Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Sandie Crisp, ‘Goddess Bunny’ of the Underground Scene, Dies at 61

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostSandie Crisp, ‘Goddess Bunny’ of the Underground Scene, Dies at 61She became a muse among the Hollywood avant-garde, appearing in movies, music videos and photographs. She died of Covid-19.Sandie Crisp in 2016. She appeared in music videos, movies and stage shows.Credit…Chuck GrantFeb. 4, 2021Updated 6:20 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Sandie Crisp, a transgender actress and model who, under her stage name the Goddess Bunny, served as a muse to generations of artists, gay punks and other denizens of the West Hollywood avant-garde, died on Jan. 27 at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 61.Her death was confirmed by Mitchell Sunderland-Jackson, a friend. The cause was Covid-19, he said.For decades, Ms. Crisp was a familiar presence on the sidewalks of Santa Monica Boulevard and in the hustler bars that once lined it, where she dressed like a grungy diva and lip-synced songs by Donny Osmond, Judy Garland and Selena.In the 1980s and ’90s, she became a popular subject for artists who frequented that scene as well as their collaborator. Directors cast her in underground movies, and she appeared in music videos by Dr. Dre and Billy Talent. A nude photograph of her sits in the permanent collection of the Louvre.Her aesthetic, which blended the Hollywood noir of David Lynch with the punk offensiveness of GG Allin and Lydia Lunch, knew few boundaries. For one performance she dressed as Eva Braun alongside a man dressed as Hitler. An audience member leapt to his feet and punched her in the face.“Being able to shock and offend as a way of avoiding co-option by corporate capitalism — she was the muse for people pursuing that sensibility,” said the Canadian filmmaker Bruce La Bruce, the director, most recently, of “Saint-Narcisse” (2020).Ms. Crisp was equally renowned among drag performers, especially those of a rawer sensibility.“If you’re an actual drag queen, you know about the Goddess Bunny,” said Simone Moss, the founder of Bushwig, an annual drag conclave that started in New York and gave Ms. Crisp a lifetime achievement award in 2017. “She’s a part of drag history as much as Divine,” she said, referring to the actress made famous by John Waters in films like “Pink Flamingos.”Sandie Crisp was born on Jan. 13, 1960, in Los Angeles to John Wesley Baima, a lawyer, and Betty Joann (Sherrod) Baima, a secretary.Their child contracted polio, causing limited use of her arms and legs. Doctors prescribed a variety of surgeries and medical devices — Milwaukee braces, Harrington rods — but they caused only further physical damage. She used a wheelchair to get around.After the Baimas divorced, Sandie spent several years in foster homes around Los Angeles, at times subjected to abuse by doctors and at least one foster parent, according to Sandie’s account and that of her half brother, Derryl Dale Piper II.She returned to live with her mother when she was 11, and by 14 she was beginning to present herself as a woman, Mr. Piper said, a turn that brought conflict with their mother, who was deeply religious.Ms. Crisp left home after high school, moving to West Hollywood and joining a small community of punks, artists, homeless teens and hustlers. She made her mark almost immediately. Foulmouthed and dressed in sequined gowns that she often sewed herself, she insisted on being treated like a celebrity. Her penchant for telling wild tales about herself — like how she had appeared in off-Broadway musicals and dated celebrities — only made her more intriguing to her peers.Sandie Crisp was equally renowned among drag performers, especially those who lean toward a raw, edgy sensibility.Credit…Gibson Fox“She was such a visually extreme person,” said the photographer Rick Castro, one of many artists who hired Ms. Crisp to appear in their work in the 1980s and ’90s. “The way she carried herself, like she was a movie star, like old-school Hollywood royalty — she didn’t carry herself like someone who should be ashamed,” he said in an interview.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Eva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77An executive with the respected label Harmonia Mundi, she shaped classical music careers and public tastes in turning out incomparable recordings from a French farmhouse.Eva Coutaz, the driving force behind the record label Harmonia Mundi, rehabilitated forgotten composers and nurtured some of the leading figures in early music.Credit…Josep MolinaFeb. 4, 2021, 3:13 p.m. ETEva Coutaz, who in more than four decades at the highly respected record label Harmonia Mundi shaped musicians’ careers, rehabilitated forgotten composers and expanded the tastes of record collectors, died on Jan. 26 in Arles, France. She was 77.Jean-Marc Berns, the label’s head of marketing, said the cause was complications of renal failure.Ms. Coutaz joined Harmonia Mundi in 1972 at the invitation of its founder, Bernard Coutaz, whom she would go on to marry. Her first job was to oversee publicity and to organize concerts to promote the label’s artists, but she quickly proved her business acumen and artistic sensibility.Ms. Coutaz nurtured long-term relationships with a stable of musicians that included some of the leading figures in early music, among them the countertenor Alfred Deller and the performer-conductors René Jacobs, William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe. Later she brought in another generation of recording stars, including the violinist Isabelle Faust, the pianist Alexandre Tharaud and the baritone Matthias Goerne.She built a catalog of more than 800 recordings as head of production starting in 1975. On the death of her husband in 2010 she became chief executive of the company and remained in that post until 2015, when she sold the label.At its most prolific, Harmonia Mundi released more than 50 new recordings a year. Industry publications frequently crowned it label of the year, and collectors came to trust it as a guide to hidden gems and illuminating interpretations of the classics. With their beautifully designed covers and thoughtful liner notes, Harmonia Mundi albums stood for a listening culture that was both meticulous and meditative.Ms. Coutaz was “the great guiding force” behind the label, Mr. Christie said in a phone interview. As a businesswoman, he said, she could be “tough as old boots.”“She had a strong will and an extraordinary sense of rightness about repertory,” he added. “And she was going to take risks.”In the 1970s and ’80s, those risks paid handsome dividends in a market buoyed by fresh interest in early music and historically informed interpretations. Ms. Coutaz recognized, for example, the market potential of the French baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier at a time when his ilk lagged far behind the popular appeal of their German and Italian counterparts, Mr. Christie said.Costly productions of unknown oratorios and operas remained a gamble, and Ms. Coutaz greenlighted some projects against her own better financial judgment. In a 2018 radio interview with the Belgian station RTBF, she spoke about a recording, led by Mr. Jacobs, of the opera “Croesus” by the northern German baroque composer Reinhard Keiser — a footnote in music history books.“I thought it would be a loss for us,” she said. But she was so taken by the music that she told herself, “I want to record it — it would be a shame if people don’t hear it.” “Croesus” sold more than 25,000 copies, a triumph for classical music.Mr. Jacobs said that Ms. Coutaz had encouraged his conducting career when he was still known mainly as a countertenor. After he had gained fame as a champion of Baroque music, she urged him to record Mozart operas. His Harmonia Mundi recording of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” won a Grammy Award in 2004 and became a best seller.“She pushed me to go further,” he said.Eva Schannath was born in Wuppertal, Germany, on Feb. 26, 1943. Her father was a cabinetmaker. After attending a Roman Catholic school in Düsseldorf, she took on an apprenticeship as a bookseller. Eager to experience France, she went to Marseille in 1964 as an au pair, then stayed on, working first at a book shop in Montpellier and then for a cultural center in Aix-en-Provence.It was there, in 1972, that she met Mr. Coutaz, who was then running Harmonia Mundi from Saint-Michel-l’Observatoire, a remote village in Provence. Mr. Coutaz founded the company in 1958.Jean-Guihen Queyras, a boy studying the cello, was living in a nearby hamlet, and his parents befriended the couple. When he was 10 he received his first taste of a Harmonia Mundi recording session when Ms. Coutaz invited him to work the organ bellows for Mr. Christie in a tiny Romanesque mountain chapel.Years later Mr. Queyras joined the label as a soloist. “What was different to other labels was her vision and her very human and organic way to bring together musicians in a way that really feels like a family,” he said.He recalled her strong emotional reactions to music. “Sometimes she would talk to you after a concert, and you could see there had been tears,” he said. “She really made all this out of pure, intense love for music.”Eva and Bernard Coutaz worked closely together even as they married, divorced and remarried. They had no children. Information on her survivors was not immediately available.The couple moved the label to an old farmhouse in Arles in 1986. It became the creative and logistical hub for a company that at its height employed more than 350 people. Its influence spread through subsidiaries in Spain and the United States, a publishing arm and a network of record boutiques.In the early 2000s, the rise of streaming started to put the recording industry in crisis and forced painful cuts at Harmonia Mundi. In the radio interview, Ms. Coutaz spoke of a 70 percent drop in CD sales over a span of 10 years. She warned that as earnings plummeted, high-quality studio recordings would become a thing of the past. “If digital sales are not monetized, the moment will come when you can no longer produce,” she said.In 2015, she approved the sale of Harmonia Mundi’s catalog to PIAS, a Belgian group of independent labels. She remained involved as a consultant for another year, to help maintain quality. In 2018, Gramophone, a leading classical music publication, named Harmonia Mundi label of the year.Reflecting on Ms. Coutaz, Mr. Christie said his generation had known a recording industry led by “strong-minded and intensely committed individuals who had an extraordinary sense of the rightness of what they were doing and how to create markets.”“And she stood out among them.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Ricky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New York

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRicky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New YorkProlific with his point-and-shoot camera, he captured essential images of the Beastie Boys, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Run-DMC, Andy Warhol and more.The photographer Ricky Powell in 2012. An inveterate walker, he pounded the New York pavement with his camera and snapped photos of whatever caught his fancy.Credit…Janette BeckmanPublished More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Allan Burns, a Creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 85

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAllan Burns, a Creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 85He won Emmys for his work on that show and helped create the spinoffs “Rhoda” and “Lou Grant.” Among his other creations was the cereal mascot Cap’n Crunch.Allan Burns in 2016. He was involved in the creation of TV shows ranging from the acclaimed “Mary Tyler Moore Show” to the much-mocked “My Mother the Car.”Credit…Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesFeb. 3, 2021Updated 4:52 p.m. ETAllan Burns, a leading television writer in the 1970s and ’80s who helped create the groundbreaking hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its dramatic spinoff, “Lou Grant,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.His son Matthew said the causes were Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia.“Allan’s range was like nobody’s,” James L. Brooks, his partner in creating Ms. Moore’s series, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think you ever get an absurdist, a legitimate humorist and a feeling person in one package.”In 1969, Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks were working on “Room 222,” a comedy-drama series set in a Los Angeles high school, when Grant Tinker, Ms. Moore’s husband, asked them to create a series for her. Their first concept was that she play a divorced woman who worked as a reporter for a gossip columnist.“We ran it past Mary and Grant and they absolutely loved it,” Mr. Burns said in an interview for the Television Academy in 2004.But Mr. Burns said that during a meeting he and Mr. Brooks attended at CBS headquarters in Manhattan, a research executive told them there were four things American audiences “won’t tolerate”: New Yorkers, Jews, divorced people and men with mustaches.“What do you do with that?” Mr. Burns said in the interview. “We were dismissed.”Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks quickly turned the series’ setting into a TV newsroom and Ms. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, into a woman who had never been married and had just ended a long-term relationship.Ed Asner and Mary Tyler Moore in the first episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which Mr. Burns created with James L. Brooks. They later developed the spinoff series “Lou Grant” for Mr. Asner.Credit…CBS, via Getty Images“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — set largely at WJM-TV in Minneapolis and in Mary Richards’s apartment — was praised for Ms. Moore’s portrayal of a single working woman, and for its writing. The series ran from 1970 to 1977 and won 29 Emmy Awards; Mr. Burns shared in five of them.“Allan could channel the character of Mary Richards,” Mr. Brooks said. “He gave us a sense of her by the way he talked about her.”Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks twice spun off shows from “Mary Tyler Moore” for MTM Enterprises, Ms. Moore and Mr. Tinker’s production company. “Rhoda” followed the ups and downs of Mary’s best friend after she moved back to New York. In “Lou Grant,” which began in 1977, Mary Richards’s tough-yet-comedic newsroom boss, played by Ed Asner, became the determined city editor of a Los Angeles newspaper.In the late 1970s, Mr. Burns started branching out into films. He wrote the screenplay for “A Little Romance” (1979), starring Laurence Olivier and Diane Lane, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and for “Butch and Sundance: The Early Days” (1979), a prequel to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). He also wrote and directed “Just Between Friends” (1986), with Ms. Moore, Ted Danson and Christine Lahti. It was his only film as a director.Mr. Burns directing Christine Lahti in “Just Between Friends” (1986), which he wrote and directed. It was his only film as a director.Credit…Orion, via Everett CollectionAnd he continued to develop sitcoms. In the 1980s, he created or helped create three short-lived comedy series: “The Duck Factory,” which starred Jim Carrey as an animator; “Eisenhower and Lutz” about a shiftless lawyer played by Scott Bakula, and “FM,” set in a public radio station.In his review of “Eisenhower and Lutz,” John O’Connor of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Burns, “He cannot only whip up generous batches of clever dialogue but is also extremely clever with staging bits of comic business.”Allan Pennington Burns was born on May 18, 1935, in Baltimore. His father, Donald, was a lawyer. His mother, Paulene (Dobbling) Burns, was a homemaker who became a secretary after her husband died when Allan was 9. Three years after that, she and Allan moved to Hawaii, where his older brother, Donald Jr., was stationed at Pearl Harbor.While attending Punahou School in Honolulu, Allan contributed cartoons to The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He used his drawing talent while studying architecture at the University of Oregon. He dropped out during his sophomore year in 1956 and moved to Los Angeles, where he was hired as a page at NBC and later became a story analyst. After being laid off, he began writing and illustrating greeting cards while trying to find work at an animation studio.He found a job at Jay Ward Productions, which produced “Rocky and His Friends,” the satirical cartoon series about the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (more formally, Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose). Mr. Burns appeared unannounced at Mr. Ward’s office on Sunset Boulevard, toting his portfolio of greeting cards. Mr. Ward leafed through the cards, chuckled and quickly hired him.Mr. Burns wrote for the moose, the squirrel and other characters on “The Bullwinkle Show.” He also developed the character Cap’n Crunch for Quaker Oats, which had hired Mr. Ward’s company to create a mascot for a new cereal. After he and his colleague Chris Hayward left Mr. Ward in 1963, they created “My Mother the Car,” a sitcom that starred Jerry Van Dyke, with Ann Sothern as the voice of his mother, who has been reincarnated as a vintage Porter automobile and speaks only to him. A notable flop considered by some to be one of TV’s worst shows, it was canceled after one season.In 1967 and 1968, Mr. Burns and Mr. Hayward worked on the only season of the sitcom “He & She,” in which the married couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss played a comic book artist and his wife, a social worker. Mr. Burns shared his first Emmy with Mr. Hayward for one episode.After “He & She” was canceled, its producer, Leonard Stern, brought them to the espionage parody, “Get Smart,” another series he produced, then in its fourth season. “Room 222” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” soon followed.In addition to his son Matthew, Mr. Burns is survived by his wife, Joan (Bailey) Burns; another son, Eric; and five grandchildren.Mr. Asner, who worked for Mr. Burns on both “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant,” recalled him in an interview as a gentlemanly boss.“He was a guide and mentor, and I loved him,” he said. “Jim Brooks was the bouncing-off-the-walls part of the team, and Allan was the stabilizer.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Hal Holbrook, Actor Who Channeled Mark Twain, Is Dead at 95

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHal Holbrook, Actor Who Channeled Mark Twain, Is Dead at 95He carved out a substantial career in television and film but achieved the widest acclaim with his one-man stage show, playing Twain for more than six decades.Hal Holbrook on stage as Mark Twain in 2005. Mr. Holbrook was 29 when he started playing Twain at 70; as he grew older, he found he needed less and less makeup to look elderly.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021, 12:17 a.m. ETHal Holbrook, who carved out a substantial acting career in television and film but who achieved his widest acclaim onstage, embodying Mark Twain in all his craggy splendor and vinegary wit in a one-man show seen around the world, died on Jan. 23 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his assistant, Joyce Cohen, on Monday night.Mr. Holbrook had a long and fruitful run as an actor. He was the shadowy patriot Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” (1976); an achingly grandfatherly character in “Into the Wild” (2007), for which he received an Oscar nomination; and the influential Republican Preston Blair in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012).He played the 16th president himself, on television, in Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln,” a 1974 mini-series. The performance earned him an Emmy Award, one of five he won for his acting in television movies and mini-series; the others included “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (1970),his protagonist resembling John F. Kennedy, and “Pueblo” (1973) in which he played the commander of a Navy intelligence boat seized by North Korea in 1968.Mr. Holbrook was a regular on the 1980s television series “Designing Women.” He played Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” Shakespeare’s Hotspur and King Lear, and the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”But above all he was Mark Twain, standing alone onstage in a rumpled white linen suit, spinning an omnisciently pungent, incisive and humane narration of the human comedy.Mr. Holbrook in 1973, when he played the commander of a Navy intelligence boat seized by North Korea in the TV movie “Pueblo.”Credit…Jerry Mosey/Associated PressMr. Holbrook never claimed to be a Twain scholar; indeed, he said, he had read only a little of Twain’s work as a young man. He said the idea of doing a staged reading of Twain’s work came from Edward A. Wright, his mentor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. And Mr. Wright would have been the first to acknowledge that the idea had actually originated with Twain himself — or rather Samuel Clemens, who had adopted Mark Twain as something of a stage name and who did readings of his work for years.Mr. Holbrook was finishing his senior year as a drama major in 1947 when Mr. Wright talked him into adding Twain to a production that Mr. Holbrook and his wife, Ruby, were planning called “Great Personalities,” in which they would portray, among others, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.Mr. Holbrook had doubts at first. “Ed, I think this Mark Twain thing is pretty corny,” he recalled telling Mr. Wright after the first rehearsals. “I don’t think it’s funny.”But Mr. Wright prevailed upon him to stay with it, and in 1948 the character came along when the Holbrooks took to the road with a “Great Personalities” touring production.They first tried the Twain sketch before an audience of psychiatric patients at the veterans hospital in Chillicothe, Ohio — a circumstance Mr. Holbrook explains only vaguely in his 2011 memoir, “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain.” In the sketch, Mr. Holbrook’s cantankerous Twain was interviewed by Ruby Holbrook:“How old are you?”“Nineteen in June.”“Whom do you consider the most remarkable man you ever met?”“George Washington.”“But how could you have ever met George Washington if you’re only nineteen years old?”“If you know more about me than I do, what do you ask me for?”The patients stared straight ahead — “No one was looking at us,” Mr. Holbrook wrote — and guffawed at the laugh lines, proving that “the guys in the ward were saner than they looked” and that the material had legs.The Twain piece became their most popular sketch over the next four years, as the couple crisscrossed the country performing for schoolchildren, ladies’ clubs, college students and Rotarians.Meeting President Dwight D. Eisenhower as Mark Twain at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 1959.Credit…Bob Schutz/Associated PressMr. Holbrook began developing his one-man show in 1952, the year Ms. Holbrook gave birth to their first child, Victoria. He soon looked the part, with a wig to match Twain’s unruly mop, a walrus mustache and a rumpled white linen suit, the kind Twain himself wore onstage. From his grandfather, Mr. Holbrook got an old penknife, which he used to cut the ends off the three cigars he smoked during a performance (though he was not sure whether Twain ever smoked onstage). He sought out people who claimed to have seen and heard Twain, who died in 1910, and listened to their recollections.He had more or less perfected the role by 1954, the year he began a one-man show titled “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.Two years later he took his Twain to television, performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show.” In the meantime he had landed a steady job in 1954 on the TV soap opera “The Brighter Day,” on which he played a recovering alcoholic. The stint lasted until 1959, when, tiring of roles he no longer cared about, he opened in “Mark Twain Tonight!” at the Off Broadway 41st Street Theater.By then the metamorphosis was complete. With his shambling gait, Missouri drawl, sly glances and exquisite timing, Hal Holbrook had, for all intents and purposes, become Mark Twain.“After watching and listening to him for five minutes,” Arthur Gelb wrote in The New York Times, “it is impossible to doubt that he is Mark Twain, or that Twain must have been one of the most enchanting men ever to go on a lecture tour.”Mr. Holbrook preparing his makeup. With his shambling gait, Missouri drawl, sly glances and exquisite timing, his metamorphosis became complete.Credit…Michael Stravato for The New York TimesBut for Mr. Holbrook, the Mark Twain guise he put on every night was a mask; behind it, he wrote in his memoir, was a lonesomeness that had plagued his early life, beginning when his parents abandoned him as a small child. As an adult he found his marriage, his fatherhood and even his stage life caught in an existential deadlock, with “survival and suicide impulses working in tandem.” His escape, he said, was punishing amounts of work, not to mention the company of friends like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.In his memoir, Mr. Holbrook described an emotional low point in the early 1950s. He was sitting in a hotel room at the end of a long day, still undecided about doing an all-Mark Twain show and feeling lost, when he began rereading “Tom Sawyer” for the first time since high school.“You heard the voices coming right off the page,” he wrote. “This was a surprise, and after a while I began to feel pleasant with myself and that was a surprise, too. Bitterness receded and in its place a boy came crowding in, his friends came in and his family, and it wasn’t very long before I did not feel so lonely anymore. Mark Twain had cheered me up.”Harold Rowe Holbrook Jr. was born on Feb. 17, 1925, in Cleveland. He was 2 years old when his parents left him. His mother, the former Aileen Davenport, ran off to join the chorus of the revue “Earl Carroll’s Vanities.” Harold Sr. went to California after leaving young Hal in the care of grandparents in South Weymouth, Mass.The young Mr. Holbrook spent his high school years at the Culver Military Academy in Indiana and then enrolled at Denison to major in the dramatic arts, but his education was interrupted by service as an Army engineer during World War II. He was stationed for a while in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where he joined an amateur theater group and met Ruby Elaine Johnston, who became his first wife. The couple returned to Denison after the war, and Mr. Holbrook soon became Mr. Wright’s prize student.After he became an established attraction in the United States, Mr. Holbrook took “Mark Twain Tonight!” to Europe, performing in Britain, Germany and elsewhere. German audiences roared when he presented Twain’s view of Wagnerian opera: “I went to Bayreuth and took in ‘Parsifal.’ I shall never forget it. The first act occupied two hours and I enjoyed it, in spite of the singing.”Mr. Holbrook and Emile Hirsch in the 2007 film “Into the Wild.”Credit…ParamountMr. Holbrook toured the country with the show several times a year, racking up well over 2,000 performances. He compiled an estimated 15 hours of Twain’s writings, which he dipped into whenever his routine needed refreshing. He won a Tony Award in 1966 for his first Broadway run in “Mark Twain Tonight!”Mr. Holbrook was 29 when he started playing Twain at 70; as he grew older, he found he needed less and less makeup to look elderly. He continued the act well past his own 70th birthday, returning to Broadway in 2005, when he was 80.After playing Twain for more than six decades, he abruptly retired the role in 2017. “I know it must end, this long effort to do a good job,” he wrote in a letter to the Oklahoma theater where he had been scheduled to perform. “I have served my trade, gave it my all, heart and soul, as a dedicated actor can.”Mr. Holbrook made his Broadway debut in 1961 in the short-lived “Do You Know the Milky Way?” He returned there in the musical “Man of La Mancha,” in Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall” and other plays.His scores of television appearances included “That Certain Summer” (1972), a groundbreaking film in which he starred as a divorced man who must ultimately admit to his son that he has a gay lover (Martin Sheen). In the early 1990s he had a recurring role on the sitcom “Evening Shade.”Mr. Holbrook’s many film roles tended to be small ones, although there were exceptions. One was as the mysterious informant Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 film adaptation of the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate cover-up. Another was in “The Firm” (1993), based on John Grisham’s corporate whodunit, in which Mr. Holbrook played the stop-at-nothing head of a Memphis law firm.Mr. Holbrook and his wife, Dixie Carter, at the 2008 Screen Actors Guild Awards, where he was nominated for his role in “Into the Wild.”Credit…Chris Pizzello/Associated PressHis Oscar-nominated performance, in “Into the Wild,” directed by Sean Penn, was as a retired military man who has a desert encounter with a young man on a quest for self-knowledge that would ultimately take him to the Alaskan wilderness. His final screen roles were in 2017, when, at 92, he guest-starred in episodes of the television series “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Hawaii Five-0.”Mr. Holbrook’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1965. In addition to their daughter, Victoria, they had a son, David. His second marriage, to the actress Carol Eve Rossen, ended in divorce in 1979. They had a daughter, Eve. In 1984 he married the actress Dixie Carter, who died in 2010.He is survived by his children as well as two stepdaughters, Ginna Carter and Mary Dixie Carter; two grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren.In adapting Mark Twain’s writing for the stage, Mr. Holbrook said he had the best possible guide: Twain himself.“He had a real understanding of the difference between the word on the page and delivering it on a platform,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. “You have to leave out a lot of adjectives. The performer is an adjective.”Richard Severo, Paul Vitello and William McDonald contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Dustin Diamond, Actor on ‘Saved by the Bell,’ Dies at 44

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDustin Diamond, Actor on ‘Saved by the Bell,’ Dies at 44Mr. Diamond played Screech on the NBC high school sitcom, but struggled to find work and reconcile with cast members in the decades after the show ended.Dustin Diamond as Samuel “Screech” Powers on “Saved by the Bell,” a Saturday morning staple on NBC from 1989 to 1992.Credit…Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesFeb. 1, 2021Updated 6:17 p.m. ETDustin Diamond, the former child actor who found fame on the enduring NBC Saturday morning sitcom “Saved by the Bell” but struggled to find work in later years, died on Monday in Florida. He was 44.A representative for Mr. Diamond, Roger Paul, confirmed the death. He said that the cause was carcinoma and that Mr. Diamond died in a hospital.After Mr. Diamond went “through some medical testing,” in January, his representatives said in a statement that he had cancer.From 1989 to 1992, Mr. Diamond played Samuel “Screech” Powers on “Saved by the Bell,” which developed a cult following among millennials and members of Generation X and grew into an internet obsession for some fans.The show followed the day-to-day adventures of a group of loudly dressed friends at the fictional Bayside High School in California.Saturday morning viewers watched Mr. Diamond grow up on the show as he played Screech, the sweet-natured, geeky underdog and the dunce among his friends. An ongoing plotline was the character’s unrequited crush on Lisa Turtle, who was played by Lark Voorhies.Screech was also the comedic sidekick to Zack Morris, the popular student who was played Mark-Paul Gosselaar. The show’s cast also included Mario Lopez as Slater, Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie and Tiffani Thiessen as Kelly, who rounded out the circle of friends.The show also starred Dennis Haskins as the school principal who mentored and disciplined the group. Mr. Diamond appeared in all 86 episodes.Memorable plot lines included a caffeine pill addiction by Ms. Berkley’s character, the friends competing in a dance competition hosted by the radio disc jockey Casey Kasem and when “Screech” is asked to make fake IDs so the guys could go to a club.Mr. Diamond was born on Jan. 7, 1977, in San Jose, Calif., according to IMDB.com, and he said he began acting when he was 8. He also appeared in other series, including “The Wonder Years.”He originated the role of Screech in 1988 when he was cast in “Good Morning, Miss Bliss,” the Disney Channel series that was the forerunner to “Saved by the Bell” and introduced many of its characters.After “Saved by the Bell” ended in 1992, a prime-time spinoff show called “Saved by the Bell: The College Years” followed the gang in college. That show ran for one season, ending in 1994. From 1994 to 2000, he reprised the role of Screech in another spinoff series, “Saved by the Bell: The New Class.”After the series ended, Mr. Diamond became known for his post-stardom troubles, and spoke openly about his struggles finding work.“The hardest thing about being a child star is giving up your childhood,” Mr. Diamond said in 2013 on “Oprah: Where Are They Now?” While he was working on “Saved by the Bell,” he said, he feared being replaced, saying, “You don’t get a childhood, really.”After the series ended, he said: “I didn’t really know what I was going to do. It was hard to get work that wasn’t Screech-cloned stuff.”He added: “I had been working for the last 10 years, every single week, and I felt lost. As I mature I realize, wow, I was kind of going through my rebellious teens in my 20s.”Seeking a payout in the mid-2000s, Mr. Diamond found tabloid fame with the release of a sex tape that he later spoke of with regret.“The sex tape is the thing that I’m most embarrassed about,” Mr. Diamond said on Ms. Winfrey’s documentary show. Although he made some money from the tape, he said, “it wasn’t worth what the fallout was.”He was also featured on reality shows including “Celebrity Boxing 2” in 2002 and “Celebrity Fit Club,” on VH1, in 2007.In 2009, he released a tell-all book called “Behind the Bell” that claimed that members of the show’s cast were using drugs and having sex. Years later, Mr. Diamond expressed regret about the book as well, saying it was written by a ghostwriter.“The book was another disappointment of mine,” he said in Ms. Winfrey’s documentary. “I was a first-time author, so they had a ghostwriter. I talked to a guy a few times, so the book has some truth in it, and a lot of the stories were just kind of throwaways.”Mr. Diamond’s problems also extended to court. In 2015, he was accused of stabbing a man during a fight in a Wisconsin bar. Mr. Diamond said he had pulled a knife to defend himself; he was convicted on two misdemeanors, sentenced to four months in jail and ordered to pay more than $1,000 to the man who was stabbed.In a 2016 interview on “Extra,” Mr. Diamond told Mr. Lopez that were he to meet his other former “Saved by the Bell” castmates, he would “ask for forgiveness for any kind of misunderstandings that may have come about by the book.” He said he had not seen some of his co-stars for decades.Mr. Diamond was repeatedly omitted from reunions. In 2015, he was left out of a skit that reunited the cast on “The Tonight Show,” and in 2020, when “Saved by the Bell” was rebooted on NBC’s Peacock streaming service, Mr. Diamond was not part of the new series.Information about Mr. Diamond’s survivors was not immediately available.Christopher Mele contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Jamie Tarses, Executive in a Hollywood Rise-and-Fall Story, Dies at 56

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJamie Tarses, Executive in a Hollywood Rise-and-Fall Story, Dies at 56She broke barriers as a woman in the TV industry and turned out hit after hit, only to see it all fizzle under a very public spotlight.Jamie Tarses in 1996. At 32 she was named president of entertainment at ABC, the first woman ever to serve as a network’s top programmer.Credit…Steve GoldsteinFeb. 1, 2021, 3:09 p.m. ETLOS ANGELES — A young, female executive arrives in the men’s locker room that was broadcast television in the 1990s and snaps a few towels of her own, working with writers to shape juggernaut comedies like “Mad About You” and “Friends.” She is so good at spotting hits that she becomes, at 32, the president of entertainment at ABC, the first woman ever to serve as a network’s top programmer.But she fizzles in epic fashion, brought down by corporate dysfunction, unvarnished sexism, self-sabotage, weaponized industry gossip and scalding news media scrutiny.Such was the show business life of Jamie Tarses, who died on Monday in Los Angeles at 56. Her death was confirmed by a family spokeswoman, who said the cause was “complications from a cardiac event.” She suffered a stroke in the fall and had spent a long period in a coma.Ms. Tarses (pronounced TAR-siss) broke a Hollywood glass ceiling in 1996, when she became president of ABC Entertainment. ABC badly needed fresh hit shows, and Ms. Tarses, who had worked at NBC, had a reputation for serving up a steady supply — especially zeitgeist-tapping sitcoms. She had shepherded the cuddly “Mad About You” and the neurotic “Frasier” to NBC’s prime-time lineup. “Friends,” which she had helped develop, was the envy of every network.“Jamie had a remarkable ability to engage writers — to understand their twisted, dark, joyful, brilliant complexity and really speak their language and help them achieve their creative goals,” said Warren Littlefield, who was NBC’s president of entertainment from 1991 to 1998. “She was highly creative herself and, of course, came from a family of writers.” (Her father, Jay Tarses, wrote for “The Carol Burnett Show” and created “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” an acclaimed comedic drama, from 1987 to ’91. Her brother, the comedy writer Matt Tarses, has credits like “Scrubs” and “The Goldbergs.”)Even so, Ms. Tarses faced extreme challenges.Upstart broadcast competitors — the scrappy Fox, UPN, the WB — were siphoning young adult viewers away from the Big Three networks. So were cable channels. In 1996, about 49 percent of prime-time viewers watched ABC, CBS or NBC, down from roughly 74 percent a decade earlier, according to Nielsen data. HBO was moving into original programming with shows like “Sex and the City,” further diluting the talent pool.The Walt Disney Company had purchased ABC shortly before Ms. Tarses arrived, heightening Wall Street scrutiny and intensifying corporate politics. “ABC was a snake pit in those days,” said Jon Mandel, who ran MediaCom, a television ad-buying agency. “Some people spent more time trying to assassinate internal rivals than actually doing their jobs.”Ms. Tarses in 1997 as president of ABC Entertainment. At NBC she had served up a steady supply of hit sitcoms, including “Mad About You,”  “Frasier” and “Friends.” Credit…Kevork Djansezian/Associated PressThen came The Article.After a year at ABC, Ms. Tarses, who had alienated some colleagues by not returning calls and missing morning meetings, gave the journalist Lynn Hirschberg unfettered access for an 8,000-word cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The piece portrayed Ms. Tarses as “a nervous girl” who swung erratically between arrogance and insecurity. “Women are emotional, and Jamie is particularly emotional,” one male agent, speaking anonymously, was quoted as saying. “You think of her as a girl, and it changes how you do business with her.”The article, which pointedly discussed Ms. Tarses’s hairstyle and feminine way of sitting, helped color the rest of Ms. Tarses’s career. Once someone is typecast in Hollywood, even as an executive, getting people to see that person in a different light can be a never-ending battle.“A lot of it was pure sexism,” said Betsy Thomas, a screenwriter and friend.Even so, Ms. Tarses was criticized at times as showing poor judgment. In 1998, ABC hosted more than 100 television critics and entertainment journalists from across the United States at a promotional event in Pasadena, Calif. ABC stars were also invited, including a young Ryan Reynolds, then appearing on a sitcom called “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place.” As the evening wore on, reporters witnessed Ms. Tarses and Mr. Reynolds go outside and become amorous.The indiscretion, which was reported on by some newspapers, contributed to a narrative that had congealed around Ms. Tarses: She was too impetuous for such a big job.Her bosses, including Robert A. Iger, then chairman of the ABC Group, had been applying patches to the situation. A veteran television executive, Stuart Bloomberg, was installed above Ms. Tarses. Then, as part of a restructuring, yet another manager, Lloyd Braun, was placed over her in what was essentially a demotion. Vicious infighting ensued, what The Wall Street Journal later deemed “a case study in dysfunctional corporate relationships.”Thomas Gibson and Jenna Elfman in 1998 in “Dharma & Greg,” a popular sitcom that Ms. Tarses developed at ABC. Credit…Jerry Fitzgerald/ABCMs. Tarses resigned in 1999. She left ABC with one popular sitcom, “Dharma & Greg,” and one comedy that was a hit with critics, Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night.” She also put “The Practice,” a popular legal drama from David E. Kelley, on the ABC schedule.“I just don’t want to play anymore,” she told The Los Angeles Times when she left ABC. “The work is a blast. The rest of this nonsense I don’t need.”Sara James Tarses was born in Pittsburgh on March 16, 1964 to Jay and Rachel (Newdell) Tarses. The family moved to suburban Los Angeles, where her father became a successful sitcom writer (first on “The Bob Newhart Show”).Ms. Tarses attended Williams College in Massachusetts, studying play structure and receiving a theater degree in 1985. She was a production assistant on “Saturday Night Live” in New York for a season before returning to Los Angeles in 1986 to become a casting director for Lorimar Productions. She joined NBC in 1987 in the “current” comedy programming division (shows already on the air), where she monitored scripts for shows like “Cheers” and “A Different World,” starring Lisa Bonet.Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s much-admired entertainment chief, became her mentor. He swiftly promoted Ms. Tarses to the network’s comedy development department, where she worked on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” which turned Will Smith into a household name; the oddball “Wings,” set at a New England airport; and “Blossom,” centered on a teenage Mayim Bialik.Ms. Tarses’s departure from NBC was ugly.Michael Ovitz, the polarizing former power agent, had become Disney’s president. He began talking to Ms. Tarses about taking over ABC. But she was under contract at NBC. Gossip swirled in Hollywood that she solved the problem by claiming that she had been sexually harassed by Don Ohlmeyer, a senior NBC executive. (Mr. Ohlmeyer blamed Mr. Ovitz for the rumor and publicly called him “the Antichrist,” leading to a media frenzy.) Ms. Tarses and NBC denied the story, as did Mr. Ovitz, but it continued to hound her, making the young Ms. Tarses appear as someone “who would do anything to get ahead,” as Ms. Hirschberg wrote.When she arrived at ABC in the spring of 1996, Ms. Tarses was the second-youngest person ever to be the lead programmer of a network. (Mr. Tartikoff was 31 when he took over at NBC.) Her age, along with her status as the first woman to have that prestigious job, resulted in an unusual amount of scrutiny, often negative. Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, referred to her as “Minnie Mouse” in one article and “scarily ruthless” in another.Karey Burke, who ran ABC from 2018 to 2020 and is now president of 20th Television, a leading TV studio, said of Ms. Tarses in a statement: “She shattered stereotypes and ideas about what a female executive could achieve, and paved the way for others, at a cost to herself.”After quitting ABC in 1999, Ms. Tarses avoided the spotlight and remade herself as a producer. Several television pilots failed, but she ultimately found a few modest hits, including “My Boys,” a comedy created by Ms. Thomas and centered on a female sportswriter, and “Happy Endings,” a sitcom that dusted off the “Friends” formula.“She was a hands-on, deeply involved producer who just so totally got my voice and my sense of humor,” Ms. Thomas said. “She knew how to pull the best out of you without trying to change your writing or make it into something different.”Ms. Tarses in 2018. After quitting ABC she avoided the spotlight and remade herself as a producer. Credit…Emma Mcintyre/Getty ImagesIn addition to her brother, Matt, Ms. Tarses is survived by her partner, Paddy Aubrey, a chef and restaurateur; their two children, Wyatt and Sloane; her parents; and a sister, Mallory Tarses, a teacher and fiction writer.Even decades after she had left ABC, Ms. Tarses continued to serve as a lightning rod in Hollywood. To some, she was the victim of a misogynistic television industry. Others stubbornly viewed her as a callous climber.“She had smarts, drive, family connections, money, the mentor everyone wished they had, very good looks, absolutely everything going for her,” Mr. Mandel said. “That automatically created jealousy and resentment.”He continued: “Yes, she made mistakes. But the same could be said about any guy in Hollywood — especially then — and none of them had the added pressure of breaking a glass ceiling.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Sibongile Khumalo, South Africa’s ‘First Lady of Song,’ Dies at 63

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySibongile Khumalo, South Africa’s ‘First Lady of Song,’ Dies at 63Proficient across a range of genres, she had the hall-filling power of an operatic mezzo-soprano and the directness of a pop singer.The South African singer Sibongile Khumalo in performance at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn in 2007. Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021, 3:04 p.m. ETSibongile Khumalo, a virtuoso vocalist whose ease of motion between opera, jazz and South African popular music made her a symbol of the country’s new social order after the end of apartheid, died on Thursday. She was 63.Her family wrote on Instagram that the cause was complications of a stroke, and that she had endured a long illness. The post did not say where she died.Fleet and precise across a wide vocal range but particularly elegant in the upper register, Ms. Khumalo’s voice had the hall-filling power of an operatic mezzo-soprano and the directness of a pop singer. After making her debut as Carmen in a production in Durban, she earned wide acclaim for her roles in South African operas and plays, including “UShaka KaSenzangakhona,” “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu” and “Gorée,” all of which toured internationally.At home she was equally known for her catchy original compositions and her renditions of South African jazz standards like the straight-ahead anthem “Yakhal’ Inkomo,” written by the saxophonist Winston Ngozi, which became a calling card.When the apartheid government fell and Nelson Mandela became the country’s first democratically elected president in 1994, Ms. Khumalo performed at his inauguration. Mandela famously referred to her as the country’s “first lady of song,” and the title stuck.The next year, when South Africa went to the Rugby World Cup — a moment of national reconciliation later immortalized in the film “Invictus” — Ms. Khumalo was invited to perform both her home country’s national anthem and that of its opponent, New Zealand. It was “the one and only time I’ve ever watched a rugby match, at any level, of any kind,” she told a television interviewer in 2017, laughing.In 1996 Sony released her debut album, “Ancient Evenings,” which included a number of originals and loosely adhered to a vocal-driven South African pop style. Over the next two decades she would release a steady stream of albums, earning four South African Music Awards. For her stage performances, she garnered three Vita Awards.In 2008 she received the Order of Ikhamanga in silver, among the country’s highest honors for contributions to the arts.Sibongile Mngoma was born in Soweto on Sept. 24, 1957, to Grace and Khabi Mngoma. Her mother was a nurse; her father was a scholar and musician who helped found the music department at the University of Zululand.Sibongile began studying at age 8 under a respected local music teacher, Emily Motsieloa, focusing on the violin. She was heavily influenced by the music of local healers and ministers at the nearby church, as well as the Western classical and pop records her parents played around the house.She also inherited her father’s passion for education and went on to earn undergraduate degrees from both Zululand and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She later received honorary doctorates from Zululand, Rhodes University and the University of South Africa.She taught at Zululand, but she also sought opportunities to reach children who lacked access to major institutions. She held teaching and administrative positions at the Federated Union of Black Artists Academy in Johannesburg and the Madimba Institute of African Music in Soweto.Ms. Khumalo’s husband, the actor and director Siphiwe Khumalo, died in 2005. The couple had two children, Ayanda and Tshepo Khumalo. A full list of survivors was not immediately available.In 1993, she won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award at the famed Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and her star rose swiftly. She had already begun turning heads with a concert program, titled “The 3 Faces of Sibongile Khumalo,” that showed off her versatility across genres. Those “faces” were jazz, opera and traditional South African music.When Ms. Khumalo was a girl, her father had brought her to see Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu, a Zulu princess and musician known for her prowess as a singer and composer. “My dad made me sit at her feet to listen to her play ugubhu and sing,” Ms. Khumalo wrote in the notes to her self-titled 2005 album, referring to a Zulu stringed instrument. “I thought he was being very unkind to me because all the other children were out in the yard playing.”But decades later, she drew upon the experience when she collaborated with the scholar Mzilikazi Khumalo (no relation) to create “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu,” billed as the first Zulu opera, centered on the princess’s own compositions. “It must have been destiny,” she said. “In my professional years the music came back and it began to make sense.”When “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu” traveled to the United States in 2004, Anne Midgette reviewed it for The New York Times, praising Ms. Khumalo’s “talent and versatility.” Ten years after South Africa had achieved democratic rule, Ms. Midgette noted, Ms. Khumalo seemed to represent “a symbol of its new culture.”In a 2019 interview ahead of her performance at the Joy of Jazz Festival in Johannesburg, Ms. Khumalo said that no matter the symbolism, her main commitment was to the singularity of her own voice. “While exposing yourself and opening yourself up to what is out there, it is also important to remain true to yourself, so that even when you allow yourself to be influenced by others, you retain an identity that clearly defines you,” she said.Whatever the subject matter, she added, “it is the truth in what you express, and how you express it, that is paramount.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More