Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Adele Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen’s Mother, Dies at 98

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      Bruce Springsteen has long said that his mother was among his greatest influences and credited her with encouraging his musical ambitions.Adele Springsteen, who nurtured the budding musical talent of her son, the pioneering rock star Bruce Springsteen, died on Wednesday. She was 98.Mr. Springsteen announced his mother’s death in an Instagram post on Thursday. No cause was given, but Ms. Springsteen had struggled for more than a decade with Alzheimer’s disease.Her son has been outspoken about his relationship with his mother and her influence on him.Ms. Springsteen rented him his first guitar when he was 7, he said in 2021 during his Broadway show, “Springsteen on Broadway,” which ran for more than two months that year as the city began to emerge from pandemic-related closures. The show had wide-ranging reflections, including thoughts about his mother.It was also Ms. Springsteen, he told the brimming Broadway audiences, at the St. James Theater, who danced to 1940s swing music and impressed in him the joys of bop-inspiring tunes, according to the NBC program “Today.”He also spoke of his mother’s ability to persist in her vivacious spirit even as aging and a punishing disease took their toll.“She’s 10 years into Alzheimer’s,” he said. “She’s 95. But the need to dance, that need to dance is something that hasn’t left her. She can’t speak. She can’t stand. But when she sees me, there’s a smile.”Ms. Springsteen was born Adele Zerilli on May 4, 1925, in Brooklyn. She married Douglas Springsteen, with whom she had her son in 1949 and later two daughters, Virginia and Pamela.She worked as a legal secretary and raised a young working-class family in Freehold, N.J., while her husband often struggled to find steady work and grappled with mental illness. He died in 1998.“She willed we would be a family and we were,” Mr. Springsteen wrote in “Born To Run,” his memoir. “She willed we would not disintegrate and we did not.”Ms. Springsteen’s high-spirited ethos, ever-present, seemed to be the through line in her life, and one that buoyed the lives of the people around her.“My mother is the great energy — she’s the energy of the show,” Mr. Springsteen told The Miami Herald in 1987. “The consistency, the steadiness, day after day — that’s her.” He added that “it was she who created the sense of stability in the family, so that we never felt threatened through all the hard times.”In the Instagram post on Thursday announcing his mother’s death, Mr. Springsteen shared a video of his mother, in old age, dancing to “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller, captioned with an excerpt from his own 1998 song about her, “The Wish.”“I’m older but you’ll know me in a glance,” it read. “We’ll find us a little rock ’n’ roll bar and we’ll go out and dance.”Aimee Ortiz More

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      Toni Stern, Who Wrote Songs With Carole King, Dies at 79

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      A sunny California poet, she provided the words to songs on “Tapestry” and other albums, including the enduring hit “It’s Too Late.”Toni Stern, a breezy young Californian who became a trusted lyricist for Carole King, providing the words for the enduring standard “It’s Too Late” and many other songs during Ms. King’s flowering as a chart-topping solo artist, died on Jan. 17 at her home in Santa Ynez, Calif., near Santa Barbara. She was 79.Her husband and only immediate survivor, Jerry Rounds, confirmed the death. He did not specify the cause.Ms. Stern, a Los Angeles native, was an aspiring painter and poet living in Laurel Canyon, an enclave popular with the Los Angeles rock elite, in the late 1960s. It was there that she met Ms. King, who had moved west from New Jersey after a painful breakup with her husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, with whom she had formed one of the decade’s powerhouse hit-making duos.The two hit it off immediately. “When I moved to California in 1968, she was the epitome of a free-spirited Laurel Canyon woman,” Ms. King wrote in a Facebook post after Ms. Stern’s death. “She lived in a hillside house with her dog, Arf, surrounded by books, record albums, plants and macramé.”The two would soon share songwriting credits. When Ms. King stepped into the limelight as a solo performer, Ms. Stern provided lyrics to the songs “What Have You Got to Lose” and “Raspberry Jam” on her first solo album, “Writer,” released in 1970.Their partnership continued on the follow-up, “Tapestry” (1971), a pop music colossus that topped the Billboard 200 for 15 weeks and went on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time. Ms. Stern provided the words for “It’s Too Late,” which was No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart for five weeks, and “Where You Lead.”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

      Jack Jennings, P.OW. Who Helped Build Burma Railway, Dies at 104

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      He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and was one of thousands of prisoners whose hardships were the basis for the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died this month in St. Marychurch, England. He was 104.His daughters Carol Barrett and Hazel Heath told the BBC on Jan. 22 that he had died in a nursing facility, though the exact date of death was unclear.They said they believed their father was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian solders who were captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.A private in the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three-and-half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and thousands more local prisoners — were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build embankments, and drive piles into the ground.In his 2011 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, using a heavy weight raised by the men to the top of a timber frame.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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      Melinda Wilson, Wife of Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, Dies at 77

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      Ms. Wilson’s relationship with her husband, a co-founder of the Beach Boys, was portrayed in the 2014 film “Love & Mercy.”Melinda Wilson, who rescued her future husband, the Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson, from psychological ruin when they were dating in the 1980s, died on Tuesday. She was 77.Mr. Wilson confirmed her death on Instagram, saying that they had been married for 28 years. No cause of death was given.Jean Sievers, Mr. Wilson’s manager, said that Ms. Wilson had died suddenly at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She added that the couple has five adopted children — Dakota Rose, Daria Rose, Dash, Dylan and Delanie Rae — who all survive her and carry Mr. Wilson’s surname.The couple’s relationship was portrayed in the 2014 biopic “Love & Mercy.” The film shows Ms. Wilson (Elizabeth Banks) meeting Mr. Wilson, played by both John Cusack and Paul Dano, in a Cadillac showroom in Los Angeles where she was working as a saleswoman.After the film was released, Ms. Banks said in an interview with ABC News that she had met Ms. Wilson while preparing for the role.“She said to me, ‘Music is his first love,’” Ms. Banks told ABC. “‘Nothing can replace it. It’s his being, it’s his essence, it’s his everything. So I’m settling for second, but it’s a pretty good — it’s a pretty good second.’”The film shows Ms. Wilson helping her then boyfriend navigate a bout of mental illness in the 1980s. That effort, and their courtship, is complicated by the presence of Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a psychologist who had helped Mr. Wilson fight off depression and substance abuse to stage a professional comeback.Mr. Landy, whose team of professional minders at one point lived with Mr. Wilson 24 hours a day, insinuated himself into the musician’s life to the point where the therapist was at one point acting as his Mr. Wilson’s business partner, record producer and occasional songwriting partner.In 1992, a lawsuit by Mr. Wilson’s family resulted in a court order that barred Mr. Landy from contacting Mr. Wilson. Mr. Landy died in 2006.John Cusack as Brian Wilson and Elizabeth Banks as Melinda Ledbetter in the 2014 film “Love & Mercy.”François DuhamelMelinda Kae Ledbetter was born on Oct. 3, 1946, in Pueblo, Colo. She grew up in Whittier, Calif., and went to college there before becoming a model, Ms. Sievers said.She also worked as a producer on several films related to her husband’s music, including “Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road” (2021) and “Pet Sounds Live at Royce Hall” (2006). The latter title refers to “Pet Sounds,” a landmark 1966 Beach Boys album.When the couple saw the film “Love & Mercy” for the first time, Ms. Wilson told ABC News, she did not know how tough the experience would be.“I think I was more nervous than him when I took him to see it, and after, I said, ‘So what did you think?’” she said. “And he goes, ‘Oh, it was really a lot worse in real life.’” More

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      in Theater

      Chita Rivera, Electrifying Broadway Star, Is Dead at 91

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      Appearing in scores of stage productions, she dazzled audiences for nearly six decades, most memorably starring as Anita in “West Side Story” and Velma Kelly in “Chicago.”Chita Rivera, the fire-and-ice dancer, singer and actress who leapt to stardom in the original Broadway production of “West Side Story” and dazzled audiences for nearly seven decades as a Puerto Rican lodestar of the American musical theater, died on Tuesday in New York. She was 91.The death was announced in a statement by her daughter, Lisa Mordente. It gave no other details.To generations of musical aficionados, Ms. Rivera was a whirling, bounding, high-kicking elemental force of the dance; a seductive singer of smoky ballads and sizzling jazz; and a propulsive actress of vaudevillian energy. She appeared in scores of stage productions in New York and London, logged 100,000 miles on cabaret tours and performed in dozens of films and television programs.On Broadway, she created a string of memorably hard-edged women — Anita in “West Side Story” (1957), Rosie in “Bye Bye Birdie” (1960), the murderous floozy Velma Kelly in “Chicago” (1975) and the title role in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993). She sang enduring numbers in those roles: “America” in “West Side Story,” “One Boy” and “Spanish Rose” in “Bye Bye Birdie,” and “All That Jazz” in “Chicago.”Ms. Rivera, foreground, led dancers in a rehearsal for “West Side Story,” which opened on Broadway in 1957, the same year she married a dancer in the production. Leo FriedmanCritics thumbed thesauruses for hyperboles to rhapsodize about her pyrotechnics. In 2005, Newsweek called her “only the greatest musical-theater dancer ever.” Reviewing her performance in “Bye Bye Birdie” in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called her “a flammable singer and gyroscopic dancer.” Of her Tony Award-winning romp as Anna in “The Rink” (1984), Richard Corliss in Time magazine wrote: “Packing 30 years of Broadway savvy into the frame of a vivacious teenager, the 51-year-old entertainer could by now sell a song to the deaf.”Ms. Rivera was a hard-working perfectionist who rarely missed a beat, let alone a performance. Trained in classical ballet before joining the musical stage, she was beloved on Broadway, where she began performing in the early 1950s. With her showstopping voice and eloquent body language, she radiated a charisma rooted in solid song and dance techniques and in the pleasures she derived from 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?  More

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      Marlena Shaw, Venerable Nightclub Chanteuse, Dies at 84

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      She sang jazz (with Count Basie, among others) and later funk and disco, frequently in intimate venues, where she regaled audiences with tales of old love affairs.Marlena Shaw, who cultivated a sultry stage presence and husky voice from the final echoes of the big-band era, to the go-go Playboy Clubs of the 1960s, to the rise of funk, to disco and finally to the modern cabaret circuit, died on Jan. 19. She was 84.Her daughter MarLa Bradshaw announced her death on social media but did not share any further details.Ms. Shaw first came to public notice in the mid-1960s, when she performed at Playboy Clubs around the country. Describing one of those performances in 1966, The Los Angeles Times labeled her a “pretty girl singer” but also called her “the surprise of the bill.” That same year, Jet magazine reported that “three record companies were waving contracts in her face” after a New York engagement.She signed with Cadet Records, which in 1967 released her recording of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” a vocal version of the Joe Zawinul tune that had been a hit for Cannonball Adderley. It reached No. 58 on the Billboard pop chart and 33 on the R&B chart.It also got the attention of Count Basie, who invited Ms. Shaw to try out for a job singing with his band.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?  More

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      Jo-El Sonnier, Who Sparked a Revival of Cajun Music, Dies at 77

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      An accordion virtuoso and a gifted vocalist, he scored country hits in the 1980s by putting a Cajun spin on songs like Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter.”Jo-El Sonnier, a singer and accordionist who revived Cajun music in popular culture with hit versions of Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter” and Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and with appearances on recordings by Mark Knopfler and Elvis Costello, died on Jan. 13 after a performance in Llano, Texas. He was 77.The cause was a heart attack, the music promoter Tracy Pitcox wrote on social media. He said Mr. Sonnier had been airlifted to a hospital in Austin, where he was pronounced dead.Recordings by Cajun singers and players of stringed instruments like Rusty and Doug Kershaw and Jimmy C. Newman often reached the country Top 40 in the 1950s and ’60s. But it wasn’t until Mr. Sonnier’s arrival three decades later that Cajun accordion music became more than a regional phenomenon.Mr. Sonnier in 1966, when he was 20 years old. A versatile multi-instrumentalist, he first picked up the accordion when he was 3.via Sonnier familyHis album “Come On Joe,” released by RCA in 1987, contained four Top 40 country singles, including “No More One More Time,” a lovelorn ballad, and the rollicking “Tear-Stained Letter,” both of which reached the country Top 10 in 1988. A two-stepping tour de force, Mr. Sonnier’s version of “Tear-Stained Letter” reimagined Mr. Thompson’s hurtling Anglo-Celtic original as a Cajun romp.“Back then, country music was steel, fiddles, drums and lead guitars, so it was a challenge to put the accordion up front,” Mr. Sonnier said of the making of the single in a 2009 interview with the blog 88 Miles West. “We used everything on that record that people thought you couldn’t get away with, and we did.”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?  More

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      David J. Skal, Scholar Who Took Horror Seriously, Dies at 71

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      In books like “The Monster Show” and “Screams of Reason,” he examined the cultural significance of movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people.David J. Skal, a witty historian of horror entertainment who found in movies like “Dracula” and “Rosemary’s Baby” both a mirror of evolving societal fears and a pressure-release valve for those anxieties, died on Jan. 1 in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 71.Mr. Skal was returning home after a movie and early dinner with his longtime partner, Robert Postawko, when an oncoming vehicle crossed a median and hit their car, said Malaga Baldi, Mr. Skal’s literary agent. Mr. Postawko was badly injured but survived the crash.Mr. Skal was an author with encyclopedic knowledge of a subject not always taken seriously — movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people — whose erudition, combined with a chatty writing style, made his books lively and entertaining.As an evangelist for horror, he was a regular guest on NPR, explicating frightful topics in a sonorous and friendly voice, and a consultant to Universal Studios for a theme park ride in Florida, “Halloween Horror Nights.” He also added commentary tracks to Universal’s DVD series of classic monster movies, from “Dracula” (1931) to “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954).“One of the major functions that monsters provide for us is they let us process our fears about the real world without having to look at them too directly,” he told The New York Times in 2014.He could riff in his writings on the cultural theories of Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling and R.D. Laing. But his own critiques were never stuffy, grounded as they were in his personal fandom for a genre he first encountered as a boy living outside Cleveland. His first movie memory was watching “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” on television.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?  More