Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Jeremy Tepper, Alt-Country Impressario, Dies at 60

      by

      As a journalist, singer, label owner and radio producer, he fostered a community of musicians on the outskirts of Americana.Jeremy Tepper, who over a long and varied career as a journalist, singer, label owner and radio producer championed the anarchic, high-energy music that straddled the lines separating country, rock, punk and plain old Americana, died on June 14 in Queens. He was 60.His wife, the musician Laura Cantrell, said the cause of death, at Elmhurst Hospital, was a heart attack.Born in upstate New York and educated in Manhattan, Mr. Tepper was perhaps an unlikely apostle for a style of music variously called alt- or outlaw country, but which he preferred to call “rig rock” — the sort of sounds favored by long-haul truck drivers. Far from the big hats and ostrich-skin boots of Nashville’s Lower Broadway, it is the music one might hear coming from honky-tonks, jukeboxes, truck stops and big-rig radios, the corners of Americana that Mr. Tepper celebrated with unironic joy.“It is taking all that truck-driving music — streamlined, guitar-based country rock — and dragging it onto the modern interstate,” he told Newsday in 1990.Mr. Tepper was rig-rock’s greatest fan and biggest booster. He wrote about it for publications like Pulse and The Journal of Country Music, and for his own magazine, Street Beat, which was dedicated to jukeboxes and the music one found in them. 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

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      Taylor Wily, ‘Hawaii Five-0’ and ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ Actor, Dies at 56

      by

      He spent his early career as a professional sumo wrestler.Taylor Wily, who played a shrimp truck vendor and police informant on the television reboot of “Hawaii Five-0,” and who in his earlier years was an acclaimed professional sumo wrestler, died on Thursday. He was 56.Paul Almond, a legal representative for Mr. Wily, confirmed his death. A location and cause of death were not immediately available.Mr. Wily starred as Kamekona in more than 170 episodes of “Hawaii Five-0,” a reimagining of the 1970s crime drama that followed the escapades of state police officers on the island. His character became a fan favorite, gradually morphing into the show’s resident entrepreneur, running a shaved ice business and a helicopter tour company alongside his shrimp venture.“‘Hawaii Five-0’ could become ‘Kamekona Five-0,’” Masi Oka, who played Dr. Max Bergman on the series, said in a 2012 interview with CBS.The series, which ran from 2010 to 2020, followed a fictional state police unit that seemed to routinely crave shrimp. Mr. Wily’s character was a warm and comedic presence onscreen that resonated with fans across the world as well as with residents in Hawaii.Peter Lenkov, a producer of the series, said on social media that he was drawn to Mr. Wily from his first audition, and that he was impressed enough with Mr. Wily to write in his character as a recurring role.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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Donald Sutherland, ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘Hunger Games’ Star, Dies at 88

      by

      Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in “M*A*S*H,” a ruthless Nazi spy in “Eye of the Needle,” a soulful father in “Ordinary People” and a strutting fascist in “1900,” died on Thursday in Miami. He was 88.His son Kiefer Sutherland, the actor, announced the death on social media. CAA, the talent agency that represented Mr. Sutherland, said he had died in a hospital after an unspecified “long illness.” He had a home in Miami.With his long face, droopy eyes, protruding ears and wolfish smile, the 6-foot-4 Mr. Sutherland was never anyone’s idea of a movie heartthrob. He often recalled that while growing up in eastern Canada, he once asked his mother if he was good-looking, only to be told, “No, but your face has a lot of character.” He recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said: “This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.”Yet across six decades, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 films and television shows — some years he was in as many as half a dozen movies. “Klute,” “Six Degrees of Separation” and a 1978 remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” were just a few of his other showcases.And he continued to work well into his last years, becoming familiar to younger audiences through roles in multiple installments of “The Hunger Games” franchise, alongside Brad Pitt in the space drama “Ad Astra” (2019) and as the title character in the Stephen King-inspired horror film “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” (2022).Mr. Sutherland’s chameleonlike ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another and just plain odd in yet a third appealed to directors, among them Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone.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

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Thomas J. McCormack Dies at 92; Transformed St. Martin’s Press

      by

      He turned “an insignificant trade house” into a powerhouse, publishing best sellers like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “All Creatures Great and Small.”Thomas J. McCormack, an iconoclastic chief executive and editor who transformed St. Martin’s Press into a publishing behemoth with best-selling books like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “All Creatures Great and Small” and its own mass-market paperback division, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Jessie McCormack, said.The few props that Mr. McCormack employed from the 18th floor of the Flatiron Building in Manhattan — an ancient adding machine, his cigar and the daily tuna sandwich that substituted for the typically well-lubricated publishers’ lunch — belied a rare fusion of marketing savvy, which enabled him to buy future best-sellers, and editorial scrupulousness, which led him to make good books even better.During his tenure as chairman, chief executive and editor in chief of St. Martin’s, Publishers Weekly called him “one of the great contrarians of publishing, who believed, against the publishing grain, in volume at all costs.”Mr. McCormack, the magazine said, had turned St. Martin’s “from an insignificant trade house on the brink of bankruptcy to a quarter-billion-dollar powerhouse with one of the most extensive lists in the business.”Mr. McCormack in the 1980s. His advice to fellow editors: Do no harm. Their most vital attribute, he said, was sensibility.via McCormack FamilyIn book publishing, where executives have customarily shied from innovation, Sally Richardson, publisher-at-large of Macmillan, St. Martin’s parent company, said of Mr. McCormack in 1997: “He was never afraid to zig when the industry zagged.”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

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Elinor Fuchs, Leading Scholar of Experimental Theater, Dies at 91

      by

      First as a journalist and later as a professor at Yale, she provided the intellectual tools to help actors, directors and audiences understand challenging work.Elinor Fuchs, whose impassioned insights into contemporary theater — first as a critic prowling the avant-garde scene in New York, and later as a professor at Yale — made her one of the leading scholars of the modern American stage, died on May 28 at her home in the West Village of Manhattan. She was 91.Her daughter Katherine Eban said the cause was complications of Lewy body dementia.Professor Fuchs specialized in dramaturgy, or the construction of a play, including its dramatic structure, its characters’ motivations and technical issues about set design and lighting.In conventional times, dramaturgy can seem to be an arcane, even slightly stuffy field. But in Professor Fuchs’s hands, it became a vital tool for examining the revolutionary new forms of theater emerging in the 1960s and ’70s, forms that complicated — or dismissed entirely — conventional notions about character, dramatic arc and authorial intention.Unlike many other theater scholars, Professor Fuchs first came at these questions from a journalistic point of view. After attempting a career as an actor and writing a play, she turned to freelance theater criticism for what was then a bountiful crop of alternative weeklies around Manhattan, including The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News.She found herself drawn to challenging works like “Leave It to Beaver Is Dead,” a 1979 play at the Public Theater that included a full-length rock concert as a third act. The New York Times panned it, and it soon closed.But Professor Fuchs loved it, recognizing the play and other experimental fare as not just a new take on theater but also a whole new, postmodern cultural sensibility — even though at first she struggled to explain it.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

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Angela Bofill, R&B Hitmaker With a Silky Voice, Dies at 70

      by

      Starting in the late 1970s, she scored multiple hit singles, including “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and “I Try,” but multiple strokes in the 2000s ended her career.Angela Bofill, a New York-bred singer whose sultry alto propelled a string of R&B hits in the late 1970s and early ’80s before strokes derailed her career in the 2000s, died on Thursday in Vallejo, Calif. She was 70.Her death, at the home of her daughter, Shauna Bofill Vincent, was announced in a social media post by her manager, Rich Engel. He did not specify a cause.With a silky blend of Latin, jazz, adult-contemporary and soul, Ms. Bofill is best remembered for jazzy love songs like “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and funk-inflected pop numbers like “Something About You.” Armed with a three-and-a-half-octave range, her voice was “as cool as sherbet, creamy, delicately colored, mildly flavored,” as Ariel Swartley wrote in Rolling Stone magazine in 1979.Starting in 1978, Ms. Bofill logged six albums in the Top 40 of the Billboard R&B charts, with five of them crossing over to the Top 100 of the pop charts. She also scored seven Top 40 R&B singles, including “Angel of the Night,” (1979) and “Too Tough” (1983).Angela Tomasa Bofill was born on May 2, 1954, in New York City to a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father and grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, in Manhattan and in the West Bronx. She started writing songs as a child.By her teens, she was already showing off her vocal chops in a duo with her sister Sandra and a group called the Puerto Rican Supremes, and also as a member of the prestigious All-City Chorus, a group composed of top high-school singers in the city’s five boroughs.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

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      Nick Mavar, ‘Deadliest Catch’ Star, Dies at 59

      by

      Mr. Mavar, who ran a fishing operation in Alaska, starred in the reality television show for 16 years and captained his own boat.Nick Mavar, a commercial salmon fisherman known for his tenacity and resourcefulness who was also a deckhand on the Discovery Channel’s extreme fishing reality show “Deadliest Catch,” died on Thursday at a hospital in King Salmon, Alaska. He was 59.His death was confirmed by his wife, Julie (Hanson) Mavar. His nephew Jake Anderson said that Mr. Mavar had a heart attack on Thursday while on a ladder at a boatyard in Naknek, Alaska, where he ran his fishing operation, and fell onto a dry dock.He was pronounced dead at a hospital, Mr. Anderson said.The Bristol Bay Borough Police Department in Naknek confirmed that Mr. Mavar had died but declined on Friday evening to share additional details.“Deadliest Catch,” which follows crab fishermen on their strenuous and sometimes brutal job off the Alaskan coast, is one of the top-rated programs on basic cable, drawing millions of viewers.The show premiered in 2005, and Mr. Mavar appeared in 98 episodes, working on a fishing boat called the F/V Northwestern until 2021.Mr. Mavar left the show while filming an expedition in 2020 after his appendix ruptured, revealing a cancerous tumor, Mr. Anderson said.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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Martin Starger, Influential Shaper of TV and Movies, Dies at 92

      by

      In his decade at ABC, long the doormat network in prime time, he helped guide it toward the No. 1 spot. He later produced “Nashville” and won an Emmy for “Friendly Fire.”Martin Starger, who as a senior executive at ABC in the 1970s helped bring “Happy Days,” “Roots,” “Rich Man, Poor Man” and other shows to the small screen — and the network nearly to the brink of No. 1 in prime time — before turning to producing movies, most notably Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” died on May 31 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.His death was confirmed by his niece, Ilene Starger, a casting director.Mr. Starger joined ABC in the mid-1960s and rose to positions of increasing importance, culminating in his promotion to president of ABC Entertainment in 1972. The entertainment mogul Barry Diller, who was one of his protégés at ABC, described Mr. Starger in an email as “the quintessential television executive of the 1970s.” He was, Mr. Diller said, the “essence of N.Y. smarts: suave, sophisticated and funny. He was culturally ahead of his audience but was pragmatic in his programming choices, but ever striving for better.”From left, Anson Williams, Donny Most, Ron Howard and Henry Winkler in an episode of “Happy Days,” one of the shows Mr. Starger helped bring to the air as an ABC executive.ABC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesMr. Starger’s time at ABC was characterized by the network’s long struggle to break out of last place in prime time, behind CBS and NBC, in what was then a three-network universe.Mr. Starger and other executives balanced middlebrow programs, including “Marcus Welby, M.D.” and “The Six Million Dollar Man,” with TV movies like “The Missiles of October” (1974), which dramatized the Cuban missile crisis, and prestigious mini-series like “Roots,” based on Alex Haley’s book about his family history.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