Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Amadou Bagayoko, Half of Malian Duo Who Went Global, Dies at 70

      by

      As Amadou & Mariam, he and his wife were improbable pop stars on two counts. Their style was venturesome and eclectic, and they were blind virtuosos.Amadou Bagayoko, a Malian guitarist and composer who with his wife, the singer Mariam Doumbia, formed Amadou & Mariam, inventing a broadly accessible sound that made fans of people worldwide who otherwise knew little about music from Africa, died on Friday in Bamako, Mali’s capital. He was 70.His death was announced by the Malian government, which did not provide a cause. He and Ms. Doumbia lived in Bamako.In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Amadou & Mariam was regularly described as the new century’s most successful African musical act.Mr. Bagayoko, who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, called their sound “Afro-rock,” and the group regularly combined his winding guitar solos with, for example, the pounding of a West African djembe drum.Yet the group’s music also consistently evolved. Their breakout hit, the 2005 album “Dimanche à Bamako,” had chatty spoken asides, sirens, the hubbub of crowds — city sounds turned into melodies. Their 2008 album “Welcome to Mali,” conversely, embraced an electronic style of funk, opening with a song, “Sabali,” featuring Damon Albarn of the arty hip-hop group Gorillaz.What was consistent was a sweet, graceful sound that still had the power to build to crescendos, with Ms. Doumbia’s alto achieving clear, pleasant resonance over a rich orchestration.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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      John Peck, Underground Cartoonist Known as The Mad Peck, Dies at 82

      by

      Among many other accomplishments, he illustrated a scholarly work on the history of comic books and wrote record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.John Peck, a cultural omnivore known as The Mad Peck whose dryly humorous style as an underground cartoonist, artist, critic, disc jockey and record collector was accompanied by an ornate eccentricity, died on March 15 in Providence, R.I. He was 82.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a ruptured aneurysm in his aorta, said his sisters, Marie Peck and Lois Barber.Mr. Peck was not as well known or acclaimed as underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb or Art Spiegelman. That was perhaps in part because his interests were so broad, Gary Kenton, who edited him at Fusion and Creem magazines from the late 1960s into the ’70s, said in an interview.“To me, he would be a Top 10 cartoonist, a Top 10 D.J., a Top 10 rock critic,” Mr. Kenton said.Mr. Peck illustrated one of the first scholarly works on the importance of comic books. And he was perhaps the first cartoonist to write record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.He also wrote an academic paper in 1983 with the literary commentator Michael Macrone about the evolution of television; its title, “How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean,” playfully referenced phallic symbolism in the oil-soaked prime-time soap opera “Dallas.” Mr. Peck once called it his “crowning achievement.”His comic-strip music critiques appeared in Fusion, Creem, Rolling Stone and other music publications, and in The Village Voice. He worked in a retro style repurposed from the 1940s and ’50s and wrote with sardonic humor (“Is There Life After Meatloaf?”), while offering trustworthy criticism.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

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Joe DePugh, Pitcher Who Inspired Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days,’ Dead at 75

      by

      A gifted athlete, he gave a clumsy teenage Bruce Springsteen his first nickname, Saddie. Years later, the Boss returned the favor, memorializing him in a song.Joe DePugh, the Little League teammate of Bruce Springsteen who inspired the rocker’s hit song “Glory Days,” a rousing, bittersweet anthem to their hardscrabble childhoods in Freehold, N.J., where time passed by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” died on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 75.The cause of death, in a hospice facility, was metastatic prostate cancer, his brother Paul said.In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the Boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose athletic abilities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star pitcher, gave him the nickname Saddie.“Bruce lost this big game for us one year,” Mr. DePugh told The Palm Beach Post in 2011. “We stuck him out in right field all the time, where you think he’s out of harm’s way. But this important game, we had a bunch of guys missing, and we had to play him.”In the last inning, Saddie dropped an easy fly ball.“Actually, it hit him on the head,” Mr. DePugh said, “and we lost the game.”They remained friends in high school, bonding over their turbulent home lives and their distant, alcoholic fathers. After graduation, Saddie took off to play rock ’n’ roll in bars and nightclubs. Joe, who excelled at multiple sports, tried out for the Los Angeles Dodgers but wound up playing basketball at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.In 1973, when they had been out of touch for years, these two boyhood friends bumped into each other at the Headliner, a roadside bar in Neptune, near the Jersey Shore. Mr. Springsteen was walking in; Mr. DePugh was walking out.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

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Val Kilmer, Film Star Who Played Batman and Jim Morrison, Dies at 65

      by

      A wide-ranging leading man who earned critical praise, he was known to be charismatic but unpredictable. At one point he dropped out of Hollywood for a decade.Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65.The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Mr. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered, she said.Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, Mr. Kilmer was in fact cast as a rocker a handful of times early in his career, when he seemed destined for blockbuster success. He made his feature debut in the slapstick Cold War spy-movie spoof “Top Secret!” (1984), in which he starred as a crowd-pleasing, hip-shaking American singer in Berlin unwittingly involved in an East German plot to reunify the country.He gave a vividly stylized performance as Jim Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991), and he played the cameo role of Mentor — an advice-giving Elvis as imagined by the film’s antiheroic protagonist, played by Christian Slater — in “True Romance” (1993), a violent drug-chase caper written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.Val Kilmer as the rock singer Jim Morrison in the 1991 film “The Doors.”Sidney Baldwin/TriStar PicturesMr. Kilmer had top billing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in “Thunderheart” (1992), in which he played an unseasoned F.B.I. agent investigating a murder on a South Dakota Indian reservation, and in “The Saint” (1997), a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob. Most famously, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney he inhabited the title role (and the batsuit) in “Batman Forever” (1995), doing battle in Gotham City with Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), though neither Mr. Kilmer nor the film were viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise.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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Richard Chamberlain, Actor in ‘Shogun’ and ‘Dr. Kildare,’ Dies at 90

      by

      An overnight star as Dr. Kildare in the 1960s, he achieved new acclaim two decades later as the omnipresent leading man of mini-series.Richard Chamberlain, who rose to fame as the heartthrob star of the television series “Dr. Kildare” in the early 1960s, proved his mettle by becoming a serious stage actor and went on to a new wave of acclaim as the omnipresent leading man of 1980s mini-series, died on Saturday night at his home in Waimanalo, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. He was 90.A spokesman, Harlan Boll, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Mr. Chamberlain was just 27 when he made his debut in the title role of the idealistic young intern on NBC’s “Dr. Kildare,” based on the 1930s and ’40s movie series. With his California-blond boyish good looks and low-key charm, he became an overnight star, said to be receiving 12,000 fan letters a week during the show’s five-year run (1961-66).Not long after the series ended, he moved to England, determined to shake his pretty-boy image by training as a serious actor. By 1969 he was playing Hamlet at the Birmingham Repertory Theater and surprising the British critics, who called him assured, graceful and plucky. “Anyone who comes to this production to scoff at the sight of a popular American television actor, Richard Chamberlain, playing Hamlet will be in for a deep disappointment,” a review in The Times of London declared.After five years he returned to the United States and to notable stage and screen roles, but it was television, and in particular the mini-series format, that restored his major star status. It began with a role as a Scottish trapper in the ensemble cast of the 12-part “Centennial” in 1978, as viewers began a brief but intense romance with this new programming form, which combined feature-film ambition with the many hours required to tell big stories in great detail.For Mr. Chamberlain, the phenomenon hit full force only when he played the dashing 17th-century romantic lead in “Shogun” in 1980, seducing a new generation of fans. He followed that in 1983 with his portrayal of Ralph de Bricassart, the tortured young priest in the saga “The Thorn Birds,” making him a 49-year-old sex symbol and the undeniable holder of the unofficial title “king of the mini-series.”Mr. Chamberlain received Emmy Award nominations for “The Thorn Birds” and “Shogun,” as well as for “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story” (1985) — in which he played Raoul Wallenberg, the World War II resistance hero — and for “The Count of Monte Cristo” (1975). He won three Golden Globes during his career, for “The Thorn Birds” and “Shogun,” and as best television actor for “Dr. Kildare” in 1963.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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Linda Williams, Who Introduced Pornography to Academia, Dies at 78

      by

      One of the first to write seriously about a fraught subject, she also played a major role in developing the field of film studies and feminist film theory.Linda Williams, a trailblazing scholar whose research was foundational to the field of film studies and to feminist film theory, and who wrote extensively about pornography, died on March 12 at her home in Lafayette, in Northern California. She was 78.Her husband, Paul Fitzgerald, said the cause was complications of a hemorrhagic stroke she had five years ago.“Linda was there before there was any such thing as feminist film studies,” B. Ruby Rich, the former editor in chief of the journal Film Quarterly, said in an interview. “She played a pivotal role in its development, but she was not orthodox.”Ms. Rich continued: “She did not stay in her lane at a time when people were really guarding boundaries and really policing what others were doing. She was fearless about following her inquiries wherever they would lead. In any branch of academics or scholarship, that is really, really unusual.”A longtime professor of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Williams wrote and edited articles and books on subjects as diverse as surrealism, spectatorship and the television series “The Wire.”She was keenly interested in how various film genres affected the body — for example, the way horror movies could induce shivers — and in her 2002 book, “Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson,” she explored how the tropes of melodrama figured in widening and narrowing America’s racial divide.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

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      Clive Revill, Original Voice of Emperor Palpatine in ‘Star Wars,’ Dies at 94

      by

      His voice can be heard for only a minute in “The Empire Strikes Back,” but it provided the first draft of a character that would be a mainstay of the franchise for decades.It was a minute that changed the course of the “Star Wars” franchise. In “The Empire Strikes Back,” the now-celebrated 1980 sequel, audiences were treated to the first on-camera sighting of Emperor Palpatine.After receiving only a glancing mention in the first movie, he could have looked and sounded like anything. A human. A Wookiee. A droid. A turtle. There was, instead, a disfigured, robed face — portrayed by the actress Marjorie Eaton — that terrified fans and etched the character into “Star Wars” lore.But Palpatine’s voice — cool, crisp and commanding — belonged to Clive Revill, who in about 60 seconds set the stage for one of the most feared and infamous characters in science fiction. Mr. Revill died on March 11 in Sherman Oaks, Calif., his daughter, Kate Revill, said on Thursday. The cause, she said, was complications of dementia. He was 94.Palpatine’s appearance, however brief, is pivotal. In the conversation with Darth Vader it is established that Vader, already an iconic villain, has a boss — one whom Vader himself fears. Additionally, Palpatine recognizes Luke Skywalker as a true threat.In just a few lines, Mr. Revill established Palpatine as a cold, dominant figure.When the original trilogy was rereleased in 2004, his voice was replaced by that of Ian McDiarmid, who played Palpatine in subsequent “Star Wars” films, starting with “Return of the Jedi” (1983). But in various iterations of Palpatine since the original — including the franchise films, the video game “Fortnite” and even Lego re-enactments — the character’s voice is built on Mr. Revill’s work.“Those voices are all influenced by this first example,” said Greg Iwinski, a writer on the animated “Star Wars” series “Young Jedi Adventures.” “That was 45 years ago. That’s the importance of that legacy. He was the first guy to do it.”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

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Herb Greene, Who Photographed the Grateful Dead and Other 1960s Rock Acts, Dies at 82

      by

      Herb Greene, whose evocative portraits of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and others helped define the rock scene that emerged in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, died on March 3 at his home in Maynard, Mass. He was 82.His wife, Ilze Greene, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Greene pursued music portraiture in his spare time while working for about a dozen years in the 1960s and ’70s, as a fashion photographer for the Joseph Magnin department store and the men’s wear retailer Cable Car Clothiers.Instead of photographing concerts, which did not interest him, he invited bands and musicians to various studios in San Francisco, including one he had on Front Street, and to his apartment, where some of them stood in front of a dining room wall filled with hieroglyphics drawn by a roommate with knowledge of Egyptology.His pictures of the Dead, a favorite subject, include Jerry Garcia, the band’s leader, in a vest and tie, playing a banjo while seated on a stool, with a wall-sized American flag behind him; Ron McKernan, the Dead’s organist, known as Pigpen, striking a threatening pose in front of Mr. Garcia; and the band on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, in the district known as a center of the hippie counterculture.Mr. Greene’s many pictures of the Grateful Dead, a favorite subject, include a well-known one of Jerry Garcia against a wall-sized American flag.Herb Greene, via Greene familyHe also photographed Ron McKernan, the Dead’s organist, known as Pigpen.Herb Greene, via Greene familyMr. Greene photographed the Grateful Dead (from left, Mr. Garcia, Mr. McKernan, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann) on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, in the district known as a center of the counterculture.Herb Greene, via Greene familyWe 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