Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Siegfried Fischbacher, Magician of Siegfried & Roy, Dies at 81

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySiegfried Fischbacher, Magician of Siegfried & Roy, Dies at 81Mr. Fischbacher’s death came months after that of Roy Horn, his partner in one of the most spectacular shows in Las Vegas history.The illusionist Siegfried Fischbacher in 2008. Together, he and Roy Horn captivated Las Vegas audiences for decades.Credit…Mark Sullivan/Getty Images for CineVegasRichard Sandomir and Jan. 14, 2021Updated 6:30 p.m. ETSiegfried Fischbacher, the German-born magician who was half of Siegfried & Roy, the team that captivated Las Vegas audiences with performances alongside big cats, elephants and other exotic animals, died on Wednesday night at his home in Las Vegas. He was 81.The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his publicist, Dave Kirvin. Mr. Fischbacher’s longtime partner in the production, Roy Horn, died of complications of Covid-19 in May at 75.For a time, the team’s name was all but synonymous with Las Vegas show business, with spectacular performances that combined smoke machines and white tigers, lasers and elephants, sequined costumes, snakes and illusions of metamorphosis.Their long-running production at MGM’s Mirage hotel and casino was one of the most lavish and successful in Las Vegas history.Mr. Fischbacher, left, and Roy Horn with Mantecore, the tiger that mauled Mr. Horn in 2003.Credit…Peter Bischoff, via Getty ImagesThe pair’s show ended in October 2003, after Mr. Horn was mauled by a 400-pound white tiger named Mantecore, which dragged him offstage before a stunned capacity crowd of 1,500 at the Mirage.The attack left Mr. Horn with lasting damage to his body. After he spent years recovering, the team made one final appearance, with Mantecore, at a benefit performance for the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas in February 2009. They retired from show business in 2010.Mr. Horn, left, and Mr. Fischbacher in New York in 1987 with the rare white tigers Neva, left, a female, and Vegas, a male.Credit…Scott Mckiernan/Associated PressMr. Fischbacher and Mr. Horn, who were domestic as well as professional partners, kept dozens of exotic cats and other animals in the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat, a glass-enclosed, tropically forested habitat at the Mirage; at Jungle Paradise, an 88-acre estate outside town; and at Jungle Palace, their $10 million Spanish-style home in Las Vegas.“From the moment we met, I knew Roy and I, together, would change the world,” Mr. Fischbacher said in a statement after Mr. Horn’s death. “There could be no Siegfried without Roy and no Roy without Siegfried.”The two performers amazed Las Vegas audiences over four decades with stage extravaganzas that blended Mr. Fischbacher’s mastery of illusion and Mr. Horn’s preternatural ability to train and communicate with white tigers, lions and other animals.In their lavish shows, an elephant would vanish, a white tiger would turn into a beautiful woman, a tiger would appear to levitate over the audience and Mr. Horn would become a snake.The success of Siegfried & Roy’s show paved the way for more spectacular ones in Las Vegas.“Cirque du Soleil came in, you know, and Steve Wynn started that concept of Cirque in Las Vegas,” Mr. Fischbacher told Las Vegas Weekly in 2013. “The same thing that we inspired, Cirque du Soleil, inspired him.”Mr. Fischbacher was born on June 13, 1939, in Rosenheim, Germany, to Martin and Maria Fischbacher. At age 8, he became fascinated with magic when he saw a book on the subject in the window of a local store. It cost only five marks, but his mother would not give him the money; he claimed to have a found a five-mark note on a street and bought the book.When he performed a trick in which a coin vanished in a glass of water, his father praised him. “For me, having been brought up in a strict Bavarian way, it was the first time my father ever acknowledged me,” he is quoted as saying in his online biography.He was inspired by a German magician named Kalanag, whose show, Mr. Fischbacher said, was “one of the most exciting events in my life.”He left home at 17, working first as a dishwasher and bartender at a small hotel in Lago di Garda, Italy, then as a steward on the Bremen, a German cruise liner. The captain of the Bremen saw him perform magic for the crew and suggested that he perform for the passengers.He met Mr. Horn on the Bremen in 1957. Mr. Horn was a cabin boy with a love of animals who had smuggled his pet cheetah, Chico, onto the ship. They struck up a friendship, and Mr. Fischbacher asked Mr. Horn to help out with his magic act.“I did the usual thing: rabbit out of the hat and birds and so on,” Mr. Fischbacher said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in 2003, five days after Mr. Roy’s accident. “Afterwards, I said, ‘What do you think?’ And he said, ‘Can you do what you did with a rabbit with a cheetah?’”“I didn’t know he had a pet cheetah at the time,” he added, “and I said, ‘Anything is possible.’”In 1964, five years after they started working together, they were playing nightclubs in Germany and Switzerland. When they performed at a charity benefit in Monte Carlo in 1966, Princess Grace of Monaco raved about them, giving their career a boost.As their act became more extravagant with the addition of more illusions and animals, Siegfried & Roy were booked into nightclubs throughout Europe. They made their debut in Las Vegas at the Tropicana in 1967, then moved on to headliner status at the Stardust in 1978 and the Frontier, where the marquee billed them as “Superstars of Magic.”Steve Wynn, who built the Mirage, signed them to a five-year, $57.5 million contract in 1987, three years before the hotel and casino opened. The deal included building a theater to Siegfried & Roy’s specifications. Mr. Wynn quickly cashed in on his expensive bet when they began to sell out immediately. They grossed an estimated $30 million in 1990 (about $60 million in today’s dollars).They were “the single most successful entertainment attraction in Las Vegas history,” Mr. Wynn was quoted as saying on the ABC News program “Nightline” in 2019.“Thirty years, 48 weeks a year, capacity business,” he added.Their act ended abruptly on Oct. 3, 2003 with the mauling of Mr. Horn after 5,750 performances at the Mirage. During their performance, he stumbled onstage — both he and Mr. Fischbacher said he had probably had a stroke — leading Mantecore to grab him by the neck and drag him offstage, causing an extreme loss of blood.Mr. Horn believed the tiger, sensing he was ill, was trying to protect him. Immediately after, Mr. Horn is said to have asked that no harm come to Mantecore. (The tiger was unharmed, and died 11 years later.)Mr. Fischbacher is survived by his brother, Marinus, and his sister, Margot, a Franciscan nun who goes by Sister Dolore.Speaking to Larry King in 2003, Mr. Fischbacher talked about the connection that he and Mr. Horn had with their audience, some of whom came hundreds of times.“I’m OK,” he said. “I’m good. I love my audience. I love the audience like Roy loves the animals, and this combination together, it worked, you know.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Howard Johnson, 79, Dies; Elevated the Tuba in Jazz and Beyond

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHoward Johnson, 79, Dies; Elevated the Tuba in Jazz and BeyondFluent and graceful on a notoriously cumbersome instrument, he helped to find it a new role in a wide range of musical settings.Howard Johnson in concert in Amsterdam in 1986. One critic called him “the figure most responsible for the tuba’s current stature as a full-fledged jazz voice.”Credit…Frans Schellekens/RedfernsJan. 14, 2021Updated 4:20 p.m. ETHoward Johnson, who set a new standard by expanding the tuba’s known capacities in jazz, and who moonlighted as a multi-instrumentalist and arranger for some of the most popular acts in rock and pop, died on Monday at his home in Harlem. He was 79.His death was announced by his publicist, Jim Eigo. He did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Johnson had been ill for a long time.Fluent and graceful across an enormous range on one of the most cumbersome members of the brass family, Mr. Johnson found his way into almost every kind of scenario — outside of classical music — where you might possibly expect to find the tuba, and plenty where you wouldn’t.His career spanned hundreds of albums and thousands of gigs. He played on many of the major jazz recordings of the 1960s and ’70s, by musicians like Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, Carla Bley and Charlie Haden; contributed arrangements and horn parts for rock stars like John Lennon and Taj Mahal; and performed as an original member of the “Saturday Night Live” band.“I could find myself in almost anybody’s record collection,” he said in an interview in 2015 for the online documentary series “Liner Note Legends.”And for more than 50 years, Mr. Johnson led ensembles with tubas on the front lines — first Substructure, then Gravity, which became his signature solo achievement. Consisting of a half-dozen tubas and a rhythm section, Gravity aimed, he said, to elevate the public’s estimation of the instrument.From the 1930s, when traditional New Orleans music fell out of favor in jazz, the tuba had been relegated to the sidelines; the upright bass had almost entirely replaced it. Mr. Johnson helped to find it a new role, by expanding its range upward and by playing so lyrically. In recent years critics have hailed a broader renaissance for the tuba in jazz, building on the foundation that Mr. Johnson laid.Writing in The New York Times in 2006, the critic Nate Chinen called Mr. Johnson “the figure most responsible for the tuba’s current stature as a full-fledged jazz voice.”Howard Lewis Johnson was born on Aug. 7, 1941, in Montgomery, Ala., and raised in Massillon, Ohio, outside Canton. His father, Hammie Johnson Jr., worked in a steel mill, and his mother, Peggy (Lewis) Johnson, was a hairdresser. They weren’t musicians, but they kept the radio on at all times, usually tuned to gospel, R&B, jazz or country.It was on boyhood visits to his uncle’s house that Howard first became enchanted with live music. “He lived over a juke joint, and if I spent the night and slept on the floor, I could hear the bass line very well,” he remembered in a 2017 interview with Roll magazine. “And that was very satisfactory.”A gifted student, he learned to read before he was 4 and skipped a grade in school. His first instrument was the baritone saxophone; after receiving just two lessons from his junior high school band teacher, he taught himself the rest. A year later, he learned the tuba entirely by watching other players’ fingerings in band rehearsals. He would wait until everyone had left the practice room, then tiptoe over to the tuba and try out what he had seen.In the high school band, he thrived on friendly competition with his fellow tuba players. Many of them were receiving private lessons, but left to his own devices Mr. Johnson blew by them, stretching the instrument far past its normal range and maintaining a graceful articulation throughout.“I thought I was playing catch-​​up — that all the stuff that I taught myself to do, the others could already do it,” he told Roll. “The ones who were the best in the section were kind of like role models: I wanted to play like them someday. But by the end of that school year, I could play much better than they could. And I could do a lot of other things.”After high school, Mr. Johnson spent three years in the Navy, playing baritone sax in a military band. While stationed in Boston, he met the drummer Tony Williams, a teenage phenom who would soon be hired by Miles Davis, and fell in with other young jazz musicians there. After being discharged, he moved briefly to Chicago, thinking it would be a good place to hone his chops before eventually moving to New York. At a John Coltrane concert one night, he met the prominent multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, a member of Coltrane’s band. When he mentioned that his range was as great on the tuba as it was on the baritone, Dolphy urged him to move to New York right away.“He said, ‘If you can do half of what you say you can do, you shouldn’t be waiting two years here; I think you’re needed in New York now,’” Mr. Johnson recalled. “So I thought, ‘It’s February, maybe I should go to New York in August.’ I thought about it some more, and I left six days later.”Mr. Johnson also learned to play the bass clarinet, euphonium, fluegelhorn and electric bass as well as the pennywhistle, which he particularly loved as a foil to the tuba in terms of both pitch and portability. Characteristically, he took this unlikely instrument not as a novelty but seriously, developing a lightweight, even-toned, exuberant sound on it.On arriving in New York, he soon found work with the saxophonist Hank Crawford, the bassist Charles Mingus and many others. He began a two-decade affiliation with the composer and arranger Gil Evans, sometimes contributing arrangements to his orchestra.In 1970, after being connected through a business associate, Mr. Johnson persuaded the blues and rock singer Taj Mahal to allow him to write arrangements of Mr. Mahal’s songs that would include a suite of tubas, and then to take them on the road. Mr. Johnson and three other tuba players are heard on “The Real Thing,” Mr. Mahal’s 1971 live album. He would continue to work with Mr. Mahal off and on.Mr. Johnson was soon getting work from other rock musicians. He led the horn section for the Band in the 1970s, including on the group’s farewell performance, captured in Martin Scorsese’s famed concert film “The Last Waltz.” He continued working with Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer and singer, for decades.But Mr. Johnson’s greatest public exposure came on television. In 1975 he joined the house band for a new late-night comedy show then called “NBC’s Saturday Night.” He remained in the ensemble for five years, helping to shape its rock-fusion sound and making an appearance in some of the show’s most fondly remembered musical sketches.Mr. Johnson with his band Gravity on a 1978 episode of “Saturday Night Live.” He was also an original member of the show’s house band.Credit…NBC/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesMr. Johnson is survived by his daughter, the vocalist and songwriter Nedra Johnson; two sisters, Teri Nichols and Connie Armstrong; and his longtime partner, Nancy Olewine. His son, the musician and artist David Johnson, died in 2011.With Gravity, which he led from the 1970s until the end of his life, Mr. Johnson poured the sum of his musical experiences into arrangements for six tubas and a rhythm section that alternated between acoustic and electric. Reviewing a Gravity performance in 1977 for The Times, Robert Palmer lauded the group’s “fresh sound” and said he was disarmed by its “sunny good humor and affection for the jazz‐and‐blues tradition.”Mr. Palmer made particular note of Mr. Johnson’s versatility: “Whether he is improvising on tuba, which he plays in a roaring and whooping style with remarkable facility, or on the baritone saxophone, which he wields with fluent authority and a dark, smoking tone, he combines New Orleans phrasing, avant‐garde shrieks, blues riffing and multi‐noted bebop flurries in a consistently exciting and wildly original style.”In the 1990s, well into middle age, Mr. Johnson signed with Verve Records and released three albums with Gravity, full of blues-battered, elegantly arranged music: “Arrival: A Pharoah Sanders Tribute” (1994), “Gravity!!!” (1995) and “Right Now!” (1998). The last album featured Mr. Mahal singing roisterous straight-ahead jazz on some tracks.Mr. Johnson in 2008. Despite health problems, he remained active until nearly the end of his life.Credit…Michael JacksonMr. Johnson remained active until nearly the end of his life, despite a number of health setbacks. In 2017, he and Gravity released a quietly triumphant last album, “Testimony,” with some original members still in the band. His daughter also makes an appearance on the album.In 2008, the instrument maker Meinl Weston unveiled the HoJo Gravity Series tuba, designed for players with Mr. Johnson’s wide range.“This is something I hear every time: ‘I didn’t know a tuba could do that!’” Mr. Johnson said in a 2019 interview with the Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “Well, that means I haven’t been doing my job, because I’ve been doing it since 1962, and people still don’t know.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Frank Kimbrough, Pianist With a Subtle Touch, Is Dead at 64

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrank Kimbrough, Pianist With a Subtle Touch, Is Dead at 64He could hold the spotlight in everything from a trio to Maria Schneider’s 18-piece big band. He was also a passionate educator.The pianist Frank Kimbrough in performance at Jazz Standard in New York in 2014. He had an understated style that fit well in many different settings.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesJan. 12, 2021, 6:09 p.m. ETFrank Kimbrough, a deft and subtle jazz pianist known for his work in the Maria Schneider Orchestra and other prominent groups, and as the leader of his own small ensembles, died on Dec. 30 at his home in Queens. He was 64.Ann Braithwaite, his publicist, said that the cause was not yet known but that it was believed to be a heart attack.Casual of gesture but deeply focused in demeanor, Mr. Kimbrough had an understated style that could nonetheless hold the spotlight in trio settings, or fit slyly into Ms. Schneider’s 18-piece big band.In many ways, his playing reflected the Romantic, floating manner of his first jazz influence, Bill Evans. But his off-kilter style as both a player and a composer also called back to two of his more rugged bebop-era influences: Herbie Nichols and Thelonious Monk, both of whom he eventually paid tribute to on record.In 2018, Mr. Kimbrough put forth “Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk,” the most ambitious recording of his career, a six-disc collection on Sunnyside Records spanning Monk’s entire known songbook. Mr. Kimbrough’s loose and generous spirit as a bandleader permeates the record, driving a quartet that features Scott Robinson on saxophones and other horns, Rufus Reid on bass and Billy Drummond on drums.All told, Mr. Kimbrough released well over a dozen albums as a leader, starting with “Star-Crossed Lovers” (1986), a cassette-only release for Mapleshade Records, and including the celebrated recordings “Lullabluebye” (2004), “Play” (2006) and “Live at Kitano” (2012).Since 1993, he had appeared on every album except one by Ms. Schneider, a Grammy winner and National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, including last year’s widely acclaimed double disc “Data Lords.”In a New York Times review of the trumpeter Ron Horton’s sextet in 2000, Ben Ratliff wrote, “Part of Mr. Kimbrough’s originality takes the form of an almost passive or Zenlike approach to an active situation; his solo in an urgent piece called ‘Groveling’ was a sustained rubato rhapsody, and otherwise he plays cloudlike chords where you would normally expect rhythmic stabs.”Frank Marshall Kimbrough Jr. was born on Nov. 2, 1956, in Roxboro, N.C. His mother, Katie Lee (Currin) Kimbrough, was a piano teacher, and he always said that he had been playing since before he could remember. His father was a florist. Frank took piano with a local Baptist minister, then briefly studied at Appalachian State University before dropping out because the school’s curriculum didn’t have a place for jazz.By his mid-20s he was a known bandleader on the Chapel Hill scene, and in 1980 he relocated to Washington, where he gigged with a number of local stalwarts and came under the wing of the pianist and vocalist Shirley Horn. It was through her that he eventually signed with Mapleshade, after moving to New York City in 1981. His mentors there included the pianists Andrew Hill and Paul Bley, as well as the drummer Paul Motian.“They were all very kind to me, and we’ve spent a lot of time together,” he said in a 2019 interview with jazztrail.net. “So their influence was not just musical. I observed how they worked and we spent time talking about music, but other things too.”Mr. Kimbrough himself went on to be an educator known for his commitment to his students. He taught piano at New York University in the 1990s and in 2008 became a music professor at the Juilliard School, where he taught until his death.“I think it’s my responsibility to pass all the information I’ve learned from these great musicians on,” he said in 2019. “This music is not taught in books, it’s taught person to person, and I try to give all that away.”In addition to his wife of 31 years, the vocalist Maryanne de Prophetis, Mr. Kimbrough is survived by his mother and four younger brothers: Conrad, Mark, Edwin and David.In 1985, he won the Great American Jazz Piano Competition, held annually at the Jacksonville Jazz Festival in Florida. In the early 1990s he and the bassist Ben Allison founded the Jazz Composers Collective, whose members often played and recorded together. Their work in that organization led to the Herbie Nichols Project, an effort that was led by Mr. Allison but that featured Mr. Kimbrough prominently.Mr. Kimbrough listened to a wide array of music, in jazz and well beyond, often leaning toward ruminative composers like Morton Feldman or folkloric sources from around the world.His favorite place to compose, he said, was on a park bench by the East River, overlooking Manhattan.“I write things that are sketches, one page long. I like to write simple pieces that are easy to play,” he told DownBeat in 2016. “There is a park across the street from my house, and I go over there at night, maybe around 11:00, and I sit there. And if an idea hits me, I may walk around the park with the idea bouncing around my head for six months, and then I might write 16 bars of music.”A patient, deliberate process suited Mr. Kimbrough, and he was uninterested in any approach that valued physical skill over earnest expression. “Music is not athletics,” he said. “I am tired of hearing clever athletic music.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Pat Loud, Reality Show Matriarch of ‘An American Family,’ Dies at 94

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPat Loud, Reality Show Matriarch of ‘An American Family,’ Dies at 94A mother of five, she unapologetically laid bare the drama of her family life as a star of the first reality show.The Loud family (clockwise from top): Kevin, Lance, Michele, Pat, Delilah, Grant and Bill.Credit…John Dominis/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesJan. 11, 2021Updated 5:11 p.m. ET Before “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” before the Kardashians, before the idea of living large and unscripted on camera became a TV staple, there was a startling program on public television called “An American Family” with a startling female character named Pat Loud.Ms. Loud was a California mother of five. She drank, she plotted her divorce, she adored, and accepted, her openly gay son. She did it all in Santa Barbara and all on camera — in 1973. Loving, boisterous, witty, resilient and sometimes angry and hurt, she did not act like most women on television at the time. But she was ostensibly not acting at all. She was the first reality television star on the first reality show — and she paid a price for breaking new ground.Critics called her materialistic and self-absorbed. An “affluent zombie,” one said. What wife and mother would do such a thing? Newsweek put Ms. Loud, her husband, Bill, and their children on its cover with the headline “The Broken Family.”Many others, however, saw her as honest and brave, uninhibited and unconditional in her love for her children.Ms. Loud died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, her family said in a Facebook post. She was 94. She was 47 when the show that made her famous first aired, and she spent much of the rest of her life explaining why she had done it and how it had changed her family. She made few apologies.She told the talk show host Dick Cavett in no uncertain terms that she had no problem with her son Lance’s homosexuality. She wrote in her autobiography, “Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story” (1974), that given how she felt that her family had been mistreated after the show aired, “now we are all unabashedly trying to get anything we can from the instant fame.”But life went on. Once a homemaker and Junior League volunteer, Ms. Loud found new work with Ron Bernstein, a literary agent, and later with the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. She moved to New York, then England, before returning to California in the late 1990s to be with Lance after he became sick with H.I.V. in 1987. (He died of complications of hepatitis C in 2001.) She divorced her husband, though they reunited many years later.Ms. Loud with her son, Lance, in 1990. She was forthright in asserting her acceptance of his open homosexuality when “An American Family” was generating wide publicity in the 1970s.Credit…Ann Summa/Getty ImagesBy the time she was in her 80s, public perception of her had shifted. Where once she had been seen as an unmitigated self-promoter, now she was a wise, refined matriarch of a genre gone astray.Speaking of the “Real Housewives” franchise, Ms. Loud told The New York Times in 2013, “It just seems like all these beautiful blond girls, all made up, with stem glasses of white Chablis, and they’re all just fighting at dinner somewhere.”Critics of “An American Family” accused it of being contrived, but the Louds long maintained that they had behaved as normally as they could with cameras constantly trailing them. Craig Gilbert, a producer for WNET, chose the Louds for his subject because the family had lots of children — and because they said yes.“We asked the kids, and they all agreed,” Ms. Loud told The Times in 2013. “It seemed like a fun thing to do.”The family expected the filming to last for just a few weeks and doubted that the final product would find many viewers. In the end, more than 300 hours of film captured over seven months was reduced to 12 one-hour episodes.“They just went for the sensational stuff,” Ms. Loud said.The most sensational involved scenes from Lance Loud’s flamboyant life in New York — where he performed in a rock band and where his mother visited him, accompanied by cameras — and the breakup of the Louds’ marriage.Bill Loud had been unfaithful for years, and his wife knew it. In one wine-saturated conversation captured on film, she complained about his affairs to her brother and sister-in-law. She told The Times in 2013 that she had been “coerced” into letting the scene be filmed. Mr. Gilbert rejected that assertion.“I said, ‘Pat, we must shoot that,’” he told The Times in 2013. “She said, ‘I do not want you to.’ I said, ‘We must, Pat, because otherwise it’s going to come out of the blue. No one will understand it.’ She finally agreed, and her brother and sister-in-law were in the room when she agreed to it. And now she says she was coerced.”In a later episode, Ms. Loud told her husband that she wanted a divorce. “By the time she asked Dad for a divorce, she didn’t care if the entire city of Santa Barbara was watching or the whole world,” her daughter, Delilah, said in an interview for this obituary in 2014. “She just wanted Dad out.”Ms. Loud in 2013. By the time she was in her 80s, public perception had recast her from a self-promoter into a wise matriarch of a genre, reality TV, that had gone astray.Credit…Robert Caplin for The New York TimesPatricia Claire Russell was born Oct. 4, 1926, in Eugene, Ore., the daughter of an engineer. Her family was close with another family that had a little boy named Bill Loud. They met when she was about 6. Years later, when she was studying history as an undergraduate at Stanford, Mr. Loud would visit her from the University of Oregon.“He would drive down and pick her up and then go to Tijuana to see bull fights,” Delilah Loud said. “They had quite a courtship.”Ms. Loud graduated from Stanford in 1948. The Louds eloped to Mexico in March 1950. By the time the cameras showed up, in 1971, Mr. Loud had built a successful business making parts for mining equipment, and the family was living an affluent life. They had a house with a pool and a Jaguar in the driveway. They took long vacations to Europe.Ms. Loud was widely read, and she talked with her children about art, music and books. Life was bigger than Santa Barbara, she told them.“They were adventurous types,” Delilah Loud said, recalling the family conversation about whether to participate in “An American Family.” “They wanted us to experience the world and they thought, ‘Well, what the heck, it’ll be a new experience.’’’Bill Loud, with whom Ms. Loud reunited in 2001 at the request of Lance, died in 2018 at 97.Ms. Loud’s is survived by Delilah and another daughter, Michele, as well as two sons, Kevin and Grant, according to the family’s Facebook post.Ms. Loud moved to New York with her daughters in 1974 and lived in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for more than a decade while working as a literary agent and doing other work.She lived in Bath, England, in the early 1990s before moving back to California to live with Lance. In 2001, Lance, who had led the rock band the Mumps and was a freelance writer, asked the original camera and sound equipment operators of “An American Family” to document his final days. He did not tell his mother that the cameras would show up.“I don’t know why Lance did that, but he wanted to do it,” she told The Times.In 2003, public television aired “Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family.”Alex Marshall and Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Michael Apted, Versatile Director Known for ‘Up’ Series, Dies at 79

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMichael Apted, Versatile Director Known for ‘Up’ Series, Dies at 79His output included “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and a James Bond film. But he was best known for his long-running documentary series about life in Britain.The director Michael Apted with, from left, Jackie Bassett, Lynn Johnson and Susan Davis, three of the subjects of his documentary “28 Up” (1984), the fourth in a series that began with “Seven Up!” in 1964 and followed the lives of a group of British people in roughly seven-year intervals. (Ms. Johnson died in 2013.)Credit…Granada TelevisionJan. 8, 2021, 7:01 p.m. ETMichael Apted, a versatile director whose films were as varied as the James Bond picture “The World Is Not Enough” and the biographical dramas “Gorillas in the Mist” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and who made his most lasting mark with the “Up” documentary series, which followed the lives of a group of British people in seven-year intervals for more than a half century, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 79.His agent in the United States, Roy Ashton, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Mr. Apted, who was British, was a researcher at Granada Television in England when he helped pick the 14 children, all of them 7, who became the subjects of “Seven Up!,” the initial documentary in the “Up” series, which was directed by Paul Almond and shown on British television in 1964.The film was intended as a one-off, but Mr. Apted picked up the ball seven years (more or less) later, acting as director of “7 Plus Seven,” broadcast in England in late 1970, in which he interviewed the same children, now at a more developed stage of life.Then came “21 Up” in 1977, “28 Up” in 1984 and so on, with new installments arriving every seven years, all directed by Mr. Apted. “63 Up” was released in 2019.Collectively, the films became a serial portrait of a group of ordinary people advancing through life, from childhood through adulthood, charting their different paths, changing perspectives and various fates (one participant, Lynn Johnson, died in 2013). The New York Times in 2019 called it “the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema.”The intent of the original program in 1964 was to look at different segments of Britain’s class system. Thanks to Mr. Apted’s persistence, “Up” became something more.“I realized for the first time, after 20 years on the project, that I really hadn’t made a political film at all,” he wrote in 2000. “What I had seen as a significant statement about the English class system was in fact a humanistic document about the real issues of life.”Mr. Apted in Los Angeles in 2012. His “Up” series, The New York Times said in 2019, was “the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema.”Credit…Robert Yager for The New York TimesManohla Dargis, summarizing “63 Up” in The Times, wrote, “There’s great pleasure in revisiting this series, seeing who turned out just fine and sometimes better than you might have expected or hoped.”While revisiting “Up” periodically across six decades, Mr. Apted worked in television and commercial film.“Agatha” (1979), a fictional drama about the novelist Agatha Christie, starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. Mr. Apted had particular success in the 1980s, beginning in 1980 with “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” about the country singer Loretta Lynn, played by Sissy Spacek, who won the best-actress Oscar.Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn in Mr. Apted’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980). She won an Oscar for her performance.Credit…Universal StudiosThe next year he directed the John Belushi-Blair Brown comedy “Continental Divide”; two years later came the crime drama “Gorky Park,” based on the Martin Cruz Smith novel, starring William Hurt. In 1988 there was “Gorillas in the Mist,” the story of the naturalist Dian Fossey; its five Oscar nominations included one for Sigourney Weaver, who played Ms. Fossey.Mr. Apted’s 1990s films included “Thunderheart” (1992), a thriller with Val Kilmer, and the drama “Nell” (1994), a vehicle for Jodie Foster. Then came his entry in the James Bond franchise — “The World Is Not Enough” (1999), with Pierce Brosnan as agent 007.In a 2010 interview with The Times, Mr. Apted reflected on his one regret about the “Up” series — that his initial choice of children was unbalanced, 10 boys but only 4 girls — and how his choices of mainstream films might have been a way to compensate for that.“The biggest social revolution in my life, growing up in England, has been the change in the role of women in society,” he said. “We didn’t have civil rights and Vietnam in England, but I think that particular social revolution is the biggest thing, and I missed it by not having enough women. And because I didn’t have enough women, I didn’t have enough choice of what options were in front of women who were building careers and having families and all this sort of stuff.”He continued: “Looking at everything from ‘Agatha’ through ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ from ‘Nell’ and “Continental Divide,’ they’re all to do with women’s role in society and what women have to do to have a role in society, or the choices women have to make to stay in society or have a voice in society, in both straightforward and eccentric ways. That’s always interested me. And that, I think, stems from the feeling that I slightly missed out.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.A complete obituary will appear shortly.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More