Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Movies

      Vincent Patrick, Chronicler of Hustlers and Mobsters, Dies at 88

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      A novelist and screenwriter, he wrote “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and “Family Business” and brought them both to the big screen.Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” at 44, died on Oct. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his son Richard said.The son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Mr. Patrick was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included “Family Business” (1985) and “Smoke Screen” (1999).In manner and accent, Mr. Patrick seemed like a character he might have dreamed up himself. A 1999 profile in The Los Angeles Times noted that “his voice has that subterranean rumble of an accent, a sound that good character actors try to emulate when playing retired cops or tough but fair patriarchs.”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of Charlie, the down-on-his-luck night manager of a Manhattan saloon, whose cousin Paulie sucks him and a locksmith friend into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.“The connective thread is the sad state of their lives, their disenchantment and the curse of being dreamers,” Joe Flaherty wrote in a review in The New York Times. The novel, he added, “mines territory rarely encountered in fiction and, in the vernacular of his tough, streetwise characters, delivers a sweetheart of a book.”“Family Business,” the tale of three generations of hustlers from an ethnically mixed New York family, also explored the psychological allure of the big score. Jessie McMullen, the con-man grandfather; Vito, his son, who is in the wholesale meat business; and Adam, his M.I.T.-educated grandson, all find themselves drawn into a risky caper to swipe a plant cell from a California laboratory and sell it to a rival genetic engineering company.“Mr. Patrick could have drawn these characters with broad strokes, concentrating on the heist, and still have come up with a decent thriller,” Arthur Krystal wrote in The Times. “Instead he chose to provide them with interesting lives and, in the cases of Vito and Adam, with the intelligence and self-doubts of men uncomfortable with their moral upbringing.”Mr. Patrick himself was quoted by The Times: “There’s a colorfulness about their value systems that makes them attractive to a writer,” he said, “a willingness to take risks and an ability to meet life sort of head-on and wrestle with it and not retreat into a very secure position.”Some critics were less kind to the feature film versions of both books, which Mr. Patrick himself adapted. “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, was “less a story than a display of acting mannerisms,” the critic Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.Reviewing “Family Business” (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, Mr. Canby found a paucity of wit. He also found the idea that three actors so physically dissimilar could be blood relatives to be a stretch.Still, Mr. Patrick understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, his son Richard said in a phone interview. His father, he said convinced the producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, “I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen.’”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of a down-on-his-luck saloon night manager who gets sucked into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.Seaview BooksVincent Francis Patrick was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in the Bronx, the middle of three children of Vincent and Angela (Hunt) Patrick. His mother was a legal secretary. Growing up, he dreamed of being a writer, and he churned out short stories during his teens.School, however, was another matter. He chafed at the strict discipline at the Roman Catholic schools he attended, and he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after his junior year. In order to make ends meet, he set pins at a Bronx bowling alley before taking a job selling Bibles door to door in Bronx apartment buildings.As he recounted in a 1999 performance at the storytelling series staged by the Moth, he abandoned the job after watching his sales partner persuade a housewife to raid her 7-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for the $7 down payment on a fancy leather-embossed Bible. “I didn’t know yet who I was,” he told the audience. “But I knew who I was not.”In 1954 he married Carole Unger, and the couple had two sons. With a family to support, Mr. Patrick earned his high school diploma and put himself through New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and a partner then started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets.By his mid-30s, however, the call of a literary career had become too loud to ignore, so he left engineering to take another stab at writing professionally. “I wasn’t really happy, and I knew if I didn’t begin to write something, it wasn’t going to be written,” he told People magazine in 1979.Mr. Patrick hammered out a draft of his first book while working as a bartender at an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where his son said he drew inspiration by rubbing elbows with the underworld types from Little Italy who would hang out there.From left, Mickey Rourke, Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts in the film version of “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), for which Mr. Patrick wrote the screenplay.MGM, via Everett CollectionWhile he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Richard Patrick said, it soon became a successful side career. Among other projects, he contributed to the script for “The Devil’s Own” (1997), starring Harrison Ford as a police officer and Brad Pitt as an Irish Republican Army member hiding out in Staten Island, and wrote the two-part television movie “To Serve and Protect” (1999).He was also hired to write early treatments for “Beverly Hills Cop” and “The Godfather III,” although both projects ended up in other hands.In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Patrick is survived by his wife; another son, Glen; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Hollywood, Mr. Patrick once said, was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap. “Once you start,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “it’s hard to get out.” Discussing his third novel, “Smoke Screen,” a thriller involving international terrorism and a deadly virus, he admitted that his screenwriting work had slowed his literary output.“Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years,” he said. “But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I’ve gotten better. And that’s because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It’s different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters.” More

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      in Theater

      Burt Young, ‘Rocky’ Actor Who Played Complex Tough Guys, Dies at 83

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      A former boxer from the streets of Queens, he became a scene stealer with his portrayals of mobsters, cops and working men with soul.Burt Young, a burly Queens-bred actor who leveraged a weary gravitas and bare-knuckled demeanor to build a prolific career as a Hollywood tough guy in films like “Chinatown,” “Once Upon a Time in America” and, most notably, “Rocky,” for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, died on Oct. 8 in Los Angeles. He was 83.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Morea Steingieser.With his bulldog build and his doleful countenance, Mr. Young amassed more than 160 film and television credits. He often played a mob boss, a street-smart detective or a bedraggled working man.But even when he played a villain, he was no mere heavy. Despite his background as a Marine and a professional boxer, Mr. Young brought layers of complexity to his work. The acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who once coached him, called Mr. Young a “library of emotions.”With his no-nonsense approach, he found a kindred spirit in another Hollywood tough guy, the filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in “The Killer Elite” (1975), starring James Caan, and “Convoy” (1978), starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw.“Both were mavericks and outlaws, with a deep respect for art,” his daughter said in a phone interview. “They understood each other because of the intensity and honesty Peckinpah demanded. He had no tolerance for lack of authenticity.”Throughout the early 1970s, Mr. Young made memorable appearances on television shows like “M*A*S*H” and in movies like the mob comedy “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) and “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), a drama about a sailor (James Caan) who falls in love with a prostitute (Marsha Mason).He also proved a scene stealer in a powerful, if brief, appearance in “Chinatown” (1974), Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece, as a cuckolded Los Angeles fisherman who becomes entangled in a tale of incest and murder.His true breakout came two years later, with “Rocky,” the story of a low-level hood and club boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who gets an unlikely bout with the heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Mr. Young played the combustible Paulie, a butcher friend of Rocky’s and the brother of Adrian (Talia Shire), the introverted woman who becomes Rocky’s girlfriend.Although “Rocky” would propel Mr. Stallone, who also wrote the screenplay, to stardom, Mr. Young often said that he had been the bigger name in Hollywood before the project began. “I was the only actor that didn’t audition in the first ‘Rocky,’” he said in a 2017 interview with The Rumpus, a culture website. “And I got the most money for it.”Mr. Young remembered his first meeting with Mr. Stallone, in a studio commissary. “He kneels down next to me,” he recalled. “He says, ‘Mr. Young, I’m Sylvester Stallone. I wrote Rocky,’” — and then, Mr. Young said, he added, “You’ve got to do it, please.”“He’s trying to twist my arm,” Mr. Young said.The film, a gritty and often somber human drama directed by John G. Avildsen, was a far cry from its sometimes cartoonish sequels, all but one of them directed by Mr. Stallone, in which Mr. Young also appeared. “It really wasn’t a fighting story, it was a love story, about someone standing up,” he said of the first movie in a 2006 interview with Bright Lights Film Journal. “Not even winning, just standing up.”“Rocky” became a 1970s landmark. It received 10 Academy Award nominations, including Mr. Young’s for best supporting actor, and won three Oscars, including for best picture.“I made him a rough guy with a sensitivity,” Mr. Young later said of Paulie. “He’s really a marshmallow, even though he yells a lot.”Mr. Young as Paulie in the original “Rocky.” The character was prone to volcanic eruptions, which including smashing up his sister’s house with a baseball bat.Everett CollectionBurt Young — he adopted that name as an actor; sources differ on his name at birth — was born on April 30, 1940, in Queens. His father was a sheet-metal worker, an iceman and eventually a high school shop teacher and dean.Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the Corona section of Queens, Mr. Young got an early taste of the streets. “My dad, trying to make me a gentler kid, sent me to Bryant High School in Astoria, away from my Corona pals,” he wrote in the foreword to “Corona: The Early Years,” (2015), by Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou.“Soon, however, I got thrown out, and it was on to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, getting booted out after one term,” he continued. “Finally, it was the Marines at 16, my pop fibbing my age to get me in.”He started boxing in the Marine Corps and went on to a successful, if relatively brief, professional career under Cus D’Amato, the boxing trainer and manager who shepherded the careers of Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. He had a win-loss record of about 17-1 — his own accounts varied — when he quit the ring.In his late 20s, he was laying carpets and doing other odd jobs when he became infatuated with a woman who tended bar, and who told him that she dreamed of studying acting with Mr. Strasberg. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was,” he told Bright Lights. “I thought it was a girl.”Mr. Young set up a meeting for the two of them with Mr. Strasberg, the father of method acting, and ended up studying with him for two years. “Acting had everything I was fishing for,” he recalled. “In my life till then, I’d used tension to hold myself upright. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”His many other film credits ranged from “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1989), a harrowing adaptation of the scandalous 1964 novel by Hubert Selby Jr. about lost souls from the underside of midcentury Brooklyn, to the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School.” Mr. Young also wrote and starred in “Uncle Joe Shannon” (1978), the story of a jazz trumpeter whose life implodes before he finds redemption.In addition to his daughter, Mr. Young is survived by a brother, Robert, and a grandson. His wife, Gloria, died in 1974.Mr. Young, second from left, performed onstage with Robert De Niro, center, and Ralph Macchio, third from right, in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” which opened at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1986.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Young also had a long career in theater, including a role alongside Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” a play about a drug dealer and his son that opened at the Off Broadway Public Theater in Manhattan in 1986 and later moved to Broadway.Mel Gussow of The New York Times praised Mr. Young’s humor-laced performance as Mr. De Niro’s partner and lackey. He singled out one scene for praise in which Mr. Young, he wrote, was “sheepishly pulling up the wide waistband of his loud shorts while insisting that he is not fat but has ‘big bones.’”Mr. Young was an avid painter who sold his work, and whose moody portraits showed the influence of Picasso and Matisse. “I don’t think you can put me in a bottle as an actor or an artist,” he said in a 2016 video interview. “Perhaps the acting, I’m a little more structured.”In acting, he added, he zeroed in on precise emotional cues to express, say, greed or anger — to “fatten up” his characters.Little wonder, then, that his Paulie in “Rocky” leaped off the screen with volcanic eruptions — tossing his sister’s Thanksgiving turkey into an alley in a fit of rage, smashing up her house with a baseball bat.“Paulie was a pretty ugly guy many times,” he said. But, he added, “they miscast me.“I’m a lovable son of a gun. It’s just that I go astray here and there.” More

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      in Theater

      Steven Lutvak, Whose Darkly Comic Show Won a Tony, Dies at 64

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      He wrote several musicals without attracting much notice. Then he struck Broadway gold with “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”Steven Lutvak, a composer and lyricist whose only Broadway show, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” — a black comedy about a killer in London who bumps off the relatives who stand in the way of his becoming a wealthy royal — won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Oct. 9 at his work studio in Manhattan. He was 64.The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Michael McGowan, his husband.Over the years, Mr. Lutvak wrote several musicals that were staged in regional theaters and Off Off Broadway. But none were nearly as successful as “A Gentleman’s Guide.”Set in Edwardian England, it is the story of Monty Navarro, a poor man who, after learning that he is a distant relative of the rich D’Ysquith clan (and then being denied a claim to its lineage), kills the eight kinfolk (all played by one actor) in the line of succession between him and the head of the family, the Ninth Earl of Highhurst.The show opened in November 2013 and ran for 905 performances over more than two years.In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said that the score — Mr. Lutvak wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Robert L. Freedman — “establishes itself as one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to be heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or so, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting have taken over.”“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” was nominated for 10 Tonys in 2014 — Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman were nominated for original score — and won for Mr. Freedman’s book, Darko Tresnjak’s direction and Linda Cho’s costume design, as well as for best musical.“Steve was a gifted composer, lyricist and musician, but more than anything he was a born storyteller,” Mr. Freedman said by phone. “I was able to speak to him in my own language about story, plot and characters in a way that not every composer can do.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      in Music

      Carla Bley, Jazz Composer, Arranger and Provocateur, Dies at 87

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      Her music, which ranged from chamber miniatures to blaring fanfares, was suffused with a slyly subversive attitude.Carla Bley, an irrepressibly original composer, arranger and pianist responsible for more than 60 years of wily provocations in and around jazz, died on Tuesday at her home in Willow, a hamlet in upstate New York. She was 87.Her longtime partner in life and music, the bassist Steve Swallow, said the cause was complications of brain cancer.Ms. Bley’s influential body of work included delicate chamber miniatures and rugged, blaring fanfares, with a lot of varied terrain in between. She was branded an avant-gardist early in her career, but that term applied more to her slyly subversive attitude than to the formal character of her music, which always maintained a place for tonal harmony and standard rhythm.Within that given frame, Ms. Bley found plenty of room to confound expectations and harbor contradictions. In the 2011 biography “Carla Bley,” Amy C. Beal described her music as “vernacular yet sophisticated, appealing yet cryptic, joyous and mournful, silly and serious at the same time.”Certainly, few composers in Ms. Bley’s generation were as prolific or polymorphic in their output while projecting an identifiable point of view. She wrote elegant, drifting songs that became jazz standards, like “Ida Lupino” and “Lawns”; yearning, cinematic big-band pieces, like “Fleur Carnivore”; iconoclastic rearrangements of national anthems and classical fare; and unwieldy, uncategorizable projects like her jazz-rock opera “Escalator Over the Hill.”Originally issued on three LPs, “Escalator Over the Hill” was named album of the year by the weekly British publication Melody Maker in 1973, the same year it won a Grand Prix du Disque, France’s most prestigious award for musical recordings. With a surrealistic libretto by the poet Paul Haines, a cast including some of the era’s leading jazz renegades and vocals by Linda Ronstadt and Jack Bruce of the rock band Cream, it captured the woolly, insubordinate spirit of the age, just as it consolidated the elements of Ms. Bley’s style.That style could be a lot to take in, as John S. Wilson noted a decade later in The New York Times: “She made strong and dramatic use of darkly colored ensembles, of the tuba as a solo instrument or the core of a passage, of trombone solos that could be wildly broad and flatulent or warm and snuggling, of brass-band ensembles with a wry, ragged sound, of saxophones that came squirming up out of stolid fundamentalist ground to a shrill avant-garde ecstasy.”Ms. Bley’s portfolio as a leader included a big band stocked with some of the leading musicians in New York; a fusionesque sextet, whose ranks included Larry Willis on acoustic and electric piano and Hiram Bullock on guitar; and a chamberlike trio featuring Mr. Swallow and the saxophonist Andy Sheppard. She was the original conductor and arranger of the Liberation Music Orchestra, the revolutionary-minded ensemble formed by the bassist Charlie Haden in 1969, and continued to lead it in tribute after Mr. Haden’s death in 2014.When she was recognized as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2015, Ms. Bley expressed wonderment, still convinced of her fringe existence. “When I first toured Europe with my own band, the audience threw things at me — and I mean fruit mostly, but bottles too,” she said in 2016. “I loved it. Nobody else got fruit thrown at them. That’s so wonderful! Anything that happened that was out of the ordinary, I appreciated.”Ms. Bley at her home in Willow, N.Y., in 2016. “I’m a composer who also plays piano,” she once said, “and I sometimes feel I should wear a sign onstage saying ‘She Wrote the Music.’”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesBorn Lovella May Borg in Oakland, Calif., on May 11, 1936, Ms. Bley came to music largely through the ministrations of her father, Emil Carl Borg, a church organist, choirmaster and piano teacher. She was 8 when her mother, Arline (Anderson) Borg, died of heart failure.Ms. Bley’s childhood was dominated by church meetings rather than movies or pop culture. “I was doused in religion, soaked in it, terrified of going to hell,” she recalled in 1974. But she was also an instinctual nonconformist, and by her teens she had broken free of those religious moorings, initially to pursue an interest in competitive roller-skating.She first encountered jazz at age 12, via a concert by the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. At 17, she hitchhiked across the country to New York City, epicenter of the jazz scene. She worked as a cigarette girl at Birdland, where the Count Basie Orchestra was often in residence. “I was just this girl from Oakland in a green dress I made myself, looking totally out of place, un-New Yorkerly, holding cigarettes,” she recalled. “I think I was noticeable.”One musician who took notice was the pianist Paul Bley. They married in 1957, and he encouraged her to write; most of her earliest compositions appeared on his albums. The noted composer George Russell provided further validation when he commissioned her to write for his sextet. Some of her other pieces, like “Ictus” and “Jesus Maria,” were recorded by the clarinetist and saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre’s trio, with Mr. Swallow and Mr. Bley.Jazz was undergoing a creative revolution in the 1960s — and, partly by association, Ms. Bley found herself at the turbulent center of an emerging avant-garde. She was a founder of the Jazz Composers Guild, which sought better working conditions for musicians. Though short-lived, it yielded a productive institution: the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, which Ms. Bley formed with the Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler. After she divorced Mr. Bley in 1967, she and Mr. Mantler married.Ms. Bley is survived by a daughter from that marriage, the vocalist, pianist and composer Karen Mantler, and by Mr. Swallow, her partner of more than 30 years.Ms. Bley in concert in Amsterdam in 1989.Frans Schellekens/Redferns, via Getty ImagesBy the late 1960s, Ms. Bley was widely recognized as a composer full of fresh ideas: The prominent vibraphonist Gary Burton featured her music exclusively on “A Genuine Tong Funeral,” an RCA release on which he led an ensemble that included Mr. Mantler, the saxophonist Gato Barbieri and the tuba and baritone saxophone player Howard Johnson, among others.Those and other musicians from the ranks of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra formed the core personnel on “Escalator Over the Hill.” Though it was intended for release on a major label, Ms. Bley and Mr. Mantler grew disillusioned with label negotiations and formed JCOA Records to release it — along with the New Music Distribution Service, a pioneering nonprofit distributor for independent releases.After Ms. Bley received a Guggenheim fellowship for composition in 1972, she and Mr. Mantler formed another label, Watt. It released more than two dozen of her albums over the next 35 years, with distribution through ECM Records.Ms. Bley had more than fleeting contact with rock: In 1975 she joined a band with Mr. Bruce on bass and Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones on guitar. And she wrote all the songs for “Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports,” a 1981 album credited to Mr. Mason, the drummer in Pink Floyd, with lead vocals by Robert Wyatt, formerly of Soft Machine.During the 2010s, Ms. Bley focused a good deal of her energies on the Liberation Music Orchestra, preserving Charlie Haden’s musical vision as well as his commitment to left-leaning social activism: She included a new version of her late-’60s composition “Silent Spring” on the orchestra’s fifth album, “Time/Life,” released in 2016. As a performer she worked mainly with Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Swallow, touring internationally and releasing several albums for ECM.Ms. Bley outside her home in 2016.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesFeaturing some of Ms. Bley’s sparest and most beguilingly lyrical compositions, these albums — the most recent of which, “Life Goes On,” was released in 2020 — also naturally put a spotlight on her piano playing, which had long been a source of mixed feelings for her.“I’m a composer who also plays piano,” she told the German journalist Thomas Venker in 2019, “and I sometimes feel I should wear a sign onstage saying ‘She Wrote the Music.’”But speaking with The Times in 2016, Ms. Bley noted with satisfaction that the idiosyncrasies in her playing were her own:“There’s nobody that plays like me — why would they? So if I’ve had an influence, maybe it would be if they decided to play like themselves. In other words, the whole idea of not playing like anybody is a way of playing.” More

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      in Television

      Suzanne Somers, Star of ‘Three’s Company,’ Is Dead at 76

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      She became famous for playing, as she put it, “one of the best dumb blondes that’s ever been done,” then became a sex-positive health and diet mogul.Suzanne Somers, who gained fame by playing a ditsy blonde on the sitcom “Three’s Company” and then later built a health and diet business empire, most notably with the ThighMaster, died on Sunday at her home in Palm Springs, Calif. She was one day away from turning 77.The cause was breast cancer, Caroline Somers, her daughter-in-law, said.“Three’s Company” first went on the air in 1977. The show told the story of two roommates — Chrissy Snow, a secretary, played by Ms. Somers; and Janet Wood, a florist, played by Joyce DeWitt — who welomed a man to join them as a third roommate: Jack Tripper, a culinary student played by John Ritter. Since their landlord would frown on an unmarried man living with two single women, the group pretended that Jack was gay.High jinks ensued. The show featured slapstick comedy, lighthearted misunderstandings and jokey one-liners.By the show’s fifth season, “Three’s Company” was one of the nation’s most popular sitcoms. Ms. Somers’s acrimonious contract negotiations with ABC became news. In 1982, The Times reported that she had wanted a raise to $50,000 from $30,000 an episode. In recent years, Ms. Somers repeatedly said that she had sought $150,000, in line with Mr. Ritter’s pay.She did not get the pay increase. Instead, she was fired.“I’ve been playing what I think is one of the best dumb blondes that’s ever been done, but I never got any credit,” she told The Times that year. “I did it so well that everyone thought I really was a dumb blonde.”Ms. Somers’s first notable role came in the 1973 film “American Graffiti.” She appeared only briefly, mouthing “I love you” to one of the stars, Richard Dreyfuss; the credits listed her as “Blonde in T-Bird.”But that scene was beguiling enough to earn her a spot on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, who, Ms. Somers recalled earlier this year in an interview with Page Six, introduced her as “the mysterious blonde in the Thunderbird from ‘American Graffiti.’”Ms. Somers in New York in 2020. After leaving “Three’s Company,” she appeared in many other television shows, including “Step by Step.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAppearing on “The Tonight Show,” she said, got her the audition for “Three’s Company.”In the years after “Three’s Company,” Ms. Somers remained recognizable for frequent appearances in movies and on television, including the 1990s sitcom “Step by Step,” a stint co-hosting the television series “Candid Camera” and a wide variety of talk shows.But her later reputation sprang from her business acumen — which proved to be more formidable than ABC’s executives appreciated in 1980.She and her husband, Alan Hamel, made the ThighMaster, a workout device, one of the most recognizable products in infomercial history, thanks in part to Ms. Somers’s many leggy appearances alongside the product. The ads showcased her beauty and her advice that is “it’s easy to squeeze, squeeze your way to shapely hips and thighs.”More than 10 million units of the ThighMaster have been sold over the years at an average price of about $30, Caroline Somers said. She is not only Ms. Somers’s daughter-in-law but also the president of her mother-in-law’s company, which owns the ThighMaster and has overseen Ms. Somers’s other business and entertainment activities.In the mid-2000s, Ms. Somers was appearing on the Home Shopping Network for more than 25 hours every month. She was the pitchperson for everything from cowboy boots to waffle irons.Ms. Somers also wrote more than 27 books, including 14 best sellers, which tended to focus on issues related to the body and aging.Some of the methods she promoted — particularly bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, a treatment that she called “the juice of youth” for menopausal women — have often been criticized by doctors as unproven and possibly unsafe, even as the market for them has grown.The foundation of her business efforts was the sex positivity that she had embodied since “Three’s Company.”“A sexual person,” she told The Times for a profile in 2020, “is a healthy person.”Suzanne Marie Mahoney was born on Oct. 16, 1946, in San Bruno, Calif. Her father, Francis, had some success as an athlete but not enough for a lasting career, and he spent much of Suzanne’s youth working at a brewery. Her mother, Marion (Turner) Mahoney, was a medical secretary.Suzanne Mahoney was kicked out of a Catholic high school when nuns discovered love letters she had written. She graduated from Capuchino High School, a public high school, in San Bruno.She attended Lone Mountain College (which later became part of the University of San Francisco), but she dropped out after she discovered in 1965 that she was pregnant, and she married the baby’s father, Bruce Somers.They divorced in the late 1960s. Not long afterward, she worked as a prize model on a game show hosted by Alan Hamel, a frequent TV host. They quickly began dating and married in 1977.In addition to Caroline Somers and Mr. Hamel, Ms. Somers is survived by Bruce Somers, her son from her first marriage; two stepchildren, Stephen and Leslie Hamel; two siblings, Maureen Gilmartin and Dan Mahoney; two granddaughters; and four step-grandchildren.Ms. Somers was first diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer more than 20 years ago. She pivoted from selling mainly jewelry, apparel and weight loss and diet products to focusing on organic skin care and cleaning goods, along with her promotion of hormones.She managed to sustain an energetic calendar of live performances. An autobiographical show on Broadway, “The Blonde in the Thunderbird,” was critically panned and closed after only 15 performances, but she had better luck in Las Vegas, where she enjoyed many years of song-and-dance gigs, featuring flamboyant costumes and no small amount of glitter.At the time of her Times profile in 2020, Ms. Somers had recently fallen from the private tram on her 93-acre compound in Palm Springs while partying with friends. Yet a reporter observed her at a spa in New York City managing the feat of walking with “a vampy strut” even while using crutches. More

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      in Television

      Phyllis Coates, the First Lois Lane on TV’s ‘Superman,’ Dies at 96

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      She replaced Noel Neill, who had played Lois in two Superman movie serials; Ms. Neill in turn replaced her after one season.Phyllis Coates, who played the reporter Lois Lane, one of the most enduring characters in popular culture, in a theatrical film and the first season of the popular “Adventures of Superman” television series, died on Wednesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 96.Her daughter Laura Press confirmed the death, at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s retirement community.Ms. Coates was a busy if not well-known actress when she became the second onscreen Lois. Noel Neill had played the role in two 15-part movie serials, “Superman” (1948) and “Atom Man vs. Superman” (1950), in which Kirk Alyn played the Man of Steel.“But when there were talks about making a theatrical film — which would become ‘Superman and the Mole Men’ — Kirk Alyn didn’t want to do the role anymore,” Larry T. Ward, the author of “Truth, Justice & the American Way,” a biography of Ms. Neill, said in a phone interview. “He felt he had been typecast. So rather than just replacing Superman, they replaced the entire cast.”In “Mole Men” (1951), Lois and her fellow Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent, who is also Superman (George Reeves replaced Mr. Alyn in the role), witness the panic in a small town when two small, glowing, balding underground beings emerge from their home deep in an oil well.The “Adventures of Superman” TV series debuted the next year, with Ms. Coates, Mr. Reeves, Jack Larson as the cub reporter Jimmy Olsen and John Hamilton as Perry White, The Daily Planet’s cantankerous top editor.Ms. Coates’s Lois was serious and sometimes bullheaded. But she sometimes needed Superman to save her; Lois was an archetypal damsel in distress (and was even more so when Ms. Neill played her). This was the case when she was trapped in a mine, held on a ledge outside the newspaper’s building by a man who had strapped dynamite to himself, and captured by thugs smuggling fugitives into Canada.The series was not lavishly produced, as was evident in the characters’ wardrobes, which rarely changed.“Oh boy — I had one suit! One suit, and a double in case I got egg on it!” Ms. Coates told The Los Angeles Times in 1994 when she was cast as the mother of another Lois, Teri Hatcher, in an episode of “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.” “George’s dresser dressed me. My makeup man was Harry Thomas, who made up every monster in Hollywood.”In a statement, Ms. Hatcher said, “I’m sure she was aware of how much the fans would enjoy that inside nod to her work on the original TV series.”Ms. Coates stayed through the show’s first season but did not return in the fall of 1953, Mr. Ward said, because she had a commitment to film a pilot, which was ultimately not picked up as a series.In the book “Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes” (2006), by Tom Weaver, Ms. Coates was quoted as saying that the producer of “Adventures of Superman,” Whitney Ellsworth, offered her “about four or five times what I was getting if I’d come back, but that she “really wanted to get out of ‘Superman.’”Ms. Press said that difficult working conditions and a desire to play other roles led Ms. Coates to leave the series.Re-enter Ms. Neill, who played Lois until the series ended in 1958.Mr. Reeves died of a gunshot wound a year later. The death was ruled a suicide.Ms. Coates “got a lot of fan mail,” her daughter said, “most of it for ‘Superman,’ but also for the westerns she did with Whip Wilson and Johnny Mack Brown.”Everett CollectionPhyllis Coates was born Gypsie Ann Stell on Jan. 15, 1927, in Wichita Falls, Texas, to William Stell, known as Rush, and Jackie Evarts. After graduating from high school, Gypsie moved to Los Angeles, where she was a chorus girl in shows produced by Earl Carroll and acted in sketches in a variety revue. She also performed on a European U.S.O. tour. In 1948, she signed a contract with Warner Bros.Ms. Coates’s credits include Alice McDoakes, the wife of Joe McDoakes (played by George O’Hanlon), in a long-running series of comedy shorts, with names like “So You Want to Be a Baby Sitter” and “So You Want to Get Rich Quick,” between 1948 and 1956. She was also the star of a serial, “Panther Girl of the Kongo” (1955), in which she rode an elephant; a guest star on episodes of TV series like “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide” and “Perry Mason,” as well as “Leave It to Beaver,” which was directed by Norman Tokar, her husband at the time.“She got a lot of fan mail, most of it for ‘Superman,’ but also for the westerns she did with Whip Wilson and Johnny Mack Brown,” Ms. Press said.In addition to Ms. Press, Ms. Coates is survived by another daughter, Zoe Christopher, and a granddaughter. Her marriages to Richard Bare (who directed the McDoakes shorts), Robert Nelms, Mr. Tokar and Howard Press all ended in divorce. A son, David Tokar, died in 2011.In 1953, while she was still portraying Lois Lane, Ms. Coates told The Los Angeles Times that her 4-year-old daughter questioned (as many fans did) why Superman’s Clark Kent disguise fooled people, even though it was just a pair of glasses, a hat and a suit over his Superman outfit.Her daughter, Ms. Coates said, “just can’t understand why I can’t see through Superman’s disguise in the telecasts. She thinks I’m quite stupid about the whole thing.” More

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      Piper Laurie, Reluctant Starlet Turned Respected Actress, Dies at 91

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      She began as just another product of the studio system, but she went on to receive three Oscar nominations, win an Emmy and appear on Broadway.Piper Laurie, who escaped the 1950s Hollywood starlet-making machinery to become a respected actress with three Oscar nominations and an Emmy Award, died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91.Her manager, Marion Rosenberg, confirmed the death, The Associated Press reported.Ms. Laurie’s first Academy Award nomination was for best actress in “The Hustler” (1961), in which she played a lonely alcoholic who hooks up with a dissolute pool player played by Paul Newman. After a 15-year break from making movies, she earned a comeback nomination for her performance as the deranged religious mother of a telekinetic teenager (Sissy Spacek) in “Carrie” (1976). She received her third nomination for her role as the estranged mother of a young deaf woman (Marlee Matlin) in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986).Piper Laurie with Paul Newman in a scene from “The Hustler” in 1961. Her role in the film as a lonely alcoholic brought her an Oscar nomination as best actress.Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesJust before that, she had won an Emmy for “Promise” (1986), an acclaimed CBS movie about schizophrenia in which she played James Garner’s helpful ex-girlfriend. She received eight other Emmy nominations, including for her roles as the vengeful paper-mill manager on the original “Twin Peaks,” Rachel Ward’s sympathetic married friend in “The Thorn Birds” and the comically vicious mother of a coldhearted psychiatrist on the NBC sitcom “Frasier.”Ms. Laurie, whose birth name was Rosetta Jacobs, was 17 when Universal-International signed her as a contract player and gave her the screen name Piper Laurie — a change about which she had mixed feelings. It was the era of publicity gimmicks, an attempt to brand new performers, especially starlets, with fabricated, sometimes outrageous histories or habits. The studio was looking for an angle that had not been used before. A publicist on the set of a movie she was shooting observed a scene that involved putting flowers in a salad. The publicist decided to position her as the girl who ate flowers — orchids, rose petals, marigolds. And so she did, dutifully, for photographs and interviews. (“They didn’t taste so bad,” she told a United Press International reporter in 1991.)Publicity tours and stunts were so much a part of her career that in 1953, Collier’s magazine ran an article about how many she did — happily, the writer observed — and how much money her pictures were making for her employer.Behind her smile, however, Ms. Laurie was growing disillusioned.“Every role I played was the same girl, no matter whether my co-star was Rock Hudson or Tony Curtis or Rory Calhoun,” she told The New York Times in 1977, referring to the movies she had made while under contract with Universal. “She was innocent, sexual, simple — the less intelligent, the better, and complexity was forbidden.” She rebelled and broke her contract in 1956.As early as 1959, Ms. Laurie was brazenly frank in interviews about her experience. In one, published in The Tribune of Columbus in Indiana, she said, “If I’d continued in Hollywood, doing those old, insipid parts, I think by now I would have killed myself.”Piper Laurie in the movie “Carrie” in 1976 playing the deranged religious mother of a telekinetic teenager.United Artists/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesShe decided to hold out for better movie roles, doing television and stage work for four years or so until eventually the right thing came along: “The Hustler.”Rosetta Jacobs was born in Detroit on Jan. 22, 1932, the younger of two daughters of Alfred Jacobs, a furniture dealer, and Charlotte Sadie (Alperin) Jacobs. Her grandparents were Jewish immigrants, from Poland on her father’s side and from Russia on her mother’s.When Rosetta was 6, she was sent to accompany her older sister, who was asthmatic, to a sanitarium in Southern California. Ms. Laurie wrote in her 2011 memoir, “Learning to Live Out Loud,” that she never understood why she had to go too. Her parents told her it was to “keep your sister company,” but in hindsight, she wrote, “They must have been suffering in ways they believed we couldn’t understand” and just couldn’t deal with parenthood at the time. Three years later, their parents moved to Los Angeles and had them released.Although Ms. Laurie hated those years in the sanitarium, she eventually saw them as having benefited her. “My exile had cultivated an imagination that grew like a giant, sheltering flower,” she wrote in her memoir. “It was a lifetime gift.”Rosetta was unusually anxious about public speaking, so she was given elocution lessons. Those led to small acting roles, and with her mother’s encouragement she found a part in a play presented by a low-profile theater company in Los Angeles, won a screen test in a local contest (but did badly on the test itself), took part in comedy sketches at a resort and eventually found an agent. She and another newcomer, Rock Hudson, signed seven-year movie contracts on the same day.Piper Laurie and Ronald Reagan at a Hollywood party in 1950. They dated for a time. Associated Press/Associated PressUniversal cast her in “Louisa” (1950), a romantic comedy in which she played Ronald Reagan’s teenage daughter. (They dated after filming was over.) Over the next four years, she appeared in a dozen films, including “The Prince Who Was a Thief” (1951), “Son of Ali Baba” (1952), “The Mississippi Gambler” (1953) and “Francis Goes to the Races” (1951), in which one co-star was a talking mule.After moving to New York in the mid-1950s, Ms. Laurie acted in Off Broadway stage productions and television dramas. But she did not make her Broadway debut until 1965, when she starred as the fragile teenage heroine, Laura, in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” with Maureen Stapleton and Pat Hingle. She returned to Broadway only once, in 2002, as part of the ensemble cast of “Morning’s at Seven.”Her later film career included “Tim” (1979), in which she played an older woman who has a relationship with a younger man who is mentally disabled (Mel Gibson, then 23, in one of his first films); Sean Penn’s drama “The Crossing Guard” (1995), starring Jack Nicholson; and “The Grass Harp” (1995), based on a Truman Capote novel.She also appeared in two horror movies, “The Faculty” (1998) and “Bad Blood” (2012); in both, she played a cult matriarch. In 2018, she appeared in two movies: “Snapshots,” a drama in which she played a grandmother with a secret past, and “White Boy Rick,” a crime drama starring Matthew McConaughey.Ms. Laurie had a long romantic relationship with the director John Frankenheimer, who directed her in the original live television version of “Days of Wine and Roses” in New York, but they never married. While promoting “The Hustler,” Ms. Laurie was interviewed by Joe Morgenstern, then an entertainment reporter for The New York Herald Tribune and later a film critic for Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. They began dating and married in 1962.Piper Laurie and Joe Morgenstern, then an entertainment reporter, at his desk at The Herald Tribune in New York shortly after their engagement in 1961.John Lent/Associated PressThey stayed together for two decades and lived in Woodstock, in upstate New York, for much of that time. She did a handful of guest roles on television in the first years of their marriage, then disappeared from the screen altogether in 1966 until “Carrie” — which she originally thought was meant to be a comedy — came along a decade later. In between, she focused on her marriage; sculpture, which she studied at the Art Students League in New York; and a new daughter, Anna.“Being a mother and a stone carver really helped me to find my voice,” she told The Hollywood Interview, an entertainment blog, decades later. She and Mr. Morgenstern divorced in 1982. There was no immediate information on her survivors.When asked in a 2011 interview with the Archive of American Television what acting advice she would offer, Ms. Laurie said, “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything.” But she acknowledged that her childhood shyness may have helped her “learn to listen, really, deeply, fully.”Later, she told The Hollywood Interview, she learned the relationship between focus and fear by doing live television. “The moment we went live, suddenly the air changed in the room and I was totally focused,” she recalled. “The panic, the terror, the preference to have a truck hit me was gone.”It was even better than stage acting, she said: “Live TV had the intensity of three or four opening nights on Broadway all smacked together.” More

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      Mark Goddard, a Star of the ’60s Series ‘Lost in Space,’ Dies at 87

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      For three seasons, he and a family of five, a wily (and annoying) saboteur and a talking robot were marooned on a distant planet in the far-off future: 1997.Mark Goddard, the actor best known for playing Maj. Don West on the fanciful and popular 1960s science-fiction series “Lost in Space,” died on Tuesday at a hospice center in Hingham, Mass. He was 87.His son John said the cause was pulmonary fibrosis. Major West was the pilot of a spaceship carrying a family of five, a stowaway and a robot in the far distant future — the year 1997. On their way to help colonize a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, their ship went seriously off course, leaving the cast marooned on a different, inhospitable one (though luckily the atmosphere was suitable for human life).That set the stage for encounters with giant spiders, rock monsters, frog people, cyborg armies, space hippies, alien prisons, intergalactic beauty pageants and titanium shortages.The show — created by Irwin Allen, a producer later known for popular disaster films like “The Towering Inferno” — ran for three seasons (1965-68) on CBS. Major West was theoretically the romantic lead, a handsome single man in a uniform, and the first season hinted at a budding romantic relationship between him and the family’s oldest child, Judy (Marta Kristen). But that subplot soon faded into the background.For various reasons, including being scheduled opposite the new comic-book-like “Batman,” “Lost in Space” changed in the second and third seasons from a science-fiction project to a campy series that was more comedy than adventure.Mr. Goddard’s character no longer found himself setting up force fields, aiming his ray gun at rock-throwing giants, navigating rugged new planetary terrain or fending off kidnappers from another dimension. He was more likely to be left behind analyzing soil samples while Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris), the saboteur stowaway, little Will (Billy Mumy) and the robot (Bob May, with the voice of Dick Tufeld) were off getting into trouble with a new creature or machine.Mr. Goddard’s co-stars on “Lost in Space” included, from left, Marta Kristen, Billy Mumy and Angela Cartwright.20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett CollectionThe other regulars in the cast were Guy Williams and June Lockhart as the space-traveling parents and Angela Cartwright as their other daughter.Don was always the character most annoyed by Dr. Smith, and least sympathetic to him. He could be both hot-tempered and coldhearted, but he dutifully took a spacewalk, against his better judgment, to rescue Smith from the clutches of a seductive alien creature. If it had been up to him alone, he admitted, he would have let Dr. Smith drift through space for eternity.Major West was a role Mr. Goddard had taken reluctantly, not being a fan of science fiction. In his 2008 memoir, “To Space and Back,” he referred to his space uniform, his wardrobe for the show, as “silver lamé pajamas and my pretty silver ski boots.”Charles Harvey Goddard was born in Lowell, Mass., on July 24, 1936. He was the youngest of five children of Clarence and Ruth (Delaronde) Goddard. He grew up in nearby Scituate, Mass., where his father owned and managed the local five-and-ten-cent store.Chuck, as he was known at the time, attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, about 70 miles away, with no particular career ambition. He became interested in acting after appearing in one college play, George M. Cohan’s “Seven Keys to Baldpate.” In 1957, in the middle of his junior year, he transferred to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Two years later, he moved to Los Angeles.He made his screen debut in a 1959 television movie that was meant to be a pilot for “The Joan Crawford Show.” (The series never happened.) He changed his first name to Mark at the suggestion of Chuck Connors, the star of “The Rifleman,” a western series on which Mr. Goddard made a guest appearance — no need to have two Chucks in the show’s credits.After only three weeks in town, Mr. Goddard was cast in a network series. He played Cully, the young deputy sheriff in the short-lived western “Johnny Ringo” (1959-60). A former sharpshooter at a carnival, Cully was brave enough to stand up to armed robbers and bloodthirsty bounty hunters but sensitive enough to be traumatized after killing a man for the first time.“All this time I’ve been handling guns and not knowing what they do,” Cully said after shooting a man dead in a saloon, in self-defense.From left, Mr. Goddard, Robert Taylor and Tige Andrews in a publicity photo for the crime series “The Detectives.” The New York Times described Mr. Goddard’s character as “a brash but efficient young police lieutenant.”Everett CollectionWhen “Johnny Ringo” ended after a year, Mr. Goddard joined the second season of “The Detectives,” a crime drama starring Robert Taylor. Mr. Goddard’s character, Sgt. Chris Ballard, was described by The New York Times as “a brash but efficient young police lieutenant.” “The Detectives” ended its run in 1962. Mr. Goddard’s next series, “Many Happy Returns” (1964-65), a comedy with Elinor Donahue, was also canceled after just a year. Then “Lost in Space” came along.When the show ended in 1968, he had difficulty finding acting jobs. He worked as an actors’ agent for a while, then had the opportunity to make his Broadway debut — in “The Act,” with Liza Minnelli, in 1977. Richard Eder of The Times said the production was “a first-rate cabaret show” but not really theater. It ran for eight months on star power alone.After that, Mr. Goddard appeared in a horror movie, “Blue Sunshine” (1978), and made guest appearances on several series. He entered the world of soap operas in the 1980s, appearing briefly on “One Life to Live” in 1981 and “General Hospital” in 1985 and 1986.Mr. Goddard was married three times. His marriage to Marcia Rogers (1960-68), a press agent at the time, ended in divorce, as did his marriage to the actress Susan Anspach (1970-78). In 1994 he married Evelyn Pezzulich, an English professor, who survives him. In addition to his son John, from that marriage, his survivors include two children from his marriage to Ms. Rogers, Melissa and Michael Goddard; two stepchildren from his marriage to Susan Anspach, Caleb and Catherine Goddard; two sisters, June Merrill and Patricia Panet-Raymond; and several grandchildren.In his 50s, Mr. Goddard went home again. Returning to college after 30 years, he earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and a master’s degree in education from Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. In 1991, he became a special-education teacher in Middleborough, Mass.Even after he began teaching, he took a screen acting job every now and then. He made a cameo appearance in the movie version of “Lost in Space” (1998) and was seen in the more movie dramas “Overnight Sensation” (2000) and “Soupernatural” (2010). But he no longer thought of himself as an actor.“I had a wonderful life as an actor,” he told The Houston Chronicle in 1997. “But I didn’t want to be sitting around in Hollywood, kind of a halfway celebrity looking for his next job.”Bernard Mokam More