Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Television

      Rachael Lillis, Who Voiced Popular ‘Pokémon’ Characters, Dies at 55

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      Ms. Lillis voiced the characters of Misty and Jessie in the animated series based on a video game. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in May.Rachael Lillis, an actress who voiced the original English versions of Misty and Jessie, popular characters in the 1990s “Pokémon” anime television series, and later in the franchise’s movies and games as well, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 55.The cause was cancer, according to Laurie Orr, one of her sisters.Ms. Lillis started voice acting in the 1980s, according to her IMDB page, but her big break came in the late 1990s when she was cast in the English version of the “Pokémon” TV series, a popular Japanese anime based on the “Pokémon” video games. In hundreds of episodes over eight years, Ms. Lillis voiced the characters Misty, a trusted friend of the main character, Ash Ketchum, and Jessie, one of the show’s villains.She also voiced those characters in two “Pokemon” movies as the cultural phenomenon grew.Ms. Lillis, who lived in Los Angeles, also was the voice of Jigglypuff, whose fairy song put listeners to sleep and was one of the creatures the characters pursue.Ms. Lillis, who had dozens of other voice credits to her name, had a strong sense of humor and a talent for voice acting, said Eric Stuart, who voiced James, the other member of Team Rocket in the “Pokémon” series, and worked with Ms. Lillis for many years.“If you met her, you’d not say this was so natural for her,” Mr. Stuart said in a phone interview. “Rachael in real life was pretty low key, kind of quiet and sweet,” Mr. Stuart added. “The minute she stepped in that booth it was like this whole other energy came out.”Mr. Stuart first met Ms. Lillis in the mid-1990s, when there were not a lot of people dubbing anime into English.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bob Tischler, Who Helped Revive ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Dies at 78

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      A producer of “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and albums by the Blues Brothers, he became S.N.L.’s head writer after a dismal season early in its history.Bob Tischler, who was part of the production and writing team that helped revive “Saturday Night Live” after the groundbreaking comedy show fell into a deep creative trough in the 1980-81 season, died on July 13 at his home in Bodega Bay, Calif. He was 78.His son, Zeke, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Tischler did not define himself as a writer when he joined “S.N.L.” He was best known for his work in audio, having produced “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and albums by the Blues Brothers.“I produced a lot of comedy and I did writing, but I wasn’t a member of the union or anything,” Mr. Tischler told James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales for their book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live’” (2002).“S.N.L.” needed a lot of help. After five trailblazing seasons under Lorne Michaels, its first producer, it floundered under his successor, Jean Doumanian, whose only season was widely considered the show’s worst to date.The show’s “flinty irreverence gave way a year ago to cheap shocks and worn-out formulas,” the reporter Tony Schwartz wrote in a 1981 New York Times article.Dick Ebersol, who replaced Ms. Doumanian as producer, hired Mr. Tischler as a supervisory producer in the spring of 1981 at the suggestion of the dark and temperamental Michael O’Donoghue, a veteran of the original “S.N.L.” whom Mr. Ebersol had brought back as head writer, and who had known Mr. Tischler from the Lampoon radio show. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mísia, Who Brought a Modern Flair to Fado Music, Dies at 69

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      With her smoky voice and her high-fashion look, the self-proclaimed “punk of fado” found stardom by shaking up a venerable Portuguese genre.Mísia, an acclaimed singer who helped modernize fado, a traditional Portuguese music known for wistful songs of fate, loss and regret, with a runway-ready style sense and an eclectic approach that earned her the label “anarchist of fado,” died on July 27 in Lisbon. She was 69.Her death was announced by Dalila Rodrigues, Portugal’s minister of culture, who called Mísia “a fundamental voice in the renewal of fado.” News reports said the cause was cancer.Fado — the name is derived from the Latin word fatum, meaning fate — is an urban folk music spiced with Arabic and other global influences that arose in the 19th century in the grittiest quarters of Lisbon. Marked by a minor-key plaintiveness, the music is rich with feelings of longing and resignation.Like the American blues, fado long functioned as the song of the disenfranchised, a search for transcendence amid struggle. “It was sung in the taverns and the houses of prostitution,” Mísia said in a 2000 interview with the American arts magazine Bomb, “where a lot of sailors and rough people, people who had a hard life, went to hear the music.” Fado, she added, “was the shouting of the people with no power.”Fado is also known for its theatrical, if spare, presentation: stylized, almost ritualistic performances by vocalists typically dressed in black, accompanied by traditional instruments like the Portuguese guitarra, a 12-string guitar dating to the 13th century.Her ascent to global success began with the release of her critically acclaimed debut album, called simply “Mísia,” in 1991; she eventually performed in the esteemed music halls of New York, London and Tokyo and attracted a particularly avid following in France.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      in Movies

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

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