” He added: “She and Sam were a pair. They lived each other. They really did.”The marriage of Ms. Cooke and the soul-singer and guitarist Bobby Womack, a protégé of Sam Cooke’s, attracted wide publicity in 1965. Mr. Cooke had been murdered three months earlier. EBONY MediaBut it upset many people to see Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke’s clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke’s widow about. The couple received hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter, Linda, by then a teenager. When Barbara found them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, according to Mr. Womack’s book.) They divorced in 1970.Years later, Linda Cooke married Mr. Womack’s brother Cecil, and the couple became a recording duo, Womack & Womack. Linda now goes by the name Zeriiya Zekkariyas, a nod to her African heritage.Ms. Cooke and Bobby Womack had a son, whom they named Vincent, after the Cookes’ drowned baby. Vincent Womack struggled with drugs and alcohol, his father wrote, and committed suicide in 1986 when he was 21.Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”Barbara Campbell and her twin sister, Beverly, were born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Chicago. She attended Doolittle Elementary School. Mr. Cooke had graduated from high school when they met, but Barbara, a teenage mother, worked two jobs to support herself and her child.In 1986, when Mr. Cooke was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Ms. Cooke stood by Mr. Cooke’s father to accept the award on the singer’s behalf.“I think if Sam were able to be here tonight, he would be thrilled just to see me on this stage,” Mr. Cooke’s father declared. (The elder Mr. Cook had not initially been thrilled with his son’s transition from gospel to secular music.)Ms. Cooke is survived by Ms. Zekkariyas and another daughter, Tracey Cooke; her twin sister, Beverley Lopez; and a granddaughter.Family members and Mr. Guralnick declined to speak about Ms. Cooke’s life and death, citing her wish for privacy.But Ms. Cooke had the last words in Mr. Guralnick’s nearly 750-page biography. The author quoted her reminiscing about falling in love with Mr. Cooke, and he with her, and about their wandering through Chicago’s Ellis Park in the snow when they were teenagers.“We’d walk around the park and fantasize,” she told Mr. Guralnick. “We didn’t have a dime between us, but you’d have thought I was the princess and he was the prince. Every time a Cadillac went by, I’d say, ‘That’s our chauffeur. He’s coming to take us to our mansion.’”She added: “Everybody wants a happy ending. That’s the way I see it.” More

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      Sarah Dash, the ‘Glue’ of the Vocal Trio Labelle, Is Dead at 76

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      She brought her church-rooted soprano and high harmonies to the rock and funk powerhouse best known for the No. 1 hit “Lady Marmalade.”Sarah Dash, a founding member of the groundbreaking, million-selling vocal trio Labelle, died on Monday. She was 76.Her death was announced on social media by Patti LaBelle and Nona Hendryx, the other members of Labelle. They did not say where she died or what the cause was.Ms. Dash brought her church-rooted soprano and high harmonies to Labelle, which began as a 1960s girl group before reinventing itself as a socially aware, Afro-futuristic rock and funk powerhouse, costumed in glittery sci-fi outfits and singing about revolution as well as earthy romance. In 1974, Labelle had a No. 1 hit, “Lady Marmalade,” and performed the first concert by a pop group — and a Black group — at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.In Ms. LaBelle’s 1996 autobiography, “Don’t Block the Blessings,” she wrote, “It was perfect harmony, the way we sounded together, the way we fit together, the way we moved together.”Ms. Hendryx, speaking by phone on Monday, described Ms. Dash as “a little ball of energy.” She added that Ms. Dash had played a crucial role in Labelle’s vocal interplay.“Sarah was very meticulous about vocal parts,” Ms. Hendryx said. “Patti and I would just want to do whatever we wanted to do, and Sarah had really great ears and was really great with harmony. That was her strength. She was the glue.”Labelle reached its commercial peak with the 1974 album “Nightbirds,” produced by Allen Toussaint with a New Orleans backup band and featuring the hit single “Lady Marmalade.”Sarah Dash was born in Trenton, N.J., on Aug. 18, 1945, the seventh of 13 children of Abraham and Mary Elizabeth Dash. Her father was a pastor, her mother a nurse. She grew up singing in the Trenton Church of Christ choir and turned to secular music as a teenager. She met Ms. Hendryx when the two girls’ church choirs shared a bill, and invited her to join her in the Del-Capris, a local doo-wop quintet.In 1961, Ms. Dash and Ms. Hendryx joined Patricia Holte and Cynthia Birdsong, members of a Philadelphia group, the Ordettes, to form a quartet, which they named the Blue Belles. Because there was already another group called the Bluebells, Ms. Holte adopted the name Patti LaBelle and the group became Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles (sometimes spelled Blue Belles or Bluebells).Their first hit was not actually by them; “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” was recorded by a Chicago girl group, the Starlets. But because of contractual complications, the single was credited to the Bluebelles, who performed it on tour and on television.The Bluebelles had minor hits of their own with gospel-charged versions of standard songs including “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Danny Boy,” and the group worked through the 1960s on the R&B circuit, recording on the Newtown, Cameo-Parkway and Atlantic labels. For years, they played three shows a night, up to 300 nights a year, at clubs and theaters; in New York City, they became known as the Sweethearts of the Apollo.Labelle performing on Cher’s television variety show in 1976. From left: Nona Hendryx, Ms. Dash and Patti LaBelle.CBS via Getty ImagesMs. Birdsong left the group to join the Supremes in 1967, but the trio persevered. In 1966, the group had performed on the BBC pop program “Ready, Steady, Go!,” and the members had stayed in contact with a producer from the show, Vicki Wickham. Ms. Wickham became their manager, along with the Who’s management team, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert.The Bluebelles metamorphosed into Labelle in 1970. Abandoning the formal gowns and wigs of a girl group for jeans, tie-dye and Afros, the group moved from the R&B circuit to rock clubs like the Bitter End in Manhattan.In 1971, Labelle released its self-titled debut album and collaborated with Laura Nyro on her album “Gonna Take a Miracle”; the group also opened for the Who on an arena tour. The trio’s 1972 album, “Moon Shadow,” started with the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; its 1973 album, “Pressure Cookin’,” featured a medley of the Thunderclap Newman song “Something in the Air” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”Along with its sociopolitical messages, Labelle adopted a new look designed by Larry LeGaspi: “campy space costumes of channel-quilted metallic leather, disclike cowls and boots with stratospherically high stacked heels,” as Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times. Labelle was at the forefront of glam-rock and Afro-Futurism.While Ms. LaBelle’s acrobatic voice often dominated Labelle’s arrangements, Ms. Dash was prominent in songs like “(Can I Speak to You Before You Go to) Hollywood.”Labelle reached its commercial peak with the 1974 album “Nightbirds,” produced by Allen Toussaint with a New Orleans backup band. Although most of its songs were written by Ms. Hendryx, its hit was by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan: “Lady Marmalade,” a tale of a memorable New Orleans prostitute, with the refrain “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?”Labelle made two more albums, “Phoenix” and “Chameleon,” before breaking up in 1977, with its members pulling in different musical directions: disco for Ms. Dash and Ms. LaBelle, rock for Ms. Hendryx. They moved into solo careers, and Ms. Dash started hers with a hit in 1978: “Sinner Man,” from her solo album simply titled “Sarah Dash,” the first of four she made in the 1970s and ’80s. “Oo-La-La, Too Soon,” from her 1980 album “Oo-La-La, Sarah Dash,” was turned into a commercial jingle for Sasson jeans.Ms. Dash in performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 2012. After Labelle broke up in 1977, she began her solo career in 1978 with a hit single, “Sinner Man.” Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesShe also recorded widely as a session singer — with Nile Rodgers, the Marshall Tucker Band, the O’Jays, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones. She looked back on her career in the 1990s with one-woman shows and an autobiography, “A Dash of Diva.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dash stayed in touch with the members of Labelle and appeared on solo albums by Ms. LaBelle and Ms. Hendryx. The trio had a club hit together in 1995 with “Turn It Out,” heard on the soundtrack of the movie “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.” In 2008, Labelle reunited for a full album, “Back to Now,” followed by a tour.Ms. Dash gave her final performance on Saturday night, two days before her death, when she joined Ms. LaBelle during a performance in Atlantic City.“Sarah Dash was an awesomely talented, beautiful and loving soul who blessed my life and the lives of so many others in more ways than I can say,” Ms. LaBelle posted on social media. “And I could always count on her to have my back!” More

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      in Movies

      Saadi Yacef, ‘Battle of Algiers’ Catalyst and Actor, Dies at 93

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      At the center of the Algerian effort to throw off French rule, he re-created that role in Gillo Pontecorvo’s searing 1966 movie, based on a book by Mr. Yacef.Saadi Yacef, a revolutionary leader who fought French rule in Algeria in the 1950s and then set in motion — and acted in — “The Battle of Algiers,” Gillo Pontecorvo’s acclaimed 1966 film about the long anti-colonialism struggle, died on Sept. 10 in Algiers, the capital. He was 93.His daughter Zaphira Yacef, who confirmed the death, said he had had heart problems.Mr. Yacef became involved in opposition movements while still a teenager and in 1954 joined the Front de Libération Nationale, the F.L.N., the leading nationalist organization during the war for independence. The war lasted from 1954 to 1962, ending with the country’s liberation from France.He became the organization’s military chief in Algiers in 1956, ordering bombings and other guerrilla attacks until his arrest by French paratroopers the next year in the part of the city known as the casbah. He was sentenced to death.“While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he told The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”Charles de Gaulle, who was elected president of France in 1958, eventually set Mr. Yacef free. That began an entirely different chapter in Mr. Yacef’s life. While in prison he had written “Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger” (“Memories of the Battle of Algiers”), his account of a particularly violent three-year portion of the war.Once Algeria became independent, the F.L.N., ruling the country, sought to commission a film about the freedom fight, with Mr. Yacef leading the effort.“At that time,” he told Le Monde in 2004, “everyone swore by Italian neorealism. That’s why I went to Italy to look for a screenwriter and a director for ‘The Battle of Algiers.’”With a script based on his book, he met with Mr. Pontecorvo, who was said to have been considering his own movie about the Algerian War, one that he hoped would star Paul Newman as a French paratrooper turned journalist. Mr. Yacef and his backers nixed that idea, and Mr. Pontecorvo found Mr. Yacef’s script propagandistic, but they continued to talk. Mr. Yacef arranged to bring Mr. Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, to Algiers for an extended stay so they could study up on the revolution, see locations where the fighting had occurred and meet people who had fought.The resulting movie, filmed in Algeria with Mr. Yacef as a producer, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and caused a sensation for its startling realism. Some scenes, especially of bombings, looked so authentic that the film in its initial showings was preceded by a disclaimer saying that no newsreel footage had been used.“There are a couple of sequences which look very dangerous,” the director Steven Soderbergh said in a video for the Criterion Collection when it released a fresh version of the film in 2004. “I don’t know if you could do them now.”Mr. Pontecorvo, who died in 2006, used nonactors almost exclusively, including Mr. Yacef, who played a character largely based on himself.“Pontecorvo insisted that I appear in the film,” he told Le Monde. “I had to play in the movies moments that I had lived seven years before. The war, the prison, the torture — all of this was still fresh in my memory.”Mr. Yacef in 2012. “While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he said of his incarceration by the French, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”Ryad Kramdi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSaadi Yacef was born on Jan. 20, 1928, in Algiers to Mohamed and Keltoum Yacef, who were bakers. His schooling was interrupted by World War II when the Allies commandeered his school for use as a barracks.After the war Saadi was apprenticed to become a baker as well. He also played soccer for one of Algeria’s top teams, the Union Sportive de la Médina d’Alger, from 1952 to 1954. By then he had also been pulled into the growing anticolonial movement.In addition to his daughter Zaphira, Mr. Yacef, who lived in Algiers, is survived by his wife, Baya Boudjema Yacef, whom he married in 1965; four other children, Salima, Saida, Omar and Amin; and nine grandchildren.The revolution that Mr. Yacef helped further was known for atrocities on both sides, and Mr. Pontecorvo’s film, which focused on the fighting in Algiers from 1954 to 1957, did not pull punches.“Apart from Orson Welles, no one before had so imaginatively imitated the look of a newsreel,” the film critic Stuart Klawans wrote in The New York Times in 2004, “although Welles had pulled the trick only for the ‘March of Time’ segment of ‘Citizen Kane,’ whereas Mr. Pontecorvo kept up his illusion for 123 minutes.”The movie won the Golden Lion in Venice, that festival’s top award, and in 1967 it was chosen to kick off the New York Film Festival. It was nominated for Oscars for best foreign language film, screenplay and director.The movie has been studied over the years both by militant groups like the Black Panthers and by the Pentagon. Mr. Yacef, who later in life served as a senator in Algeria’s national assembly, readily acknowledged that orders he had issued resulted in many deaths, but he drew a distinction between actions committed in the cause of liberation and the actions of more recent groups in exporting terrorism. He had particular disdain for suicide bombings, a tactic his resistance fighters did not employ.“The fight gave meaning to our lives,” he said in 2007. “We weren’t in it to die.” More

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      in Television

      Irma Kalish, TV Writer Who Tackled Social Issues, Dies at 96

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      A female trailblazer in the TV industry, she and her husband took on topics like rape and abortion in writing for sitcoms like “All in the Family” and “Maude.”Irma Kalish, a television writer who tackled abortion, rape and other provocative issues in many of the biggest comedy hits of the 1960s and beyond as she helped usher women into the writer’s room, died on Sept. 3 in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 96. Her death, at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home, was attributed to complications of pneumonia, her son, Bruce Kalish, a television producer, said.Ms. Kalish’s work in television comedy broke the mold for female writers. What women there were in the industry around midcentury had mostly been expected to write tear-jerking dramas, but beginning in the early 1960s Ms. Kalish made her mark in comedy, notably writing for Norman Lear’s caustic, socially conscious sitcoms “All in the Family” and its spinoff “Maude” in the ’70s.She did much of her writing in partnership with her husband, Austin Kalish. They shared offices at studios around Los Angeles, usually working at facing desks producing alternating drafts of scripts.“When I became a writer, I was one of the very first woman comedy writers and later producers,” Ms. Kalish said in an oral history for the Writers Guild Foundation in 2010. She added, referring to her husband by his nickname, “One producer actually thought that I must not be writing — I must be just doing the typing, and Rocky was doing the writing.”To combat sexism in the industry, she said, “I just became one of the guys.”Ms. Kalish moderated an event sponsored by the Writers Guild in Los Angeles. She made a mark writing for Norman Lear’s topical sitcoms “All in the Family” and “Maude.”  Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via GettyWriting for “Maude,” Ms. Kalish and her husband, who died in 2016, worked on the contentious two-part episode “Maude’s Dilemma” (1972), in which the title character, a strong-minded suburban wife and grandmother in her late 40s (played by Bea Arthur), had an abortion. When it was broadcast, Roe v. Wade had just been argued in the United States Supreme Court and would be decided within months, making abortion legal nationwide. Controversy over the episode rose swiftly; dozens of CBS affiliates declined to show it.Mr. and Ms. Kalish earned a “story by” credit, and Susan Harris was credited as the script writer; Mr. Kalish said in an interview in 2012 that he and Ms. Kalish had come up with the idea for the episode.Lynne Joyrich, a professor in the modern culture and media department at Brown University, called the episode a watershed moment for women’s issues onscreen. “Maude’s Dilemma” and episodes like it, she said, demonstrated “the way in which the everyday is also political.”The Kalishs’ takes on social issues also found their way into “All in the Family.” One episode centered on Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton), the wife of the bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), weathering a breast cancer scare. Another focused on the couple’s daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), as the victim of a rape attempt.The topical scripts “elevated us in the eyes of the business,” Mr. Kalish said in a joint interview with Ms. Kalish for the Archive of American Television conducted in 2012.Mr. and Ms. Kalish were executive producers of another 1970s hit sitcom, “Good Times,” about a Black family in a Chicago housing project, and continued to write for that program and numerous others.Ms. Kalish’s career spanned decades, beginning in the mid-1950s, and included writing credits for more than three dozen shows, many that would make up a pantheon of baby boomers’ favorite sitcoms, among them “The Patty Duke Show,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “My Favorite Martian,” “F Troop,” “My Three Sons” and “Family Affair.” She also had producing credits on some 16 shows, including “The Facts of Life” and “Valerie.”Ms. Kalish’s work laid a track for other female sitcom writers to follow. As she said to the comedian Amy Poehler in an interview in 2013 for Ms. Poehler’s Web series, “Smart Girls at the Party,” “You are a descendant of mine, so to speak.”Ms. Poehler, beaming, agreed.Irma May Ginsberg was born on Oct. 6, 1924, in Manhattan. Her mother, Lillian (Cutler) Ginsberg, was a homemaker. Her father, Nathan Ginsberg, was a business investor.Irma attended Julia Richman High School on the Upper East Side and went on to Syracuse University, where she studied journalism and graduated in 1945. She married Mr. Kalish, the brother of a childhood friend, in 1948 after corresponding with him while he was stationed in Bangor, Maine, during World War II.After the couple moved to Los Angeles, Mr. Kalish became a comedy writer for radio and television. Ms. Kalish worked as an editor for a pulp magazine called “Western Romance” before leaving to stay home with their two children. Her first writing credit, on the dramatic series “The Millionaire,” came in 1955.She joined the Writers Guild in 1964 and began writing with her husband more consistently. The Writer’s Guild Foundation, in their “The Writer Speaks” video series, called them “one of the more successful sitcom-writer-couples of the 20th century.”Ms. Kalish was active in the Writers Guild of America West chapter and in Women in Film, an advocacy group, serving as its president.The couple’s last television credit was in 1998, for the comedy series “The Famous Jett Jackson,” which was produced by their son, Bruce. They wrote a script dealing with ageism.Along with her son, she is survived by her sister and only sibling, Harriet Alef; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her daughter, Nancy Biederman, died in 2016. In the interview with the Archive of American Television, Ms. Kalish expressed her desire to be known as her own person, not just Austin Kalish’s wife and writing partner.“Sure, God made man before woman,” she said, “but then you always do a first draft before you make a final masterpiece.” More