Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Sri Lanka Baila Star Sunil Perera is Dead at 68

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      The frontman of his family’s popular band combined the country’s unique, Latin-influenced sound with politically biting lyrics.COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — In the end, it was only appropriate that Sunil Perera, who had entertained generations of Sri Lankans on the radio and on the dance floor with his distinctive, Latin-fused tunes, would go out singing.On his deathbed at a hospital in the capital city of Colombo, Mr. Perera had asked for a guitar, which he wasn’t provided. So he turned to what couldn’t be denied.“The doctor told me that the day before he died, he was singing and entertaining everyone there,” said Piyal Perera, Sunil’s brother and bandmate.Mr. Perera died on Monday at the Nawaloka hospital in Colombo, his brother said. He was 68. While the cause of death was not clear, Mr. Perera had been recovering from Covid-19 when he was rushed into intensive care, Piyal Perera said.Few have made such a large impact on Sri Lanka’s cultural and entertainment scene as Mr. Perera did for half a century. Often dressed in bright colors and a bowler’s hat, he produced hit song after hit song through the Gypsies, the family band, which was preparing to celebrate its golden jubilee this year.The Gypsies specialized in baila, a jolly and rhythmic genre sung mostly in Sinhalese but influenced by the Portuguese, who colonized much of the island in the 16th and 17th centuries.Over the decades he used his lyrics and his voice to amplify concerns about Sri Lanka’s shrinking democratic space. The country, still recovering from years of civil war, has been beset by government pressure against journalists, activists and minority groups. Mr. Perera frequently lambasted a decaying political elite that has become bogged down in bickering and that, he believed, was dashing the nation’s hopes.“He was both popular and a protester,” said Lakshman Joseph-de Saram, a film composer from Sri Lanka. “We rarely have a Bob Dylan and a Michael Jackson in one package.”Mr. Saram added, “He was our baila king.”Tributes poured in after his death, including from politicians Mr. Perera had openly criticized. He directed his anger at the country’s ruling Rajapaksa family and at the opposition that repeatedly disappointed him with the chaos in its ranks.President Gotabaya Rajapaksa called his passing “a great loss.” Sajith Premadasa, leader of the opposition, said Mr. Perera had “pioneered a modern day revolution in the musical history of Sri Lanka.”He was born Uswatta Liyanage Ivor Sylvester Sunil Perera in 1952 to a Roman Catholic family and grew up in the Colombo suburb of Moratuwa. He was one of 10 children of Anton Perera, a former soldier, and Doreen Perera, a homemaker.The elder Mr. Perara built the Gypsies largely around his children. Sunil was a teenager when he joined the band before becoming its lead singer. Sunil described his father as a disciplinarian who had wanted him to complete his higher education but who supported his choice when he left his studies to focus on guitar and voice training. In 2017, the Gypsies recorded a family tribute to the founder.Sunil Perera’s opinionated lyrics and public stances set him apart from other high-profile musicians in Sri Lanka. In his songs he dealt with corruption and politicians soured after their election losses. One song depicted aliens landing in Sri Lanka and turning down an invitation to stay.“It’s 72 years since we got independence,” he said in one interview. “We are in debt to the whole world. Is it the fault of the people? Whose fault is it? I don’t blame one group. I blame the entire set of politicians who ruled us.”He was open about his personal life, discussing what he saw as hypocritical attitudes about sex in Sri Lanka’s conservative society. But his language often got him in trouble, particularly when he described women as “baby machines” in a discussion about how large Sri Lankan families were in his father’s generation.His friends and family acknowledged that Mr. Perera could be divisive, but they said his outspokenness had come from his firm belief that Sri Lanka could overcome the ethnic and religious divides that have led to conflict for decades. His brother, Piyal, said Mr. Perara had declared that what would make him happiest would be if all four of his children married into four different communities.“His head was not swollen with the fame — he was simple,” said Mariazelle Goonetilleke, a fellow musician and friend. “He was not afraid to tell the truth, always spoke his mind. There were people who didn’t like that.”Mr. Perera came down with Covid-19 last month and was hospitalized for 25 days before being discharged, only to be readmitted, this time in intensive care, just days later.He is survived by his wife, Geetha Kulatunga; two daughters, Rehana and Manisha; and two sons, Sajith and Gayan.In a video message after he was initially discharged from the hospital, Mr. Perera looked weak but determined as he thanked the hospital staff and his fans and well wishers. Dressed in a white shirt and a gray hat, his usual colors were missing.“We are thankful to God for giving us such a crowd,” he said. “We will definitely get that blessing again. When we get that time, let’s meet again, like old times.” More

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      Michael Constantine, Dad in ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ Dies at 94

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      He won an Emmy for his role in the TV series “Room 222” and played many characters over the years before becoming known as the hit film’s patriarch.Michael Constantine, an Emmy-winning character actor known as the genially dyspeptic school principal on the popular TV series “Room 222” and, 30 years later, as the genially dyspeptic patriarch in the hit film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” died on Aug. 31 at his home in Reading, Pa. He was 94.His death was from natural causes, his agent, Julia Buchwald, said.Mr. Constantine, who began his career on the Broadway stage, was endowed with fierce eyebrows, a personal warmth that belied his perennial hangdog look, and the command of a babel of foreign accents. Of Greek American extraction, he was routinely cast by Hollywood to portray a welter of ethnicities.Over time, Mr. Constantine played several Jewish characters, winning an Emmy in 1970 for the role of Seymour Kaufman, who presided with grumpy humanity over Walt Whitman High School on “Room 222,” broadcast on ABC from 1969 to 1974.He also played Italians, on shows including “The Untouchables” and “Kojak”; Russians, as on the 1980s series “Airwolf”; a Gypsy in the 1996 horror film “Thinner,” adapted from Stephen King’s novel; and, on occasion, even a Greek or two.Mr. Constantine, possessed of a gravitas that often led to him being cast as lawyers or heavies, starred as the night-court judge Matthew Sirota on “Sirota’s Court,” a short-lived sitcom shown on NBC in the 1976-77 season.Michael Constantine, right, with Lloyd Hanes in the TV series Room 222, which ran from 1969 to 1974ABCHe had guest roles on scores of other shows, including “Naked City,” “Perry Mason,” “Ironside,” “Gunsmoke” and “Hey, Landlord” in the 1960s, and “Remington Steele,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Law & Order” in the ’80s and ’90s.On film, he appeared in “The Last Mile” (1959), a prison picture starring Mickey Rooney; “The Hustler” (1961), starring Paul Newman; “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969); “Don’t Drink the Water” (1969); and “Voyage of the Damned” (1976).Mr. Constantine became known to an even wider, younger audience as Gus Portokalos, the combustible, tradition-bound father whose daughter is engaged to a patrician white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the 2002 comedy “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”An immigrant who made good as the owner of a Chicago diner, Gus is an ardent amateur etymologist who can trace any word to its putative Greek origin. (“Kimono,” he concludes after pondering the matter, surely comes from “cheimónas” — Greek for winter, since, he explains in his heavily accented English: “What do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe!”)Gus is also a fervent believer in the restorative power of Windex, applied directly to the skin, to heal a panoply of ailments like rashes and boils.“He’s a man from a certain kind of background,” Mr. Constantine said of his character in a 2003 interview with The Indianapolis Star. “His saving grace is that he truly does love his daughter and want the best for her. He may not go about it in a very tactful way. So many people tell me, ‘My dad was just like that.’ And I thought, ‘And you don’t hate him?’”“My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” which also starred Lainie Kazan as Gus’s wife and Nia Vardalos and John Corbett as the young couple, was a surprise international hit. The film took in more than $360 million worldwide, becoming one of the highest-grossing romantic comedies of all time.Mr. Constantine reprised the role on television in “My Big Fat Greek Life,” a sitcom that appeared briefly on CBS in 2003, and on the big screen in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” in 2016.The son of Theoharis Ioannides, a steelworker, and Andromache Foteadou, Mr. Constantine was born Constantine Ioannides in Reading, Pa., on May 22, 1927. (The family name is sometimes Romanized Joanides.)He settled early on an acting career, an idea reinforced after a youthful visit to a friend who was studying acting in New York.“I just knew I belonged there,” Mr. Constantine told Odyssey, an English-language magazine about Greek life, in 2011. “They could make fun of this hick from Pennsylvania, but I just belong here — this is me.”The young Mr. Constantine studied acting with Howard da Silva, supporting himself with odd jobs, among them night watchman and shooting-gallery barker. He became an understudy to Paul Muni playing the character modeled on the famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow in “Inherit the Wind,” which opened on Broadway in 1955.In “Compulsion” — a 1957 Broadway dramatization of Meyer Levin’s novel about the Leopold and Loeb murder case — Mr. Constantine took over the role of the defense lawyer from Frank Conroy just before opening night. (Mr. Conroy withdrew after suffering a heart attack during previews.)“Michael Constantine gives an excellent performance as the prototype of Clarence Darrow,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “He avoids the sentimentality that the situations might easily evoke and plays with taste, deliberation, color and intelligence.”Mr. Constantine’s other Broadway credits include Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in the original cast of “The Miracle Worker” (1959), and Dogsborough in Bertolt Brecht’s antifascist satire “Arturo Ui” (1963).Mr. Constantine’s first marriage, to the actress Julianna McCarthy, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Kathleen Christopher. His survivors include two sisters: Patricia Gordon and Chris Dobbs, his agent said. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.For all Mr. Constantine’s credits, for all his critical acclaim, it was for a single role — and for a single prop wielded in the course of that role — that he seems destined to be remembered.“I can’t tell you,” he said in a 2014 interview with his hometown paper, The Reading Eagle, “how many times I’ve autographed a Windex bottle.”Alyssa Lukpat More

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      Phil Schaap, Grammy-Winning Jazz D.J. and Historian, Dies at 70

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      His radio programs, most notably on Columbia University’s WKCR, were full of minutiae he had accumulated during a lifetime immersed in the genre.Phil Schaap, who explored the intricacy and history of jazz in radio programs that he hosted, Grammy-winning liner notes that he wrote, music series that he programmed and classes that he taught, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 70.His partner of 17 years, Susan Shaffer, said the cause was cancer, which he had had for four years.Mr. Schaap was host of an assortment of jazz radio programs over the years, but he was perhaps best known as a fixture on WKCR-FM, the student-run radio station of Columbia University, where his delightfully (some would say infuriatingly) obsessive daily program about the saxophonist Charlie Parker, “Bird Flight,” was an anchor of the morning schedule for decades.On that show, he would parse Parker recordings and minutiae endlessly. In a 2008 article about Mr. Schaap in The New Yorker, David Remnick described one such discourse in detail, relating Mr. Schaap’s aside about the Parker track “Okiedoke,” which veered into a tangent about the pronunciation and meaning of the title and its possible relation to Hopalong Cassidy movies.“Perhaps it was at this point,” Mr. Remnick wrote, “that listeners all over the metropolitan area, what few remained, either shut off their radios, grew weirdly fascinated, or called an ambulance on Schaap’s behalf.”But if jazz was an obsession for Mr. Schaap, it was one built on knowledge. Since childhood he had absorbed everything there was to know about Parker and countless other jazz players, singers, records and subgenres. He won three Grammys for album liner notes — for a Charlie Parker boxed set, not surprisingly (“Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve,” 1989), but also for “The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945-1959” (1993) and “Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings” (1996).He did more than write and talk about jazz; he also knew his way around a studio and was especially adept at unearthing and remastering the works of jazz greats of the past. He shared the best historical album Grammy as a producer on the Holiday and Davis-Evans recordings, as well as on “Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings” (2000).Mr. Schaap surrounded by jazz albums at WKCR, which also houses his collection of jazz interviews.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesOver the years he imparted his vast knowledge of jazz to countless students, teaching courses at Columbia, Princeton, the Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere.“They say I’m a history teacher,” he said in a video interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, which this year named him a Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a living jazz figure, but he viewed his role differently.“I teach listening,” he said.He had what one newspaper article called “a flypaper memory” for jazz history, so much so that musicians would sometimes rely on him to fill in their own spotty memories about play dates and such.“He knows more about us than we know about ourselves,” the great drummer Max Roach told The New York Times in 2001.Mr. Remnick put it simply in the New Yorker article.“In the capital of jazz,” he wrote, “he is its most passionate and voluble fan.”Philip Van Noorden Schaap was born on April 8, 1951, in Queens.His mother, Marjorie Wood Schaap, was a librarian and a classically trained pianist, and his father, Walter, was a jazz scholar and vice president of a company that made educational filmstrips.Phil grew up in the Hollis section of Queens, which had become a magnet for jazz musicians. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge lived nearby. He would see the saxophonist Budd Johnson every day at the bus stop.“Everywhere you turned, it seemed, there was a giant walking down the street,” Mr. Schaap told Newsday in 1995.By 6 he was collecting records. Jo Jones, who had been the drummer for Count Basie’s big band for many years, would sometimes babysit for him; they’d play records, and Mr. Jones would elaborate on what they were hearing.Seeing the 1959 movie “The Gene Krupa Story,” about the famed jazz drummer, fueled his interest even more, and by the time he was at Jamaica High School in Queens he was talking jazz to classmates constantly.“As much as they gave me a hard time and isolated me as a weirdo,” he told Newsday, “they knew what I was talking about. My peers may have laughed at me, but they knew who Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were.”Mr. Schaap became a D.J. at WKCR in 1970 as a freshman at Columbia, where he was a history major. He set out on a lifelong mission to keep jazz’s past alive.“One thing I wanted to impart,” he told the radio program “Jazz Night in America” this year, “was that the music hadn’t started with John Coltrane.”Mr. Schaap in 2012. “He knows more about us,” the great jazz drummer Max Roach once said, “than we know about ourselves.”Angel Franco/The New York TimesHe graduated from Columbia in 1974, but he was still broadcasting on WKCR half a century later. He started “Bird Flight” in 1981 and — as the “Jazz Night in America” host, the bassist Christian McBride, noted during the recent episode devoted to Mr. Schaap — he kept the show going for some 40 years, longer than Parker, who died at 34, was alive. He also hosted an assortment of other jazz programs at WKCR and other stations over the years, including WNYC in New York and WBGO in Newark, N.J.In 1973 he started programming jazz at the West End, a bar near Columbia, and he continued to do so into the 1990s. He particularly liked to bring in older musicians from the swing era, providing them — as he put it in a 2017 interview with The West Side Spirit — “with a nice last chapter of their lives.”In the “Jazz Night in America” interview, he said the West End series was among his proudest accomplishments.“A lot of them were not even performing anymore,” he said of the saxophonist Earle Warren, the trombonist Dicky Wells and the many other musicians he put onstage there.“They were my friends,” he added. “They were my teachers. They were geniuses.”Mr. Schaap, who lived in Queens and Manhattan, also did a bit of managing — including of the Countsmen, a group whose members included Mr. Wells and Mr. Warren — and curated Jazz at Lincoln Center for a time.As an educator, broadcaster and archivist, he could zero in on details that would escape a casual listener. He’d compare Armstrong and Holiday recordings to show how Armstrong had influenced Holiday’s vocal style. He’d demand that students be able to hear the difference between a solo by Armstrong and one by the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.Mr. Schaap’s marriage to Ellen LaFurn in 1997 was brief. Ms. Shaffer survives him.His National Endowment for the Arts honor this year was the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, presented to “an individual who has made major contributions to the appreciation, knowledge and advancement of the American jazz art form.”In a 1984 interview with The Times, Mr. Schaap spoke of his motivation for his radio shows and other efforts to spread the gospel of jazz.“I was a public-school music student for 12 years and never heard the name Duke Ellington,” he said. “Now I can correct such wrongs. I can be a Johnny Appleseed through the transmitter.” More

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      Igor Oistrakh, Soviet-Era Violinist (and a Son of One), Dies at 90

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      His father, David, was one of the 20th century’s finest violinists, but Igor more than held his own as a musician and interpreter performing throughout the West.Igor Oistrakh, a noted violinist who was part of a violin-playing family that included his father, David, one of the 20th century’s finest exponents of the instrument, died on Aug. 14 in Moscow. He was 90.His son, the violinist Valery Oistrakh, said the causes were pneumonia and heart problems.Though much of his career coincided with the Cold War, Mr. Oistrakh was well known in New York and elsewhere in the West, since the Soviet Union sent its best musicians on tour. He made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall in February 1962 performing with Symphony of the Air under Alfred Wallenstein. Harold C. Schonberg, reviewing the concert in The New York Times, noted that few could measure up to David Oistrakh and pronounced Igor “a good violinist, though far from a great one.”But by December 1963, Mr. Oistrakh had performed several more times in New York and had established himself as an admirable musician independent of his father.“Little can be said about the 32-year-old Soviet musician’s superb artistry that has not already been said again and again,” Howard Klein wrote in The Times in a review of a Carnegie Hall recital that month. “His beautiful, silky tone, his effortless execution in devilish passages, his restrained yet powerful emotional thrust, were in evidence and were as stunningly projected as ever.”Father and son frequently played together. When David Oistrakh made his American debut as a conductor, leading the Moscow Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1965, Igor was the soloist for the Tchaikovsky violin concerto.“David Oistrakh conducted like a proud father,” Theodore Strongin wrote in The Times, “giving his son all the leeway in the world and pacing the last movement up into a mad virtuoso fling. The sold-out audience loved it.”After his father’s death in 1974, Igor Oistrakh sometimes performed with his son. He was often accompanied in performances by his wife, the pianist Natalia Zertsalova, and critics often remarked on their like-mindedness.“One can sense them weighing every phrase,” James Allen wrote in The Scotsman, reviewing a 1999 performance at the Music Hall in Aberdeen, Scotland, “making minute adjustments, effortlessly setting up contrasts of tone and texture.”The Oistrakhs, father and son, in the United Kingdom in 1966. David Oistrakh died in 1974.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesIgor Davidovich Oistrakh was born to David and Tamara Ivanovna Oistrakh on April 27, 1931, in Odessa, Ukraine. He was studying violin by the age of 6. The household was, of course, immersed in music, and young Igor witnessed bits of history, including the time the composer Aram Khachaturian dropped by in 1940 to unveil the violin concerto he had written for David Oistrakh.“He came to play it on our piano,” Igor Oistrakh told The Times in 2001. “He did not take his overcoat off. He did not even sit at the piano. He just played, very vigorously. He was so loud that my great-great-grandmother, my father’s grandmother, was scared awake from her nap.”Mr. Oistrakh studied at the Central Music School and then at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In 1949 he won top prize at an international youth violin competition in Budapest, and in 1952 he won the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poland.He made his Western debut at Royal Albert Hall in London in 1953 and continued to perform all over the world in the Cold War era. International tensions occasionally intruded on his concerts, as they did in 1971 when, The Times wrote, a performance at Philharmonic Hall in Manhattan “was interrupted after the first piece by an unscheduled intermission during which security forces searched the hall for harassment devices that might have been planted by the groups that have been protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Oistrakh made many recordings and was a conductor and teacher, taking a post at the Moscow Conservatory in 1958. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he became a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels for a time. At his death, he lived in Moscow.His wife died in 2017. In addition to his son, he is survived by a grandson.Mr. Oistrakh’s physical resemblance to his father was striking, so much so that Tamara Bernstein, reviewing a 1992 performance with the Toronto Philharmonic for The Globe and Mail of Canada, began by saying, “It is unnerving, to say the least, to see a late lamented violinist stride on stage to wild applause.”In 1998 The Miami Herald asked him a question he must have confronted frequently: Did he feel overshadowed by his father?“I think I’ve had a wonderful career of my own, playing with the best orchestras and conductors in the world,” he answered diplomatically, “and that I was lucky to have had such a great and wonderful father.” More

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      Michael K. Williams, Omar From 'The Wire,' Is Dead at 54

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      Mr. Williams, who also starred in “Boardwalk Empire” and “Lovecraft Country,” was best known for his role as Omar Little in the David Simon HBO series.Michael K. Williams, the actor best known for his role as Omar Little, a stickup man with a sharp wit and a sawed-off shotgun in the HBO series “The Wire,” was found dead on Monday in his home in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the police said. He was 54.Mr. Williams was found at about 2 p.m., according to the New York City Police Department. The death is being investigated, and the city’s medical examiner will determine the cause.His longtime representative, Marianna Shafran, confirmed the death in a statement and said the family was grappling with “deep sorrow” at “this insurmountable loss.”Mr. Williams grew up in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he said he had never envisioned a life outside the borough. But before he was 30, he had parlayed his love for dance into dancing roles with the singers George Michael and Madonna, and then landed his first acting opportunity with another artist, Tupac Shakur.Within a few years, he appeared in more roles, including as a drug dealer in the movie “Bringing Out the Dead,” which was directed by Martin Scorsese. Then in 2002 came “The Wire,” David Simon’s five-season epic on HBO that explored the gritty underworld of corruption, drugs and the police in Baltimore.Mr. Williams as Omar Little in “The Wire,” a groundbreaking portrayal of a gay Black man on television. HBOMr. Williams played Omar Little, a charming vigilante who held up low-level drug dealers, perhaps the most memorable character on a series many consider among the best shows in television history. Omar was gay and openly so in the homophobic, coldblooded world of murder and drugs, a groundbreaking portrayal of a gay Black man on television.Off camera, however, Mr. Williams’s life was often in disarray. He wasted his earnings from “The Wire” on drugs, a spiral that led him to living out of a suitcase on the floor of a house in Newark, an experience he described with candor in an article that appeared on nj.com in 2012.He finished filming the series with support from his church in Newark, but the drug addiction stayed. In 2008, he had a moment of clarity at a presidential rally for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania. With Mr. Williams in the crowd with his mother, Mr. Obama remarked that “The Wire” was the best show on television and that Omar Little was his favorite character.They met afterward, but Mr. Williams, who was high, could barely speak. “Hearing my name come out of his mouth woke me up,” Mr. Williams told The New York Times in 2017. “I realized that my work could actually make a difference.”Mr. Williams received five Emmy Award nominations, including one in the upcoming Primetime Emmy Awards this month. He was nominated this year for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series for his portrayal of Montrose Freeman on the HBO show “Lovecraft Country.”Mr. Williams as Montrose Freeman in “Lovecraft Country.”HBO, via Associated PressMichael Kenneth Williams was born Nov. 22, 1966. His mother immigrated from the Bahamas, worked as a seamstress and later operated a day care center out of the Vanderveer Estates, the public housing complex now known as Flatbush Gardens where the family lived in Brooklyn. His parents separated when he was young.When Mr. Williams was cast as Omar in “The Wire,” he returned to Vanderveer Estates to hone his role, drawing on the figures and experiences he had grown up with, he told The Times in 2017.“The way a lot of us from the neighborhood see it, Mike is like the prophet of the projects,” Darrel Wilds, 50, who grew up with Mr. Williams in Vanderveer, told The Times. “He’s representing the people of this neighborhood to the world.”Noah Remnick More

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      Willard Scott, Longtime 'Today' Weatherman, Dies at 87

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      Mr. Scott, who played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was a longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show who emphasized showmanship over science.Willard Scott, the antic longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show, whose work, by his own cheerful acknowledgment, made it clear that you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, died on Saturday at his farm in Delaplane, Va. He was 87.His death was confirmed by his wife, Paris Keena Scott. She did not specify a cause, saying only that he had died after a brief illness.Mr. Scott, who had earlier played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was among the first of a generation of television weathermen who stressed showmanship over science. Throughout the late 20th century, he was also a ubiquitous television pitchman.A garrulous, gaptoothed, boutonnière-wearing, funny-hatted, sometimes toupee-clad, larger-than-life American Everyman (in his prime, he stood 6-foot-3 and weighed nearly 300 pounds), Mr. Scott was hired in 1980 to help NBC’s “Today” compete with its chief rival, ABC’s “Good Morning America.”Joining “Today” that March, Mr. Scott went on to sport a string of outré outfits, spout a cornucopia of cornpone humor and wish happy birthday to a spate of American centenarians, all while talking about the forecast every so often, until his retirement in 2015.Though he was meant to represent the new, late-model television weatherman, Mr. Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times. He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages.There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat. There was the time, reporting from an outdoor event, that he kissed a pig on camera.The pig did not take kindly to being kissed and squealed mightily.Mr. Scott, who began his career in radio before becoming a weatherman at WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, had no background in meteorology or any allied science. But as he readily acknowledged, the weatherman’s job as reconstructed for the postmodern age did not require any.“A trained gorilla could do it,” Mr. Scott said in 1975, while he was at WRC.The only scientific asset one actually needed, he pointed out, was the telephone number of the National Weather Service.In more than three decades with “Today,” Mr. Scott traversed the country, delivering the weather on location at county fairs, town parades and quaint byways across America, as well as from NBC’s studios in New York.A frequent guest on late-night TV, he was a spokesman for a range of charitable causes and a commercial pitchman with wide television exposure — too wide, some critics maintained.The concerns he endorsed included Howard Johnson Motor Lodges, True Value Hardware, Burger King, Lipton tea, Maxwell House coffee, the American Dairy Association, the Florida Citrus Commission, Diet Coke, USA Today and many others.“A huckster for all seasons,” The New York Times called him in 1987.Mr. Scott’s onscreen persona — by his own account little different from his offscreen persona — divided viewers. Some adored him, inundating him with gifts, which he might display on the air. (Among them, the 1987 article in The Times reported, was “an airplane built out of Diet Coke cans.”)In January 1989, the country’s new first lady, Barbara Bush, broke ranks from the inaugural parade for her husband, George H.W. Bush, to dart over to Mr. Scott, broadcasting from the sidelines, and plant an impromptu kiss on his cheek.“I don’t know Willard Scott,” Mrs. Bush explained afterward. “I just love that face.”Then again, as The Boston Globe reported in 1975, there was this incident, from Mr. Scott’s days at WRC: “He was pushing a shopping cart in a Virginia supermarket recently when a little old lady charged by and smacked him with her umbrella. ‘I can’t stand you,’ she said.”The son of Willard Herman Scott, an insurance salesman, and Thelma (Phillips) Scott, a telephone operator, Willard Herman Scott Jr. was born on March 7, 1934, in Alexandria, Va.He was smitten with broadcasting from the time he was a boy, and at 16 he became a $12-a-week page at WRC-TV. After he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religion from American University, Mr. Scott and a classmate, Ed Walker, took to the Washington airwaves with a comic radio show, “The Joy Boys.”With time out from 1956 to 1958 for Mr. Scott’s Navy service, “The Joy Boys” was broadcast on WRC-AM from 1955 to 1972 and on WWDC-AM in Washington from 1972 to 1974. Featuring humorous improvisation and topical satire, it won a large following.From 1952 to 1962, Mr. Scott also played the title character on “Bozo the Clown,” the WRC-TV version of a syndicated children’s show. In the early ’60s, on the strength of his Bozo, McDonald’s asked him to develop a clown character to be used in its advertising.As Ronald McDonald, Mr. Scott did several local TV commercials for the franchise but was passed over — in consequence of his corpulence, he later said — as its national representative.In 1967, he started doing the weather on WRC-TV. There, his exploits included emerging from a manhole one Groundhog Day dressed as an astoundingly large groundhog.When Mr. Scott was hired by “Today,” he supplanted the meteorologist Bob Ryan, who was fired to make way for him. Mr. Ryan, who held a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in atmospheric science, had previously worked as a cloud physicist.Mr. Scott’s early weeks at “Today,” he later recalled, were “touch and go.”But by 1987, The Times reported, “his tenure there” was “credited with helping to catapult the show past ‘Good Morning America’ into first place in the breakfast-time sweepstakes.”Not all of Mr. Scott’s colleagues approved of his modus operandi. In 1988, Bryant Gumbel, a co-host of “Today,” wrote a confidential memorandum to an NBC executive in which he castigated the work of several colleagues, notably Mr. Scott.The memo, leaked to New York Newsday the next year, charged that Mr. Scott “holds the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.”Though Mr. Scott publicly forgave Mr. Gumbel, giving him a conciliatory kiss on the cheek on a “Today” segment soon afterward, he said elsewhere that the memo had “cut like a knife.”With NBC colleagues, Mr. Scott shared three Daytime Emmys in the 1990s for coverage of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He went into semiretirement in 1996, ceding regular forecasting to Al Roker while continuing to deliver birthday tributes.Mr. Scott’s first wife, Mary (Dwyer) Scott, whom he married in 1959, died in 2002. He married Paris Keena Scott, his second wife, in 2014. In addition to her, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Sally Scott Swiatek and Mare Scott, and two grandchildren, Sally Marie Swiatek and John Willard Swiatek.Mr. Scott was the author of several books, including “Willard Scott’s Down Home Stories” (1984) and “Willard Scott’s All-American Cookbook” (1986).For all its burlesque jocularity, Mr. Scott asserted, his job was no less taxing as a result.“Everything I do looks like it just falls into place,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “Part of what I do is make it fall into place. You have to work at being a buffoon.”Michael Levenson More

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      in Theater

      Mal Z. Lawrence, Noted Catskill Quipster, Dies at 88

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      A popular comic in the Catskills’ heyday as a resort area, he brought borscht belt humor to audiences all over the country, including on Broadway.Mal Z. Lawrence, a mainstay of comedy in the Catskills during the latter years of that resort area’s heyday and one of the four performers who brought borscht belt humor to Midtown Manhattan in 1991 in the hit show “Catskills on Broadway,” died on Monday in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 88.His talent agent, Alison Chaplin, confirmed the death, in a hospice center.Mr. Lawrence came to prominence in the Catskills in the 1950s but soon was known all over the country, playing Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Florida and other stops on the comedy circuit where his brand of relatively mild Jewish-tinged humor was greeted enthusiastically. To a Florida audience he might joke about the Catskills; to a Northern audience, he’d poke fun at Florida.“I worked a place down there called Century Village of West Palm Beach,” one routine went. “Working there was like appearing in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. If you didn’t have a handicapped parking sticker, there was nowhere to put your car.”The Catskills, which drew a heavily Jewish crowd, gradually declined during the 1960s as a summer vacation destination. Mr. Lawrence, though, kept the flame alive; he was still performing his borscht-belt-style routines as he neared 80, working material at venues in Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and elsewhere that would have fit comfortably into his act a half-century earlier.He recognized that his style of humor had acquired an added dimension of nostalgia, something he, Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Freddie Roman turned into gold in December 1991 as the original cast of “Catskills on Broadway.” The show was little more than each of them in turn doing about 30 minutes of jokes, with Mr. Lawrence going last. Opening at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, it ran for more than a year and then enjoyed a healthy touring life.“‘Catskills on Broadway’ manages to reproduce the ambience of the Catskills,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review of the Broadway premiere for The New York Times. “The basic difference is that on Broadway there is not a nosh in sight. But there is a groaning board of jokes about eaters and stuffers. As Mr. Lawrence observes, everyone in the Catskills wears warm-up suits. Warming up for what, he asks, sumo wrestling?”Mr. Lawrence also acted, portraying secondary characters in films including “Rounders” (1998) and “Boynton Beach Club” (2005) and occasionally turning up in plays. In 1997 he was part of the Broadway cast of a revival of “Candide” directed by Harold Prince, playing (as Ben Brantley’s review in The Times described it) “a giddy assortment of supporting roles.”To play them, he shaved the mustache he had been sporting for some years.“I look 20 minutes younger now,” he told Jewish Exponent at the time.Mr. Lawrence at his home in Monticello, N.Y., in the Catskills, in about 2014. He later moved to Florida. Marisa ScheinfeldManny Miller was born on Sept. 2, 1932, in the Bronx and grew up there. “Mal Z. Lawrence,” as he variously told the story over the years, was the suggestion of an early agent, or perhaps several different agents. “Lawrence” was borrowed from a Long Island village where he was appearing. As for the Z, which stood for nothing, “My agent told me I’d get more marquee space,” he said.He was a decent baseball player as a youth and said he even tried out for the Yankees, but nothing came of it.He was drafted into the Army in 1953, and while serving over the next two years began finding his way toward a comedy career. He resembled Jerry Lewis, he said, and he teamed with another soldier to do a knockoff of Mr. Lewis’s routines with Dean Martin for the amusement of fellow servicemen.He went to work in the Catskills in 1955 at Sunrise Manor in Ellenville, N.Y. He started out as a tummler, or social director, whose job was to keep guests entertained throughout the day and encourage them to join in group activities.“I took women on walks, did Simon Says,” he recalled in an oral history for “It Happened in the Catskills,” a 1991 book edited by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer. “The first time I did Simon Says, I gave away 30 T-shirts. I couldn’t get anyone out.”Soon he was performing, both at Catskills resorts and at small nightclubs in Eastern cities. If he never made the jump to television or film stardom like Danny Kaye, Buddy Hackett and other comics who started in the Catskills, he did work steadily.The Broadway show evolved from a one-night show at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island that was enthusiastically received, although not everyone was convinced it would work on Broadway.“Many knowledgeable people said that it wouldn’t go,” Mr. Lawrence told The Washington Times in 1993, when the touring version of the show played the nation’s capital. “I think I was one of those people.”In 2000 he, Bruce Adler and Dudu Fisher brought a similarly styled show, “Borscht Belt Buffet on Broadway,” to Town Hall in Midtown. He was the closer in that show as well.“Pronouncing himself thrilled to be on West 43rd Street at the height of the off-season,” Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in a review in The Times, “Mr. Lawrence is soon running through topics like doddering security guards in Florida, gambling in Atlantic City, meals in Catskills resorts, old age and the effects of marriage on behavior. The audience exits smiling.”In 1980 Mr. Lawrence married Patty Heinz, who survives him. They lived in Delray Beach.Mr. Lawrence was not the type of comic to dwell on comedic principles or technique.“My philosophy is, ‘Do anything that you have to do to make them laugh,’” he told The Washington Times. “What else can we do?” More

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      in Music

      Mikis Theodorakis, Greek Composer and Marxist Rebel, Dies at 96

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      He waged a war of words and music against a military junta that banned his work and imprisoned him during its rule of Greece, from 1967 to 1974.Mikis Theodorakis, the renowned Greek composer and Marxist firebrand who waged a war of words and music against an infamous military junta that imprisoned and exiled him as a revolutionary and banned his work a half century ago, died on Thursday. He was 96.The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, according to a statement on his website. News reports in Greece said he died at his home in central Athens.Mr. Theodorakis was best known internationally for his scores for the films “Zorba the Greek” (1964), in which Anthony Quinn starred as an essence of tumultuous Greek ethnicity; “Z” (1969), Costa-Gavras’s dark satire on the Greek junta; and “Serpico” (1973), Sidney Lumet’s thriller starring Al Pacino as a New York City cop who goes undercover to expose police corruption.Alan Bates, left, and Anthony Quinn in the title role in “Zorba the Greek,” for which Mr. Theodorakis wrote the music.Moviestore Collection Ltd./Alamy Stock PhotoIn the early 1970s, Greek exiles were fond of sharing a story about an Athens policeman who walks his beat humming a banned Theodorakis song. Hearing it, a passer-by stops the policeman and says, “Officer, I’m surprised that you are humming Theodorakis.” Whereupon the officer arrests the man on a charge of listening to Theodorakis’s music.Contradictions were a way of life in Greece in the era of a junta that repressed thousands of political opponents during its rule, from 1967 to 1974. But to many Greeks, Mr. Theodorakis (pronounced thay-uh-doe-RAHK-is) was a metronome of resistance. While he was put away for his ideals, his forbidden rebellious music was a reminder to his people of freedoms that had been lost.“Always I have lived with two sounds — one political, one musical,” Mr. Theodorakis told The New York Times in 1970.After he was released from prison into exile in 1968, he began an international campaign of concerts and contacts with world leaders that helped topple the regime in Athens four years later. It was a turning point for democracy, with a new constitution and a membership in the European Economic Community, which later became the European Union.Mr. Theodorakis arriving in France in 1968 after being freed from prison. He began an international campaign of concerts and contacts with world leaders that helped topple the regime in Athens. Associated PressAs Greece’s most illustrious composer, Mr. Theodorakis wrote symphonies, operas, ballets, film scores, music for the stage, marches for protests and songs without borders — an oeuvre of hundreds of classical and popular pieces that poured from his pen in good times and bad, even in the confines of drafty prison cells, squalid concentration camps and years of exile in a remote mountain hamlet.He also wrote anthems of wartime resistance and socialist tone poems about the plight of workers and oppressed peoples. His most famous work on political persecution was the haunting “Mauthausen Trilogy,” named for a World War II Nazi concentration camp used mainly to exterminate the intelligentsia of Europe’s conquered lands. It has been described as the most beautiful music ever written on the Holocaust.Mr. Theodorakis’s music made him a wealthy Communist. Having paid his dues to society, he did not apologize for his privileged life as a member of Parliament, with homes in Paris, Athens and the Greek Peloponnesus; for being feted at premieres of his work in New York, London and Berlin; or for counting cultural and political leaders in Europe, America and the Middle East as friends.During World War II, Mr. Theodorakis joined a Communist youth group that fought fascist occupation forces in Greece. After the war, his name appeared on a police list of wartime resisters, and he was rounded up with thousands of suspected Communists and sent for three years to the island of Makronisos, the site of a notorious prison camp. There he contracted tuberculosis, and he was tortured and subjected to mock executions by being buried alive.He studied at music conservatories in Athens and Paris in the 1950s, writing symphonies, chamber music, ballets and assorted rhapsodies, marches and adagios. He set to music the verses of eminent Greek poets, many of them Communists. He also deepened his ties to Communism: When Greece became a Cold War battleground, he blamed not Stalin but the C.I.A.Mr. Theodorakis was profoundly affected by the assassination in 1963 of Grigoris Lambrakis, a prominent antiwar activist who was run down by right-wing zealots on a motorcycle at a peace rally in Thessaloniki. His murder — a pivotal event in modern Greek history that was portrayed in thinly fictionalized form in the Costa-Gavras film as the work of leaders of the subsequent junta — provoked mass protests and a national political crisis.Mr. Theodorakis founded a youth organization in Mr. Lambrakis’s name that staged political protests across Greece and helped elect him to Parliament in 1964 on a ticket affiliated with the Communists.As Greece plunged into political and economic turmoil in 1967, Col. George Papadopoulos led a military coup that seized power, suspended civil liberties, abolished political parties and established special courts. Thousands of political opponents were imprisoned or exiled.Mr. Theodorakis, who had recently visited President Fidel Castro of Cuba, went into hiding. An arrest warrant was issued, and a military court sentenced him in absentia to five months in prison. Bans were decreed on playing, selling or even listening to his music.Months later, Mr. Theodorakis was arrested and jailed in Athens. He continued composing music in his cell. Five months later, Mr. Theodorakis, his wife and their two children were banished to Zatouna, a mountain village in the Peloponnesus, where they remained for three years.Mr. Theodorakis with his daughter, Margarita, his son, George, and his wife, Myrto, in 1968.Associated PressLeonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, Harry Belafonte and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich led calls for Mr. Theodorakis’s release, to no avail. For the last months of his detention in 1970, he was moved to a prison camp at Oropos, north of Athens. He was coughing up blood and running a fever. To stifle rumors that he had been beaten to death, the junta showed him to foreign reporters.The European government told Greece it was violating its treaty on human rights and called on the junta to end torture, release political prisoners and hold free elections. The colonels rejected the appeal, but they released Mr. Theodorakis and sent him and his family into exile in Paris, where he was hospitalized and treated for tuberculosis.Three months later, he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in his triumphant “March of the Spirit.” The crowd’s emotions spilled over. “It was as if Zorba himself were conducting,” Newsweek wrote at the time. “When it ended, the audience wouldn’t let him leave; prolonged applause, cheers, stamping feet and rhythmic cries of ‘Theodorakis! Theodorakis!’ brought him back five times.”The concert began Mr. Theodorakis’s four-year campaign for a peaceful overthrow of the junta. Touring the world, he gave concerts on every continent to raise funds for the cause of Greek democracy. He won support from cultural and political leaders. In Chile, he met the country’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende, and the poet Pablo Neruda. He later composed movements to Neruda’s “Canto General,” his history of the New World from a Hispanic perspective.He was received by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and President François Mitterrand of France. The Swedish leader Olof Palme, the West German chancellor Willy Brandt and his old friend Melina Mercouri, the actress who had become the Greek minister of culture, pledged help. Artists and writers around the world became his allies.By 1973, facing international pressure and a restless civilian population, the junta’s hold was shaky. A student uprising in Athens escalated into open revolt. Hundreds of civilians were injured, some fatally, in clashes with troops. Colonel Papadopoulos was ousted, and martial law was imposed by a new hard-liner. In 1974, the junta collapsed when senior military officers withdrew their support.Within days, Mr. Theodorakis returned home in triumph, welcomed by large crowds, his music playing constantly on the radio. “My joy now is the same that I felt waiting in a cell to be tortured,” he said. “It was all part of the same struggle.”Former Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis also returned from exile and formed a national unity government. Greece’s monarchy was abolished, a new constitution was adopted and, in 1981, Greece joined the European Economic CommunityMichael George Theodorakis was born on the Aegean island of Chios on July 29, 1925, the older of two sons of Georgios and Aspasia (Poulakis) Theodorakis. He and his brother, Yannis, were raised in provincial cities. Their father was a lawyer. Their mother, an ethnic Greek from what is now Turkey, taught her sons Greek folk music and Byzantine liturgy.Yannis became a poet and songwriter. Mikis wrote his first songs without musical instruments and gave his first concert at 17.In 1953, he married Myrto Altinoglou. They had two children, Margarita and George. After his return from exile in 1974, Mr. Theodorakis resumed concert tours and became musical director of the symphony orchestra of Hellenic Radio and Television. He also returned to politics, serving in Parliament in the 1980s and ’90s.Mr. Theodorakis conducting the orchestra at the Herodes Atticus theater in Athens in 2005.Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 1988, he quit the Communist Party and sided with conservatives who deplored scandals in the Andreas Papandreou government and bombings attributed to left-wing terrorists. But in 1992 he resigned as a conservative government minister and returned to the Socialists.Mr. Theodorakis, who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1983, wrote books on music and political affairs, as well as a five-volume autobiography, “The Ways of the Archangel.” In retirement, he condemned America’s war in Iraq and Israel’s conservative policies. Even in his 80s, with his shaggy mane of gray and penetrating eyes, he had the ferocious look of a rebel or a prophet.In 1973, during his exile, Mr. Theodorakis presented a sweeping survey of his work at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, including a trilogy based on the poems of Neruda.“The elements behind Mr. Theodorakis’s music are simple enough,” John Rockwell wrote in a review for The Times: “stirring tunes, infectious dance rhythms and the ever‐present exotic color of the bouzoukis.” But while Mr. Theodorakis “makes brilliant, inventive use of his popular materials,” Mr. Rockwell noted, “he quickly transcends them.”“Ultimately, one can’t separate Mr. Theodorakis’s politics from his music,” he added. “One can easily understand why this is the sort of music some people feel they must ban.”Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting. More