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      Felix Silla, Cousin Itt on ‘The Addams Family’ Dies at 84

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      He made a strong impression in his best-known role, even though his face wasn’t seen and his voice wasn’t heard.Felix Silla, the actor best known for playing the hairy Cousin Itt on the sitcom “The Addams Family,” died on Friday. He was 84.The cause was cancer, Mr. Silla’s representative, Bonnie Vent, said in a statement. She did not say where he died.Mr. Silla, who stood less than four feet tall, appeared as Cousin Itt in 17 episodes of “The Addams Family,” although his face was not seen and his voice was not heard. Sporting a floor-length hairpiece, sunglasses and a bowler hat, Cousin Itt spoke in a high-pitched mumble (his voice was provided by someone else in postproduction), which was understood only by the other members of the family.“The Addams Family,” seen on ABC from 1964 to 1966, was based on Charles Addams’s New Yorker cartoons about a family that was (in the words of its theme song) “mysterious and spooky.” Cousin Itt, who became a fan favorite, was created specifically for the show.Mr. Silla in 1965 as the hairy Cousin Itt in “The Addams Family.” With him, from left, were John Astin (as Gomez Addams), Carolyn Jones (Morticia Addams) and Ted Cassidy (the butler Lurch).Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesMr. Silla’s face also went unseen in other roles, including the robot Twiki on the 1979-81 NBC science fiction series “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” He was unheard there as well; Twiki’s voice was provided for most of the show’s run by Mel Blanc.He played an Ewok who rode a hang glider in the “Star Wars” film “Return of the Jedi” (1983). Four years later he was in Mel Brooks’s “Star Wars” parody, “Spaceballs.”“Felix knew a lot about making characters come to life with no dialogue,” Ms. Vent said.Viewers had a chance to see Mr. Silla’s face in the 1975 film “The Black Bird,” a comedic sequel to “The Maltese Falcon,” in which he played a villain named Litvak who menaces Sam Spade Jr. (George Segal).Mr. Silla did stunt work in “E.T.” “Poltergeist,” “The Golden Child” and other films. His many TV appearances, in addition to “The Addams Family” and “Buck Rogers,” included roles on “Bewitched,” “Bonanza” and “H.R. Pufnstuf.”His final big-screen role was in “Characterz,” a 2016 film about costumed mascots.Felix Silla was born on Jan. 11, 1937, in Abruzzo, Italy, and came to the United States in 1955. He toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as a bareback rider, trapeze artist and tumbler. He began working in Hollywood as a stuntman in 1962.He is survived by his wife, Sue, and his daughter, Bonnie. His son, Michael, died last year.The New York Times contributed reporting. More

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      Richard Rush, Who Directed ‘The Stunt Man,’ Dies as 91

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      He was nominated for an Oscar for the movie, about filmmaking stunts, perception and reality. His earlier films were aimed at the teenage market.Richard Rush, who made rebellious-youth films in the 1960s that featured emerging stars like Jack Nicholson but who had his biggest success in 1980 with “The Stunt Man,” a quirky, expectation-defying thriller that gained cult status, died on April 8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91.His wife, Claude Rush, said the cause was an accumulation of health issues that included heart and kidney failure. He had a heart transplant 18 years ago.Mr. Rush didn’t make a lot of movies; the last of his dozen feature films, the erotic thriller “Color of Night,” was released in 1994. But he made his mark with the actors he cast and with a certain fearlessness in his filmmaking choices.In “The Stunt Man,” Steve Railsback plays a fugitive who accidentally finds himself on a film set and ends up as a stunt man while striking up a romance with one of the stars (played by Barbara Hershey). Mr. Rush was nominated for an Oscar for directing and for the script, which he and Lawrence B. Marcus adapted from a Paul Brodeur novel. Peter O’Toole received an Oscar nomination for his bravura performance as the director who may or may not be trying to kill his new stunt man.The movie is full of wild stunts and misdirection, keeping the audience guessing about what is real and what is movie-within-the-movie magic.“We couldn’t wait to get to the set every day because we knew something exciting and creative was going to happen,” Mr. Railsback said in a phone interview.Mr. Rush, in a 2017 interview with the blog We Are Cult, described what he was going for in the movie.“I had the audacity to think that I could make a picture that would explore illusion and reality,” he said, “and I wanted to use the film as a mirror for the paranoid mind-set that we all live through at one point or another.”If “The Stunt Man” and some of his other films were hard to classify, switching quickly from comedy to drama to romance, that was because reality was like that, he said.“Living life is like falling down through a pinball machine, with balls bouncing off of each other, causing action and reaction in an unexpected way,” he told We Are Cult. “And that’s how I view storytelling: having that great balance of all the various elements. Something is allowed to be funny and serious sometimes within the same moment or scene.”Richard Walter Rush was born on April 15, 1929, in New York. His widow said that his parents were Ray and Nina Rush, Russian immigrants, and that his father had owned bookstores in New York and Los Angeles, where the family settled when Richard was a boy.During the Korean War Mr. Rush was part of a filmmaking unit in the Air Force, stationed in San Bernardino, Calif. After his military service he enrolled in a new film school at the University of California, Los Angeles.His early films were generally low-budget affairs made quickly and aimed at the teenage market.One of Mr. Nicholson’s earliest roles was in Mr. Rush’s first film, “Too Soon to Love” (1960), a drama about a teenage couple dealing with a pregnancy, a somewhat scandalous subject for the time. Mr. Nicholson was back in Mr. Rush’s biker picture, “Hell’s Angels on Wheels,” in 1967, two years before the better-known “Easy Rider” worked a biker theme with a cast that featured Mr. Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper (who directed that film).In 1974 Mr. Rush directed the action comedy “Freebie and the Bean,” with James Caan and Alan Arkin starring in an early example of the modern-day buddy-cop genre soon to spawn hits like “48 Hrs” and “Lethal Weapon.”On “Hell’s Angels on Wheels” and several other movies, he worked with the cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who went on to a long and acclaimed career with credits like “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces” (1970).Among Mr. Rush’s other movies were “Psych-Out” (1968), about a deaf runaway (Susan Strasberg) in the hippie heart of San Francisco, where Mr. Nicholson and Bruce Dern are among the populace; and “Getting Straight” (1970), with Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, a film that Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed as “the worst of the campus-revolution movies.”Mr. Rush on the set for “Color of Night” (1994), an erotic thriller that drew considerable attention.Cinergi Pictures Entertainment“Color of Night,” which starred Jane March and Bruce Willis, drew considerable attention both for its racy sex scenes and the dispute Mr. Rush got into with the studio over the editing. During arbitration with the studio, Cinergi Productions, Mr. Rush had a heart attack.He also had an unpleasant experience with “Air America,” an action comedy for which he wrote a script that became part of a long development tussle. When the movie finally came out in 1990, it was directed by Roger Spottiswoode; Mr. Rush shared a screenwriting credit.He married Claude Cuvereaux in 1995 after many years together. He is also survived by a son, Anthony, and a grandson.Mr. Rush had definite ideas about the scripts he agreed to direct and how to shoot them. Mr. Railsback recalled that on “The Stunt Man,” the cinematographer, Mario Tosi, was taken aback by Mr. Rush’s hands-on style.“Early on Richard would say, ‘Put your camera here, do this and do this,’” he said, “and Mario was getting upset because Richard was telling him where to put the camera and all this other stuff.”But when the day’s footage (known as dailies) came back, Mr. Railsback said, Mr. Rush’s instincts proved to be spot on.“Mario looked at the dailies,” he said, “and he walked over to Richard and said, ‘You just tell me where to put that camera.’” More

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      Black Rob, Rapper Known for His Hit Single ‘Whoa!,’ Dies at 52

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      A star for Bad Boy Records after the Notorious B.I.G.’s death, the rapper had a husky, seen-it-all voice even as a young man.Robert Ross, the rapper known as Black Rob, whose husky, seen-it-all voice powered turn-of-the-millennium hits like “Whoa!” and “Can I Live” for Bad Boy Records, died on Saturday at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. He was 52.The cause was cardiac arrest, said Mark Curry, a friend and one-time Bad Boy artist, who added that Mr. Ross had numerous health issues in recent years, including diabetes, lupus, kidney failure and multiple strokes.Mr. Ross had been undergoing dialysis and was discharged from Piedmont Atlanta Hospital this month, Mr. Curry said. In a video that was posted online and spread across the hip-hop world, Mr. Ross detailed his ailments and recent struggles with homelessness.“He didn’t have a home, but he always had us,” said Mr. Curry, who called Mr. Ross “a true poet.” He added: “He’s known for telling stories and his music described his life. You can feel it.”Last week, Mr. Curry, along with the producer Mike Zombie, began promoting a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Mr. Ross — “to help him find a home, pay for medical help and stability during these trying times,” the campaign’s description said. The fund-raiser collected about half of its $50,000 goal.Mr. Ross, who was born in Harlem, N.Y., began rapping around the age of 11, influenced by local artists like Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, whom he credited for helping to develop his storytelling prowess. He also internalized the essence of his musically ascendant neighborhood, citing its “pick-me-up kinda sound.”“It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s got a little flavor, I could dance to this’ — you’re gonna talk about a little bit of money, a little bit of drugs,” Mr. Ross said in a 2013 interview. “We were the flashiest.”Best known for the hard-hitting 2000 single “Whoa!”, which reached No. 43 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a string of electric guest verses on songs by Mase, 112 and Total, Mr. Ross could sound both motivated and weathered even as a young man.Thrust into more of a leading role after the murder of his Bad Boy label mate, the Notorious B.I.G., in March 1997, the rapper became another fast-burning star under the imprimatur of the budding hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, better known as Diddy, by the end of the 1990s.Mr. Ross’s debut album, the fittingly named “Life Story,” was released by Bad Boy in 2000, when he was 31. Already, he had spent more than a decade of his life in and out of juvenile detention, jail and prison, and the music reflected that.“It’s hell,” the rapper said at the time of his past. “Once they get their teeth on you, they keep biting, until they feel like, ‘Let’s throw away the key on this cat.’”“Life Story” featured intricate street tales of stickups, shootouts and the family struggles that could lead to such things, and it reached No. 3 on the Billboard album chart, eventually becoming platinum.Five years later, “The Black Rob Report,” the rapper’s second album, failed to find the same success, in part because Mr. Ross was back in prison, having failed to report to sentencing for a 2004 larceny charge. His career never recovered.“Bad Boy left me for dead,” Mr. Ross said upon his release from prison in 2010. Two subsequent independent releases on different labels foundered.Mr. Ross is survived by his mother, Cynthia; four siblings; nine children; and five grandchildren.Many people on social media offered condolences for Mr. Ross, including Diddy, the entrepreneur Daymond John and the rappers Missy Elliott, L.L. Cool J, GZA and Styles P.On Twitter, L.L. Cool J described Mr. Ross as a storyteller, gentleman and an M.C.Ms. Elliott lamented that the death of Mr. Ross closely followed that of another New York rapper, Earl Simmons, known as DMX, who died this month.“It’s hard finding the words to say when someone passes away,” Ms. Elliott said on Twitter. “I am Praying for both of their families for healing.” More

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      Rusty Young, Country-Rock Pioneer, Is Dead at 75

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      As a founding member of the band Poco, he helped define a genre and establish the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in West Coast rock.Rusty Young, a founding member of the popular country-rock group Poco and a key figure in establishing the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in the West Coast rock of the late 1960s and ’70s, died on Wednesday at his home in Davisville, Mo. He was 75.His publicist, Mike Farley, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Young played steel guitar with Poco for more than a half-century. Along with other Los Angeles-based rock bands like the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco was among the architects of the country-rock movement of the late ’60s, which incorporated traditional country instrumentation into predominantly rock arrangements. The Eagles and scores of other bands would follow in their wake.Formed in 1968, Poco originally included the singer-guitarists Jim Messina and Richie Furay — both formerly of Buffalo Springfield, another pioneering country-rock band from Los Angeles — along with Mr. Young, the drummer George Grantham and the bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles. (Timothy B. Schmit, another future Eagle, replaced Mr. Meisner after he left the band in 1969.)Poco initially came together for a high-profile show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, not long after Mr. Furay had invited Mr. Young to play pedal steel guitar on his composition “Kind Woman,” the closing track on Buffalo Springfield’s farewell album, “Last Time Around.” The music that Poco made generally employed twangier production and was more populist in orientation than that of Buffalo Springfield, a band that had at times gravitated toward experimentalism and obfuscation.Mr. Furay’s song “Pickin’ Up the Pieces,” the title track of Poco’s debut album in 1969, served as a statement of purpose:Well there’s just a little bit of magicIn the country music we’re singin’So let’s begin.We’re bringin’ you back down home where the folks are happySittin’ pickin’ and a-grinnin’Casually, you and meWe’ll pick up the pieces, uh-huh.Poco in 1973, clockwise from left: Paul Cotton, Mr. Young, Richie Furay, Timothy B. Schmit and George Grantham.Gijsbert Hanekroot/RedfernsAt once keening and lyrical, Mr. Young’s pedal steel work imbued the group’s music with its rustic signature sound and helped create a prominent place for the steel guitar among roots-conscious California rock bands.“I added color to Richie’s country-rock songs, and that was the whole idea, to use country-sounding instruments,” Mr. Young explained in a 2014 interview with Goldmine magazine, referring to Mr. Furay’s compositions.But Mr. Young, who also played banjo, Dobro and mandolin, was not averse to musical experimentation. “I pushed the envelope on steel guitar, playing it with a fuzz tone, because nobody was doing that,” he told Goldmine. He also played the pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, much as a Hammond B3 organist would, causing some listeners to assume he was indeed playing an organ.Mr. Young was not among Poco’s original singers or songwriters. But he emerged as one of the group’s frontmen, along with the newcomer Paul Cotton, after the departure of Mr. Messina in 1971 and Mr. Furay in 1973. Mr. Young would go on to write and sing the lead vocal on “Crazy Love,” the band’s biggest hit, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart (and No. 17 on the pop chart) in 1979.He also wrote and sang lead on “Rose of Cimarron,” another of Poco’s more enduring recordings from the ’70s, and orchestrated the 1989 reunion of the group’s original members for the album “Legacy,” which, like the 1978 platinum-selling “Legend,” yielded a pair of Top 40 singles.Norman Russell Young was born on Feb. 23, 1946, in Long Beach, Calif., one of three children of Norman John and Ruth (Stephenson) Young. His father, an electrician, and his mother, a typist, took him to country music bars, where he was captivated by the steel guitar players as a child.He grew up in Denver, where he began playing the lap steel guitar at age 6. As a teenager, he worked with local psychedelic and country bands.After moving to Los Angeles, but before joining Poco, he turned down an invitation to become a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, which at the time featured Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, formerly of the Byrds.Mr. Young performing at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2018.Timothy Norris/WireImageAfter Mr. Cotton’s departure from Poco in 2010 over a financial dispute, Mr. Young became the group’s sole frontman. The band made its final album, “All Fired Up,” in 2013, the same year Mr. Young was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in St. Louis. He released his first solo album, “Waitin’ for the Sun,” in 2017, and performed sporadically with the most recent version of Poco until the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.Mr. Young is survived by his wife of 17 years, Mary Brennan Young; a daughter, Sara; a son, Will; a sister, Corine; and three grandsons. His brother, Ron, died in 2002.Mr. Young’s emergence as a singer and songwriter in Poco in the late ’70s, after almost a decade as a supporting instrumentalist, was as opportune as it was fortuitous.“The band didn’t need another singer-songwriter when Richie and Jim were in the band,” he explained, referring to Mr. Furay and Mr. Messina, in his 2014 Goldmine interview. “My job was to play steel guitar and make the music part of it. So when my job changed, it opened up a whole lot of opportunity for me. So I liked the way things went.” More

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      Helen McCrory, British Star of Stage, Film and TV, Dies at 52

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      She was acclaimed for her work on the TV series “Peaky Blinders” and in three Harry Potter movies, but she first gained notice in the London theater.Helen McCrory, the accomplished and versatile British stage and screen actress who played Narcissa Malfoy in three Harry Potter films and the matriarch Polly Gray on the BBC series “Peaky Blinders,” in addition to earning critical plaudits for her stage work, has died at her home in north London. She was 52.Her death, from, cancer, was announced on social media on Friday by her husband, the actor Damian Lewis.Ms. McCrory was a familiar face to London theater audiences and to British television and film viewers well before she won wider recognition in the Harry Potter movies. She began her career in the theater in 1990, straight out of drama school, playing Gwendolen in a production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” in Harrogate, Yorkshire. In 1993, the director Richard Eyre, who was the head of the National Theater, cast her in the leading role in his production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s comic play “Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’” for which she earned glowing reviews.“Helen McCrory, in the title role, perfectly captures Rose’s crossover from a lovelorn ingénue to wounded woman,” Sheridan Morley wrote in The International Herald Tribune.The next year she played Nina in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the National Theater, alongside Judi Dench and Bill Nighy, and in 1995 she was named “most promising newcomer” in the Shakespeare Globe Awards for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the West End.Ms. McCrory worked steadily in the theater over the next two decades, with notable appearances as Yelena in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in 2002; as Rosalind in “As You Like It” in 2005 (which earned her an Olivier Award nomination for best actress); as Rebecca West in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” in 2008; and as Medea in 2016.“Portrayed with unsettling accessibility and nerves of piano wire by Helen McCrory,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, “the Medea of ancient myth has become the sad but scary crazy lady next door, the kind who inspires you to lock up your children.”But as early as 1994, Ms. McCrory was also venturing into film and television work. In 2003 she appeared as Barbara Villiers, the mistress of Charles II, in Joe Wright’s four-part series “Charles II: The Power and the Passion,” and in 2006 she made a cameo appearance as Cherie Blair, the wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, in Stephen Frears’s “The Queen” — a role she reprised in the 2010 film “The Special Relationship,” written, as was “The Queen,” by Peter Morgan.Ms. McCrory became known to worldwide audiences through her 2009 role as Narcissa Malfoy, the mother of Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy, in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” She played the role again in Parts 1 and 2 of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the final films in the series. (She had in fact been slated for a larger role, as Bellatrix Lestrange, in the earlier “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” but had been forced to withdraw after discovering she was pregnant; Helena Bonham Carter took over.)She was good at playing villains — the evil alien Rosanna Calvierri in an episode of “Doctor Who,” the spiritualist Evelyn Poole in the series “Penny Dreadful,” and, perhaps most notably, Polly Gray, the aunt of the gang boss Tommy Shelby, on the period crime drama “Peaky Blinders,” a role she played for its entire five-season run, from 2013 to 2019.Ms. McCrory with Jason Isaacs, left, and Tom Felton in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” (2011).Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Brothers PicturesHelen Elizabeth McCrory was born on Aug. 17, 1968, in the Paddington neighborhood of London, the eldest of three children. Her father, Iain McCrory, was a diplomat; her mother, Ann (Morgans) McCrory, worked for the National Health Service.During her childhood, her father’s work for the Foreign Service took the family to Tanzania, Norway, Madagascar and Paris.“Dad tells me my first appearance onstage was dancing during an official visit by the French president,” Ms. McCrory said in a 2014 interview with The Times of London. “I’m pretty sure the idea of being an actress came to me around that time. Every evening at the house was like a little concert.”In her teens she was sent back to England, to the Queenswood School for Girls in Hertfordshire. She began to act while there and, after graduating, spent a year traveling around Italy before being accepted at the Drama Center London.Being an actress “was the only thing I wanted to be,” she told The Times of London in 2017, adding that she had been “incredibly lucky” to be quickly given major roles.Ms. McCrory met Mr. Lewis in 2003, when they were both appearing in Joanna Laurens’s “Five Gold Rings” at the Almeida Theater in London. “Damian’s naughty, and I’ve always loved my naughty boys,” she said last year on the BBC 4 radio program “Desert Island Discs.” They had two children, Manon in 2006 and Gulliver in 2007, and married in 2007. Although Mr. Lewis also found fame, on the television series “Homeland” and “Billions,” they maintained a low-key life in London.Ms. McCrory with her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, in London in 2017 after she was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire.Pool photo by Wpa“I’m much happier as I’ve got older,” Ms. McCrory told The Times of London in 2016. “Age has given me nothing but confidence, security and joy.” She added, “To me, ‘Helen McCrory, 47’ means nothing. ‘Helen McCrory, bad housewife and argumentative after a bottle of gin’ would be much more relevant.”In recent years she appeared on TV in leading roles in David Hare’s political drama “Roadkill” and James Graham’s “Quiz” and as the voice of a daemon in “His Dark Materials.”Last year, Ms. McCrory and Mr. Lewis spearheaded a fund-raising effort to provide meals for members of the National Health staff amid the coronavirus pandemic. Their work led to donations of close to £1 million ($1.4 million) to the Feed NHS Scheme. Just a month ago, on March 12, she appeared with Mr. Lewis on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” to discuss the project.Her illness was not widely known, and her death came as a surprise to most. Complete information on survivors, in addition to her husband and children, was not immediately available. More

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      Benita Raphan, Maker of Lyrical Short Films, Is Dead at 58

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      Her dreamlike “genius” films about figures like Emily Dickinson and Buckminster Fuller hovered between documentary and experimental cinema.Benita Raphan made short experimental films about eccentric and unusual minds — like John Nash, the mathematician; Buckminster Fuller, the utopian architect; and Edwin Land, who invented Polaroid film. Her “genius” films, as they were known, are dreamlike, lyrical and suggestive. Not quite biography, they hover between documentary and experimental filmmaking. Ms. Raphan described herself as a cinematic diarist and an experimental biographer.“Up From Astonishment” (2020), her most recent film, is about Emily Dickinson. In it, ink blooms on a page; butterflies pinwheel; there are empty bird nests, an abacus and various inscrutable shapes. Susan Howe, a poet, and Marta Werner, a Dickinson scholar, are the film’s narrators, but not really. Ms. Raphan had sampled clips from her interviews with them and used their words strategically and evocatively.In one sound fragment, Ms. Howe says: “I can’t be called just a poet. I always have to be called an experimental poet, or difficult poet, or innovative poet. To me all good poetry is experimental in some way.”Ms. Raphan was a poet in her own right. She died at 58 on Jan. 10 in New York City. Her mother, Roslyn Raphan, confirmed her death, which had not been widely reported at the time, but did not specify a cause.Ms. Raphan’s films are in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and have been shown at the Sundance and Tribeca festivals, as well as on the Sundance Channel, HBO, PBS and Channel Four in Britain. She was a Guggenheim fellow in 2019.“Benita had a wonderful way of flipping the way we think about a biographical film,” said Dean Otto, curator of film at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky. When he was a curator at the Walker Art Center, Mr. Otto acquired four of Ms. Raphan’s films, and she donated an additional two.“She conducted oral history interviews with people who knew the person or were moved by the work and then took that soundtrack and, using her background in graphic design, created these abstract images,” Mr. Otto said. “What she wanted to do was take you into the mind of these geniuses, imagine their thought processes and present that visually.”Ms. Raphan told an interviewer in 2011, “I am interested in revisiting a life or a career from the very start, from the beginning; the basic concept as initial thought, as an impulse, as an ineffable compulsion, an intuition; to reframe and reinvent an action as simple as one pair of hands touching pencil to paper.”Moments from “Absence Stronger Than Presence,” Ms. Raphan’s 1996 film about Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid film.via Raphan familyvia Raphan familyMs. Raphan was born on Nov. 5, 1962, in Manhattan. Her mother, Roslyn (Padlowe) Raphan, was an educator; her father, Bernard Raphan, was a lawyer.She grew up on the Upper West Side and graduated from City-as-School, an alternative public high school at which students design their own curriculums based on experiential learning, mostly through internships. (Jean-Michel Basquiat was an alumnus, as is Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys.) Ms. Raphan interned with Albert Watson, the fashion photographer.Her mother described Ms. Raphan as an “irregular verb.”“She saw things through a different lens,” she said. “Benita could take something ordinary and find beauty in it. She was the real deal. No artifice about her. The heart was right out there.”Ms. Raphan earned an undergraduate degree in media arts from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan — where she also taught for the last 15 years — and an M.F.A. from the Royal College of Art in London. She spent 10 years in Paris, working as a graphic designer for fashion companies like Marithé & François Girbaud, before returning to New York in the mid-1990s.In addition to her mother, she is survived by her sister, Melissa Raphan.“While the rest of us were stealing from our instructors and other design luminaries,” said Gail Anderson, a creative director and former classmate of Ms. Raphan’s, “Benita was on her own journey, working with delicate typography and haunting images, creating collages and photo-illustrations that were uniquely Benita.”Ms. Raphan was, in her own estimation, more of a collage artist than a filmmaker. “Her films are really collages of ideas,” said Kane Platt, a film editor who worked on many of her projects. “Working with her you had a lot of freedom, and if you had ideas that were weird and wacky, she was like, ‘Go, go, go!’”She was also, Mr. Platt said, the consummate hustler. “I’ve never met anyone like her,” he said. “It was all on a shoestring. She would trade, she would barter, whatever was necessary.”He and others donated their work on her films, though she always offered to pay. (For “Absence Stronger Than Presence,” her film about Edwin Land, she persuaded the actor Harvey Keitel to provide the voice-over, and sent a chauffeur-driven limousine to pick him up for the recording session.) She found ways to be generous in return.Ms. Raphan in 2019, the year she was named a Guggenheim fellow. Declan Van Welie“She was able to bring together some very talented people,” said Marshall Grupp, one of her mentors, a sound designer and co-owner of Sound Lounge, an audio postproduction company. “Even though she had no money, she did whatever she needed to do to make it happen. I think people are attracted to that. I adored her.“She thanked me for everything,” he continued; “I don’t think people do that in this industry. Her thank-you notes came wrapped in beautiful envelopes, in a bag with colored paper. The idea of her showing appreciation in small and significant ways meant a lot. She had a lot of humanity, and that came through in her work.”At her death, Ms. Raphan was working on a film about animal behavior. Since adopting a behaviorally challenged dog from a shelter years ago, she had been fascinated by the workings of the canine mind.“Benita was a gleaner,” the filmmaker Alan Berliner said. “She was very much an urban anthropologist. She had a knack for finding things — or letting things find her. She walked her dog several times a day and knew her neighborhood very well; she knew who threw things out and where. Her films are filled with many of the strange and surprising objects she often found — the carved head of a dog; an old typewriter; a teapot; an old notebook. They lent her films a kind of unpredictability and surreal quality.”Mr. Berliner added: “Her films were not so much about their subject as they were about the issues they evoked. They’re filled with hints of things, synaptic touches that trigger thoughts. Sometimes I thought of her as a scientist in an artist’s body. She was always interested in the mystery of things.” More

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      James Hampton, Bumbling ‘F Troop’ Bugler, Dies at 84

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      A character actor, he was best known for comedic roles but also appeared in “The China Syndrome” and other dramas.James Hampton, a character actor who achieved a measure of sitcom immortality with one of his earliest roles, the inept bugler Hannibal Dobbs in the 1960s series “F Troop,” died on Wednesday at his home in Trophy Club, Texas. He was 84.Linda McAlister, his agent, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Hampton had a genial countenance well suited to comedic roles characterized by bumbling or gullibility. He had appeared in a handful of television shows, “Death Valley” and “Dr. Kildare” among them, when the director of a “Gunsmoke” episode he was in brought him to the attention of a Warner Bros. casting director. That led to the role on “F Troop,” a spunky ABC comedy about a military outpost, Fort Courage, in the 1860s.The show starred Forrest Tucker, Larry Storch, Melody Patterson and Ken Berry, but Mr. Hampton made an indelible impression in his secondary role as a bugler whose playing bore only a passing resemblance to music. (In the show’s opening montage, an arrow makes a direct hit into the bell end of his horn as he’s playing.) The show ran for only two seasons, but its over-the-top humor in an era of milder comedies like “The Andy Griffith Show” endeared it to a certain segment of viewers.Mr. Hampton was well known to a later generation from the 1985 movie “Teen Wolf,” in which he portrayed the father of the title character, a werewolf played by the emerging star Michael J. Fox. He was also in its sequel, “Teen Wolf Too,” which starred Jason Bateman, in 1987.Mr. Hampton played more serious roles as well, including the power company public relations man who is showing Jane Fonda’s character around a nuclear power plant when disaster strikes in “The China Syndrome” (1979).He occasionally directed, including episodes of the 1990s series “Hearts Afire,” whose cast included Billy Bob Thornton. When Mr. Thornton wrote his acclaimed film “Sling Blade” (1996), he made sure that there was a role in it for Mr. Hampton, as a hospital administrator.Burt Reynolds was another important influence in his career. They met while working together on “Gunsmoke” when Mr. Reynolds was a regular cast member. The two appeared in the 1974 football movie “The Longest Yard,” and Mr. Hampton both wrote and directed episodes of Mr. Reynolds’s 1990s series, “Evening Shade.”James Wade Hampton was born on July 9, 1936, in Oklahoma City. His father, Ivan, owned a dry cleaning business, and his mother, Edna (Gately) Hampton, worked at a millinery.He grew up in Dallas and was a speech and drama major at North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas). He was drafted in the Army in 1959 and served in Europe. Returning to Texas in the early 1960s, he worked in regional theater before moving to New York in 1962.Mr. Hampton in 2012. He continued to act occasionally even after semi-retiring in 2002.Barry Brecheisen/WireImageMr. Hampton worked steadily for the next four decades and landed occasional roles even after semi-retiring and settling back in Texas in 2002. He is survived by his wife, Mary Deese Hampton, whom he married in 2002; two sons, James and Frank; a daughter, Andrea Hampton Doyle; and three grandchildren.After “F Troop,” Mr. Hampton returned to slapstick-in-uniform in the 1976 movie “Hawmps!” He played a mid-19th-century lieutenant tasked with overseeing an experiment in Texas that involved using camels in the cavalry. Mr. Hampton was a favorite of Johnny Carson in that period and was a frequent guest on his “Tonight Show,” including on the night of the Hollywood premiere of “Hawmps!”As Mr. Hampton told the story to The Community Common of Portsmouth, Ohio, in 2007, he was Mr. Carson’s first guest so that he could leave early to get to the premiere. He happened to mention to Mr. Carson that his mother was in the studio audience. Mr. Carson brought up the house lights and congratulated her on her son’s big night.His mother responded by saying: “You just go ahead to the premiere, James. I’m going to stay and watch the rest of Johnny.” More

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      Ethel Gabriel, a Rare Woman in the Record World, Dies at 99

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      For much of her more than 40 years at RCA, Ms. Gabriel was a producer, overseeing “Living Strings” and other profitable lines.Ethel Gabriel, who in more than 40 years at RCA Victor is thought to have produced thousands of records, many at a time when almost no women were doing that work at major labels, died on March 23 in Rochester, N.Y. She was 99.Her nephew, Ed Mauro, her closest living relative, confirmed her death.Ms. Gabriel began working at RCA’s plant in Camden, N.J., in 1940 while a student at Temple University in Philadelphia. One of her early jobs was as a record tester — she would pull one in every 500 records and listen to it for manufacturing imperfections.“If it was a hit,” she told The Pocono Record of Pennsylvania in 2007, “I got to know every note because I had to play it over and over and over.”She also had a music background — she played trombone and had her own dance band in the 1930s and early ’40s — and her skill set earned her more and more responsibility, as well as the occasional role in shaping music history. She said she was on hand at the 1955 meeting in which the RCA executive Stephen Sholes signed Elvis Presley, who had been with Sun Records. She had a hand in “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” the 1955 instrumental hit by Pérez Prado that helped ignite a mambo craze in the United States.She may have produced or co-produced the album that contained that tune, but April Tucker, lead researcher on a documentary being made about Ms. Gabriel, said details on the early part of her career were hazy. Ms. Gabriel often said that she had produced some 2,500 records. Ms. Tucker said officials at Sony, which now holds RCA’s archives, had told her that the number may actually be higher, since contributions were not always credited.In any case, by the late 1950s Ms. Gabriel was in charge of RCA Camden Records, the company’s budget line, and was earning producer credits, something she continued to do into the 1980s.In 1959 she began the “Living Strings” series of easy-listening albums, consisting of orchestral renditions of popular and classical tunes (“Living Strings Play Music of the Sea,” “Living Strings Play Music for Romance” and many more), most of which were released on Camden. The line soon branched out into “Living Voices,” “Living Guitars” and other subsets and became a big profit-generator for RCA — which was not, Ms. Gabriel said, what the boss expected when he put her in charge of Camden, a struggling label at the time.“I’m sure he thought it was a way to get rid of me,” she told The Express-Times of Easton, Pa., in 1992 (too diplomatic to name the boss). “Well, I made a multimillion-dollar line out of it, conceived, programmed and produced the entire thing.”Ms. Gabriel with her fellow producers Don Wardell, left, and Alan Dell at the 1983 Grammy Awards. They shared the award for best historical album for “The Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra Sessions.” Ed and Nancy MauroThere were other profitable series as well. Ms. Gabriel was particularly good at repackaging material from the RCA archives into albums that sold anew, as she did in the “Pure Gold” series. In 1983 she shared a Grammy Award for best historical album for “The Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra Sessions” By the time she left RCA in 1984, she was a vice president.Yet, unlike the top male record executives of the era, she rarely made headlines. Ms. Tucker, an audio engineer, said she had never heard of Ms. Gabriel until one day she went searching to see if she could find out who the first female audio engineer was. She brought Ms. Gabriel to the attention of Sound Girls, an organization that promotes women in the audio field, and soon Caroline Losneck and Christoph Gelfand, documentary filmmakers, were at work on “Living Sound,” a film about her.Ms. Losneck, in a phone interview, said they had been hoping to complete the documentary by Ms. Gabriel’s 100th birthday this November.Ms. Losneck said Ms. Gabriel had survived in a tough business through productivity and competence.“She knew who to call when she needed an organist,” she said. “She knew how to manage the budget. All that gave her a measure of control.”Many of the records Ms. Gabriel made fit into a category often marginalized as elevator music.“It’s easy to look back on that music now and say it was kind of cheesy,” Ms. Losneck said, “but back then it was part of the cultural landscape.”Toward the end of her career, as more women began entering the field, Ms. Gabriel was both an example and a mentor. Nancy Jeffries, who went to work in RCA’s artists-and-repertoire department in 1974 and had earlier sung with the band the Insect Trust, was one of those who learned from her.“Being a woman and having ambition at a record company in those days was something that just didn’t compute with most of the male executive staff, but I was fortunate enough to land in the A&R department at RCA Records, where Ethel was established as a force to be reckoned with,” Ms. Jeffries, who went on to executive positions at RCA, Elektra and other record companies, said by email. “She had developed a couple of deals that, while they weren’t particularly ‘hip,’ generated a lot of income and financed some of the more speculative workings of the department. Lesson one: Make money for the company and they will leave you be.”Mr. Mauro summarized his aunt’s career simply:“She was successful early on when the playing field wasn’t level.”Ms. Gabriel, interviewed by The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1983, had a succinct explanation of her ability to thrive in a man’s world.“I didn’t know I was somewhere I shouldn’t be,” she said.Ethel Nagy was born on Nov. 16, 1921, in Milmont Park, Pa., near Philadelphia. Her father, Charles, who died when she was a teenager, was a machinist, and her mother, Margaret (Horvath) Nagy, took up ceramic sculpture later in life.Ms. Gabriel studied trombone in her youth and formed a band, En (her initials) and Her Royal Men, that played in the Philadelphia area. While at Temple she began working at RCA in nearby Camden putting labels on records and packed them before advancing to record tester.Ms. Gabriel at her home in Rochester, N.Y., in 2019. She had a succinct explanation of her ability to thrive in a man’s world: “I didn’t know I was somewhere I shouldn’t be.”Living Sound FilmAfter graduating in 1943, Ms. Gabriel continued her studies at Columbia University and worked at RCA’s offices in New York, including as secretary to Herman Diaz Jr., who led RCA’s Latin division. She spent a lot of time listening in on studio sessions, and by the mid-1950s trade publications were referring to her as an “RCA Victor executive.”In 1958 she married Gus Gabriel, who was in music publishing. The couple counted Frank Sinatra as a friend. In a 2011 interview with The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, she said that in 1973, when her husband was dying in a hospital, she walked into his room one day and found his nurses in a tizzy.“I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’” she recalled. “They said, ‘Oh, everybody got autographed pictures from Sinatra!’”Ms. Jeffries said that Ms. Gabriel had always mentored the women at the company no matter where they were on the corporate ladder. But her helping hand was extended to men, too, as the producer Warren Schatz found out when he joined RCA in the mid-1970s, as the disco wave was building.He had an idea for an album that might catch that wave, he said, and she came up with $6,000 to get it made. It was by the Brothers and included a song, “Are You Ready for This,” that became a dance-floor staple.“So Ethel basically started my life off at RCA,” Mr. Schatz said in a phone interview. Soon he was vice president of A&R, and she was reporting to him.“Whatever she wanted to do, I would just say yes to,” he said. “She was so calm, and so knowledgeable, and so self-sufficient.”Ms. Gabriel left RCA in 1984, in part, she said, at the urging of Robert B. Anderson, a former U.S. treasury secretary, who persuaded her to turn over to him her retirement package — more than $250,000 — so that he could invest it in the hope that the proceeds would finance future music ventures. The money disappeared, and Mr. Anderson, who died in 1989, was later convicted of tax evasion.Ms. Gabriel lived in the Poconos for a number of years before moving to a care center in Rochester to be near Mr. Mauro and his family. As she died at a hospital there, Mr. Mauro said, the staff had Sinatra songs playing in her room. More