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      Gunnel Lindblom, Familiar Face in Bergman Films, Dies at 89

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGunnel Lindblom, Familiar Face in Bergman Films, Dies at 89She appeared in early classics like “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Virgin Spring” and devoted much of her long career to the stage.Gunnel Lindblom and Gunnar Björnstrand in Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1957 film “The Seventh Seal.” She appeared in several of his early films. Credit…Svensk Filmindustri, via PhotofestJan. 27, 2021, 5:04 p.m. ETGunnel Lindblom, a Swedish actress who worked with Ingmar Bergman in his early classic films and on decades of stage productions, died on Sunday in Brottby, Sweden, a small community north of Stockholm. She was 89.The death was announced by her family.In “The Seventh Seal” (1957), Bergman’s portrait of a knight (played by Max von Sydow) returning from the Crusades to find his village devastated by plague, Ms. Lindblom was an unnamed mute girl. At the film’s end, her character finally speaks, announcing biblically, “It is finished.”In “Wild Strawberries” (1957), about an elderly professor reflecting on life and loneliness, she was the man’s beautiful and kind sister in turn-of-the-century flashbacks.In “The Virgin Spring” (1960), Bergman’s tale of Christianity and revenge in medieval Sweden, Ms. Lindblom was a young, sullen, accidentally pregnant, Odin-worshiping servant girl of a wealthy landowner (also played by Mr. von Sydow). She witnesses the rape and brutal murder of his daughter, her spoiled but naïve teenage mistress.Ms. Lindblom’s professional relationship with Bergman, who died in 2007, continued and evolved. After “The Virgin Spring,” she appeared in two parts of his film trilogy about religion and faith: In “Winter Light” (1963), her character was a depressed fisherman’s wife; in “The Silence” (1964) she was a woman isolated with her dying sister in an unfamiliar foreign country.A decade later she had a supporting role in “Scenes From a Marriage,” Bergman’s Scandinavian mini-series, which starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson and was released internationally as a feature film in 1974. Her character, Eva, is an attractive work colleague of the leading man.One of Ms. Lindblom’s seven screen directing credits was “Paradistorg,” a drama about a family getaway. When it was released in the United States in 1978 as “Summer Paradise,” Janet Maslin’s review in The New York Times summed up the characters’ middle-class crises: “The women are lonely, the men are weaklings, and the children are growing up without proper supervision.”When Bergman directed “Ghost Sonata,” August Strindberg’s 1908 modernist play, at Dramaten in Stockholm at the turn of the millennium, Ms. Lindblom was cast as the Captain’s Wife, a beautiful woman who becomes a mummy.Strindberg, although he died in 1912, was perhaps the second most influential Swedish artist in her career; in recapping it, in fact, the first credit that some European obituaries mentioned was her title performance in a 1965 BBC production of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” his story of a wealthy young woman’s attraction to a servant. Ms. Lindblom received an honorary Guldbagge, Sweden’s Oscar equivalent, for lifetime achievement in 2002.Ms. Lindblom in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the 2009 Swedish film version of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel. It was her last high-profile movie role.Credit…AlamyGunnel Martha Ingegard Lindblom was born on Dec. 18, 1931, in Gothenburg (Goteborg), Sweden, and studied acting at the Gothenburg City Theater in the early 1950s.She made her film debut in Gustaf Molander’s “Karlek” (the English title was “Love”), a 1952 drama about a young priest, and collaborated frequently with Bergman at Malmo City Theater, where he had become artistic director.She had a busy six-decade theater career, most notably with the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, and played close to 60 screen roles — including Aunt Julie in “Hedda Gabler” (1993), the professor’s wife in “Uncle Vanya” (1967) and the ex-wife of a guilty choreographer in Susan Sontag’s “Brother Carl” (1971).She appeared in three recent film shorts (the last, “Bergman’s Reliquarium,” in 2018) and made a guest appearance on “The Inspector and the Sea,” a Swedish crime-drama series, in 2011. But her last high-profile screen role was in the Swedish film version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2009), based on Stieg Larsson’s best seller. (Two years later, an American version, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, was released.)In the Swedish film “Millennium” and in the 2010 American mini-series inspired by it, Ms. Lindblom played Isabella Vanger, the mother of the serial-killer antagonist. Isabella knew for years that her children were being sexually abused and said nothing.Ms. Lindblom and Sture Helander, a Swedish physician, married in 1960, had three children and divorced in 1970. In 1981, she married Frederik Dessau, the Danish film director and writer, and they divorced in 1986.No information on survivors was immediately available, but Ms. Lindblom had two sons, Thomas Helander and Jan Helander, and a daughter, Jessica Helander.Much of Ms. Lindblom’s career was devoted to theater, but she gladly acknowledged her love of filmmaking — sometimes just for the joy of shooting outdoors rather than being cooped up inside a theater, she said. And she had a particular appreciation for period films, partly because some managed to convey true timelessness.Watching contemporary films of the past, “you say, ‘Oh, that was made in the ’50s,’ ” she reflected in a 21st-century video interview. “But in a period film, if it’s well done, you don’t see when it’s made.”After all, the human condition itself is timeless.“I don’t think people have changed very much,” Ms. Lindblom said in the same interview, alluding to her medieval character in “The Virgin Spring.” “The feelings are very much the same. So you have to go for the truth.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Gregory Sierra, Actor Known for His Sitcom Work, Dies at 83

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGregory Sierra, Actor Known for His Sitcom Work, Dies at 83Often cast in ethnic roles, he saw his career take off in the 1970s as a recurring character on “Sanford and Son” and a regular on “Barney Miller.”Gregory Sierra in an episode of the Emmy Award-winning sitcom “Barney Miller.” He played a detective for two seasons on the show, set in a Greenwich Village police station.Credit…ABC, via PhotofestJan. 26, 2021Updated 7:03 p.m. ETGregory Sierra, a character actor who navigated easily between comedy and drama but was best known for his supporting roles on the sitcoms “Sanford and Son” and “Barney Miller,” died on Jan. 4 at his home in Laguna Woods, Calif. He was 83.His wife, Helene Sierra, said the cause was stomach and liver cancer.Lanky and balding, Mr. Sierra started out in Hollywood in the late 1960s and early ’70s taking modest parts — including on the sitcom “The Flying Nun” and the secret agent series “Mission Impossible,” as well in as the 1970 film sequel “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”With his Puerto Rican background, Mr. Sierra was often cast in ethnic roles, including Latinos, Italians and Native Americans.In 1972, during its second season, he joined the cast of “Sanford and Son,” one of Norman Lear’s many groundbreaking sitcoms, in the recurring role of Julio Fuentes, a junk dealer who lived next door to Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx), who also had a junkyard with his son, Lamont (Demond Wilson), in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. He stayed until 1975.Julio tried hard to befriend Fred but was the frequent target of his insults.“Why don’t you go do some work in your yard,” Fred tells Julio in one episode. “Go take a bath. Go milk your goat.”“I did that all this morning,” Julio says.“Why don’t you go back to Puerto Rico?” Fred says.“I come from New York City and I can live in any of the 50 states I want,” Julio answers.“Why don’t you try Alaska?” Fred responds. “That’s a state.”Mr. Sierra left “Sanford and Son” to become a member of the original cast of “Barney Miller,” the Emmy Award-winning sitcom starring Hal Linden set in a police precinct in Greenwich Village. As Detective Sgt. Chano Amenguale, Mr. Sierra earned particular praise for a 1975 episode which he was emotionally devastated and nearly broke down after killing two gunmen.After two seasons, he left “Barney Miller” when he was cast as the star of an ensemble comedy, “A.E.S. Hudson Street,” about an emergency service hospital in Manhattan. He played a doctor in the series, which made its debut in 1978.In his review, The New York Times’s television critic John J. O’Connor described “A.E.S. Hudson Street” as “silly, often downright stupid and occasionally insultingly tasteless.” But, he added, “With Mr. Sierra around to hold the absurdities together, it should not be written off to quickly.”ABC canceled it after five episodes.Mr. Sierra with Redd Foxx, seated, and Demond Wilson in an episode of “Sanford and Son.”Credit…NBC, via PhotofestMr. Sierra was also part of the original cast of “Miami Vice” in 1984, as the commanding officer of the detectives played by Philip Michael Thomas and Don Johnson. But he left after four episodes; his character was assassinated after he decided to leave the series. “He did not like Miami and some of the people he worked with,” his wife said by phone. “He gave up a lot to leave the show.”Gregory Joseph Sierra was born on Jan. 25, 1937, in Manhattan and grew up in Spanish Harlem. His parents abandoned him when he was young, and he was raised by an aunt.In addition to his wife, Mr. Sierra is survived by his stepdaughters, Kelly and Jill, and a step-granddaughter. His first two marriages ended in divorce.After serving in the Air Force, Mr. Sierra went with a friend to an acting school audition in Manhattan. Mr. Sierra was not there for the audition, but after performing an improvisation with his friend, it was he and not his friend who got into the school.He later toured with the National Shakespeare Company and appeared as the King of Austria in “King John” at the New York Shakespeare Festival (now Shakespeare in the Park) in 1967.He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and maintained a prolific acting pace for 30 years, largely in supporting roles.One of his most riveting characters appeared in a 1973 episode of “All in the Family.” His character, Paul Benjamin, was a Jewish vigilante who tried to protect the home of Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), whose front door has been covered with a swastika. Mr. Sierra infused the character with humor and self-assurance.Believing that the ignorant, bigoted Archie has been the victim of anti-Semitism, Paul tells him — to his confusion and consternation — “You sure don’t look Jewish.”“Well there’s a good reason for that,” Archie says. “I ain’t Jewish.”The swastika, it turns out, was meant for a Jewish neighbor with a similar address. Moments after Paul leaves the Bunkers’ house, he is killed by a car bomb.Mr. Sierra’s most recent credited role was as a screenwriter in “The Other Side of the Wind” (2018), Orson Welles’s long-delayed movie about a movie director (John Huston), which was filmed in the 1970s but not released until 2018.In 2009, Mr. Sierra returned to the stage after 40 years as a British police officer in a production of “See How They Run” at the theater at Laguna Woods Village, the retirement community where he lived.“He hadn’t been onstage for a very long time, so he was a little nervous,” John Perak, who directed Mr. Sierra in that production, said by phone. “I said, ‘Greg, don’t be afraid, it’s not a big deal.’ He came prepared and did very well.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWalter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101His movies included “Fail Safe,” “Paris Blues” and, perhaps most notably, “The Front,” based on his own experience of being blacklisted.The screenwriter Walter Bernstein in 1983. His leftist politics influenced both his life and his art.Credit…Susan Wood/Getty ImagesJan. 23, 2021, 6:06 p.m. ETWalter Bernstein, whose career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, “The Front,” died on Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.His wife, Gloria Loomis, said the cause was pneumonia.Described in a 2014 Esquire profile as a “human Energizer bunny,” Mr. Bernstein was writing, teaching and generating screenplay ideas well into his 90s. Until recently, he had several projects in various stages of development. He created the BBC mystery mini-series “Hidden” in 2011, and he was an adjunct instructor of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts until he retired in 2017. “They’ll carry me off writing,” he told Variety.Mr. Bernstein’s politics — he called himself a “secular, self-loving Jew of a leftist persuasion” — influenced both his life and his art.“Fail Safe” (1964), the story of an accidental bombing of Moscow, was a bold rejoinder to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. “Paris Blues” (1961), which he wrote for the director Martin Ritt, a fellow blacklist victim and frequent collaborator, starred Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman as expatriate American jazz musicians and delivered pointed commentary on racial intolerance. “The Molly Maguires” (1970), also directed by Mr. Ritt, concerned union-busting in the coal mines of 19th-century Pennsylvania, mirroring the social upheavals of the late 1960s and ’70s.Mr. Bernstein with Woody Allen on the set of the 1976 film “The Front,” based on Mr. Bernstein’s experience during the blacklist of the 1950s. Mr. Bernstein’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.Credit…Columbia PicturesThe subject of “The Front” (1976), also directed by Mr. Ritt and the only film for which Mr. Bernstein received an Academy Award nomination (it was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America award), was the blacklist itself: Woody Allen starred as a “front,” a stand-in for a writer who, like Mr. Bernstein, had been blacklisted. (Mr. Bernstein made a cameo appearance for Mr. Allen that same year in “Annie Hall.”)Not all Mr. Bernstein’s subjects were political. The football-themed “Semi-Tough,” starring Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson and based on a novel by Dan Jenkins, lampooned the New Age spirituality of such ’70s movements as EST; “Yanks,” starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, explored the romantic entanglements and cultural differences between American troops and local Englishwomen during World War II. Mr. Bernstein’s lone feature film as a director was a comedy, “Little Miss Marker,” a 1980 version of the oft-filmed Damon Runyon story that starred Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.A Hollywood EducationMr. Bernstein was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 20, 1919, to Louis and Hannah (Bistrong) Bernstein, Eastern European immigrants who were “not really affected by the Depression,” as Mr. Bernstein recalled in his autobiography, “Inside Out” (1996), because his father, a schoolteacher, was protected by civil service employment rules. He attended Erasmus High School in Flatbush, which was so crowded the students were split into three shifts, a boon for the film-loving Walter: When he was on the 6:30-to-noon shift, he could catch matinees next door at the Astor Theater, where admission during the day was a dime.Upon graduation, Mr. Bernstein was offered what he called a “wild, dubious” gift from his father: six months of an intensive language course at the University of Grenoble. His father knew a French family Walter could stay with and “had aspirations for me I did not share,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, adding, “If I had a choice of where to go for six months it would have been Hollywood.”Walter Matthau, Julie Andrews and Sara Stimson in “Little Miss Marker” (1980), the only feature film Mr. Bernstein directed.  Credit…Universal PicturesBut the experience broadened him, thrusting him as it did into the midst of young intellectuals, often Communists, living on a continent where Hitler, war and Marxism were the currency of conversation.He then attended Dartmouth College, where he became the film critic of The Daily Dartmouth, a job that came with a pass for the local cinema. “The only catch,” Mr. Bernstein recalled in “Inside Out,” “was that there were no screenings or previews, so you had to write the review before seeing the movie.”“I found this no real impediment,” he added. “Anyone could review a movie after seeing it; that was mere criticism. Doing it this way made it art.”He also became a contributor to The New Yorker, for which he would write during and after the war, and where he eventually became a staff writer.First, however, there was a war to get through. Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth, he was drafted and sent to Fort Benning, Ga., where in 1941, during the relatively relaxed period before Pearl Harbor, soldiers staged a show titled “Grin and Bear It,” written by Mr. Bernstein. (“It wasn’t very good,” he recalled, “but it was a show.”)“Brooks Atkinson was coming down from The Times to see it,” he said, “and John O’Hara, who was the reviewer for Newsweek. It was a big thing. We were supposed to open on Dec. 10.” On Dec. 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.“One of the actors said, ‘Now we’re not going to get the critics,’” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “And we didn’t.”Making Wartime NewsWhile contributing military-themed articles to The New Yorker, Mr. Bernstein, who eventually attained the rank of sergeant, became a globe-trotting correspondent for Yank, the Army journal, a job that would last throughout World War II. It was for Yank that he got the scoop that would give him his first taste of fame.“Army Writer Also Sees Tito but Censors Stop His Story” read the May 20, 1944, Associated Press headline: Mr. Bernstein, defying military protocol, had been spirited into war-torn Yugoslavia by anti-German partisans and given the first interview with Marshal Josep Broz, known as Tito, the Communist leader who would head the postwar Yugoslav republic until his death in 1980.“I was the first Western correspondent to see him,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “The Allies were planning to send in a couple of reporters from the pool and photographers, but the military wanted to delay any news about Tito till after the Second Front opened; the partisans wanted the opposite. They wanted publicity.”Although Mr. Bernstein’s interview with Tito was temporarily quashed, the Associated Press article made it world news.The screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, center, in 1947 after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refusing to say whether he was or had been a member of the Communist Party. Mr. Trumbo, like Mr. Bernstein and a number of other Hollywood writers, was blacklisted.Credit…Henry Griffin/Associated Press“I had an aunt who was a charter member of the Communist Party; she worked for the party as a stenographer or something like that,” Mr. Bernstein said in 2010 in an interview for this obituary. “And when I came back from the war, she asked me if I would talk to some Communist functionaries. I said that was all right with me. They wanted to know about Tito; nobody was telling them anything. And I told them about my adventures.”“I didn’t join the party until after the war,” Mr. Bernstein said, although the events of the ’30s, including the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, made the Communist cause attractive to him. “The Communists,” he said, “seemed like they were doing something.”In 1947, with his Yank and New Yorker experience under his belt, a well-received collection of his war stories (“Keep Your Head Down”) on the bookshelves and a hankering to get into movies, Mr. Bernstein went to Hollywood. He had been offered a contract with the writer-producer Robert Rossen at Columbia Pictures, where he did uncredited work on “All the King’s Men.”Mr. Bernstein ended up staying in Hollywood for six months: His agent, Harold Hecht, had formed what would be a prolific production partnership with the actor Burt Lancaster and “offered me a job for twice what I was getting,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “which still wasn’t much.”That led to his first Hollywood credit, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands” (1948), a crime drama starring Mr. Lancaster and Joan Fontaine. But by this time the blacklist was starting to make itself felt within an industry where left-wing political sentiments had previously been both common and tolerated.Suddenly Untouchable“I was still in Hollywood in 1947, during the Hollywood Ten,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to the prosecution of writers, producers and directors who had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about their Communist affiliation. “I was working for Rossen, who was a Communist. At first it was the Hollywood 19, then it was cut down to 10. I don’t know why. Rossen was very upset that he hadn’t made the cut.”No one took the hearings seriously at first, but they soon would. Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name appeared in “Red Channels,” an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by the right-wing journal Counterattack.“I was listed right after Lenny Bernstein,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “There were about eight listings for me, and they were all true.” He had indeed written for the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights.Mr. Bernstein at his apartment in Manhattan in 2000. He continued to write, teach and generate screenplay ideas well into his 90s.Credit…Jim Cooper/Associated PressMr. Bernstein and other blacklisted writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers like Sidney Lumet, who used Mr. Bernstein, now back in New York, throughout the ’50s on “You Are There,” the CBS program hosted by Walter Cronkite that re-enacted great moments in history.It was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues, notably the writers Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff, began the ruse of protecting their anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a ploy later dramatized in “The Front.” (In addition to Mr. Allen, the movie starred Zero Mostel, who, like the film’s director, Mr. Ritt, had also been blacklisted.)“Suddenly, the blacklist had achieved for the writer what he had previously only aspired to,” Mr. Bernstein joked in “Inside Out.” “He was considered necessary.”It was the now largely forgotten “That Kind of Woman” (1959), with Sophia Loren, that restarted Mr. Bernstein’s “official” career. The film’s director was Mr. Lumet, who hired Mr. Bernstein under his own name, thus effectively restoring him to the ranks of the employable.In the years following the blacklist, Mr. Bernstein worked regularly for Hollywood, although he continued to live in New York. Among his film credits were the westerns “The Wonderful Country” (1959) and “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960), the Harold Robbins adaptation “The Betsy” (1978) and the Dan Aykroyd-Walter Matthau comedy “The Couch Trip” (1988). He received an Emmy nomination for the television drama “Miss Evers’ Boys” (1997), based on the true story of a 1932 government experiment in which Black test subjects were allowed to die of syphilis, and wrote the teleplay for the live broadcast of “Fail Safe” in 2000.In addition to his wife, a literary agent, Mr. Bernstein is survived by a daughter, Joan Bernstein, and a son, Peter Spelman, from his first marriage, to Marva Spelman, which ended in divorce; three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Jake, from his third marriage, to Judith Braun, which also ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage; his stepdaughter, Diana Loomis; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Marilyn Seide.Six decades after the fact, Mr. Bernstein voiced a warmly nostalgic view of the Red Scare period, an era that has become synonymous with intolerance and fear.“I don’t know if it’s true of other people getting older,” he said, “but I look back on that period with some fondness in a way, in terms of the relationships and support and friendships. We helped each other during that period. And in a dog-eat-dog business, it was quite rare.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jimmie Rodgers, Who Sang ‘Honeycomb’ and Other Hits, Dies at 87

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJimmie Rodgers, Who Sang ‘Honeycomb’ and Other Hits, Dies at 87His crossover appeal landed him on the charts often in the 1950s and ’60s, but a violent incident in 1967 derailed his career.The singer Jimmie Rodgers in a 1958 publicity photo. He was was a regular presence on the pop, country, R&B and easy listening charts for a decade.Credit…Bettmann ArchiveJan. 22, 2021, 5:21 p.m. ETJimmie Rodgers, whose smooth voice straddled the line between pop and country and brought him a string of hits — none bigger than his first record, “Honeycomb,” in 1957 — died on Monday in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 87.His daughter Michele Rodgers said that the cause was kidney disease and that he had also tested positive for Covid-19.Mr. Rodgers was a regular presence on the pop, country, R&B and easy listening charts for a decade after “Honeycomb,” with records that included “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again” (1958) and “Child of Clay” (1967), both of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.He might have continued that run of success but for an ugly incident in December 1967, when he was pulled over by a man who, he later said, was an off-duty Los Angeles police officer and beat him severely.Three brain surgeries followed, and he was left with a metal plate in his head. He eventually resumed performing, and even briefly had his own television show, but he faced constant difficulties. For a time he was sidelined because he started having seizures during concerts.“Once word gets out that you’re having seizures onstage, you can’t work,” he told The News Sentinel of Knoxville, Tenn., in 1998. “People won’t hire you.”Mr. Rodgers was found to have spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder characterized by spasms in the muscles of the voice box, a condition he attributed to his brain injury. Yet he later settled into a comfortable niche as a performer and producer in Branson, Mo., the country music mecca, where he had his own theater for several years before retiring to California in 2002.James Frederick Rodgers was born on Sept. 18, 1933, in Camas, Wash., in the southwest part of the state. (Four months earlier, a more famous Jimmie Rodgers, the singer known as the father of country music, had died; the two were unrelated.) His mother, Mary (Schick) Rodgers, was a piano teacher, and his father, Archie, worked in a paper mill. Jimmie started out singing in church and school groups.After graduating from high school, he briefly attended Clark College in Washington State but left to enlist in the Air Force, serving in Korea during the Korean War. In a 2016 interview with The Spectrum, a Utah newspaper, he recalled one particular evening near Christmas 1953.“I bought a beat-up old guitar from a guy for $10 and started playing and singing one night and all the guys joined in,” he said. “We were sitting on the floor with only candles for light, and these tough soldiers had tears running down their cheeks. I realized if my music could have that effect, that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”Back in the States and stationed near Nashville, he started performing in a nightclub for $10 a night and free drinks before returning to Washington after mustering out. In 1957 he traveled to New York to perform on a TV talent show and also snagged an audition for Roulette Records, singing “Honeycomb,” a Bob Merrill song he had learned off a recording by Georgie Shaw and had been performing in the Nashville club.“They basically said, ‘Don’t go any further, that’s great,’” he said in an interview with Gary James for classicbands.com.Mr. Rodgers in performance in 1969, two years after a violent incident in Los Angeles temporarily ended his career.Credit…Jim McCrary/RedfernsMr. Rodgers was taken to a studio to record what he thought would be a demo with musicians he had only just met.“They brought in four players and three singers and we recorded it in about two hours — no charts, no music,” he said in a 2010 oral history for the National Spasmodic Dysphonia Association.A week or two later, he was surprised to hear the song on the radio. It reached the top of the Billboard pop and R&B charts.Later that year he had another success with his version of a song that had been a hit for the Weavers, “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” giving it an up-tempo kick and injecting key changes similar to what he had used in “Honeycomb.”“I was told that they won’t sell — records that change keys, people can’t sing along with them,” Mr. Rodgers recalled in an oral history recorded in 2002 for the National Association of Music Merchants. The public disagreed.His early songs, released as Elvis Presley was shaking up the music scene, were a sort of comfort food, jaunty yet melodic and not too earthshaking. In 1959 his quick popularity earned him his own television variety show, which ran for one season.“If his singing style calls for more emphasis on beat than lilt,” Jack Gould wrote of its premiere in The New York Times, “at least it has the virtue of being well this side of rock ’n’ roll.”Mr. Rodgers’s short-lived acting career included a lead role in the 1964 war movie “Back Door to Hell.” Also in the cast was a young Jack Nicholson.Credit…ImdbMr. Rodgers in concert in 2012. He had his own theater in Branson, Mo., the country music mecca, for several years before retiring to California in 2002.Credit…John Atashian/Getty ImagesMr. Rodgers dabbled in acting in the 1960s, including a leading role in “Back Door to Hell,” a 1964 war movie whose cast also included Jack Nicholson. In 1965, “Honeycomb” found new life when Post introduced a cereal by that name, repurposing the song to advertise it, the jingle sung by Mr. Rodgers. He also sang a SpaghettiOs jingle that riffed on his “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again.”Mr. Rodgers said he was under consideration for a featured role in the 1968 movie musical “Finian’s Rainbow” when the encounter on the freeway derailed his career. In his telling, he was driving home late at night when the driver behind him flashed his lights. He thought it was his conductor, who was also driving to Mr. Rodgers’s house, and pulled over.“I rolled the window down to ask what was the matter,” he told The Toronto Star in 1987. “That’s the last thing I remember.”He ended up with a fractured skull and broken arm. He said the off-duty officer who had pulled him over called two on-duty officers to the scene, but all three scattered when his conductor, who went looking for Mr. Rodgers when he hadn’t arrived home, drove up.The police told a different story: They said Mr. Rodgers had been drunk and had injured himself when he fell. Mr. Rodgers sued the Los Angeles Police Department, prompting a countersuit; the matter was settled out of court in his favor to the tune of $200,000.During his long recovery Mr. Rodgers got another shot at a TV series, a summer replacement variety show in 1969.“I looked like a ghost,” he admitted in a 2004 interview.His marriages to Colleen McClatchy and Trudy Ann Buck ended in divorce. In 1978, he married Mary Louise Biggerstaff. She survives him.In addition to her and his daughter Michele, he is survived by a son, Michael, from his first marriage; two sons from his second marriage, Casey and Logan; a daughter from his third marriage, Katrine Rodgers; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More