Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Music

      Richard Gaddes, Opera Impresario Who Spotted Young Talent, Dies at 81

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      As leader of opera companies in Santa Fe and St. Louis, he welcomed new works as well as new artists.Richard Gaddes, a British-born opera impresario who nurtured young talent as director of companies in Santa Fe, N.M., and St Louis, died on Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 81.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Santa Fe Opera, where he served as general director for eight years, and by the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, of which he was a founder. The executor of his estate, Maria Schlafly, said he died after a brief illness.Leading the two companies over several decades, Mr. Gaddes (pronounced GAD-iss) helped spur the careers of younger stars like Thomas Hampson, Christine Brewer and Frank Lopardo, and brought prominent artists well known in Europe, like the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and the conductor Edo de Waart, to audiences in the United States.His generous, open-minded embrace of an art form he saw as encompassing all others spurred his attempts to open it up — to new artists, new audiences and new works. In Santa Fe, he offered discounted tickets to New Mexico residents and staged a production of “The Beggar’s Opera” at the city’s El Museo Cultural using mostly local performers.“I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing if it hadn’t been his leap of faith,” said Ms. Brewer, who had been a school music teacher before Mr. Gaddes heard her sing in a competition in St. Louis and decided to take a chance on her. She didn’t win the competition, but Mr. Gaddes sent her a check anyway.“Richard just said, ‘I heard it in your voice.’ He was super supportive,” Ms. Brewer said in a phone interview.Invited to create an opera company in St. Louis at the end of the 1970s, Mr. Gaddes had an idea at odds with local grand-opera expectations: to use the new company to engage young American singers at the beginning of their careers. His idea turned out to be fruitful.From left, Alan Kays, Stephen Dickson and Joseph McKee in a 1979 production of “Three Pintos” at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, where Mr. Gaddes was general director.Opera Theater of Saint Louis“I recommended to them that rather than doing extravaganzas with elephants and camels and mob scenes in large spaces, what they should do is have an ensemble company presenting the cream of the crop of young American singers,” Mr. Gaddes said in an interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, which honored him in 2008.The conductor Leonard Slatkin wrote in an email that the St. Louis company “became a destination point for those starting careers.” He added that Mr. Gaddes “had an encyclopedic knowledge of the repertoire and knew what could and could not be done.”Mr. Gaddes pursued a similarly democratizing approach toward expanding the audience in Santa Fe. He had already had a long career there before becoming director in 2000, a post he held until 2008.“I felt there was a slight attitude of our being elitist,” he said, noting that the company, located seven miles outside the city, “didn’t have much to do with the locals.”His initiatives, including the reduced-price ticket scheme, transformed the audience, which went from being 38 percent New Mexican to over 50 percent.“What’s marvelous is, Richard has really taken the reins in a new era in which the piece of contemporary opera that everyone feels we are obliged to do does not have to be an act of sufferance,” the director Peter Sellars said in an interview after Mr. Gaddes was honored by the N.E.A. “It’s not like having to go in for invasive surgery. It is in fact, a pleasure.”Richard Gaddes was born on May 23, 1942, in Wallsend, an old coal mining and shipbuilding town near Newcastle in the north of England. His father, Thomas, worked in the local shipyards; his mother, Emily (Rickard) Gaddes, was a homemaker.He showed an early aptitude for music — his parents both sang in local choirs — and his mother, defying his father’s wishes, paid for his train ticket to London to audition at Trinity College of Music (now the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), where he was immediately accepted. He graduated in 1964.To earn money, he turned pages at Wigmore Hall, then London’s premiere chamber music venue; started a series of lunchtime concerts at the hall, which became immensely popular; and went to work for an artist management company.Mr. Gaddes credited his days at Wigmore Hall with stirring his interest in helping young singers. “I turned pages for many great accompanists, including Gerald Moore,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I sat at the piano during the cycles of singers such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, los Ángeles, Hans Hotter. An amazing, amazing exposure to music that you couldn’t buy.”Spotted by the conductor John Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, on a trip to London, he was eventually recruited to become the company’s artistic administrator in 1969, at age 25.He became founding general director of the Opera Theater of Saint Louis in 1976, and under his stewardship it became the first American opera company to receive an invitation to the Edinburgh International Festival. He returned to the Santa Fe company in 1994 and became its second general director in 2000.Mr. Gaddes is survived by his brother Harry. Another brother, Simon, died in 2011. More

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      in Theater

      Vinie Burrows, Acclaimed Actress Who Became an Activist, Dies at 99

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      She got her start on Broadway at 15. But after finding a dearth of roles for Black women, she ultimately turned to one-woman shows that addressed racism and sexism.Vinie Burrows, a Harlem-born stage actress who made her mark on Broadway in the 1950s, but who grew frustrated by how few choice roles were available for Black women and turned her focus to one-woman shows exploring the legacies of racism and sexism, died on Dec. 25 in Queens. She was 99.Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son, Gregory Harrison.Ms. Burrows made the first Broadway appearance of her seven-decade career in 1950 alongside Helen Hayes and Ossie Davis in “The Wisteria Trees,” a reimagining of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by the writer and director Joshua Logan that shifted the drama from an aristocratic Russian estate to a 19th-century Louisiana plantation.Ms. Burrows in a scene from “The Wisteria Trees” (1950), in which she made her Broadway debut, with Ossie Davis, who is sitting beside her, and Maurice Edwards.Martin Beck Theater, via Performing Arts Legacy ProjectHer Broadway career continued to blossom into the mid-1950s. Among the high-profile productions in which she appeared was a 1951 revival of “The Green Pastures,” Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1930 retelling of Old Testament stories from an African American perspective. In the early 1960s, she appeared with Moses Gunn and Louis Gossett Jr. in a New York production of “The Blacks,” a searing and surrealistic examination of racial stereotypes and Black identity by the subversive white French author and playwright Jean Genet.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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      in Theater

      Glynis Johns, a Tony Winner and Actress in ‘Mary Poppins,’ Dies at 100

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      In a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years, she was also known for her role in the hit 1965 Disney movie “Mary Poppins.”Glynis Johns, the British actress who in a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years won a Tony Award for her role in “A Little Night Music,” giving husky, emotion-rich voice to the show’s most memorable number, “Send In the Clowns,” and played an exuberant Edwardian suffragist in the Disney movie classic “Mary Poppins,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 100.The death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her manager, Mitch Clem.Ms. Johns was 49 and on the brink of her fourth divorce when the Stephen Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music” opened at the Shubert Theater in February 1973. The New York Times described her character, Desirée Armfeldt, as “a slightly world‐weary and extremely lovewise actress in turn‐of‐the‐century Sweden.”The critics adored her. To Clive Barnes of The Times, “the misty-voiced and glistening-eyed Glynis Johns was all tremulous understanding.”To Walter Kerr, also writing in The Times, she was “that cousin of bullfrogs and consort of weary gods”; she was “discreet, dangerous … and gratifyingly funny.”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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      in Television

      Donald Wildmon, Early Crusader in Conservative Culture Wars, Dies at 85

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      He founded the American Family Association, which became a juggernaut in the Christian right’s campaign against sex and gay themes in art, television and pop culture.Donald E. Wildmon, a conservative activist whose alarm over indecency on television spawned a national organization, the American Family Association, a once powerful cog of the Christian right, and who led boycotts over sexuality and gay themes in some of America’s most popular TV shows and in the arts, died in Tupelo, Miss., where he lived, on Dec 28. He was 85.The cause was Lewy body dementia, according to a statement posted by the American Family Association.Mr. Wildmon’s crusades beginning in the 1970s against boundary-pushing trends in popular culture and the arts — including high-profile attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts — were an early thunderclap of the culture wars that have moved from the fringe of the Republican Party to its mainstream.A former pastor in the United Methodist Church, Mr. Wildmon became a lightning rod for liberals, who attacked him for bigotry and stifling free speech. In 1981, the president of NBC, Fred Silverman, a champion of socially conscious television, said that Mr. Wildmon’s threats to boycott advertisers were “a sneak attack on the foundation of democracy.”“A boycott,” Mr. Wildmon responded in an interview with The New York Times that year, “is as legal and as American as apple pie.”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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      in Movies

      Ana Ofelia Murguía, Mexican Actress and Voice in Coco,’ Dies, 90

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      Her 60-year career in film, television and theater “marked an entire era” and made her one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses.Ana Ofelia Murguía, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses, whose voice acting as Mama Coco in the animated movie “Coco” brought her international recognition, died on Sunday. She was 90.Her death was confirmed by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and National Theater Company, which did not specify the cause of death.The National Theater Company described Murguía on social media as “one of Mexico’s greatest actresses.” In a statement, Lucina Jiménez López, the director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, described her career as one that “marked an entire era.” In the 2017 film “Coco,” made by Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios, Murguía plays the key role of Mama Coco, the great-grandmother of a boy, the protagonist Miguel, who finds himself in the land of the dead on a journey to uncover his family’s history. At the emotional climax of the film, Miguel and Mama Coco sing the song “Remember Me” together.The movie, which is built around the Mexican holiday of the Day of the Dead, was celebrated for its portrayal of Mexican culture and its handling of weighty subjects like death in a children’s movie. It won best animated featured and best original song, for “Remember Me,” at the 2018 Oscars.“Coco” introduced Murguía to a global audience, but she was well-known in her home country of Mexico long before.Ana Ofelia Murguía was born on Dec. 8, 1933, in Mexico City. She studied acting at Mexico’s National School of Theater Arts and made her debut in 1954 in the play “Trial By Fire.” Her first screen role was in the 1964 film “Transit.”She would go on to appear in more than 70 plays and 90 films, working with some of Mexico’s best filmmakers. Hailed for her versatility, she often played the role of the villain or antagonist, according to a statement from the Institute of Fine Arts and National Theater Company.At Mexico’s prestigious Ariel awards, Murguía won best supporting actress for her performances in “Cadena Perpetua,” in 1979; “Los Motivos de Luz,” in 1986; and “La Reina de la Noche” (The Queen of the Night), in 1996. She was nominated for best actress five times but never won. In 2011, she was recognized with a Golden Ariel special lifetime achievement award.In April 2023, she was awarded the Ingmar Bergman Medal from the National Autonomous University of Mexico for leaving an “indelible mark” on Mexican film and theater. More

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      in Music

      Les McCann, a Jazz Pianist and Singer, Dies at 88

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      He released more than 50 albums but had his greatest commercial success with “Compared to What,” a recording that came together at the last minute in 1969.Les McCann, a jazz pianist and vocalist who was an early progenitor of the bluesy, crowd-pleasing style that came to be known as soul jazz, and who, although he released more than 50 albums, was best known for a happenstance hit from 1969, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88.His death, at a hospital where he had been admitted with pneumonia, was confirmed on Monday by Alan Abrahams, his longtime manager and a producer of several of his albums. Mr. McCann had lived for the past four years at a skilled nursing facility in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles.Mr. McCann’s earthy, uplifting approach to music was a product of his upbringing in a churchgoing family. As he came to emphasize his singing more and play electric keyboards, his albums, released from 1960 to 2018, influenced funk and R&B artists and became a rich vein for hip-hop artists to mine.His greatest commercial success, though, came purely by chance, in June 1969 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Already a recording veteran by then, with albums on Pacific Jazz, Limelight and, most recently, Atlantic, Mr. McCann was appearing at the festival for the first time. After he and the tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, also an Atlantic artist, played separate sets, they gave an unscheduled performance together, with Mr. Harris as well as the expatriate trumpeter Benny Bailey joining Mr. McCann’s trio.Neither had played with Mr. McCann before, and there was no time for rehearsal. But the performance was to be recorded and filmed for broadcast.Despite the pressure, or perhaps because of it, as Mr. McCann recalled in the liner notes for the 1996 CD reissue of the concert album, which was released in 1969 as “Swiss Movement,” “Just before we went onstage, and for the first time in my life, I smoked some hash.”When he got to the bandstand, he wrote, “I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was totally disoriented. The other guys said, ‘OK, play, man!’ Somehow I got myself together, and after that, everything just took off.”The highlight of the concert was Eugene McDaniels’s protest song “Compared to What.” Stretching past eight minutes and featuring Mr. McCann’s churchy vocals, “Compared to What” would be released as a single and peak at No. 35 on the Billboard R&B chart. “Swiss Movement” was nominated for a Grammy Award and went on to sell a half-million copies.Mr. McCann and Mr. Harris reconvened in 1971 for the Atlantic studio album “Second Movement.” They also returned to Montreux for the 1988 festival, where they performed an obligatory reprise of “Compared to What.”Leslie Coleman McCann was born on Sept. 23, 1935, in Lexington, Ky., to James and Anna McCann. His father was a water maintenance engineer.His family was a musical one; he, his four younger brothers and his sister all sang in the Shiloh Baptist Church choir. Mr. McCann began playing piano at age 3 and a few years later had a music teacher, who charged 35 cents a lesson. (Those lessons did not last long: She died only six weeks after he began studying with her.) While attending Dunbar High School in Lexington, he played drums and sousaphone in the marching band.He left Kentucky at 17 when he enlisted in the Navy and was posted to the San Francisco area.Les McCann performing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1974. He had been performing in clubs in Los Angeles when he was first offered a record contract.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesDuring his time in the Navy, he sang on “The Ed Sullivan Show” after winning a talent contest. On his nights off, he would spend time at the Black Hawk, a San Francisco jazz nightclub.After leaving the Navy, Mr. McCann moved to Los Angeles, where he studied music and journalism at Los Angeles City College and hosted a Monday night jam session at the Hillcrest Club. It was during that time that he first connected with Mr. McDaniels.In a 2017 interview for the magazine Oxford American, Mr. McCann was asked about Mr. McDaniels’s composition “Compared to What.” “When I heard him,” he said, “I hired him in my band — one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. And I found out he was also a writer. We stayed in touch for years after that, and he would always send me songs. I can’t tell you how many songs he sent me, but that one stuck with me.”Mr. McCann was performing in Los Angeles clubs when a representative of Pacific Jazz Records heard him and asked if he had a record contract. When told no, the representative pulled one from his pocket and offered it to him.Mr. McCann recorded more than a dozen albums for the label from 1960 to 1964, usually leading a trio under the businesslike moniker Les McCann Ltd., but sometimes adding guest horns or orchestral accompaniment and sometimes collaborating with the guitarist Joe Pass. He also took part in Pacific Jazz sessions led by the saxophonist Teddy Edwards, the Jazz Crusaders and others. Les McCann Ltd. backed the singer Lou Rawls on his debut album, “Stormy Monday,” released by Capitol in 1962.Mr. McCann then moved to Limelight, a subsidiary of Mercury Records run by Quincy Jones, for which he made six albums from 1964 to 1966. He signed with Atlantic in 1968; on his first album for the label, “Much Les,” he was accompanied by a string section.He would make 11 albums for Atlantic. On two of them, “Invitation to Openness” (1971) and “Layers” (1972), he played a host of keyboards and synthesizers, an avenue he had been inspired to explore after hearing the keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s work with Miles Davis. Those albums have been cited as seminal in popularizing electric keyboards.Later in his Atlantic years, Mr. McCann was featured more as a singer in a slicker, more pop-oriented context. This continued through the 1970s and ’80s on albums for the Impulse!, A&M and Jam labels. But he also remained committed to the piano. In 1989, when he was a guest on the NPR show “Piano Jazz,“ hosted by his fellow pianist Marian McPartland, it was as both a singer and a player. The two closed the broadcast with a duet on “Compared to What.”Mr. McCann had returned to emphasizing his piano playing by 1994, when he released “On the Soul Side,” the first of three albums for the MusicMasters label, which reunited him with Eddie Harris and Lou Rawls. But a stroke later that year forced him to once again focus on singing, which he did through the end of the decade.He later recovered fully and resumed recording. He released albums on a German label in 2002 and on a Japanese label two years later. His last recording was the holiday-themed “A Time Les Christmas,” which he released himself in 2018.In December, Resonance Records released the archival album “Les McCann — Never a Dull Moment! Live From Coast to Coast (1966-1967),” comprising concert recordings from Seattle and New York.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. McCann’s music has been sampled by nearly 300 hip-hop artists, including Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Nas, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G. and Sean Combs.Mr. McCann performing at the 40th Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006. He also painted and was a photographer.Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto AgencyIn 1975, Mr. McCann became the first artist in residence at Harvard University’s Learning From Performers program. He was also a devoted painter and photographer of jazz culture and Black history, and his images have been included with some of his albums. His work was collected in 2015 in the book “Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.”In an interview for the preface to that book, Mr. McCann was asked how he had achieved intimacy with his photographic subjects. He responded: “I trust my intuition, you see,” adding, “I’m better off when I just do what I do on the piano: play.”Rebecca Carballo More

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      in Television

      Shecky Greene, High-Energy Comedy Star, Is Dead at 97

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      A Las Vegas institution, he would do just about anything for a laugh, including physical comedy so broad that it sometimes left him black and blue.Shecky Greene, a high-energy stand-up comedian who for many years was one of the biggest stars in Las Vegas, died on Sunday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 97.His daughter Alison Greene confirmed his death. Mr. Greene was a frequent guest of Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and other television hosts, and had acting roles in movies and on television. But he never reached as wide an audience as many of his fellow comedians, probably because his humor was best experienced in full flower on a nightclub stage rather than in small doses on the small screen. In Las Vegas, though, he was an institution. A versatile entertainer of the old school — he told stories, he made faces, he ad-libbed, he did impressions, he sang — he would do just about anything for a laugh, including physical comedy so broad that it sometimes left him black and blue.He was not one to stick to a set routine. “I wasn’t an A-B-C-D comic. ‘Hello, ladies and gentlemen’ and then the next line,” he told the comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2011. Audiences who went to see Shecky Greene never knew quite what to expect.“One of the greatest I ever saw in a nightclub,” his fellow comedian Pat Cooper told Mr. Nesteroff. “I saw him climb the curtain and do 20 minutes on top of the curtain! He destroyed an audience.”Some said he was at his funniest when he was angry, which was often. “He’s got to be somewhere where he hates the owner, hates the hotel,” the comedian Jack Carter once said, “so that he’s got something to go on.”He was at least as unpredictable off the stage as he was on it. He became famous not just for his act but also for his drinking binges, gambling sprees and erratic, often self-destructive behavior.“I should have been fired maybe 150 times in Las Vegas,” Mr. Greene told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996. “I was only fired 130 times.”Probably the most famous Shecky Greene story involved the time he drove his car into the fountain in front of Caesars Palace. In a 2005 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he confirmed the story, but admitted that the way he told it in his act was slightly embellished: He did not really greet the police officers who rushed to the scene with the words “No spray wax, please.” That line, he said, was suggested to him after the fact by his friend and fellow comedian Buddy Hackett.Another of his best-known jokes was also, he insisted, based on a true story. Frank Sinatra, the joke went, once saved his life. Five men were beating Mr. Greene, but they stopped when Sinatra said, “OK, boys, that’s enough.” Onstage, Mr. Greene told stories, made faces, ad-libbed, did impressions and sang. He also appeared on various television shows.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesAs amusing as the stories of Mr. Greene’s behavior were, the truth is that he had severe mental health problems, including bipolar disorder and panic attacks, which were apparently exacerbated when he developed a dependence on his prescription medication. He had other ailments as well, including cancer, and by the mid-1980s he had stopped performing.Mr. Greene, who had a family history of mental illness, went public with his condition in the 1990s and, with the help of a new therapist and new medication, gradually resumed his career. He even incorporated his illness into his shtick.“I’m bipolar,” he told a Las Vegas television interviewer in 2010. “I’m more than bipolar. I’m South Polar, North Polar. I’m every kind of polar there is. I even lived with a polar bear for about a year.”By 2005, although he was happily describing himself as retired, he could be persuaded to perform at private parties. In 2009 he made his first Las Vegas appearance in many years, at the Suncoast Casino, and he continued to perform occasionally in Las Vegas. As early as 1996, Mr. Greene was performing, he said, for one reason only. “I’m not in it for a career anymore,” he told The Sun. “I had my career. I’m in it to enjoy myself.”Although never known as the most decorous of comedians, Mr. Greene made news in the comedy world in 2014 when he stormed out of a Friars Club event in Manhattan and announced that he was resigning from the club after his fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried did material that Mr. Greene, who had been scheduled to speak, found offensive. “He got dirtier and dirtier,” Mr. Greene told a radio interviewer, without providing details, “so I got up and I said, ‘That’s it.’”Fred Sheldon Greenfield was born on April 8, 1926, in Chicago. (In 2004 he legally changed his name to Shecky Greene, long after his professional first name had come to connote a certain kind of brash, aggressive, old-school comedian even to people who had never seen him perform.) His parents were Carl and Bessie (Harris) Greenfield. His father was a shoe salesman and his mother sold hosiery at a department store before quitting to focus on raising their three children. Mr. Greene performing on “The Hollywood Palace” television show in 1965.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesAfter serving in the Navy during World War II, he enrolled at Wright Junior College (now Wilbur Wright College) in Chicago with plans of becoming a gym teacher. But he was sidetracked by his interest in performing.He took a summer job at a resort near Milwaukee, where, he once recalled, “They paid me $20 a week and gave me a fancy title, ‘social director.’” He became a performer, he said, because the resort couldn’t afford to hire big-name acts. “I wasn’t Red Skelton,” he recalled, “but I got a few laughs.”He returned to college that September but also continued developing a comedy act and occasionally performed in nightclubs. It would be a few years before his commitment to show business became full time.He left college to accept a two-week engagement in New Orleans; that booking stretched into three years, and ended only when the nightclub burned down. Unsure of his next move, he returned to Chicago and went back to college, but left for good when the comedian Martha Raye offered him a job as her opening act in Miami.“This time,” he said in an interview for his website, sheckygreene.com, “I made up my mind: I would stick with show business. I was only 25 years old and making $500 a week. Besides, I had a silent partner to support — I had discovered how to bet the horses.”He first ventured into Nevada, then in its early days as an entertainment mecca, when the Golden Hotel in Reno hired him for four weeks in 1953. His opening-night performance so impressed the hotel’s owners that they held him over for 18 weeks and offered him a new contract, for a guaranteed $20,000 a year (the equivalent of more than $200,000 today). He was soon headlining in Las Vegas, where for one week in 1956 Elvis Presley was his opening act.Mr. Greene on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson in 1975.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesBy 1975 he was making $150,000 a week (more than $800,000 in today’s money), one of only a handful of comedians in that salary range at the time. He liked to say that he gambled most of it away, but that it didn’t matter because he had more money than God — whose weekly salary, he happened to know, was only $35,000.He was also gaining a reputation for his sometimes violent offstage behavior. A decade later, his mental health problems had brought his career to a halt.He eventually overcame those problems, for which he gave much of the credit to the support of his wife, Marie (Musso) Greene, whom he married in 1985.His first two marriages, to Jeri Drurey and Nalani Kele, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Alison, he is survived by another daughter, Dorian Hoffman — Mr. Greene and his first wife adopted both of them at birth — and by his wife. He moved to Las Vegas several years ago; previously, he had lived in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, Calif.Although destined to be remembered primarily as a Las Vegas performer, Mr. Greene had a considerable television résumé, as both a comedian and an actor.He had a recurring role on the World War II series “Combat!” in 1962 and 1963 and appeared on “The Love Boat,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mad About You,” as well as variety and talk shows. (He was an occasional “Tonight Show” guest host in the 1970s.) He appeared in a few movies as well, including “Splash” (1984) and Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part I” (1981).Interviewed by The Washington Times in 2017, Mr. Greene looked back on his career philosophically:“Why did I do this and that? At 90 I still don’t know. Once in a while I’ll have a nice sleep. Most nights I wake up yelling, ‘Why did I do that?’“Life is strange, but if you’ve had a mixture of a life like I had, it’s all right.”Alex Traub More

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      in Movies

      Tom Wilkinson, Actor in ‘The Full Monty,’ Dies at 75

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      A versatile actor who also starred in “Shakespeare in Love” and “Batman Begins,” he won acclaim through decades of work in television and film and onstage.Tom Wilkinson, the actor who could turn a manic lawyer, a steel-foreman-turned-stripper and parts small and large into mesmerizing turns, winning Oscar nominations and plaudits for his performances in movies like “Michael Clayton” and “The Full Monty,” died on Saturday, according to a family statement. He was 75.The statement, from his agent sent on behalf of his family, said he died suddenly at home. It did not provide other details.Mr. Wilkinson’s range seemed to know no bounds.He earned Academy Award nominations for his work in “In the Bedroom” and “Michael Clayton” and delighted audiences in comedies like “The Full Monty” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”He appeared in blockbusters like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Batman Begins,” and took on horror in “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” history as Benjamin Franklin in “John Adams,” and memory in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”He often did not have the name recognition or sheer star power of the actors he played opposite — George Clooney, Sissy Spacek and Ben Affleck among them. But he drew audiences’ eyes and critics’ acclaim through decades of work in television and film and onstage.“I see myself as a utility player, the one who can do everything,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “I’ve always felt that actors should have a degree of anonymity about them.”To many Britons, though, “The Full Monty,” remains his most beloved performance, as one of the gruff, unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield, England, who scheme to make some money and repair their self-regard by starting a striptease act for the town.In “The Full Monty,” Mr. Wilkinson was among the characters who schemed to earn money by starting a striptease act.Maximum Film / Alamy Stock PhotoMr. Wilkinson played Gerald Cooper, an aging ex-foreman who joins the cadre in part to escape the ornamental gnomes his wife erected on the lawn.But his range extended far beyond comedy, and he was nominated for the Academy Award for best actor for his performance in “In the Bedroom,” directed by Todd Field.Opposite Ms. Spacek, Mr. Wilkinson played one half of a Maine couple struggling in the aftermath of their son’s murder. Mr. Field said he was drawn to Mr. Wilkinson because of his everyman quality.“You don’t typically think that Robert Redford is going to live next door,” Mr. Field told The Times. “But you believe that Tom Wilkinson could live next door. That’s the difference.”A few years later, Mr. Wilkinson was winning acclaim again as a high-powered lawyer who has a breakdown in Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton.” He was nominated for another Academy Award for his performance in that film.By then, Mr. Wilkinson had been acting for three decades, in theater, television and film.He was born in Yorkshire, England, and his parents moved to Canada when he was 4, seeking better work than farming. Their stay lasted only six years, during which time his father worked as an aluminum smelter. The family returned to Britain, where Mr. Wilkinson’s parents ran a Cornwall pub until his father died, drawing Mr. Wilkinson and his mother back to Yorkshire.Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Wilkinson said his life took a sharp turn at 16, at the King James’s Grammar School at Knaresborough, where the headmistresses “simply decided she would make something of me.”This, he said, “meant being invited round to her house, being taught how to eat, which knives and forks to reach for first.”“We would go to the theater together,” he said. “Having wandered aimlessly through school, suddenly someone took an interest in me.”But he was not drawn to acting until he reached the University of Canterbury in 1967, he said. After college, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he discovered that it was possible for “working-class kids from the provinces” to open art galleries, run rock bands, become designers, be actors.“All the things that weren’t cool became cool,” he said. “I saw the young, provincial bohemian and thought, that role can be mine. I’ll be in the arts. You can have a life in the arts. Why not?” More