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      Craig muMs Grant, Actor and Slam Poet, Dies at 52

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      He was a star of the HBO series “Oz” under the name muMs, which he also used on the poetry circuit both before and after finding success on television.Craig muMs Grant’s biggest success as an actor was the role of Poet on the HBO prison drama “Oz,” but fans of that series were accustomed to seeing him credited simply as muMs. It was a name he adopted as a young man when he was exploring rap and slam poetry, influences that he said changed his life.“Before hip-hop,” as he put it in “A Sucker Emcee,” an autobiographical play he performed in 2014, “I couldn’t speak.”Mr. Grant compiled a respectable career as an actor. He appeared on “Oz” throughout its six-season run, which began in 1997, and turned up in spot roles on series including “Hack,” “Boston Legal” and “Law & Order” and its spinoffs, and in movies like Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” (2000). But before his “Oz” breakthrough he was a familiar presence on the slam poetry circuit in New York and beyond; he was in the 1998 documentary “SlamNation” as part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s slam team.He returned to his poetry/rap roots often, even after “Oz” gave him a measure of fame — appearing onstage with the Labyrinth Theater Company in New York, where he was a member of the ensemble, and performing at colleges and small theaters all over the country.Mr. Grant, third from left, in an episode of the HBO series “Oz” in 1997. He played Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.HBO“I love words,” he told The Indianapolis Star in 2001. “Anybody ever wanted to buy me anything for Christmas or my birthday, they can buy me a dictionary. The bigger, the better.”Mr. Grant died on Wednesday in Wilmington, N.C., where he was filming the Starz series “Hightown,” in which he had a recurring role. He was 52.His manager, Sekka Scher, said the cause was complications of diabetes.Craig O’Neil Grant was born on Dec. 18, 1968, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a locksmith and carpenter at Montefiore Hospital, and his mother, Theresa (Maxwell) Grant, was a teacher.Mr. Grant graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx and was taking college courses in Virginia when, he said, he started exploring writing, seeking to infuse poetry with the energy of the rap music he enjoyed.“The problem with poetry is, a lot of the audience sometimes has a short attention span,” he told the Indianapolis paper years later. “So poetry has to have rhythm to capture people who can’t listen for so long. They’ll just close their eyes and ride the rhythm of your voice.”He took the name “muMs” when he was around 20. He was in a rap group, he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2003, and still had a bit of a youthful lisp, so a friend suggested he call himself “Mumbles.”“I thought about that for a week and shortened it to muMs,” he said, and then he turned that into an acronym for “manipulator under Manipulation shhhhhhh!” That phrase, he told the Indianapolis paper, symbolized the notion that “as great as I want to become or as great as I think I am, I can always go to the edge of the ocean, stand there and realize I’m nothing in comparison to the universe.”Back in New York, he didn’t succeed as a rapper. But he began performing spoken-word poetry at places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which is where someone involved in developing “Oz” saw him and recommended that Tom Fontana, the show’s creator, give him a look. Mr. Grant auditioned by performing one of his poems, and he was cast as Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.Mr. Grant, who lived in the Bronx, joined Labyrinth in 2006 and appeared in various roles in its productions. He also began writing plays, including “A Sucker Emcee,” in which he told his life story largely in rhymed couplets while a D.J. working turntables provided a soundtrack.Mr. Grant is survived by his partner, Jennie West, and a brother, Winston Maxwell.In 2003 Mr. Grant released a spoken-word album called “Strange Fruit,” taking the title from the song about lynchings famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.“Today, strange fruit means we’re the product of everything Black people have been through in this country — Middle Passage, Jim Crow, segregation,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 2004. “It’s a new way of looking at it. The metaphor of strange fruit means life and birth for me, where it used to mean lynching and death. Blacks have been doing that for years, taking the bad and flipping it, making the best of a bad situation.” More

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      Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84

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      In “Lonesome Dove,” “The Last Picture Show” and dozens more novels and screenplays, he offered unromantic depictions of a long mythologized region.Larry McMurtry, a prolific novelist and screenwriter who demythologized the American West with his unromantic depictions of life on the 19th-century frontier and in contemporary small-town Texas, died on Thursday at home in Archer City, Texas. He was 84.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Diana Ossana, his friend and writing partner.Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006.But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television mini-series.Mr. McMurtry wrote “Lonesome Dove” as an anti-western, a rebuke of sorts to the romantic notions of dime-store novels and an exorcism of the false ghosts in the work of writers like Louis L’Amour. “I’m a critic of the myth of the cowboy,’’ he told an interviewer in 1988. “I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.’’But readers warmed to the vivid characters in “Lonesome Dove.” Mr. McMurtry himself ultimately likened it, in terms of its sweep, to a Western “Gone With the Wind.”Heath Ledger, left, and Jake Gyllenhaal in a scene from the 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain.” Mr. McMurtry and Diana Ossana won an Academy Award for their screenplay, based on a short story by Annie Proulx.Kimberly French/Focus FeaturesRobert Duvall, left, and Ricky Schroder in a scene from the 1989 mini-series “Lonesome Dove.” Mr. McMurtry found his greatest commercial and critical success with the sweeping novel on which the mini-series was based, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesMr. McMurtry was the son of a rancher, and the realism in his books extended to the Texas he knew as a young man. His first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” (1961), examined the values of the Old West as they came into conflict with the modern world. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, the Texas historian Wayne Gard wrote:“The cow hands ride horses less often than pickup trucks or Cadillacs. And in the evening, instead of sitting around a campfire strumming guitars and singing ‘Git along, little dogie,’ they are more likely to have a game at the pool hall, drink beer and try their charms on any girls they can find.”He added that Mr. McMurtry had “not only a sharp ear for dialogue but a gift of expression that easily could blossom in more important works.”From the start of his career, Mr. McMurtry’s books were attractive to filmmakers. “Horseman, Pass By” was made into “Hud,” directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman. Mr. McMurtry’s funny, elegiac and sexually frank coming-of-age novel “The Last Picture Show” (1966) was made into a film of the same title in 1971 starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie of his 1975 novel, “Terms of Endearment,” directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson, won the Academy Award for best picture of 1983.Mr. McMurtry with Diana Ossana, his longtime collaborator, in 2006, when they won the Academy Award for “Brokeback Mountain.”Brian Snyder/ReutersMr. McMurtry relished his role as a literary outsider. He lived for much of his life in his hometown, Archer City, Texas, two hours northwest of Dallas. He had the same postal box for nearly 70 years. When he walked onstage to accept his Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain,” he wore bluejeans and cowboy boots below his dinner jacket. He reminded audiences that the screenplay was an adaptation of a short story by Ms. Proulx.Yet Mr. McMurtry was a plugged-in man of American letters. For two years in the early 1990s he was American president of PEN, the august literary and human rights organization. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote on topics relating to the American West. His friends included the writer Susan Sontag, whom he once took to a stock car race.Six Buildings, One BookstoreFor some 50 years, Mr. McMurtry was also a serious antiquarian bookseller. His bookstore in Archer City, Booked Up, is one of America’s largest. It once occupied six buildings and contained some 400,000 volumes. In 2012 Mr. McMurtry auctioned off two-thirds of those books and planned to consolidate. About leaving the business to his heirs, he said: “One store is manageable. Four stores would be a burden.”Mr. McMurtry’s private library alone held some 30,000 books and was spread over three houses. He called compiling it a life’s work, “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves.” Mr. McMurtry at his bookstore in 2000. It once occupied six buildings and contained some 400,000 volumes but has since been consolidated into one building.Ralph Lauer/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via Associated PressLarry Jeff McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, on June 3, 1936, to Hazel Ruth and William Jefferson McMurtry. His father was a rancher. The family lived in what Mr. McMurtry called a “bookless ranch house” outside of Archer City, and later in the town itself. Archer City would become the model for Thalia, a town that often appeared in his fiction.He became a serious reader early, and discovered that the ranching life was not for him. “While I was passable on a horse,” he wrote in “Books,” his 2008 memoir, “I entirely lacked manual skills.” He graduated from North Texas State University in 1958 and married Jo Ballard Scott a year later. The couple had a son, James, now a well-regarded singer and songwriter, before divorcing.After receiving an M.A. in English from Rice University in Houston in 1960, Mr. McMurtry went west, to Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in a class that included the future novelist Ken Kesey. Thanks to his friendship with Mr. Kesey, Mr. McMurtry made a memorable cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s classic of new journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). The book details Mr. Kesey’s drug-fueled journey across America, along with a gang of friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters, in a painted school bus.In the scene, Mr. Kesey’s bus, driven by Neal Cassady, pulls up to Mr. McMurtry’s suburban Houston house, and a naked and wigged-out woman hops out and snatches his son. Mr. Wolfe describes Mr. McMurtry “reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, ‘Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!’” Mr. McMurtry teaching at Rice University in Houston in 1972. He wrote his first novels while teaching English there and at Texas Christian University, George Mason College and American University.via Rice UniversityMr. McMurtry wrote his first novels while teaching English at Texas Christian University, Rice University, George Mason College and American University. He was not fond of teaching, however, and left it behind as his career went forward. He moved to the Washington area and with a partner opened his first Booked Up store in 1971, dealing in rare books. He opened the much larger Booked Up, in Archer City, in 1988 and owned and operated it until his death. In a 1976 profile of Mr. McMurtry in The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin observed his book-buying skills. “Larry knows which shade of blue cover on a copy of ‘Native Son’ indicates a first printing and which one doesn’t,” Mr. Trillin wrote. “He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten writing.”A Knack for Female CharactersWhile much of Mr. McMurtry’s writing dealt with the West or his Texas heritage, he also wrote novels about Washington (“Cadillac Jack”), Hollywood (“Somebody’s Darling”) and Las Vegas (“The Desert Rose”). There was a comic brio in his best books, alongside an ever-present melancholy. He was praised for his ability to create memorable and credible female characters, including the self-centered widow Aurora Greenway in “Terms of Endearment,” played by Shirley MacLaine in the film version.In the novel, Aurora is up front about her appetites. “Only a saint could live with me, and I can’t live with a saint,” she says. “Older men aren’t up to me, and younger men aren’t interested.”“I believe the one gift that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters that readers connect with,” Mr. McMurtry once wrote. “My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the screen.” His early novels were generally well reviewed, although Thomas Lask, writing about “The Last Picture Show” in The Times Book Review, said, “Mr. McMurtry is not exactly a virtuoso at the typewriter.” Other critics would pick up that complaint. Mr. McMurtry wrote too much, some said, and quantity outstripped quality. “I dash off 10 pages a day,” Mr. McMurtry boasted in “Books.”Some felt that Mr. McMurtry clouded the memories of some of his best books, including “The Last Picture Show,” “Lonesome Dove” and “Terms of Endearment,” by writing sequels to them, sequels that sometimes turned into tetralogies or even quintets. It was hard to recall, while reading his “Berrybender Narratives,” a frontier soap opera that ran to four books, the writer who delivered “Lonesome Dove.”Mr. McMurtry near the Royal Theater in Archer City, Texas, a locale in his novel “The Last Picture Show.” His store, Booked Up, is nearby.Mark Graham for The New York TimesMr. McMurtry sometimes felt the sting of critical neglect. “Should I be bitter about the literary establishment’s long disinterest in me?” he wrote in “Literary Life,” a 2009 memoir. “I shouldn’t, and mostly I’m not, though I do admit to the occasional moment of irritation.” In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he liked to tweak his critics by wearing a T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist.” He was open about the shadows that sometimes fell over his life and writing.After completing “Terms of Endearment,” he entered what he described as “a literary gloom that lasted from 1975 until 1983,” a period when he came to dislike his own prose. He had a heart attack in 1991, followed by quadruple-bypass surgery. In the wake of that surgery he fell into a long depression during which, he told a reporter, he did little more than lie on a couch for more than a year.That couch belonged to Ms. Ossana, whom Mr. McMurtry had met in the 1980s at an all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson. They began living together, and collaborating shortly afterward — Mr. McMurtry writing on a typewriter, Ms. Ossana entering the work into a computer, often editing and rearranging.“When I first met Larry, he was involved with about five or six different women,” Ms. Ossana told Grantland.com in 2014. “He was quite the ladies’ man. I was always really puzzled. One day I said to him, ‘So all of these women are your girlfriends?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, do they know about one another?’ He said, ‘Nooo.’”Mr. McMurtry had reportedly completed a draft of a memoir titled “62 Women,” about some of the women he knew and admired. He had an unusual arrangement in the last years of his life.In 2011 he married Norma Faye Kesey, Ken Kesey’s widow, and she moved in with Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana. “I went up and drug Faye out of Oregon,” he told Grantland.com. “I think I had seen Faye a total of four times over 51 years, and I married her. We never had a date or a conversation. Ken would never let me have conversations with her.”In addition to his wife and son, Mr. McMurtry is survived by two sisters, Sue Deen and Judy McLemore; a brother, Charlie; and a grandson.Mr. McMurtry’s many books included three memoirs and three collections of essays, including “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” published in 1999. “There are days,” Mr. McMurtry wrote, “where I think my own nonfiction will outlive my novels.” In addition to old books, Mr. McMurtry prized antiquated methods of composition. He wrote all of his work on a typewriter, and did not own a computer. He wrote for the same editor, Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster, for more than three decades before moving to Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, in 2014.“Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality,” he once said, “I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Bertrand Tavernier, 79, French Director With Wide Appeal, Dies

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      He was a regular on the world’s film festival circuit with movies like “Death Watch,” a science-fiction thriller, and “’Round Midnight,” about a jazz musician.Bertrand Tavernier, a French director best known in the United States for “’Round Midnight,” the 1986 film that earned Dexter Gordon an Oscar nomination for his performance as a New York jazz musician trying to get his life and career on track in Paris, died on Thursday in Sainte-Maxime, in southeastern France. He was 79.The Institut Lumiere, a film organization in Lyon of which he was president, posted news of his death on Facebook. The cause was not given.Mr. Tavernier made some 30 features and documentaries and was a regular on the film festival circuit, winning the best director award at Cannes in 1984 for “A Sunday in the Country,” what Roger Ebert called “a graceful and delicate story about the hidden currents in a family” headed by an aging painter living outside Paris.Mr. Tavernier had worked primarily as a film critic and publicist until 1974, when he directed his first feature, “The Clockmaker of St. Paul,” the story of a man whose son is accused of murder. The movie, more character study than crime drama, quickly established him in France and drew praise overseas.“‘The Clockmaker’ is an extraordinary film,” Mr. Ebert wrote, “the more so because it attempts to show us the very complicated workings of the human personality, and to do it with grace, some humor and a great deal of style.”The French actor Philippe Noiret played the father in that movie. The two would work together often, and teamed up again in 1976 in another tale about a murderer, “The Judge and the Assassin,” with Mr. Noiret playing the judge. The cast also included Isabelle Huppert, who would appear in other Tavernier films.Philippe Noiret in Mr. Tavernier’s first feature, “The Clockmaker of St. Paul” (1974). Mr. Tavernier and Mr. Noiret would work together often.Kino VideoMr. Tavernier was soon working with international casts. “Death Watch,” a 1980 science fiction thriller, starred Harvey Keitel as a television reporter who has an eye replaced with a camera so that he could surreptitiously film the last days of a woman — played by Romy Schneider — who seems to have a terminal disease.“’Round Midnight” featured a cast full of musicians — not only Mr. Gordon, a noted saxophonist, but also Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and others, including Herbie Hancock, who won an Oscar for his original score.“The screenplay, by Mr. Tavernier and David Rayfiel, is both rich and relaxed, with a style that perfectly matches the musicians’,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. “Some of the talk may well be improvised, but nothing sounds improvised, but nothing sounds forced, and the film remains effortlessly idiosyncratic all the way through.”Dexter Gordon as an expatriate American saxophonist and François Cluzet as a Parisian friend and admirer in Mr. Tavernier’s “’Round Midnight” (1986).Warner Bros. PicturesBertrand Tavernier was born on April 25, 1941, in Lyon to René and Ginette Tavernier. His father was a noted writer and poet. In a 1990 interview with The Times, Mr. Tavernier described an isolated boyhood.“My childhood was marked by loneliness because my parents didn’t get along well,” he said. “And it’s coming out in every movie. I’ve practically never had a couple in my films.”He mentioned the impact of his hometown.“It’s a very secretive city,” he explained. “My father used to say that in Lyon you learn that you must never lie but always dissemble, and it’s part of my films. The characters are often oblique in their relationships. Then there will be brief moments when they reveal themselves.”He was interested in film from a young age, and his early jobs in the film business included press agent for Georges de Beauregard, a noted producer of the French New Wave. He also wrote about film for Les Cahiers du Cinéma and other publications, and he continued to write throughout his career — essays, books and more. As a film historian, he was known for championing movies, directors and screenwriters who had been treated unkindly by others.In the foreword to Stephen Hay’s 2001 biography, “Bertrand Tavernier: The Film-maker of Lyon,” Thelma Schoonmaker, the noted film editor and widow of the director Michael Powell, credited Mr. Tavernier with resurrecting the reputation of Mr. Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” which was condemned when it was released in 1960 but is now highly regarded by many cinephiles.“Bertrand’s desire to right the wrongs of cinema history has a direct connection to the themes of justice that pervade his own films,” she wrote.Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes festival and of the Institut Lumière, said Mr. Tavernier had been tireless in his advocacy.“Bertrand Tavernier has built the body of work that we know, but he built something else: being at the service of the history of cinema, of all cinemas,” Mr. Frémaux said by email. “He wrote books, he edited other people’s books, he did an extraordinary amount of film interviews, tributes to everyone he admired, film presentations.”“I’m not sure there are any other examples in art history of a creator so dedicated to the work of others,” he added.Jacques Gamblin, center, in Mr. Tavernier’s “Safe Conduct” (2002), about French filmmakers who worked during the German occupation in World War II.Empire PicturesMr. Tavernier’s own films sometimes set personal stories amid sweeping moments of history. “Life and Nothing But” (1989), set in 1920, had as a backdrop the search for hundreds of thousands of French soldiers still missing in action from World War I. “Safe Conduct” (2002) was about French filmmakers who worked during the German occupation in World War II.But Mr. Tavernier wasn’t interested in historical spectacle for its own sake.“Often people come to me and say you should do a film about the French Resistance, but I say this is not a subject, this is vague,” he told Variety in 2019. “Tell me about a character who was one of the first members of the Resistance and who did things that people later in 1945 say must be judged as crimes. Then I have a character and an emotion that I can deal with.”His survivors include his wife, Sarah, and two children, Nils and Tiffany Tavernier.Mr. Tavernier slipped humor into his movies, even a serious one like “Life and Nothing But,” which had a scene — with some basis in reality, he said — in which a distraught army captain has to quickly find an “unknown soldier” to be placed below the Arc de Triomphe.“The rush to find the Unknown Soldier is completely true, though we had to guess how it took place,” Mr. Tavernier said. “Just imagine: How do you find a body which is impossible to identify and still be sure he is French?”Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris. More

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      Jessica Walter, ‘Arrested Development’ Matriarch, Dies at 80

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      In a six-decade career, the Emmy Award-winning actress gained early fame with “Play Misty for Me” and found a new audience as Lucille Bluth, the matriarch of the dysfunctional family in “Arrested Development,” a cult hit.Jessica Walter, whose six-decade acting career included roles ranging from an obsessed radio fan in Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut, “Play Misty for Me,” to the cutting, martini-swilling matriarch of the dysfunctional Bluth family on “Arrested Development,” died at her home in New York City on Wednesday. She was 80.Ms. Walter’s death was confirmed by her publicist, Kelli Jones, who did not specify a cause.Over a long and wide-ranging career, Ms. Walter found consistent work as a versatile performer with more than 150 credits that included tart-tongued turns in television comedy series and serious roles in dramatic Hollywood movies and New York stage productions. She was often cast as — and relished playing — off-center women capable of silencing men with a withering glance, a piercing remark or the sharp point of a knife.“Lucky me, because those are the fun roles,” she told The A.V. Club in 2012. “They’re juicy, much better than playing the vanilla ingénues, you know.”Jessica Walter and Clint Eastwood in the 1971 film “Play Misty for Me.”Universal PicturesShe began her career with minor parts in 1960s television shows like “Flipper” and “The Fugitive” before gaining notice for her role as an American wife who leaves her husband, an English racecar driver, in the 1966 John Frankenheimer movie “Grand Prix.” The film earned Ms. Walter a Golden Globe nomination in the category “new star of the year” in 1967.Five years later, she was nominated for another Golden Globe for playing Evelyn, a devoted fan with a homicidal streak who becomes obsessed with a disc jockey portrayed by Mr. Eastwood in his 1971 movie “Play Misty for Me.”In 1975, she won an Emmy for her role as the title character, a detective, in the NBC mystery “Amy Prentiss.” She was also nominated for Emmy Awards for “The Streets of San Francisco” in 1977, “Trapper John, M.D.” in 1980 and “Arrested Development” in 2005.Jessica Walter of “Amy Prentice” received a kiss from Peter Falk of “Columbo” after both won Emmys in 1975.Associated PressShe appeared in numerous Broadway productions, including “Advise and Consent,” Neil Simon’s “Rumors,” “A Severed Head,” “Night Life” and “Photo Finish.” In 2011, as her star rose, she played the fur-wrapped dowager Evangeline Harcourt in a Roundabout Theater Company revival of “Anything Goes,” which won several Tony Awards.In recent years, she became a cult figure, beloved for her poisonous put-downs and side-eyed glances as the fabulously wealthy and diabolical mother Lucille Bluth on “Arrested Development.” The zany, self-referential sitcom about a narcissistic family was critically adored when it debuted in 2003, and it introduced Ms. Walter to a new generation. She said she could hardly get on a subway car or a bus without being stopped by a fan.“You know, you look a lot like that woman that plays Lucille Bluth,” they would tell her.“I say, ‘You know, I’ve heard that,’” she told The New York Times in 2018. “You know, Lucille is in my DNA now.”The show was also the source of some anguish for Ms. Walter. In 2018, she revealed that she had been verbally harassed on the set by Jeffrey Tambor, who played her husband and who had been fired that year from the Amazon show “Transparent” amid allegations of sexual harassment and verbal abuse. He denied the allegations of sexual misconduct but admitted that his temper had been an issue, and he conceded that he had blown up at Ms. Walter.“I have to let go of being angry at him,” Ms. Walter said through tears in the 2018 interview with The Times, as Mr. Tambor sat a few feet away. In “almost 60 years of working,” she said, “I’ve never had anybody yell at me like that on a set and it’s hard to deal with, but I’m over it now.”During the interview, another star of the show, Jason Bateman, painted Mr. Tambor’s behavior as typical. His comments drew a blistering reaction online, and Mr. Bateman later apologized, saying he was “incredibly embarrassed and deeply sorry to have done that to Jessica.”Jessica Walter was born in New York City on Jan. 31, 1941. Her father, David Walter, was a musician and a member of the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York City Ballet Orchestra. Her mother, Esther Groisser, was a teacher. Ms. Walter attended the High School of Performing Arts.She was married twice, first to Ross Bowman, a Broadway stage manager, and in 1983 to the Tony-winning actor Ron Leibman, who died in 2019.Ms. Walter’s survivors include her daughter, Brooke Bowman, and a grandson.Ms. Walter and Mr. Leibman performed together in a 1986 production of “Tartuffe” at the Los Angeles Theater Center.More recently, they had also voiced characters on the FX animated comedy series “Archer,” about an agency full of misfits who undertake James Bond-like missions but spend an inordinate amount of time drinking, having sex with one another and disparaging people. On the show, Ms. Walter voiced Malory, a ruthless mother with more than a passing resemblance to Lucille Bluth.A full obituary will be published later. More

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      Paul Jackson, Funk Bassist With Herbie Hancock, Dies at 73

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      He was an integral member of Mr. Hancock’s jazz-funk band the Headhunters, whose albums reached millions in the 1970s.Paul Jackson, whose springy and grooving electric bass lines drove much of Herbie Hancock’s pioneering jazz-funk in the 1970s, died on Thursday at a hospital in Japan, where he had lived for more than 30 years. He was 73.Mike Clark, a drummer and lifelong Jackson collaborator, said the cause was sepsis brought on by complications of diabetes.In 1973, inspired by the music of Sly Stone and the Pointer Sisters, and frustrated by many jazz musicians’ habit of dismissing groove-based music offhand, Mr. Hancock started the Headhunters, with Mr. Jackson on bass.“I didn’t want to make a record that combined jazz and funk,” Mr. Hancock remembered in “Possibilities,” his 2014 autobiography, written with Lisa Dickey. “I wanted pure funk.”The band’s first album, “Head Hunters,” became a smash. It was the first jazz LP to sell over a million copies, and it hit No. 13 on the Billboard albums chart. Combining the rich acoustic-electric layering of Mr. Hancock’s previous band, Mwandishi, with a brawny backbeat, the group modeled a new brand of slyly sophisticated funk. And Mr. Jackson’s restless bass playing had everything to do with it.“Paul Jackson was an unusual funk bass player, because he never liked to play the same bass line twice, so during improvised solos he responded to what the other guys played,” Mr. Hancock wrote. “I thought I’d hired a funk bassist, but as I found out later, he had actually started as an upright jazz bass player.”Paul Jerome Jackson Jr. was born on March 28, 1947, in Oakland, Calif., one of four siblings raised by two piano-playing parents, Rosa Emanuel and Paul Sr., in a musical household.His father was a heavyweight boxer and later a contractor who sometimes worked as a security guard for music venues. Paul Sr. befriended a number of famous musicians, including James Brown and the trombonist J.J. Johnson, who sometimes hung out at the family house.When he worked security at concerts, Paul Sr. often brought along his son, and later in life Mr. Jackson would treasure the memory of hearing the Miles Davis Quintet perform at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, with Paul Chambers on bass.“As soon as I heard that bass, man, I said, ‘Oh!’” Mr. Jackson said in an interview with ukvibe.org. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to go and try that out, man.’ So I went back to my junior high school music teacher and picked one up. And that’s when I found out what was happening!”Mr. Hancock, foreground, and Mr. Jackson performing on the television show “Soul Train” in 1974. Soul Train, via Getty ImagesLetting his devilish sense of humor peek through, he added: “Playing wood bass, the first thing you do is you grab it and you put in between your legs. You play that E string and it vibrates your adolescence! I said, ‘I like this instrument. I really like this instrument. I’m going to play this.’”He is survived by his wife, Akiko Suzuki, and a sister, Denise Perrier. A previous marriage ended in divorce, and a son from that marriage died.Mr. Jackson was early in his career when he became friends with Mr. Clark. When the Headhunters’ original drummer, Harvey Mason, left the band, Mr. Jackson recommended Mr. Clark for the job.With the friends at the center of their four-piece rhythm section, the Headhunters went on to record three more albums with Mr. Hancock in the mid-1970s — the widely influential “Thrust” (1974), “Man-Child” (1975) and “Flood” (1975), recorded live in Tokyo — followed by two without him, “Survival of the Fittest” (1975) and “Straight from the Gate” (1977), both for Arista.With the Headhunters, Mr. Jackson started to show off his homey, gravel-road voice, first on “God Make Me Funky,” the opening track on “Survival of the Fittest.” A from-the-hip soul shuffle, featuring background vocals from the Pointer Sisters, “God Make Me Funky” — like many Headhunters tunes — would be widely sampled by hip-hop producers, including on classic albums by N.W.A., Eric B. & Rakim, De La Soul and the Fugees.In 1978 Mr. Jackson released a venturesome debut album of his own, “Black Octopus,” for the Eastworld label. In its first track alone, his band glides from free improvisation to briskly swinging jazz to funk.Mr. Jackson in 1998. He became an in-demand side musician, heard on albums by the Pointer Sisters, Santana and the saxophonists Stanley Turrentine and Sonny Rollins.Peter Van Breukelen/RedfernsBy then Mr. Jackson was an in-demand side musician, appearing on recordings by, among others, the Pointer Sisters, the Latin rock bands Santana and Azteca, and the jazz saxophonists Stanley Turrentine and Sonny Rollins.The Headhunters reunited in the late 1990s, releasing “Return of the Headhunters” (1998) with Mr. Hancock as a special guest. Four more albums followed.Speaking to ukvibe.org before a concert in 2013 with a quartet he had formed, Mr. Jackson described performing as a process of attuning oneself to the audience. “I look at the audience,” he said. “The first thing I do during the first song is engage. I figure that if I can get 20 percent of the first row to roll their eyes back in their heads, then I’ve got them.” More

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      Kenneth Cooper, Harpsichordist With Improviser’s Gift, Dies at 79

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      He excelled in the Baroque repertoire, but this interests were eclectic. He was also an accomplished musicologist.Kenneth Cooper, a harpsichordist, pianist and musicologist who was acclaimed for performances of Baroque music that balanced historical insights with engaging spontaneity, whose nearly 100 recordings included forays into contemporary works and ragtime, and whose collaborators included Yo-Yo Ma, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 79.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his family, who said he had suffered a stroke a few days earlier at his Manhattan apartment.Mr. Cooper had a flair for improvisation and ornamentation based on his scholarly studies of early music practices. “Oh, I enjoy improvising a lot,” he said in a 1977 interview with The New York Times. “I always enjoy making trouble.”He added: “I know there are harpsichordists who are more well behaved than I am. But I’m not trying to be outrageous. I’m trying to give the music the same vividness and impulse that I think Bach or Handel might have given it.”That interview appeared the day before Mr. Cooper presented a recital at Alice Tully Hall, a typically adventurous program that included compositions by Bartok and Ligeti and showcased a recent discovery: works from a frayed early-18th-century volume that Mr. Cooper had chanced upon while rummaging through a junk shop in Oxford, England, and that contained harpsichord transcriptions of orchestra overtures to 65 of Handel’s operas and oratorios.Some harpsichordists might have dismissed these works as not “authentic” Handel, Mr. Cooper said, though he surmised that the arrangements could have been prepared by Handel’s students. But he embraced them for their vitality and grandeur, as well as for the opportunity they offered for creativity. Though Handel’s melodies, bass lines and rhythms were intact, inner voices were omitted; performers were clearly expected to fill in these parts extemporaneously.In a review of Mr. Cooper’s recording of those Handel transcriptions in 1978, the Washington Post critic Joseph McLellan praised the album for presenting familiar music “in a striking new perspective.”Mr. Cooper’s 1978 recording of Handel transcriptions was praised for presenting familiar music “in a striking new perspective.”VanguardMr. Cooper’s adventurousness went hand in hand with scrupulous musicianship and articulate technique. He was a sensitive partner in chamber works, as in his recording, with Mr. Ma, of Bach’s sonatas for viola da gamba (played on the cello) and harpsichord.In 1993, Mr. Cooper’s interest in Baroque works for larger forces led him to found the Berkshire Bach Ensemble, an extension of the Berkshire Bach Society in Great Barrington, Mass., then in its third year. The ensemble, which he directed for 23 years, presented chamber and orchestra programs in various locations. The concerts included an annual New Year’s Eve program, often featuring Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos.This offering grew so popular that in time it spread over several days at several sites, most notably the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. A Berkshire Eagle article in conjunction with Mr. Cooper’s final New Year’s program, in 2016, estimated that he had presided over some 200 Brandenburg Concerto performances for the society.“I’ve enjoyed every single one of them,” the article quoted him as saying. “I’ve had the most amazing group of players.”Kenneth Cooper was born in New York City on May 31, 1941, and grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. His father, Rudolf, a British immigrant, taught English at the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts). His mother, Florence (Buxbaum) Cooper, after raising Mr. Cooper and his sister, Constance, worked at the Museum of Modern Art and became active in the League of Women Voters. Both parents were painters and art collectors.Mr. Cooper began studying piano at a young age. A brief residency at his high school by the harpsichordist Fernando Valenti fired his enthusiasm for that instrument, leading to his studies at the Mannes College of Music with the eminent harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe. He then attended Columbia University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s and, in 1971, a doctorate in musicology.While leading a student ensemble at Columbia, Mr. Cooper auditioned a soprano from Barnard College for a staged production of Handel’s “Acis and Galatea.” That singer, Josephine Mongiardo, won the role of Galatea, and she and Mr. Cooper married in 1969.The couple performed together for decades, including at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1979 in a program of works by Bach and Handel, a rarity by the 19th-century composer Franz Lachner and a premiere by Seymour Barab, with Mr. Cooper playing harpsichord and piano.Ms. Mongiardo-Cooper, a voice teacher at Barnard and elsewhere, survives Mr. Cooper, along with their son, Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, an actor and singer, and his sister, Constance Cooper.A pivotal early solo recital for Mr. Cooper, at Alice Tully Hall in 1973, earned a glowing review in The Times from the critic Allen Hughes, who described the young artist as a “virtuoso of apparently unfaltering precision, rhythmic security and tone color sensitivity.”Mr. Cooper performed works by Clementi on the pianoforte at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Elebash Recital Hall in Manhattan in 2003.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAs his career thrived, Mr. Cooper performed regularly at festivals in Santa Fe, N.M.; Lucerne, Switzerland; and Salzburg, Austria. He also appeared with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His recordings include well-received albums of Scarlatti sonatas and of Bach’s violin sonatas, with Mr. Cooper accompanying the violinist Ani Kavafian on fortepiano, as well as “Silks and Rags,” featuring his versions of ragtime pieces and other American fare. He taught at Barnard, Columbia, Mannes and elsewhere.In an appearance on the radio program “WNCN Live” in the early 1980s, Mr. Cooper explained what it was like to lose himself in performance.He was about to play Bach’s dark, teeming and intense Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. Every time he played it, “something new comes out of it,” he said.“It’s almost now an adventure to see what new is waiting,” he added.However, he said, he had to be careful. “If it’s too different, I can get very distracted and forget what I’m doing.” More

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      Bhaskar Menon, Who Turned Capitol Records Around, Dies at 86

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      After becoming the label’s chief in 1971, he oversaw the release of gargantuan hits like Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”In 1970, Capitol Records’ business was struggling. The Beatles, the company’s top act, were defunct. Hits were scarce among its remaining roster. That year, the company lost $8 million.It needed a savior, and it found one in Bhaskar Menon, an Indian-born, Oxford-educated executive at EMI, the British conglomerate that was Capitol’s majority owner. He became the label’s new chief in 1971 and quickly turned its finances around, driving a gargantuan hit in 1973 with Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon.” He later ran EMI’s vast worldwide music operations.Mr. Menon, who was also the first Asian man to run a major Western record label, died on March 4 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 86.The death was confirmed by his wife, Sumitra Menon.“Determined to achieve excellence, Bhaskar Menon built EMI into a music powerhouse and one of our most iconic global institutions,” Lucian Grainge, the chief executive of Universal Music Group, which owns the Capitol label and EMI’s recorded music business, said in a statement after Mr. Menon’s death.Mr. Menon with Maurice Lathouwers of Capitol Records and the singer Helen Reddy, who had numerous hits for the label in the 1970s.EMI Music WorldwideVijaya Bhaskar Menon was born on May 29, 1934, to a prominent family in Trivandrum, in south India (now Thiruvananthapuram). His father, K.R.K. Menon, was the finance secretary under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru; the first one-rupee notes issued after India’s independence from Britain bore his signature. Mr. Menon’s mother, Saraswathi, knew many of India’s leading classical musicians personally.Mr. Menon studied at the Doon School and St. Stephen’s College in India before earning a master’s degree from Christ Church, Oxford. His tutor at Oxford recommended him to Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI, and Mr. Menon began working there in 1956.A proud British institution, EMI controlled a wide musical empire, with divisions throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. While there, Mr. Menon assisted the producer George Martin, who later became the Beatles’ chief collaborator.In 1957, Mr. Menon joined the Gramophone Company of India, an EMI subsidiary; he became managing director in 1965 and chairman in 1969. Later in 1969, he was named managing director of EMI International.Capitol, the Los Angeles label that had been home to Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, was reeling from business missteps and declining sales, and EMI installed Mr. Menon as its president and chief executive. He slashed Capitol’s artist roster, tightened budgets and pushed for more aggressive promotion of the label’s artists.Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon” was one of the most noteworthy successes of Mr. Menon’s tenure at Capitol and one of the biggest blockbusters in music history.In 1972, Mr. Menon learned that Capitol was at risk of losing the next album by Pink Floyd, which blamed the company for the poor sales of its previous albums in the United States. Mr. Menon flew to the South of France, where Pink Floyd was performing and, after an all-night negotiating session, they agreed on a deal. Mr. Menon commemorated the terms on a cocktail napkin and brought it back to Capitol’s legal department in Los Angeles, said Rupert Perry, a longtime executive at EMI and Capitol.“The Dark Side of the Moon,” released by Capitol with a huge promotional campaign, was one of the biggest blockbusters in music history; it stayed on Billboard’s album chart for 741 consecutive weeks and has sold more than 15 million copies in the United States alone.Led by Mr. Menon, Capitol continued to have success in the 1970s with Bob Seger, Helen Reddy, Steve Miller, Linda Ronstadt, Grand Funk Railroad and others.In 1978, EMI put its music divisions under unified management as EMI Music Worldwide and named Mr. Menon chairman and chief executive. He remained in that position until retiring from the music industry in 1990. From 2005 to 2016, he served on the board of directors of NDTV, a news television channel in India. In 2011, an ailing EMI was sold to Sony, which bought its music publishing business, and Universal Music.Mr. Menon, right, at a gala celebrating Capitol’s 75th anniversary in Los Angeles in 2016. With him was Steve Barnett, who was then the chairman and chief executive of the label.Lester Cohen/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn some ways, Mr. Menon was an outsider in the Southern California music scene.“I was a very unusual and unlikely sort of person to be sent here under those circumstances to take overall executive command of Capitol,” Mr. Menon was quoted as saying in “History of the Music Biz: The Mike Sigman Interviews,” a 2016 collection published by the industry magazine Hits.Mr. Menon’s wife recalled in a phone interview that when they married, in 1972, Mr. Menon told her, “There are only two Indians in L.A.: Ravi Shankar and me.” She recounted stories of the two men — old friends from India — scouring the city’s exclusive west side in vain for good Indian food.In addition to his wife, Mr. Menon is survived by two sons, Siddhartha and Vishnu, and a sister, Vasantha Menon.Although Mr. Menon was primarily known as a manager of the business side of the labels he ran, he had the respect of many musicians. In the 2003 documentary “Pink Floyd: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon,” Nick Mason, the band’s drummer, recalled Mr. Menon’s efforts in promoting the band’s breakthrough album, calling him “absolutely terrific.”“He decided he was going to make this work, and make the American company sell this record,” Mr. Mason said. “And he did.” More

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      James Levine, Former Met Opera Maestro, Is Dead at 77

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      Mr. Levine was the longtime musical leader of the Met and orchestras in Boston and Munich. But his career ended in a scandal over allegations of sexual improprieties.James Levine, the guiding maestro of the Metropolitan Opera for more than 40 years and one of the world’s most influential and admired conductors until allegations of sexual abuse and harassment ended his career, died on March 9 in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 77.His death was confirmed on Wednesday morning by Dr. Len Horovitz, his physician. He did not specify the cause, and it was unclear why the death had not been announced earlier. Mr. Levine had been living in Palm Springs.After investigating accounts of sexual improprieties by Mr. Levine with younger men stretching over decades, the Met first suspended and then fired him in 2018, a precipitous fall from grace at the age of 74. He fought back with a defamation lawsuit.Before the scandal emerged, Mr. Levine was a widely beloved maestro who for decades helped define the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, expanding its repertory and burnishing its world-class orchestra. And his work extended well beyond that company. For seven years, starting in 2004, he was the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, earning high praise during his initial seasons for revitalizing that esteemed ensemble, championing contemporary music and commissioning major works by living composers.After investigating accounts of sexual improprieties by Mr. Levine with younger men stretching over decades, the Met first suspended and then fired him in 2018.Damon Winter/The New York TimesMr. Levine also served as music director of the Munich Philharmonic for five years (1999-2004). He had long associations with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as music director of its Ravinia Festival for more than 20 years.His final years as a maestro were dogged by health crises, including a cancerous growth on his kidney and surgery to repair a rotator cuff after he tripped on the stage at Symphony Hall in Boston in 2006. The problems forced Mr. Levine to miss weeks, even months, of performances. In March 2011, facing reality, he resigned the Boston post.Despite the stark break with the Met Opera, it is at that institution where Mr. Levine’s musical legacy will be mainly defined. He had a 47-year association with the house and served in various positions of artistic leadership there. “No artist in the 137-year history of the Met had as profound an impact as James Levine,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in a statement. “He raised the Met’s musical standards to new and greater heights during a tenure that spanned five decades.”Most conductors of Mr. Levine’s generation maintained international careers, jetting from one appearance to another and not getting tied down for too long at any one post. Mr. Levine’s commitment to the Met was a throwback to the era of conductors like his mentor George Szell, who was the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra for 24 years.From the beginning, his association with the Met seemed an ideal match of musician, art form and institution. A few weeks before turning 29, he made his debut in Puccini’s “Tosca” on June 5, 1971, a matinee for which he had had no stage rehearsals with the starry cast, headed by Grace Bumbry as Tosca and Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi. Reviewing the performance, Allen Hughes of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Levine “may be one of the Metropolitan’s best podium acquisitions in some time.” Mr. Levine was named the company’s principal conductor, the first person to hold that post, for the 1973-74 season. The next year, with the departure of Rafael Kubelik, who had a brief and uneasy tenure as music director, Mr. Levine took over that title, beginning with the 1976-77 season, and settled in for what turned out to be 2,552 performances — far more than any other conductor in its history — as well as the creation of an extensive catalog of recordings and videos, including some landmark Met productions. He confidently led both early Mozart and thorny Schoenberg, and he brought works like Berg’s “Wozzeck” from the outskirts to the center of the company’s repertory.At 5 feet 10 inches, with a round face, unkempt curly mane and portly build, Mr. Levine did not cut the figure of a charismatic maestro. His father used to nudge him to lose weight, cut his hair and get contact lenses, but Mr. Levine balked.“I said that I would make myself so much the opposite of the great profile that I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m engaged because I’m a musician, and not because the ladies are swooning in the first balcony,” he said in a 1983 Time magazine cover article. Indeed, Mr. Levine expanded the public’s perception of what a conductor should be and, through dozens of “Live From the Met” broadcasts on public television, became one of the most recognized classical musicians of his time, even sharing the screen with Mickey Mouse in Disney’s “Fantasia 2000.”He was neither a podium acrobat like Leonard Bernstein nor a grim-faced technician like Szell. His movements were nimble but never attention-grabbing. He encouraged orchestra players to watch his face, which beamed with pleasure when things were going right and signaled an alert when called for. “Give me some eyes” was his frequent request.A Sense of Musical DramaSome critics said Mr. Levine’s work lacked an identifiable character. Though his interpretive approach, even in matters as basic as tempos, fluctuated markedly throughout his career, certain qualities were consistent. His performances were clearheaded, rhythmically incisive without being hard-driven, and cogently structured, while still allowing melodic lines ample room to breathe. Not surprisingly given his immersion in opera, he had a keen sense of drama that carried into his accounts of symphonic literature. Above all, Mr. Levine valued naturalness, with nothing sounding forced, whether a stormy outburst in a Wagner opera or a ruminative passage of a Mahler symphony.By the late 1980s, the Met Orchestra was considered among the top opera house ensembles in the world. That was not enough for Mr. Levine. He instituted a regular series of orchestra concerts at Carnegie Hall and transformed what had been periodic chamber music programs with Met musicians into the popular Met Chamber Ensemble.A proficient and elegant pianist, he forged close musical ties with the Met players by performing chamber works with them. In time, many critics came to consider the Met Orchestra on a par with the leading symphonic ensembles of the world.Mr. Levine began his career in opera at a time when the genre was perceived to be in decline. “The farther we get from the living tradition of opera, the more difficult it is to come up with the voices and personalities to perform it convincingly,” he said in a 1985 article in The New York Times Magazine.Mr. Levine in about 1971. He had a 47-year association with the Metropolitan Opera and long ones as well with orchestras in Boston, Vienna, Munich and elsewhere.Hastings-Willinger & Associates/Met Opera ArchivesTo contend with this situation, he argued, it was essential for the Met to place artistic matters under the guidance of a maestro steeped in the tradition — namely himself. Soon he was conducting as much as one-third of the Met’s performances each season, claiming for himself most of the major works, the new productions and the biggest stars. His quick rise at the Met was viewed by many as a power grab. There were frequent complaints that giants of opera like Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Georg Solti and Riccardo Muti had little presence or were absent from the conducting ranks.In its defense the Met explained that given the company’s repertory system, with multiple works in performance simultaneously during a week, conducting an opera involved a commitment that many leading maestros were unwilling to make. Besides, it was hard to argue with success. Perhaps Mr. Levine was hogging the podium and keeping rivals at bay, but audiences and critics were excited by the artistic results.Rumors of Mr. Levine’s alleged sexual misconduct with younger men had trailed him for decades. Though periodically news organizations had looked into the story, nothing concrete turned up until December 2017. Amid the tide of allegations against powerful men in what came to be called the #MeToo movement, four men went public with accusations that Mr. Levine had sexually abused them. The acts were alleged to have taken place as far back as 1968 and began, the accusers each maintained, when they were teenagers.After their accusations were reported in The New York Post and The Times, the Met hired an outside law firm to investigate and suspended Mr. Levine pending the results. In March 2018, after the investigation found what the Met called credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in “sexually abusive and harassing conduct,” the company fired him.Days later Mr. Levine sued the Met for breach of contract and defamation. The suit claimed that Peter Gelb, who had been general manager since 2006 and in public had been a steadfast supporter of Mr. Levine, had “brazenly seized” on allegations of misconduct as “a pretext to end a longstanding personal campaign to force Levine out.” The company responded in May of that year with a countersuit, releasing evidence that, according to a company statement, Mr. Levine had “used his reputation and position of power to prey upon and abuse artists,” citing examples of misconduct that it said had occurred from the 1970s through 1999.Mr. Levine’s suit sought at least $5.8 million. The Met sought roughly the same amount. The two sides settled in the summer of 2019, agreeing that the Met and its insurer would pay Mr. Levine $3.5 million.In July 2020, the Maggio Musicale festival in Florence, Italy, announced his return to the podium the following January, but those performances were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.A Young TalentJames Lawrence Levine was born on June 23, 1943, in Cincinnati. Though his heritage was German, Latvian and Hungarian, all of his grandparents were born in the United States. His father, Lawrence Levine, under the name Larry Lee, was a bandleader and pop crooner in Los Angeles during the 1930s; he later returned to Cincinnati, his hometown, to work in his father’s clothing business. Mr. Levine’s mother, the former Helen Goldstein, had been an actress in New York under the name Helen Golden and had a leading role opposite John Garfield on Broadway in “Having Wonderful Time” in 1937.By the age of 2 Mr. Levine was picking out tunes on the family’s Chickering piano. Formal lessons with Gertrude Englander began when he was not quite 5. Thor Johnson, the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, took an interest in young Jimmy, who advanced quickly and made his debut with the orchestra at 10, playing Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1.His teacher persuaded his parents to take him to New York for an evaluation at the Juilliard School. The renowned piano pedagogue Rosina Lhevinne heard him play and urged the dean of the school to offer him a scholarship.Mr. Levine in 1962. At Juilliard he studied with the conductor Jean Morel.Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesBut Mr. Levine’s parents did not want to disrupt his childhood in Cincinnati. There were more things in the world than music, his mother said. Jimmy needed to learn how to be a full person and to live with his two younger siblings: Thomas, an artist, who in later life became an assistant to his brother; and Janet, who became a clinical psychologist.He is survived by his sister; his brother died in April.Instead of setting their son up in New York, the Levines arranged for him to take regular trips to the city, usually every other week. He would fly to New York on Friday night, have lessons with Ms. Lhevinne on Saturday morning, take in the Met matinee or an evening orchestra concert, have another lesson on Sunday, then return home that afternoon.In 1956, Mr. Levine went to the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, where he worked with the pianist Rudolf Serkin and was the chorus master for a performance of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” put on by the resident musicians and singers. The next year he spent the first of 14 summers at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, where he committed himself to a conducting career.Mr. Levine was a powerful force at the Met Opera over five decades.Calle Hesslefors/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1961, after graduating from high school, he moved to New York and enrolled in Juilliard’s college division, where he studied with the conductor Jean Morel. At a summer program in Baltimore in 1964, the American Conductors Project, he was heard by Szell, who invited him to come to Cleveland to be his assistant. Mr. Levine left Juilliard without completing a degree and spent the next six years working closely with Szell.Mr. Levine’s debut with the Cleveland Orchestra came in 1967, conducting Strauss’s tone poem “Don Juan.” While there he met Suzanne Thomson, a young oboist from Detroit, who put aside her own career to become his personal assistant and living companion, sharing his Upper West Side apartment from the early 1970s.Mr. Levine was circumspect about his private life, refusing to discuss his sexual orientation or romantic relationships. In a 1998 interview with The Times, he explained why he had refused to comment on rumors and “such nonsense” over the years. “I’ve never been able to speak in public generalities about my private life,” he said. “Day by day, my world is filled with real music, real people, real interactions.” He added almost plaintively: “How much do you have to give? How good do you have to be?”In 1966, while still working under Szell in Cleveland, Mr. Levine founded the University Circle Orchestra, an ensemble of young musicians interested in contemporary music. The next year he conducted the orchestra in the premiere of Milton Babbitt’s “Correspondences,” a formidably difficult 12-tone work, winning its composer’s lasting admiration. Opening night at the Met Opera for the 1997-98 season, when Mr. Levine was at the height of his powers.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesIn March 2018 The Boston Globe published a long exposé of Mr. Levine’s years with this student ensemble in Cleveland, drawing on some two dozen interviews with former students and musicians, who described a cultlike atmosphere around Mr. Levine, even though he was not much older than they. The participants, who became known as “Levinites,” recalled belittlement by their mentor, loyalty tests and even group sex.Just 15 years after his Met debut, Mr. Levine’s leadership role there was formalized in 1986, when he became the house’s artistic director, a title that was scaled back to music director in 2004, when he began his tenure with the Boston Symphony.He had other important associations as well. He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 1976 conducting Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” in a landmark Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production. In 1982 he made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, conducting the centennial production of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” At the time, Bayreuth was still tainted by the anti-Semitism of Wagner and certain of Wagner’s descendants, who ran the festival during the rise of the Nazis and hobnobbed with Hitler. The festival directors purposefully entrusted this milestone production to Mr. Levine, who was Jewish. “Parsifal,” a work he conducted with spacious, luminous eloquence, became a Levine specialty.Though he made 20th-century operas like Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” Berg’s “Lulu” and Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” central to the Met’s identity, Mr. Levine could not turn the company into a house that nurtured new opera. For such a prestigious international institution, the Met’s list of premieres during the Levine era, including works by John Corigliano, John Harbison, Philip Glass, Tobias Picker and Tan Dun, was not long.In interviews over the years Mr. Levine asserted that he tried to commission new works but that the Met was a monumental, slow-moving institution. He once also lamented the dearth of good-enough new operas.In the 1990s, Mr. Levine’s relationship with Joseph Volpe, the Met’s effective, pugnacious general manager, was sometimes fraught. Mr. Volpe respected Mr. Levine and gave him most of what he wanted, but put the brakes to financially risky projects (like a concert performance of Mahler’s daunting “Symphony of a Thousand”) and several commissioning ideas.As supertitles became popular at other opera companies, including the New York City Opera next door to the Met in Lincoln Center, Mr. Levine argued that his house’s informed patrons would find them distracting. Supertitles would come to the Met “over my dead body,” he said in a 1985 interview, a comment he came to regret.Mr. Volpe, who disagreed, prevailed, and in 1995 the house introduced its innovative technology, Met Titles, which employed individual screens mounted on the back of the seat in front of each audience member. The titles could be individually turned on or off, a feature that Mr. Levine said had ameliorated his objection.Podiums in Munich and BostonMr. Levine was eager to leave his mark on the legacy of symphonic music and to cultivate a major orchestra. This led to what many saw as a curious career move: becoming principal conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.His selection was hotly debated in the German press, in part because of his salary ($1.2 million), at a time when cultural institutions in Germany were being forced to accept smaller government subsidies. Though the orchestra made strides under Mr. Levine’s leadership, the relationship proved disappointing. He was unwilling to cut back his Met schedule to spend more time in Munich. When the Boston Symphony came calling, he was receptive.Mr. Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he commissioned important works.Michael Lutch/Boston Symphony OrchestraMr. Levine began his Boston tenure in the fall of 2004 with a commanding performance of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” the piece he had longed to perform with the Met’s orchestra and chorus. Initially, Mr. Levine was able to maintain full involvement and high standards at the Met while thriving in Boston, where he could finally commission significant works from major composers, especially Elliott Carter and Charles Wuorinen, and build a legacy. But concerns about his health soon surfaced.Starting in the 1990s, Mr. Levine had been afflicted with tremors in his left hand and left leg. To compensate, he developed a technique with minimal hand motions and eventually conducted while sitting in a tall, swiveling chair. In 1996, for the 25th anniversary of his Met debut, he conducted the Met orchestra and chorus in a gala concert that lasted eight hours and involved some 60 acclaimed singers performing 42 selections. As the author Johanna Fiedler recounted in “Molto Agitato,” a history of the Met, Mr. Levine’s detractors considered the gala an unseemly act of self-celebration. Others felt inspired to see Mr. Levine marking the occasion by working so hard.Still, overweight and overworked, he often moved with hesitancy. In an article in The New York Times in the spring of 2004, several members of the Met orchestra complained anonymously that Mr. Levine’s baton cues were getting hard to read and that his attention sometimes flagged during long performances.In 2008 Mr. Levine had surgery to remove a cancerous cyst from a kidney, causing him to withdraw from most of that season at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony’s summer home. By the time he resigned, the symphony calculated that he had missed one-fifth of his scheduled performances.At the Met, with Mr. Gelb’s encouragement, Mr. Levine limited his schedule to the projects he most cared about and ceded some major productions and important revivals to guests, including Mr. Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Simon Rattle, who made long-awaited Met debuts.By the time he resigned, the Boston Symphony calculated that he had missed one-fifth of his scheduled performances because of health issues.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Gelb kept Mr. Levine on as music director even during a two-year period when health problems prevented him from performing. When, in May 2013, he conducted a Met Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall, a triumphant return, Mr. Levine used a motorized wheelchair, which he continued to employ at the house. In April 2016, Mr. Gelb eased him into a new position as music director emeritus.Mr. Levine’s final appearance at the Met, on Dec. 2, 2017, was a Saturday matinee performance of Verdi’s Requiem with the orchestra, chorus and four vocal soloists. He looked fatigued that day, and the performance was somewhat lackluster. That evening, the news of the allegations against him broke.Michael Cooper contributed reporting. More