Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Jeremy Bulloch, Who Played Boba Fett in ‘Star Wars’ Movies, Dies at 75

      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 storyJeremy Bulloch, Who Played Boba Fett in ‘Star Wars’ Movies, Dies at 75Mr. Bulloch said he based his performance as the menacing bounty hunter in part on a Clint Eastwood role as a laconic gunslinger.Jeremy Bulloch in 2017 with the Boba Fett suit he wore in “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.”Credit…Associated PressDec. 17, 2020Jeremy Bulloch, the British actor who helped to make Boba Fett, the menacing bounty hunter with the dented helmet and T-shaped visor, one of the most popular characters in the “Star Wars” firmament, died on Thursday. He was 75.Mr. Bulloch’s death was confirmed by a statement on his website, which said he had spent his final weeks at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London. Mr. Bulloch had health complications, including Parkinson’s disease, the statement said.Mr. Bulloch became an actor at an early age, starring in commercials before expanding into television, stage, and film.Among his credits were numerous TV shows from the 1970s and ’80s, including “Doctor Who” and “Robin of Sherwood.” He also played supporting roles in three James Bond features — “Octopussy,” “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “For Your Eyes Only.”But he was best known for playing Boba Fett in “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.”Mr. Bulloch landed the role thanks to his half brother, Robert Watts, who was an associate producer of “The Empire Strikes Back,” according to StarWars.com. “‘If the suit fits, the part’s yours,’” Mr. Watts once recalled telling Mr. Bulloch. “He came in and it fit.”Mr. Bulloch said that donning Boba Fett’s battered armor, jetpack and helmet was a pleasure and a life-changing experience, although the costume itself could be quite uncomfortable.He said he had modeled the mysterious mercenary’s slow, deliberate head nod and cold, imposing physicality on Clint Eastwood’s turn as the laconic gunslinging antihero in the classic Spaghetti western “A Fistful of Dollars.”“I thought of Boba Fett as Clint Eastwood in a suit of armor,” Mr. Bulloch once said, according to StarWars.com. Ben Burtt, the sound designer on “The Empire Strikes Back,” even added the sound of jangling spurs when Fett walked, the website said.Jason Wingreen, a character actor best known for playing the genial bartender Harry on the hit sitcom “All in the Family,” voiced Boba Fett in “The Empire Strikes Back.” Mr. Wingreen died in 2016. He was 95.Mr. Bulloch said that he had terrific memories of portraying the character.“When I walked on to the set for the very first time in the costume, George Lucas looked at the costume and sort of looked out and said: ‘Mm-hmm. Yup. OK. Well, welcome aboard. It’s not a big role, but I’m sure you’ll have fun,’” he recalled in a 2015 interview with the Boba Fett Fan Club, one of many encounters he had with fans of the character and the series.Mr. Bulloch said he remembered going home after that first day and exulting to his sons: “Yes! I’m doing this.” Their response: “Dad, we’ve got homework to do. We’ll talk later.”Mr. Lucas said in a statement on StarWars.com that “Jeremy brought the perfect combination of mystery and menace to his performance of Boba Fett, which is just what I wanted the character to convey.”Born on Feb. 16, 1945, in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, England, Mr. Bulloch also appeared in “The Empire Strikes Back” without Fett’s helmet as an Imperial officer escorting a captive Princess Leia. He had a small role in “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith,” as the captain of the Tantive III, Captain Colton.Mr. Bulloch is survived by his wife, Maureen, three sons and 10 grandchildren.Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, said Mr. Bulloch “was the quintessential English gentleman.”“A fine actor, delightful company & so kind to everyone lucky enough to meet or work with him,” Mr. Hamill wrote on Twitter.Billy Dee Williams, who played Lando Calrissian, said, “Today we lost the best bounty hunter in the galaxy.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Harold Budd, Composer of Spaciousness and Calm, Dies at 84

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Latest Vaccine InformationU.S. Deaths Surpass 300,000F.A.Q.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostHarold Budd, Composer of Spaciousness and Calm, Dies at 84Known for his collaborations with art-pop artists like Brian Eno and Cocteau Twins, he created a signature sound suspended in reverberation and drone.The composer and pianist Harold Budd in Birmingham, England, in 2011. His music was known for its unhurried, organic spontaneity.Credit…Steve Thorne/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDec. 17, 2020Updated 5:45 p.m. ETHarold Budd, a composer and pianist known for the preternatural spaciousness and melancholy calm of his music, and for his collaborations with art-pop artists like Brian Eno and Cocteau Twins, died on Dec. 8 in a hospital in Arcadia, Calif. He was 84.The cause was complications of Covid-19, which he contracted at a short-term rehabilitation facility while undergoing therapy after suffering a stroke on Nov. 11, his manager, Steve Takaki, said in an email.Born in Los Angeles, Mr. Budd grew up close to the Mojave Desert, a likely inspiration for the sparsity and vastness his music could evoke. Engaged initially by free jazz, John Cage’s avant-garde innovations and early minimalism, he broke with all of those styles to create a signature sound that centered on the piano, soft-pedaled, sustained and suspended in a corona of reverberation and drone.That sound, which Mr. Budd began to develop in 1972, found its initial fruition on “The Pavilion of Dreams,” a 1978 album produced and released by Mr. Eno. In 1980, Mr. Budd and Mr. Eno jointly created “Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror,” a watershed work for both artists, not least for its feeling of unhurried, organic spontaneity. For their next collaboration, “The Pearl,” released in 1984, they brought in a second credited producer, Daniel Lanois.“I just want to say one thing again clearly right now: I owe Eno everything,” Mr. Budd proclaimed in a 2016 interview with L.A. Record, a music publication. Recording with Mr. Eno in London had “opened up another world for me that I didn’t know existed,” he said, “and suddenly I was a part of it.”Mr. Budd would go on to work with other artists active in popular music, including Andy Partridge of XTC and John Foxx, a founder of Ultravox. A collaboration with the Scottish trio Cocteau Twins, whose music shared with Mr. Budd’s a quality of esoteric reverie, produced the 1986 album “The Moon and the Melodies.” An enduring bond with Robin Guthrie, the Cocteau Twins guitarist and songwriter, resulted in several film scores and duo albums. The latest, “Another Flower,” was recorded in 2013 but released this month.Mr. Budd announced his retirement from music in 2004, but within a few years he was working again, with fresh vitality and variety. “Bandits of Stature,” issued in 2012, comprised 14 succinct pieces for string quartet. By 2018, Mr. Budd was collaborating with chamber groups in concerts that amounted to career retrospectives, including a high-profile appearance at the 2019 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn.When Mr. Budd died, Mr. Takaki wrote in an email, he had recently completed 19 new string quartets. Some had been recorded this year. Others have yet to be performed. Preparations to transcribe and edit Mr. Budd’s solo piano music and chamber works for publication began during the summer, and will continue.Mr. Budd in performance at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn., in 2019.Credit…Jake Giles Netter for The New York TimesHarold Montgomery Budd was born on May 24, 1936, to Harold Budd, who worked in the textile industry, and Dorothy (McNeill) Budd, a homemaker. His father died when he was 13, resulting in financial hardship that prompted the family to move to Victorville, on the edge of the Mojave Desert.An early interest in jazz led Mr. Budd to take up the drums. He played nightclub dates in Los Angeles while working days at Northrop Corporation, the aircraft manufacturer, to support his family, and later attended Los Angeles Community College. Drafted into the Army, Mr. Budd performed in a band with the saxophonist Albert Ayler, who would later achieve renown as a free-jazz firebrand.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Kim Ki-duk, Award-Winning South Korean Filmmaker, Dies at 59

      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 storyThose We’ve lostKim Ki-duk, Award-Winning South Korean Filmmaker, Dies at 59He was celebrated for movies centered on society’s underbelly, but he was later accused of sexual misconduct. He died of Covid-19.The South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk in 2013 at the Venice Film Festival, where his “Moebius” was screened out of competition. A year earlier, his film “Pieta” had won the Golden Lion there. Credit…Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDec. 17, 2020, 12:42 p.m. ETSEOUL, South Korea — Kim Ki-duk, ​an internationally celebrated South Korean film director who made movies ​about people ​on ​the margins of society​ that ​often ​included ​shocking scenes of violence against women, and whose career was dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct, died on Dec. 11 in Latvia.​ He was 59.The cause was Covid-19 and related heart complications, his production company, Kim Ki-duk Film​, said. According to the company, he had undergone two weeks of treatment for the disease at a hospital in Latvia, where he had recently relocated and was reported to have been scouting locations for his next film.Mr. Kim remains the only South Korean director to have won ​top ​awards at the three ​major international film festivals: those in Cannes, Venice and Berlin. He ​spent much of his time abroad after allegations that he had sexually abused actresses began to haunt his career in 2017​.Few film industry groups issued formal statements on ​Mr. Kim’s death or his films. ​Film critics who shared their condolences and appreciations on social media faced blistering reactions from people who said that doing so was tantamount to violence against his victims.“I stopped teaching Kim Ki-duk’s films in my classes in 2018 when the program about his sexual assaults screened on Korean TV,” Darcy Paquet​, an American film critic​ who specializes in Korean cinema​, wrote on Twitter.​ “If someone does such awful violence to people in real life, it’s just wrong to celebrate him. I don’t care if he’s a genius (and I don’t think he was).”​But Mr. Kim’s films also attracted fans who said his depictions of poverty and violence ​helped spark important debates about life in South Korea. “I try to discover a good scent by digging into a garbage heap,” he once said of his approach to filmmaking.His movies often centered on society’s underbelly. One dealt with a coldhearted man who turned a woman he once loved into a prostitute. He also tackled issues like suicide, rape, incest, plastic surgery and mixed-race children.“Crocodile” (1996), his first film, tells the story of a homeless man who lives on the Han River in Seoul and makes a living by stealing cash from victims who kill themselves or by recovering bodies in the river and demanding rewards from grieving families. The man saves a woman from suicide and then rapes her.Mr. Kim in Seoul in 2012 with the award he had just won in Venice. He was the only South Korean director to have won ​top ​awards at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals.Credit…Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Pieta” (2012) is perhaps Mr. Kim’s most recognized film. A deeply unnerving tale, it follows a mother and son on a quest for revenge and redemption and includes graphic scenes of torture and violence. It won the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. The year before, Mr. Kim had received an award at the Cannes festival for “Arirang,” a documentary about a near-fatal accident that occurred on one of his shoots.While his movies often garnered critical acclaim abroad, most of them were commercial failures in South Korea.“I made this movie so that we can reflect upon ourselves living in this miserable world where you are lauded for succeeding in life even if you do so through lawbreaking and corruption,” he said after his movie “One on One,” about the brutal murder of a high school girl, flopped in 2014. “I made it hoping that some will understand it. If no one does, I can’t do anything about it.”Many moviegoers, especially women, were disturbed by what they considered perverted, misogynistic and sadistic scenes of violence against women in Mr. Kim’s movies. The criticism grew significantly in 2017 when an actress starring in Mr. Kim’s movie “Moebius” accused him of forcing her into shooting a sexual scene against her will.He was later fined for slapping her in the face, but other charges were dismissed for lack of evidence or because the statute of limitations had expired.More actresses came forward with accusations of sexual abuse. Women’s rights groups in South Korea rallied behind the victims, accusing Mr. Kim of confusing “directing with abusing.”He ultimately became known as one of the many prominent ​South Korean ​men​​ — including theater directors, prosecutors, mayors, poets and Christian pastors — to face serious accusations of sexual misconduct as part of the country’s #MeToo movement. In 2018, the local broadcaster MBC aired “Master’s Naked Face,” which examined the allegations against Mr. Kim.Min-soo Jo in a scene from “Pieta” (2012), perhaps Mr. Kim’s most recognized film.Credit…Drafthouse FilmsMr. Kim denied being a sexual predator and sued his accusers for defamation. The cases were still pending in court when he died.Mr. Kim was born on Dec. 20, 1960, in ​Bongwha, a rural county in the southeast of South Korea. His early formal education ended in primary school. His father was reported to have been a disabled Korean War veteran who abused him.As a teenager, Mr. Kim toiled in factories and sweatshops. He enlisted in the South Korean Marine Corps and later enrolled in a Christian theological school, before moving to Paris to study painting when he was 30.When he returned to South Korea in 1995, he was determined to become a film director and began churning out one low-budget movie after another, winning international recognition that few South Korean directors were able to achieve.Mr. Kim is survived by his wife and a daughter.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Ann Reinking Dies at 71; Dancer, Actor, Choreographer and Fosse Muse

      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 storyAnn Reinking Dies at 71; Dancer, Actor, Choreographer and Fosse MuseFrom the ensembles of “Cabaret” and “Pippin,” she stepped into the role of Roxie Hart in “Chicago,” and the rest is Tony-winning history.Ann Reinking as a character based on herself in Bob Fosse’s autobiographical 1979 movie. “All That Jazz.” “I think I came off as a good person,” she said, “and as someone who meant something to him.”Credit…Everett CollectionPublished More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Charley Pride, Country Music’s First Black Superstar, Dies at 86

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose we’ve lostCharley Pride, Country Music’s First Black Superstar, Dies at 86He began his career amid the racial unrest of the 1960s and cemented his place in the country pantheon with hits like “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’.”Charley Pride performing in Nashville in 2018. In the 20 years after his breakout hit, “Just Between You and Me,” in 1967, 51 more of Mr. Pride’s records reached the country Top 10.Credit…Laura Roberts/Invision, via Associated PressPublished More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Noah Creshevsky, Composer of ‘Hyperreal’ Music, Dies at 75

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNoah Creshevsky, Composer of ‘Hyperreal’ Music, Dies at 75He built his musical works from myriad sampled sounds, including noises from the street as well as voices and instruments. He was also a respected teacher.The composer Noah Creshevsky in 1985 with the tools of his trade, including a Moog synthesizer. “We live in a hyperrealist world,” he said, and he wrote music to match it.Credit…via Tom HamiltonDec. 12, 2020, 5:51 p.m. ETNoah Creshevsky, a composer of sophisticated, variegated electroacoustic works that mingled scraps of vocal and instrumental music, speech, outside noise, television snippets and other bits of sound, died on Dec. 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 75. His husband, David Sachs, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Creshevsky studied composition with some of the most prominent figures in modern music, including the French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and the Italian composer Luciano Berio.Rather than pursuing a career that might have resulted in concert-hall celebrity, Mr. Creshevsky found his calling in the studio-bound world of electronic music. Using the prevailing technologies of the day — at first cutting and splicing magnetic tape, later using samplers and digital audio workstations — he made music that was dizzyingly complex in its conception and construction.But because he built his works from everyday sounds as well as voices and instruments, his compositions felt accessible, engaging and witty. The term he used to describe his music, and the philosophy that animated it, was “hyperrealism.”The “realism” comes from what we hear in our shared environment, and the “hyper” from the “exaggerated or excessive” ways those sounds are handled, Mr. Creshevsky wrote in “Hyperrealism, Hyperdrama, Superperformers and Open Palette,” an influential 2005 essay.“Contemporary reality is so densely layered and information-rich and so far removed from a hypothetical state of ‘naturalness’ that hyperrealism is an accurate term for identifying the fabric of daily life,” he continued. “We live in a hyperrealist world.”Mr. Creshevsky conveyed those qualities through his music with wild juxtapositions and fantastical distortions. He used recordings of John Cage’s speaking voice to create “In Other Words” (1976), a leisurely whirlpool of disembodied chatter. In “Great Performances” (1978), clips of classical-music performances and deadpan announcers poke gentle fun at highbrow culture. “Strategic Defense Initiative” (1978) mashes up martial-arts movie sound bites, funk beats and inexplicable noises in an exuberant tour de force of tape manipulation.The same energy and wit animate Mr. Creshevsky’s digital creations. In “Ossi di Morte” (1997), tiny scraps of recorded opera are stitched into a vignette that never existed. Similarly, “Götterdämmerung” (2009) infuses samples of the Klez Dispensers, a local klezmer ensemble, with superhuman energy and speed.Mr. Creshevsky was also a much-admired teacher. He joined the faculty of Brooklyn College in 1969 and served as director of the college’s trailblazing Center for Computer Music from 1994 to 1999. He also taught at the Juilliard School and Hunter College in New York and spent the 1984 academic year at Princeton University.Over the years Mr. Creshevsky documented much of his music on record labels that specialized in classical or experimental music. This album was released by the Mutable Music label in 2003.Noah Creshevsky was born Gary Cohen on Jan. 31, 1945, in Rochester, N.Y., to Joseph and Sylvia Cohen. His father worked in his family’s dry-cleaning business, and his mother was a homemaker. He changed his surname to Creshevsky, according to Mr. Sachs, “to honor his grandparents, whose name it was.” At the same time he also changed his first name, because, he said, “I never felt like a Gary.”The Cohen household was not especially musical, but young Gary was drawn to a piano that had been bought for his older brother. His parents, Mr. Sachs said, “were surprised to see toddler Noah — his legs too short to reach the pedals — picking out pop melodies he had heard and retained.”He began his formal musical training at 6, in the preparatory division of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. “Since my nature is that of a composer rather than a performer, I never liked spending much time practicing someone else’s composition,” Mr. Creshevsky said in an interview published by Tokafi, a music website. “Instead of working on the music that had been assigned by my teachers at Eastman, I spent many hours improvising at the piano.” He made money, he said, working as a cocktail pianist at bars and restaurants.After finishing at Eastman in 1961, he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo, now known as the University at Buffalo, in 1966. There he studied with the noted composer Lukas Foss. He also spent a year with Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, in 1963 and 1964, a rite of passage for many prominent American composers.After graduating he moved to New York City, where he founded a new-music group, the New York Improvisation Ensemble. He studied with Berio at Juilliard and earned his master’s degree in 1968.Not long afterward, Mr. Creshevsky gave up composing music meant to be performed live. In espousing hyperrealism, he identified two chief threads in his own work.Beginning with “Circuit,” a 1971 work for harpsichord and tape, he used sounds derived from familiar instruments, including the voice, to evoke “superperformers,” a term he applied to artificial performances of inhuman dexterity and exactitude.The idea had many precedents, Mr. Creshevsky wrote in 2005, including the violin music of Paganini, the piano music of Liszt and the player-piano works of Conlon Nancarrow.He also sought to radically expand the sonic palette available to a composer, a venture aided by affordable personal computers and the advent of sampling. Composers could now “incorporate the sounds of the entire world into their music,” he wrote. The result, he proposed, would be “an inclusive, limitless sonic compendium, free of ethnic and national particularity.”Mr. Creshevsky’s view of music education balanced a healthy respect for classical music’s lineage and literature with an open-minded approach to global culture and emerging technologies. “It seems probable that the next Mozart will not play the piano, but will be a terrific player of computer games,” he predicted in the Tokafi interview. “A senior generation needs to educate itself by understanding that digital technologies are creative instruments of quality.”He retired from Brooklyn College in 2000, and in 2015 he delivered his personal archives of recordings, papers and ephemera to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Over the years he had documented much of his music on record labels that specialized in classical or experimental music. He found a kindred spirit and fervent advocate in the composer and saxophonist John Zorn, whose Tzadik label issued compelling discs of Mr. Creshevsky’s compositions in 2007, 2010 and 2013.Another album suggested that Mr. Creshevsky’s influence had traveled well beyond the classical avant-garde. “Reanimator,” a career-spanning 2018 survey, appeared on Orange Milk, a label associated with contemporary styles like vaporwave and hyperpop.Seth Graham, a founder of the label, had heeded a friend’s advice to listen to Mr. Creshevsky’s music, and was struck by its audacity and prescience. Mr. Graham contacted Mr. Creshevsky on Facebook to propose a recording project — a gesture that quickly yielded a fast friendship.Orange Milk, Mr. Graham said, functioned like a close-knit community in which artists shared tips and feedback with one another. “Noah started to interact with all of us,” he said in an email, “and I know for many artists, it was helpful and a joy to interact with him.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Othella Dallas, Keeper of Katherine Dunham’s Flame, Dies at 95

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOthella Dallas, Keeper of Katherine Dunham’s Flame, Dies at 95Ms. Dallas taught the Afro-Caribbean-influenced Dunham dance technique in Europe well into her 90s. She also had a career as a blues, jazz and R&B singer. An early member of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, she later had success as a singer.Credit…via Peter WydlerDec. 11, 2020Othella Dallas, who was one of the last surviving early members of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the nation’s first self-supporting Black modern dance troupe, and taught the Afro-Caribbean-influenced Dunham technique in Europe well into her 90s, died on Nov. 28 at a nursing home in Binningen, Switzerland. She was 95.Her son, Peter Wydler, said the cause was lung cancer.The sound of conga drums reverberated at Ms. Dallas’s studio in Basel, Switzerland, for years as she gyrated to their rhythm. Her students watched reverently, eager to learn from a woman who had learned from Dunham, the matriarch of Black dance, who died in 2006.“I had three mothers in my life,” Ms. Dallas said in a 2016 documentary film about her, “What Is Luck?” “My mother, my grandmother and my godmother. And then I had Katherine Dunham. My professor.”Ms. Dallas’s dance school, which she opened in 1975, is considered the only school in Europe that teaches pure Dunham technique, a polyrhythmic style rooted in early Black dance that Dunham developed through her ethnographic research in the Caribbean in the 1930s. Alvin Ailey studied with Dunham in the 1940s, and the technique’s legacy lives on institutionally at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York.Ms. Dallas teaching a class at her dance school in Basel, Switzerland, last year. She continued to teach well into her 90s.Credit…Renata SagoBut as the style’s prominence diminished, Ms. Dallas’s devotion to teaching it rendered her a powerful living link to dance history.Glory Van Scott, a former principal Dunham dancer who is a master teacher of the technique, said Ms. Dallas was among the last of her era.“Very few are left from her generation,” Dr. Van Scott said. “But as long as there’s someone out there doing Dunham, we’re still here.”“You feel it like a religion,” she added. “It’s in our bloodline. You live with it when you teach it. You respect it. And then you give it to someone else, so they may have the honor of teaching it and seeing the genius of Dunham.”Ms. Dallas left the Katherine Dunham Dance Company in 1949, and although she was associated with her illustrious mentor her whole life, she hardly lived in her shadow.She seized her own spotlight in the 1950s as a blues and R&B singer, sharing stages with Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. She appeared at the Apollo Theater in Harlem with Sammy Davis Jr. And she had the distinction of singing in a stage musical orchestrated by a young Quincy Jones, “Free and Easy,” which flopped so badly that it left him and his band broke and stranded in Europe.Ms. Dallas settled in Switzerland in the 1960s, but she also kept performing, gradually becoming an esteemed elder stateswoman of the blues. In 2005, she played at the founding concert of the Festival da Jazz in St. Moritz, and she went on to perform there annually. Last year she received a Swiss Jazz Award.Ms. Dallas at the Festival da Jazz in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 2010. She performed at the festival annually starting in 2005.Credit…Giancarlo Cattaneo/fotoSwiss.comAfter decades running her school in Basel, she became known as an eccentric local personality. She wore elaborate jewelry and colorful headwraps, and she rode the bus to class, her diminutive figure lugging a roller bag filled with leotards and dance equipment.Ms. Dallas was born just before the Great Depression in Memphis and grew up waiting in breadlines with her mother. She lived in a creaky old house on the outskirts of town. And she was filled with verve from the start.“I was dancing since I came out of my mother’s womb,” she said in the documentary. “I said, ‘Where are the people? Where’s the microphone? Where’s the musicians? I’m ready to dance.’”In the 1930s, while Ms. Dallas was studying ballet in St. Louis, Dunham visited the school one day, and Ms. Dallas caught her attention.“They said, ‘Go dance for Ms. Dunham,’” Ms. Dallas recalled. “And Ms. Dunham, she had her eye on me. I’ll never forget that.”When she was 19, Ms. Dallas headed to New York at Dunham’s invitation to study at her school near Times Square. She was initiated into Dunham’s militaristic training regimen, required to scrub floors, wash clothes and do her teacher’s hair.“My attitude,” Ms. Dallas told The New York Times last year, was “to bleed her, to get everything that I ever wanted to learn in my life about dance.”Ms. Dallas, right, with Katherine Dunham in 1949. “I had three mothers in my life,” Ms. Dallas once said. “My mother, my grandmother and my godmother. And then I had Katherine Dunham. My professor.”Credit…via Peter WydlerMs. Dallas performed on Broadway in 1946 in “Bal Nègre,” a revue staged and choreographed by Dunham, and toured with the company throughout Europe. In Paris, she met a Swiss engineer named Peter Wydler. When Dunham discovered that Ms. Dallas intended to get married, she was initially furious, but she served as Ms. Dallas’s witness and popped the Champagne at the wedding in 1949. Eartha Kitt sang “C’est Si Bon.”Ms. Dallas left the company later that year to stay with her husband in Switzerland. She taught the Dunham technique in Zurich in the 1950s, but soon left to pursue a music career back in America. In 1975, finally settled in Europe, she opened her dance school in Basel.“Yes, I’ve had luck,” she said in the documentary, reflecting on her improbable life. “I’ve been lucky to have so much. That means, what is luck?”Othella Dallas was born Othella Talmadge Strozier on Sept. 26, 1925, in Memphis. Her father, Frank, was a pharmacist. Her mother, Thelma Lee, was a seamstress who also sang in vaudeville. A grandmother ran a music school. Othella attended high school in St. Louis and aspired to become a doctor.As a girl, she suffered from rickets; doctors suggested resetting her legs. Instead, as she told it, her grandmother took her to a voodoo priest, who prescribed that her legs get massaged in greasy dishwater while he recited an incantation.After enough dips in the kitchen sink, he said she was cured.“Let her dance,” he proclaimed.“Let her dance where?” her mother asked. “Those old dirty nightclubs?”“I don’t care where she dances,” he said. “But let her dance.”Before long, Dunham discovered Ms. Dallas and invited her to New York. As Ms. Dallas studied with her, Dunham’s ambitions for her dance company grew. She pursued Broadway and eyed an international tour.“She said, ‘I’m going to put my people on Broadway,’” Ms. Dallas recalled. “And as the first Black company on Broadway, we had to work like a dog.”Of those days, Dunham once wrote: “We weren’t pushing ‘Black Is Beautiful.’ We just showed it.”Ms. Dallas pursued her singing career in the 1950s, changing her surname from Strozier because her manager thought “Dallas” looked slicker on a marquee.In 1960, after making annual visits to her family in Europe for several years, she joined her husband and son in Switzerland, and they settled in Binningen, a town just outside Basel. She kept a scrapbook in her bedroom filled with photographs and press clips from her day in the spotlight.When Dunham died in 2006, Ms. Dallas recommitted to teaching her mentor’s technique. She traveled across Europe hosting workshops at dance schools and events.“She was aware she was pretty much the only one from her time still being able to teach,” her son said. “It was important for her to keep it pure.”Ms. Dallas in Zurich in 2019. Credit…Beda SchmidIn addition to her son, Ms. Dallas is survived by two grandchildren and a half brother, Frank Strozier, a jazz saxophonist. Her husband died in 1982.Ms. Dallas learned she had lung cancer in 2018. Her final performance was a two-hour set at the Atlantis club in Basel this February. She continued to teach at her school three days a week until the lockdown began in March. She was moved to a nursing home over the summer.During her last weeks at the school, she stuck to a favorite routine. When the studio emptied out after class, she liked to put on a Ray Charles CD. As the music played, she danced in front of the mirror by herself.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Tommy Lister, Actor Who Menaced as Deebo in ‘Friday,’ Is Dead at 62

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTommy Lister, Actor Who Menaced as Deebo in ‘Friday,’ Is Dead at 62The actor was found dead in his California home on Thursday after friends and business associates could not reach him, the authorities said.Tommy Lister’s acting career started in the 1980s, and he also developed a following in wrestling.Credit…Rob Kim/Getty ImagesDec. 11, 2020, 3:57 p.m. ETTommy Lister, a 6-foot-5-inch actor nicknamed Tiny who played the hulking neighborhood bully Deebo in the “Friday” films, has died at his home in Marina del Rey, Calif. He was 62.Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies visited Mr. Lister’s home on Thursday to do a welfare check, urged by friends and business associates who had grown concerned after not hearing from him. Mr. Lister was found dead inside the home, the Sheriff’s Department said.The department said that Mr. Lister’s death was being investigated and that a cause would be determined by the county medical examiner-coroner’s office, but added that the actor’s death “appears to be of natural causes.”Cindy Cowan, Mr. Lister’s friend and manager, said in an interview on Friday that by Wednesday night, none of his friends had heard from him for several days. After one of them knocked on his door and got no answer, the person contacted the authorities. “I think we are all shocked,” she said.Ms. Cowan said that Mr. Lister had struggled with his health after testing positive for the coronavirus several months ago, and that more than a week ago he was unable to keep a meeting at her home because he felt sick and weak. He later told her he was having trouble breathing and was unable to show up to work on a new project last Sunday, Ms. Cowan said.Mr. Lister’s acting career started in the 1980s, with roles in movies including “Runaway Train,” “Blue City” and “Beverly Hills Cop II,” according to his IMDb profile, which lists more than 250 film and television titles.Tributes to the actor from co-stars were shared on social media.Ice Cube, a writer and star of “Friday,” the 1995 comedy that gave Mr. Lister perhaps the signature role of his acting career, praised Mr. Lister as “a born entertainer who would pop into character at the drop of a hat terrifying people on and off camera” before following up with “a big smile and laugh.”Mr. Lister was also cast as President Lindberg in “The Fifth Element” in 1997, and would joke that he was the “first Black president,” Ms. Cowan said.He also gathered a following in the world of wrestling, where he was known as Zeus or the Human Wrecking Machine. He appeared with Hulk Hogan in the film “No Holds Barred” in 1989.Thomas G. Lister Jr. was born on June 24, 1958, in Los Angeles County, according to California birth records.Keith Lister, a brother of Mr. Lister, said the actor was married to Felicia Forbes and had a daughter, Faith, 12. Other survivors included Mr. Lister’s mother, Mildred Edwards Lister, and his siblings Anthony and Jill.During public appearances Mr. Lister would often oblige requests from fans to act out a few lines as the character Deebo, jokingly “scaring” them, Ms. Cowan said.“Then his teddy bear would come out, and he would break into these great, goofy smiles,” she said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More