Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Graeme Edge, Drummer and Co-Founder of the Moody Blues, Dies at 80

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      Many of their songs incorporated his spoken-word poetry, making them pioneers in the prog-rock movement of the late-1960s and ’70s.Graeme Edge, the drummer and co-founder of the British band the Moody Blues, for whom he wrote many of the spoken-word poems that, appended to songs like “Nights in White Satin,” made the group a pioneer in the progressive rock movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Thursday at his home in Bradenton, Fla. He was 80.Rilla Fleming, his partner, said the cause was metastatic cancer.The Moody Blues first gained attention as part of the British Invasion that dominated the American rock scene in the mid-1960s. Their repertoire originally consisted largely of R&B covers, but by their second album, “Days of Future Passed” (1967), they had developed the blend of orchestral and rock music that would make them famous.“In the late 1960s we became the group that Graeme always wanted it to be, and he was called upon to be a poet as well as a drummer,” Justin Hayward, the band’s lead singer, wrote in a statement on the Moody Blues website after Mr. Edge’s death. “He delivered that beautifully and brilliantly, while creating an atmosphere and setting that the music would never have achieved without his words.”Mr. Edge’s mesmerizing drumming and introspective poetry were a big part of the group’s success. The Moody Blues are probably best remembered for “Nights in White Satin” (1967), a darkly ruminative song that ends, in the original album version, with “Late Lament,” written by Mr. Edge and read by the keyboardist Mike Pinder. (It was missing from the shorter version released for radio.)Though Mr. Pinder’s sonorous baritone and the poem’s opening lines — “Breathe deep the gathering gloom” — make the poem sound melancholy, even foreboding, it was meant to be uplifting, Mr. Edge said.“I think it’s the joy, the spirit that makes it,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2018. “It’s a young boy discovering that he loves somebody for the first time, and he just wants to shout it out from the hills — and shout it out again!”“Nights in White Satin” was not originally a hit, but it reached the Top 10 when it was rereleased in 1972. (Their only other Top 10 singles were their first hit, “Go Now!,” in 1964, and the up-tempo “Your Wildest Dreams” in 1986.) It came to be regarded as a musical landmark — one of the first to emerge from the burgeoning prog-rock movement, which also included bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.The Moody Blues had other hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s, including “Tuesday Afternoon,” “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” and “Ride My See-Saw,” before going on hiatus from 1974 to 1977. During that time, Mr. Edge sailed around the world in his 70-foot yacht and released several solo albums.The band found a second wind in the 1980s, when it set aside its prog-rock past and embraced a synthesizer-driven pop sound. They released their last album, “December,” in 2003, but continued to tour regularly afterward.“I never get tired of playing the hits,” Mr. Edge told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2008. “You have a duty. You play ‘Nights in White Satin’ for them. You’ve got to play ‘I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band),’ and you’ve got to play ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ and you’ve got to play ‘Question.’ It’s your duty, and their right.”Mr. Edge at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 2018, when the Moody Blues were inducted. David Richard/Associated PressGraeme Charles Edge was born on March 30, 1941, in Rochester, a city in southeastern England. When he was 3 his family moved to Birmingham, where he grew up.He came from a musical family: His mother, a classically trained pianist, worked in a movie theater playing the accompaniment to silent films, and his father was a music-hall singer, as were his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather.Mr. Edge’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Fleming, he is survived by his daughter, Samantha Edge; his son, Matthew; and five grandchildren.When he was about 10, he heard Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Ten Little Indians” on the radio and immediately fell in love with rock ’n’ roll. Though he trained to be a draftsman, his first job was managing an R&B band in Birmingham.When that band’s drummer quit unexpectedly, Mr. Edge was hired as a temporary replacement. He had never played drums before, but he learned quickly, and when the band hired another drummer, he bought his own kit and decided to become a musician.He founded and played in several bands before he and four other musicians — Denny Laine, Ray Thomas, Clint Warwick and Mr. Pinder — formed the MB Five in 1964. They soon renamed themselves the Moody Blues.Their first hit was “Go Now!” a cover of an R&B song originally recorded by Bessie Banks. But Mr. Edge worried that playing other people’s songs would take them only so far. After Mr. Laine and Mr. Warwick left and Mr. Hayward and John Lodge joined, the band decided to take a new approach.They were big admirers of the Beatles’ use of an orchestra on some of their songs, and they decided to develop a sound that blended rock with classical instrumentation. Though they later recorded and toured with an orchestra, their first efforts employed a mellotron, an analog antecedent to the electronic synthesizer.The resulting sweep of strings and horns that played through their songs, along with Mr. Edge’s poetry, gave the Moody Blues a reputation as a thinking person’s rock band, among the earliest exponents of what came to be called art-rock.“We used to think that we were aiming at the head and the heart, rather than the groin,” Mr. Edge told The South Bend Tribune in Indiana in 2006.The Moody Blues have sold more than 70 million albums and in 2018 were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Fittingly for a song from a band once known for its covers, “Nights in White Satin” has been covered more than 140 times.Clint Warwick died in 2004. Ray Thomas died in 2018.Mr. Edge suffered a stroke in 2016 and retired from touring in 2019, but he remained an official member of the band until his death — the only remaining member of the original quintet, formed almost 60 years earlier. More

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      Jonathan Reynolds, Playwright and Food Columnist, Dies at 79

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      His plays tended to parody American institutions. His food writing tended to be full of humor.Jonathan Reynolds, who in a wide-ranging career wrote successful plays, helped write a famously bad movie, turned out lively articles on how to cook the perfect turkey and all manner of other food-related subjects, and combined his love of food and his way with words in an unusual stage show, died on Oct. 27 in Englewood, N.J. He was 79.His family said in a statement that the cause of death, at the Actors Fund Home, was organ failure.After Mr. Reynolds tried — but disliked — acting (“I had less influence than the stage manager and most of the stagehands,” he once complained), he turned to playwriting and had quick success. A pair of his one-act comedies — “Rubbers,” satirizing the New York State legislative process, and “Yanks 3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh,” about an over-the-hill pitcher — ran for months in 1975 when they were staged at the American Place Theater in New York, directed by Alan Arkin.Demand was high enough that the theater, a subscription-only house, opened sales up to single-ticket buyers for the first time in its 11-year history.Mr. Reynolds’s plays tended to lampoon American institutions, whether government or the national pastime or, as in “Tunnel Fever” in 1979, academia.“I don’t think of my plays as comedies,” he told The New York Times when that play was about to open at American Place. “I think about what characters would do in a situation, and I don’t try to make it funny. It just comes out that way.”His biggest success as a playwright may have been “Geniuses,” a satire on the movie business that was staged at Playwrights Horizons in 1982. It was inspired by the three months he spent on location in the Philippines with the director Francis Ford Coppola while Mr. Coppola was shooting “Apocalypse Now.” Mr. Reynolds was there taking notes for a possible book about the making of the movie, and possibly to contribute to the script. The book never came about, and his contribution to the script ended up being a single line of dialogue. But the play, riding rave reviews, was a hit.“The author speaks with an authority to match his acerbity,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review in The New York Times, comparing him to the humorist S.J. Perelman.“Among other things,” Mr. Gussow added, “‘Geniuses’ is an insidious act of movie criticism. Make no mistake: Beneath the japery, there is a warning: Movies can be injurious to your health; keep them out of the reach of children-directors.”Mr. Reynolds would soon have his first film credit, for writing “Micki + Maude,” a 1984 comedy directed by Blake Edwards and starring Dudley Moore as a man with two wives, played by Amy Irving and Ann Reinking. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in The Times, said that it was “never less than a delight” and that Mr. Reynolds “has an ear for ultra-high-frequency lunacies that escape the rest of us.”His next Hollywood experience, though, was not received so warmly. He was the screenwriter who adapted a story by Bill Cosby into a secret-agent comedy called “Leonard Part 6.” The movie, which starred Mr. Cosby and was released in 1987, came out so poorly that Mr. Cosby himself denounced it. In The Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel called it “the year’s worst film involving a major star.” Others have put it on lists of the worst movies ever made.His screenplay for the comedy “Switching Channels” (1988) also drew less-than-rave reviews. But Mr. Reynolds, who would earn only two more writing credits for movies (“My Stepmother Is an Alien” in 1988 and “The Distinguished Gentleman” in 1992), shrugged off the criticism, considering himself more playwright than screenwriter anyway.“It hurt for about a day,” he told Newsday in 1988. “And then I thought, ‘Well, I’m not really part of it so it doesn’t really bother me.’”Mr. Reynolds in 1997 at the American Place Theater on the set of his play “Stonewall Jackson’s House,” which took on the liberal biases of the theater world.James Estrin/The New York TimesMr. Reynolds continued to write plays, several of which, like “Stonewall Jackson’s House” (1997) and “Girls in Trouble” (2010), took on the liberal biases of the theater world and much of the theater audience. But at one point he tried something completely different: He began writing a column on food for The New York Times Magazine.His column first appeared in 2000, and he continued to write it for about five years. It was a job that, as he put it, just “fell from the sky” (aided by a recommendation from his friend Frank Rich, the newspaper’s drama critic at the time).“I didn’t go to any cooking school,” he told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2002, “and I didn’t spend time with a great chef in his kitchen for years in France.”But he did enjoy cooking, and for years he had been making diary entries about meals he had prepared or eaten and menus he had perused. He filled his columns not just with recipes and cooking tips but with anecdotes and humor. For instance, in March 2000 he offered a solution of sorts to the age-old problem with turkeys: that cooking the bird’s drumsticks and thighs thoroughly enough tended to leave the white meat dry.“For those with successful Nasdaq portfolios,” he wrote, “it’s simple: Buy two turkeys and cook one for the white meat and the other for the dark, then discard the overcooked white of one and the undercooked dark of the other.”For everyone else, he offered a solution that involved basting and assorted dos and don’ts. In 2006 he collected his cooking observations in a book, “Wrestling With Gravy: A Life, With Food.”Jonathan Randolph Reynolds was born on Feb. 13, 1942, in Fort Smith, Ark., to Donald Worthington Reynolds, founder of the Donrey Media Group, and Edith (Remick) Reynolds.He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at Denison University in Ohio in 1965 and studied for a time at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art. Back in New York, he was the understudy for the Rosencrantz role in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1967 before embarking on his writing career. Before his 1975 playwriting breakthrough, he was on the staffs of David Frost’s and Dick Cavett’s television shows.At his death Mr. Reynolds lived in Manhattan and in Garrison, N.Y.His marriage in 1978 to Charlotte Kirk ended in divorce in 1998. In 2004 he married the Tony Award-winning set designer Heidi Ettinger, who survives him, along with two sons from his marriage to Ms. Kirk, Edward and Frank Reynolds; three stepsons, North, Nash and Dodge Landesman; and two grandchildren.In 2003 Ms. Ettinger had the challenge of creating the set for a one-man show that marked Mr. Reynolds’s return to acting after a long layoff. It was called “Dinner With Demons,” and in it Mr. Reynolds cooked a full dinner, including deep-frying a turkey, while relating assorted anecdotes. That required putting a functioning kitchen onstage at the Second Stage Theater in Midtown.Legal restrictions meant the audience did not get to eat the meal; the backstage crew was the beneficiary. Mr. Reynolds told The Times that the hardest part of executing the show was making sure the dialogue and the cooking ended at the same time.“It was a lot of trial and error,” he said. “In rehearsals, the apple pancake got burned every other time.” More

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      Don Maddox, Last Survivor of a Pioneering Country Band, Dies at 98

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      In the 1940s, he joined with his three brothers and his sister, Rose, to make exuberant music that anticipated rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll.Don Maddox, the last surviving member of the Maddox Brothers & Rose, a lively sibling band that helped give rise to West Coast honky-tonk, rockabilly and early rock ’n’ roll, died on Sept. 12 in an adult care facility in Medford, Ore. He was 98.His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his wife of 11 years, Barbara Harvey-Maddox, who said he had been suffering from dementia.Hailed in the 1940s and ’50s as America’s “most colorful hillbilly band,” the Maddox Brothers & Rose were renowned for their exuberant fusion of barnyard twang and gutbucket R&B, as well as for their uproarious antics onstage. The fringed, embroidered costumes they wore — designed by the Hollywood rodeo tailor Nathan Turk — were equally dazzling, a harbinger of the Western resplendence sported by Buck Owens in the 1960s and later by Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.Mr. Owens’s lean, hard-driving Bakersfield sound owed a debt to the Maddoxes’ rollicking hillbilly boogie, propelled as it was by the instinctive thwacking by Mr. Maddox’s eldest brother, Fred, on upright bass. The early rockabilly of Elvis Presley was also influenced, notably in the slapping technique of his bass player, Bill Black, who idolized Fred Maddox.The Maddox sound “was born from that slap bass,” Mr. Maddox said of his brother Fred’s style in an interview for Ken Burns’s multipart PBS documentary “Country Music” in 2019. “Fred didn’t know what the notes were. He just slapped it for rhythm.“We didn’t call it ‘rockabilly,’” Mr. Maddox went on. “We called it ‘Okie boogie.’”Mr. Maddox played fiddle, in a sawing down-home mode, and provided backing vocals; his sister, Rose, was the lead vocalist. The other members were his older brothers Cliff and Cal on guitars and his younger brother, Henry, on mandolin.Rose Maddox died in 1998, Cliff in 1949, Cal in 1968, Henry in 1974 and Fred in 1992.The account of how the Maddoxes made it to California rivaled the story of their rise within the ranks of West Coast country music — a Depression-era narrative as emblematic as “The Grapes of Wrath.”In 1933, forced by drought to abandon their life of subsistence farming in rural Alabama, Mr. Maddox and his family — his sharecropper parents, Charlie and Lula (Smith) Maddox, and his five siblings — headed west, hitchhiking and riding in the boxcars of freight trains in search of a better life. Mr. Maddox was 10.The family picked fruit in migrant labor camps in California, where they squatted in the large concrete drainage cylinders found in construction yards in the industrial part of Oakland known as “Pipe City.”Quickly fed up with their hardscrabble life, Fred Maddox persuaded the owner of a furniture store to sponsor regular performances by him and his brothers on a radio station in Modesto. The only proviso was that the band, which at the time included only Fred, Cliff and Cal, feature a female singer, a role fulfilled with preternatural command by the 11-year-old Rose.Two years later, having changed their name from the Alabama Outlaws to the Maddox Brothers & Rose, the group won a competition at the California State Fair that included a two-year contract to perform on radio shows broadcast on KFBK in Sacramento. The next year, Mr. Maddox joined the band — managed, with the strictest of discipline, by the siblings’ mother, known as Mama Maddox.Don Maddox in performance at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in 2013. He had come out of retirement a year earlier after many years as a cattle rancher.Erika Goldring/Getty ImagesDon Maddox was born Kenneth Chalmer Maddox on Dec. 7, 1922, in Boaz, Ala., in the foothills of Appalachia.As a member of the family band from 1940 on, he toured with his siblings and appeared on the popular recordings they made for the Four Star and Columbia labels in the 1940s and ’50s, including their waltzing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer.”Other hits, like “Whoa Sailor,” “(Pay Me) Alimony” and “Hangover Blues,” were sung from his sister’s perspective and exuded not just womanly independence and pluck but an incipient feminist consciousness as well.In 1956, after more than a decade of success touring and recording (interrupted only by the military service of Mr. Maddox and his brothers), the act broke up. Rose hired Cal as her accompanist and pursued a solo career. The remaining brothers went on without them, only to call it quits two years later — because, according to Don Maddox, they lacked the talent to make a go of it on their own.For his part, Mr. Maddox went back to school to study agriculture and bought a 300-acre ranch in Ashland, Ore., where he raised Angus cattle for more than five decades.In 2012, Mr. Maddox came out of retirement to participate in an exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville commemorating the Bakersfield sound that he and his siblings had helped establish. He went on to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, on the singer Marty Stuart’s television show and at festivals, including a headlining engagement in Las Vegas.His wife is his only immediate survivor. His previous wife, Nila Bussey Maddox, died in 2002.Besides playing the fiddle and singing backing vocals with his siblings, Mr. Maddox provided the comedic impetus for the group’s gag-laden stage show, particularly through his “Don Juan” persona.“I was shy around girls, so I took Don Juan as a stage name because the Sons of the Pioneers had a song called ‘Don Juan of Mexico,’” he said in a 2008 interview with The Mail Tribune of Medford.“I thought that if I learned that song, the girls would think I was a Don Juan and talk to me. Of course, it didn’t work.” More

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      Dean Stockwell, Child Actor Turned ‘Quantum Leap’ Star, Dies at 85

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      He appeared alongside Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly when he was not yet 10. He later had signature roles in movies like “Married to the Mob” and “Blue Velvet.”Dean Stockwell, who began his seven-decade acting career as a child in the 1940s and later had key roles in films including “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1962 and “Blue Velvet” in 1986, while also making his mark in television, most notably as the cigar-smoking Al Calavicci on the hit science fiction series “Quantum Leap,” died on Sunday. He was 85.His death was confirmed by Jay Schwartz, a family spokesman, who did not say where Mr. Stockwell died or specify a cause.Mr. Stockwell had a hot-and-cold relationship with acting that caused him to leave show business for years at a time. But he nonetheless amassed more than 200 film and television acting credits from 1945 to 2015, as well as occasional stage roles.As a child he appeared alongside some of the biggest stars of the day, including Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in “Anchors Aweigh” in 1945, when he was not yet 10. But while many child stars don’t make the transition to adult careers, Mr. Stockwell was blessed with angular, rugged good looks as a young man and a distinguished maturity later, attributes that made him suitable for all sorts of roles.Several times Mr. Stockwell lost interest in the profession that he had been all but born into, escaping to work on railroads and in real estate and, in the 1960s, to immerse himself in the counterculture. He also enjoyed several career revivals, notably in the 1980s, when he was cast in career-defining roles in movies like Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas,” David Lynch’s “Dune” and “Blue Velvet” (as the menacing and eccentric henchman of a drug dealer played by Dennis Hopper), and Jonathan Demme’s “Married to the Mob,” in which his performance as a mob boss earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.Mr. Stockwell as an eccentric criminal in David Lynch’s film “Blue Velvet,” from 1986.De Laurentiis Entertainment GroupAs the son of actors — his father, Harry Stockwell, and his mother, Elizabeth Veronica, appeared onstage and in films together, and Harry Stockwell provided the voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — Mr. Stockwell had little semblance of a typical childhood before he began acting.He first appeared on Broadway in 1943, at age 7, in “The Innocent Voyage.” (His older brother, the actor Guy Stockwell, who died in 2002, was also in the cast.) He was recruited by a Hollywood talent scout, and his movie career began in 1945, when he appeared in “The Valley of Decision,” with Gregory Peck and Greer Garson, and in “Anchors Aweigh.”Mr. Stockwell was immediately praised for his skill, winning a special award at the Golden Globes for “Gentleman’s Agreement” in 1947. Reviewing the movie “Kim” in 1950, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised his performance as “delightfully sturdy and sound,” adding, “Little Dean shows a real tenderness.” Other Times reviews of his performances as a child called his work “touching,” “commendable” and “cozy.”Robert Dean Stockwell was born on March 5, 1936, in Los Angeles. His parents divorced when he was 6, and he spent most of his childhood with his mother and brother. He would later say that he looked up to directors and leading actors on the set as father figures.He would appear in 19 films before he turned 16, at which point he quit acting for the first time. Withdrawn as a child, he took little pleasure in acting, seeing it as an obligation foisted upon him by others, he said in an interview with Turner Classic Movies in 1995.“If it had been up to me, I would have been out of it by the time I was 10,” he said.After graduating from high school at 16 — as a child actor, he received three hours of schooling while working — Mr. Stockwell realized he had little training to do anything else. He flitted from one odd job to the next before reluctantly returning to acting in 1956, when he was 20.Mr. Stockwell, left, with Scott Bakula on the set of “Quantum Leap” in 1989.Ron Tom/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesOne of his biggest roles in his 20s was alongside Jason Robards, Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson in the 1962 film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in which he played the younger son, Edmund Tyrone. He, Mr. Robards and Mr. Richardson shared an acting award at the Cannes Film Festival.Other notable roles in that period included “Compulsion” (1959), a fictionalized version of a well-known murder case, in which he and Bradford Dillman played the killers of a young boy; and “Sons and Lovers” (1960), based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence.Later in the 1960s, Mr. Stockwell found comfort in the counterculture movement and the hippie ethos.“My career was doing well, but I wasn’t getting anything out of it personally,” he told The Times in 1988. “What I was looking for I was finding in another place, which was in that revolution. The ’60s allowed me to live my childhood as an adult. That kind of freedom, imagination and creativity that arose all around was like a childhood to me.”After a few years off, he returned to acting, only to learn that his time away had led Hollywood casting agents to forget him. For about a dozen frustrating years, he struggled to land roles, appearing in fringe films and performing in dinner theater.“I even heard about a casting meeting where the producer said, ‘We need a Dean Stockwell type,’” he told The Times in 1988. “Meanwhile, I couldn’t even get arrested.”He quit acting again in the early 1980s, moving to New Mexico to sell real estate. His next comeback would be his most successful, beginning a decade of his most critically acclaimed work.In 1988, he was acclaimed, and Oscar-nominated, for his performance in “Married to the Mob.” The next year, he was cast in “Quantum Leap.”That show, seen on NBC from 1989 to 1993, starred Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, a scientist who, because of a botched time-travel experiment, spends his days and nights being thrown back in time to assume other people’s identities. Mr. Stockwell portrayed Adm. Al Calavicci, described by John J. O’Connor of The Times in a 1989 review as “Sam’s wiseguy colleague, who hangs around the edges of each episode, setting the scene and commenting on the action.” Mr. Stockwell, Mr. O’Connor wrote, was “Mr. Bakula’s indispensable co-star.”Mr. Stockwell was nominated four times for an Emmy Award for best supporting actor in a drama series for his work on “Quantum Leap.” He never won an Emmy, but he did win a Golden Globe in 1990.He is survived by his wife, Joy Stockwell, and two children, Austin and Sophie Stockwell.In a 1987 interview with The Times, Mr. Stockwell said that his approach as an actor hadn’t changed since he was a child.“I haven’t changed in the least,” he said. “My way of working is still the same as it was in the beginning: totally intuitive and instinctive.“But as you live your life,” he added, “you compile so many millions of experiences and bits of information that you become a richer vessel as a person. You draw on more experience.”Neil Genzlinger contributed reporting. More

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      Marília Mendonça, Brazilian Pop Singer, Dies in Plane Crash at 26

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      Ms. Mendonça, who was a social media sensation with millions of followers, was iconic in a type of Brazilian country music called sertanejo.Marília Mendonça, one of the most popular Brazilian pop singers who was known as “The Queen of Suffering” for her angst-filled ballads, was killed on Friday in a small plane crash in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. She was 26.The singer’s press office confirmed Ms. Mendonça’s death and said her producer, Henrique Ribeiro; her uncle who was also her assistant, Abicieli Silveira Dias Filho; and the pilot and co-pilot of the plane were also killed.The plane had been headed from the city of Goiania to Caratinga, where Ms. Mendonça was to have performed in a concert on Friday night. There was no immediate word on the circumstances leading up to the crash. The authorities said they were investigating.Ms. Mendonça was iconic in a type of Brazilian country music called sertanejo, a popular genre in Brazil. Her legions of fans found power in her song lyrics, which implored women to reject bad and abusive relationships, and told the stories of flawed characters.Ms. Mendonça was a social media sensation, with 7.8 million followers on Twitter, 22 million on YouTube and more than 38 million on Instagram.The plane had been headed to Caratinga, where Ms. Mendonça was to have performed on Friday night. Minas Gerais Civil Police, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBrazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, said on Twitter, “The whole country receives in shock the news of the death of the young country singer Marília Mendonça, one of the greatest artists of her generation, whom, with her unique voice, charisma and music won the affection and admiration of all of us.”Anitta, a funk singer popular in Brazil, said on Twitter: “I just found out. I can’t believe it.”Some in Brazil’s cosmopolitan circles had scorned Ms. Mendonça’s country ballads as “‘brega,’ or corny music,” NPR reported in 2019.“Sentimental or not, her songs offer a woman’s perspective that hasn’t been heard much in sertanejo’s machismo culture, and it’s made Mendonça the leading voice of a new subgenre called ‘feminejo’ — music by and for women,” NPR said.Ana Ionova contributed reporting. More

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      JoAnna Cameron, an Early Female Superhero on TV, Is Dead at 73

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      In addition to achieving Saturday morning fame as Isis, she was said to have appeared in more national television commercials than anyone in advertising history.JoAnna Cameron, who in the 1970s portrayed Isis, the first female character on television with superpowers, and appeared in more national network television commercials than anyone else, died on Oct. 15 in Oahu, Hawaii. She was 73. The cause was complications of a stroke, said Joanna Pang Atkins, who starred with Ms. Cameron on the Saturday morning children’s series “Isis.”Ms. Cameron, who broke into the movies in 1969 with a small part in a Bob Hope film, blazed a trail when she arrived on the small screen as Isis in September 1975, two months before Lynda Carter made her first appearance as Wonder Woman. “The Bionic Woman,” starring Lindsay Wagner, began in January 1976.“Isis” starred Ms. Cameron as Andrea Thomas, a high school science teacher who had acquired the powers of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of healing and magic. Running with the speed of a gazelle, flying like a falcon and displaying superhuman strength, she used her extraordinary powers to fight crime.The series ran on CBS from 1975 to 1977; reruns were later syndicated as “The Secrets of Isis.”Ms. Cameron’s other television roles included appearances on “Columbo,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.” and “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors.”A lithe brunette, she also received tremendous exposure as a television model for scores of commercial products. The Guinness Book of World Records said in 1979 that she had appeared in more than 100 commercials on network television, more than anyone else in advertising history.Advertisers spent more than $100 million “using JoAnna as the beauteous centerpiece of their commercials for cosmetics, shampoo, wine, beer, pantyhose and breath freshener,” TV Guide reported in 1979, adding that “she certainly has a face that can sell a product.”Ms. Cameron was outdoorsy and athletic, and she appeared in commercials skiing, scuba diving, piloting a jet, driving a racecar and romping through a field of flowers. She flew with the Blue Angels and worked to promote the United States Navy. But many of her other commercials were for personal products. In an ad for pantyhose, she struck a Mrs. Robinson-like pose. In a cigarette spot, she smoked. She also made a brief foray into directing commercials, but did not enjoy it.When she appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show,” Mr. Griffin said that if all her commercials were strung together, they would run for 150 hours, or six days of continuous viewing. He noted that advertisers said she had “the perfect face,” although he did not specify what that meant.When Mr. Griffin asked her if she felt pretty, she demurred. “Pretty,” she said, “comes from being healthy and feeling good about who you are and what you do.”Patricia Kara Cameron was born on Sept. 20, 1948, in Greeley, Colo., where her parents, Harold and Erna (Borgens) Cameron, operated a drive-in restaurant.She showed an interest in acting from an early age. While in high school, she worked with the Little Theater at Colorado State College, where she had a part in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Moving to California in the 1960s, she worked part time at Disneyland as a tour guide. She was a winning contestant on “The Dating Game” and JoAnna finalist on the televised beauty pageant “The Dream Girl of 1967.”Her big break came when she became friends with Bob Hope’s daughter, Linda. Mr. Hope cast her in “How to Commit Marriage” (1969), a comedy in which he starred with Jackie Gleason and Jane Wyman.On Mr. Gleason’s advice, she dropped the name Patricia and started calling herself JoAnna Cameron, although her screen credits list her variously as Jo Anna Cameron, Joanna K. Cameron, Joanna Kara Cameron and Joanna Cameron.Her other movies included “Pretty Maids All in a Row” (1971) and “B.S. I Love You” (1971). She was under consideration for the role of Jenny Cavilleri in “Love Story” (1970), but it went to Ali MacGraw.After her last movie, in 1980, she moved permanently to Hawaii, where she had often visited. She lived a quiet and anonymous life there, a friend in Hawaii said by email, and few people knew about her Hollywood career or that she had starred in “Isis.”With a nursing degree she had earned in California, she turned to patient care, working in private facilities or patients’ homes and providing comfort and care — similar to hospice work.She also had a marketing degree, and she later became a marketer for two major hotels. Information about survivors was not immediately available.Asked in a 2002 interview for an “Isis” fan website if she had ever been afraid of being typecast by her role as Isis, she expressed no doubt.“Who’s afraid of being typecast as a superhero?” she responded. “If you have to be typecast, take superhero. Or Egyptian goddess.” More

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      in Music

      Ronnie Wilson, Founder of the Gap Band, Dies at 73

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      After beginning his career as a teenager, he joined with his two younger brothers to record R&B hits like “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” and “Outstanding.”Ronnie Wilson, the founder of the Gap Band, which rode a funky party sound to success on the R&B charts in the late 1970s and throughout the ’80s, died on Tuesday. He was 73.The death was announced on Facebook by Mr. Wilson’s wife, Linda Boulware-Wilson. She did not say where he died or what the cause was.The Gap Band topped the R&B charts four times and placed 15 songs in the R&B Top 10 from 1979 to 1990; two of its singles, “Early in the Morning” and “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” reached the pop Top 40 in 1982. Ronnie Wilson primarily played keyboards but also contributed horn and percussion parts in a rotating vocal and instrumental arrangement with his two younger brothers, Robert, who mainly played bass, and Charlie, the lead singer.Hits like “Burn Rubber on Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)” (1980) defined the Gap Band’s sound, which The New York Times critic Stephen Holden described in 1981 as “swinging minimalist funk — sweaty, slangy and streetwise.” Some of their other best-known tracks, like “Outstanding” (1982), struck an erotic tone in a softer manner — less stomping of the feet, more rolling of the hips.The Gap Band appeared on “Soul Train,” the premier television showcase for Black music at the time, and appeared in concert alongside bands like Kool & the Gang.In the years after their popularity peaked, the Gap Band’s tunes were sampled hundreds of times. Ashanti’s 2002 hit “Happy” got its leisurely, bouncy sound from “Outstanding,” and N.W.A.’s canonical “Straight Outta Compton” sped up and darkened “Burn Rubber on Me.”The Gap Band on “Soul Train” in 1979.Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty ImagesIn an interview with the weekly San Francisco newspaper The Sun-Reporter in 1999, Mr. Wilson said that he and his younger brothers were addressed with the honorific “Uncle” before their names by current music stars like Snoop Dogg “because we helped to lay the foundation for hip-hop.”Ronnie Wilson was born on April 7, 1948, in Tulsa, Okla. His father, Oscar, was a minister, and Ronnie and his brothers grew up playing music in church.Ronnie formed his first band as a teenager, and over time he got his brothers involved. The word “Gap” in the Gap Band’s name came from Greenwood Avenue, Archer Street and Pine Street in Tulsa’s Greenwood district — the neighborhood, once known as Black Wall Street, that was the site of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.The group got an early boost in the music business, and met stars like Bob Dylan, thanks to the rock singer and pianist Leon Russell, long based in Tulsa, who had the Gap Band back him on his album “Stop All That Jazz” (1974). The Wilson brothers signed their first major-label deal, with Mercury, a few years later.Ronnie Wilson later worked as a minister and continued to perform occasionally. His brother Charlie pursued a successful solo singing career. The other brother in the band, Robert, died in 2010.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      in Television

      Camille Saviola, ‘Deep Space Nine’ and Stage Actor, Dies at 71

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      She was known for her comic work in cabarets, for her performance in the musical “Nine” on Broadway and for her role in a “Star Trek” spinoff.Camille Saviola, an actress and singer who made an impression in the musical “Nine” on Broadway, in assorted cabaret spoofs and on television in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and other series, died on Oct. 28 in a hospital in North Bergen, N.J. She was 71.Alyssa Romeo, a great-niece, said the cause was heart failure.Ms. Saviola frequently drew comparisons to Ethel Merman for her big voice, which she liked to use to comic effect. One character she played in more than one cabaret show received the Ten Commandments of Soul from James Brown, earning her something of a nickname: “the Italian Godmother of Soul.”Onstage, she was best known for originating the role of Mama Maddelena, a spa manager, in the original production of “Nine,” the Arthur Kopit-Maury Yeston musical about a film director having a midlife crisis, which opened on Broadway in May 1982 and ran for almost two years. She was featured in a comic number, “The Germans at the Spa.”But she wasn’t limited to comedy. In 2005, for instance, she starred in a production of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” Bertolt Brecht’s famed antiwar play, in Pasadena, Calif.“As Mother Courage, Camille Saviola is wily, indomitable and eminently practical,” Daryl H. Miller wrote in reviewing that performance in The Los Angeles Times.She endeared herself to a different group of fans when she was cast in “Deep Space Nine” as Kai Opaka, a spiritual leader on the planet Bajor. Though she appeared in only four episodes, from 1993 to 1996, Ms. Saviola was well known to followers of the franchise, many of whom posted about her death on social media.In a 1995 interview with a “Deep Space Nine” fan magazine that is quoted on the website Memory Alpha, Ms. Saviola talked about how she got the part.“I went in — every character actress was there — and did a little reading, the real thing,” she said, referring not to a script reading but to a tarot card reading. “My grandmother read cards and tea leaves down in Greenwich Village — she never charged people money — and I have a little bit of that gift.”Camille Saviola was born on July 16, 1950, in the Bronx to Michael and Mary (D’Esopo) Saviola. The performing bug bit early.“I wanted to be Elvis Presley, and at 6 I was already lip-syncing to his records and putting on magic shows,” she told The New York Times in 1985. “By the time I was 7, I knew a thousand jokes. Around puberty, I discovered Judy Garland.”Ms. Saviola in 2003. She was seen on Broadway, in cabarets and in more than 40 film and television roles. Bruce Glikas/FilmMagicShe graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York and, her great-niece said, studied voice for a time at City College, but she left to work Off Off Broadway and in summer stock. She also sang with an all-female rock group for a time.In 1980 she was in the original Off Off Broadway cast of “Starmites,” a science fiction musical, billed only as Camille and belting out a number called “Hard to Be Diva.” (The show made Broadway briefly in 1989, though without her.) She was also in a touring production of the rock opera “Tommy,” playing the characters the Mother and the Acid Queen.In March 1985, at the Ballroom Theater in Manhattan, she was the central figure in a cabaret musical called “Hollywood Opera” that parodied eight classic films.“At the center of this nonsense stands the commandingly funny singer-actress Camille Saviola, who delivers two showstopping bits,” Stephen Holden wrote in a review in The New York Times. “The first is a heaving caricature of Anna Magnani retelling the story of ‘The Rose Tattoo’ in a pattery tarantella called ‘Della Rose’s Turn.’ Later, with Perry Arthur taking the Paul Henreid role, Miss Saviola, impersonating Bette Davis with Groucho Marx eyebrows, demolishes once and for all our fond memories of the two-cigarettes-in-the-dark love scene from ‘Now Voyager.’”Later that year she incorporated some of those bits into her own cabaret show, “Secrets of the Lava Lamp,” which found her alternately singing and telling stories.Ms. Saviola had small parts in two Woody Allen movies, “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984) and “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), the first of her more than 40 film and television roles. She had recurring roles on the 1990s TV series “The Heights” and “Civil Wars” and, more recently, on “First Monday,” “Judging Amy” and “Entourage.” In 2018 and 2019 she had a recurring role on the TV Land series “Younger.”Ms. Saviola, who at her death lived in West New York, N.J., is survived by a sister, Mary Ann Horman. More