Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Television

      Jac Venza, Who Delivered Culture to Public Television, Dies at 97

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      By making entertainment as well as education part of its mission, he gave the world “Great Performances” and other enduring programs. Jac Venza, a shoemaker’s son who almost single-handedly delivered to the proverbial “vast wasteland” that was American television in the 1960s and ’70s an oasis of cultural programming, including “Great Performances” and “Live From Lincoln Center,” died on Tuesday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 97. His death was confirmed by his spouse, Daniel D. Routhier.Mr. Venza never attended college. As an actor, he pronounced himself “dreadful.” As an aspiring artist, he began his career in Chicago by designing scenery for the Goodman Theater and window displays for the Mandel Brothers department store. But while still in his 30s, he began playing a vital role in bringing art to public television.He was working as a television producer when he was asked to collaborate with other TV innovators assembled by the Ford Foundation in the early 1960s to transform a limited service that generated no original programming into National Educational Television, the forerunner of the Public Broadcasting Service.While his fellow producers and other media experts were mulling how best to educate the viewing public through a nonprofit network, Mr. Venza recalled, he volunteered, “Why don’t we entertain them, too?”In the 1960s and ’70s, he introduced “NET Playhouse,” “Theater in America,” “Live From Lincoln Center,” “Great Performances” and, at the suggestion of the National Endowment for the Arts, “Dance in America.” He also imported popular BBC productions like “Brideshead Revisited.”He collaborated with choreographers like George Balanchine and Martha Graham, composers like Leonard Bernstein and playwrights like Tennessee Williams. Dustin Hoffman had his first starring role on television in a 1966 NET production of Ronald Ribman’s play “The Journey of the Fifth Horse.” A decade later, Meryl Streep appeared onscreen for the first time in the William Gillette play “Secret Service” on “Great Performances.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Darryl Hickman, Prolific Child Actor of the 1940s, Dies at 92

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      He was in “The Grapes of Wrath” and other films. As an adult, he was seen often on TV. He later oversaw daytime programming at CBS and taught acting.Darryl Hickman, who worked with top directors as a child actor in the 1940s, shifted to television roles in the ’50s, and succeeded Robert Morse as the star of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” in the early ’60s, died on May 22 at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 92.His wife, Lynda (Farmer) Hickman, confirmed the death.Mr. Hickman viewed himself as a character actor, never a star, during his childhood in Hollywood.“I was happy doing what I did,” he said on a panel discussion moderated by Robert Osborne on TCM in 2006 with three former child actors, Dickie Moore, Jane Withers and Margaret O’Brien, all of whom he acknowledged had been stars, unlike himself. “I knew I wasn’t in their category.”In 1940, when he was 8, he beat out dozens of other actors for the part of Winfield Joad, a brother of Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda), in “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Ford’s adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel about an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family of tenant farmers who join a fraught journey to California.Mr. Hickman recalled being on a darkened set watching Mr. Fonda shoot his farewell scene with Jane Darwell, who played Ma Joad, in which he tells her, “Wherever you can look — wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.”“I knew I was watching great acting,” Mr. Hickman said in an online interview. “It was so simple and so real and so honest and so truthful and not acted at all.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Doug Ingle, the Voice of Iron Butterfly, Is Dead at 78

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      His biggest hit, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” was a 17-minute psychedelic journey that epitomized 1960s rock indulgence. But after just a few years in the limelight, he walked away.Doug Ingle, the lead singer and organist of Iron Butterfly, the band that turned a purportedly misheard lyric into “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” the 17-minute magnum opus that propelled acid rock into the outer reaches of excess in the late 1960s, died on May 24. He was 78.His death was confirmed in a social media post by his son Doug Ingle Jr. The post did not say where he died or specify a cause.Mr. Ingle was the last surviving member of the classic lineup of Iron Butterfly, the pioneering hard rock act he helped found in 1966. The band released its first three albums within a year, starting with “Heavy” in early 1968, and, after a lineup shuffle, cemented its place in rock lore with its second album, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” released that July.“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” spent 140 weeks on the Billboard album chart, peaking at No. 4, and was said to have sold some 30 million copies worldwide. A radio version of the title song, whittled to under three minutes, made it to No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100.But it was the full-length album version — taking up the entire second side of the LP in all of its messy glory — that became a signature song of the tie-dye era. With its truncheonlike guitar riff and haunting aura that called to mind a rock ’n’ roll “Dies Irae,” the song is considered a progenitor of heavy metal and encapsulated Mr. Ingle’s ambition at the time:“I want us to become known as leaders of hard rock music,” Mr. Ingle, then 22, said in a 1968 interview with The Globe and Mail newspaper of Canada. “Trend setters and creators, rather than imitators.”A psychedelic dirge but also a love song, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” captured a 1960s spirit of yin-yang duality — much like the band’s name itself. There have been varying origin stories regarding its mysterious title, with its overtones of Eastern mysticism; the band’s drummer, Ron Bushy, said in a 2020 interview with the magazine It’s Psychedelic Baby that it grew out of an inebriated garble.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Albert S. Ruddy, 94, Dies; Producer Won an Oscar for ‘The Godfather’

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      A creator of the sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” he went on to win a second Academy Award for “Million Dollar Baby,” the boxing film starring Hilary Swank and Clint Eastwood.Albert S. Ruddy, who found early success in television as a creator of “Hogan’s Heroes,” the situation comedy about Allied prisoners outwitting their bumbling Nazi captors in a P.O.W. camp, and then became a movie producer who won Oscars for “The Godfather” and “Million Dollar Baby,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Wanda McDaniel, and his daughter, Alexandra Ruddy.Mr. Ruddy was a gravelly-voiced former systems programmer and shoe salesman who, by the time Paramount Pictures was preparing to film “The Godfather,” had become known for the unlikely success of “Hogan’s Heroes” and for producing a couple of movies that had come in under budget.“Ruddy is a tall, thin, nervously enthusiastic man who sees himself as a shrewd manipulator,” Nicholas Pileggi wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1971 about the making of “The Godfather,” an adaptation of the Mario Puzo novel about the Corleone crime family. “Ruddy had always been able to talk his way through obstacles.”Among the many hurdles he faced as “The Godfather’s” producer was the animosity toward the prospective film shown by Italian Americans, civic-minded ethnic groups like the Sons of Italy and members of Congress, who thought the movie would perpetuate gangster stereotypes. Paramount feared economic boycotts.The person who concerned Mr. Ruddy most was Joseph Colombo Sr., the reputed Mafia crime boss who had founded the Italian American Civil Rights League. He had persuaded the F.B.I. to stop using the terms Mafia and Cosa Nostra in its news releases.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Zack Norman, Actor Who Juggled Multiple Professions, Dies at 83

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      Best known for movies like “Romancing the Stone,” he also made a mark as a producer, a real estate developer and the butt of a Generation X-friendly television gag.Zack Norman, who made his mark as an actor in films like “Romancing the Stone” and “Cadillac Man” and with appearances on television shows like “The A-Team” and “The Nanny” — and who, as a producer, also became known for a star-crossed movie that became a running punchline on the show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” — died on April 28 in Burbank, Calif. He was 83.The cause of his death, at a hospital, was bilateral pneumonia related to the coronavirus, his daughter Lori Zuker Briller said.While best known for scene-stealing appearances as a supporting player, Mr. Norman was always more than a character actor. He was also a painter, a real estate developer and an art collector who in the 1980s mingled with the likes of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.Mr. Norman had a memorably menacing turn alongside Danny DeVito in the hit 1984 movie “Romancing the Stone.”20th Century Fox/Everett CollectionStarting in the early 1970s, Mr. Norman tallied nearly 40 movie and television acting credits. He had a memorably menacing turn as Danny DeVito’s crocodile-tending antiquities-smuggler sidekick in “Romancing the Stone,” Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 adventure comedy starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.He was abundantly familiar to fans of the indie director Henry Jaglom, appearing in many of Mr. Jaglom’s films, including “Sitting Ducks” (1980), a comedy in which he was one of two dimwitted hoods who steal from a gambling syndicate, and “Hollywood Dreams” (2006), in which he played a kindly film producer who looks after a fame-obsessed starlet (Tanna Frederick).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      John Koerner, Bluesman Who Inspired a Young Bob Dylan, Dies at 85

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      A spindly guitarist nicknamed Spider, Mr. Koerner was Mr. Dylan’s first friend in the scruffy world of Minneapolis bohemia where he learned about folk music.Spider John Koerner, a blues and folk singer whose work drew praise from the Doors and the Beatles (if not the general public) and who, in 1960, taught his friend Bobby Zimmerman about traditional American music, then watched as the young man metamorphosed into Bob Dylan, died on Saturday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 85.The cause was cancer, his son Chris Kalmbach said.On a self-made seven-string guitar and also on a 12-string — like his idol, Lead Belly — Mr. Koerner (pronounced KER-ner) yowled and foot-stomped his way through songs about gold miners and frogs who went a-courtin’. He played the bars and coffeehouses of the nation’s university towns, and he performed both standards and his own original songs, which came out, as one critic put it, “pre-antiquated.”Musically, he was best known as a member of Koerner, Ray & Glover, along with Dave “Snaker” Ray, another guitarist and vocalist, and Tony “Little Sun” Glover, who played harmonica. Their debut album, “Blues, Rags & Hollers,” released in 1963, was an early attempt by young middle-class white men to imitate Black blues musicians whose hard-to-find recordings they had obsessively collected.Mr. Koerner first became known as a member of Koerner, Ray & Glover, whose first album was released in 1963 and reissued in 1995.Compass Records“Demolishing the puny vocalizations of ‘folk’ trios like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Whatsit, Koerner and company showed how it should be done,” David Bowie wrote in a 2003 article in Vanity Fair in which he included “Blues, Rags & Hollers” on a list of his 25 favorite albums.The Doors decided to sign with Elektra Records in part because it had issued that album. The founder and chief executive of Elektra, Jac Holzman, often said the Beatles authorized him to issue an album of baroque interpretations of their work after John Lennon told him, “Anyone who records Koerner, Ray & Glover is OK with me.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Fred Roos, Casting Director and Coppola Collaborator, Dies at 89

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      Widely considered to have the best eye for talent in Hollywood, he shared the best-picture Oscar with Francis Ford Coppola for “The Godfather Part II.”Fred Roos, a casting director and producer who championed the early careers of A-list actors like Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson and Carrie Fisher, and whose long collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola and his family, stretching from “The Godfather” (1972) to this year’s “Megalopolis,” earned him an Oscar and an Emmy, died on Saturday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 89.His death was announced by his family in a statement.Many in Hollywood said that Mr. Roos had the best eye for talent in the business. He championed the young, relatively unknown Mr. Pacino for the role of Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” when the studio executives at Paramount wanted a better-known actor, like Robert Redford or Warren Beatty. And when his friend George Lucas was leaning toward Amy Irving for the role of Princess Leia in “Star Wars” (1977), Mr. Roos suggested he cast Carrie Fisher instead.Mr. Lucas listened — after all, it was Mr. Roos who had assembled the cast for his breakout film, “American Graffiti,” in 1973, including then-unknown actors like Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfuss and Mackenzie Phillips. He later did something similar for Mr. Coppola’s 1983 adaptation of the novel “The Outsiders,” bringing together the future stars Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze.Al Pacino as Michael Corleone and Talia Shire as his sister, Connie, in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II.” Mr. Roos was a producer of the film, which won the best-picture Oscar in 1975.John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesHarrison Ford and Linda Christensen in George Lucas’s “American Graffiti,” for which Mr. Roos assembled the cast.Screen Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Roos was particularly taken with Mr. Ford, whom he met while the young actor was doing carpentry work on his home. After getting him the uncredited role of Bob Falfa, a wisecracking drag racer, in “American Graffiti,” he cast him in small roles in Mr. Coppola’s films “The Conversation” (1974) and “Apocalypse Now” (1979).But when he suggested Mr. Ford for the role of Han Solo in “Star Wars,” Mr. Lucas balked. He said he only wanted to cast actors he had never worked with.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Morgan Spurlock, Documentarian Known for ‘Super Size Me,’ Dies at 53

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      His 2004 film followed Mr. Spurlock as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month. It was nominated for an Oscar, but it later came in for criticism.Morgan Spurlock, a documentary filmmaker who gained fame with his Oscar-nominated 2004 film “Super Size Me,” which followed him as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days — but later stepped back from the public eye after admitting to sexual misconduct — died on Thursday in New York City. He was 53.His brother Craig Spurlock said the cause was complications of cancer.A self-described attention hound with a keen eye for the absurd, Mr. Spurlock was a playwright and television producer when he rocketed to global attention with “Super Size Me,” an early entry into the genre of gonzo participatory filmmaking that borrowed heavily from the confrontational style of Michael Moore and the up-close-and-personal influences of reality TV, which was then just emerging as a genre.The film’s approach was straightforward: Mr. Spurlock would eat nothing but McDonald’s food for a month, and if a server at the restaurant offered to “supersize” the meal — that is, to give him the largest portion available for each item — he would accept.The movie then follows Mr. Spurlock and his ever-patient girlfriend through his 30-day odyssey, splicing in interviews with health experts and visits to his increasingly disturbed physician. At the end of the month, he was 25 pounds heavier, depressed, puffy-faced and experiencing liver dysfunction.The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, grossed over $22 million, made Mr. Spurlock a household name, earned him an Academy Award nomination for best documentary and helped spur a sweeping backlash against the fast-food industry — though only temporarily; today, McDonald’s has 42,000 locations worldwide, its stock is near an all-time high, and 36 percent of Americans eat fast food on any given day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More