Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Pete Brown, Who Put Words to ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ Dies at 82

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      A British Beat poet, he wrote lyrics for the band Cream and, after it broke up, continued to collaborate with Jack Bruce, the group’s lead singer and bassist.Pete Brown, a British Beat poet who wrote the lyrics to songs by the rock supergroup Cream, including the hits “White Room,” “I Feel Free” and “Sunshine of Your Love,” and who after the band’s breakup collaborated for nearly five decades with Jack Bruce, its lead vocalist and bassist, died on Friday at his home in Hastings, on the southeast coast of England. He was 82.His manager, Peter Conway, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Brown entered Cream’s circle at the request of Ginger Baker, the band’s drummer. They knew each other because Mr. Brown performed his poetry backed by jazz musicians and Mr. Baker had gotten his start in jazz combos; Mr. Baker asked Mr. Brown for help on the lyrics to the group’s debut single, “Wrapping Paper,” which preceded the release of “Fresh Cream,” its first album, in 1966.Mr. Brown quickly discovered a career-long writing partner in Mr. Bruce, whose fluid and propulsive playing provided counterpoint to Mr. Baker’s explosive drumming and the guitar pyrotechnics of Cream’s third member, Eric Clapton.In a short documentary about the making of “White Room” seen on Dutch television in 2018, Mr. Brown recalled, “It became evident that Jack and I had a chemistry, and when we wrote ‘I Feel Free,’ which was a big hit, so everyone went, ‘OK, that’s a team, let it roll.’”Mr. Brown did not provide the lyrics to all of Cream’s songs, but he was the group’s primarily lyricist. On its second album, “Disraeli Gears” (1967), he wrote the words to “Sunshine of Your Love,” a collaboration with Mr. Bruce and Mr. Clapton, as well as “Dance the Night Away” and two other songs.“White Room,” one of four songs he wrote with Mr. Bruce on the band’s third album, “Wheels of Fire” (1968), rose to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968. It was the second-highest ranking a Cream single achieved; “Sunshine” had peaked at No. 5 earlier that year.“White Room” began as a poem Mr. Brown wrote, inspired by his stay some years earlier in an actual white room, in an apartment.“I had been semi-destitute, a semi-bum, living on people’s floors, and eventually I began to earn some money from songwriting, and the white room was the first place I moved into,” he told the culture website Please Kill Me in 2022. In the Dutch documentary he added that he had stopped drinking and taking drugs in the room and decided to be a “songwriter rather than an itinerant poet.”“White Room,” begins with these lines:In the white room with black curtains near the stationBlack roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlingsSilver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyesDawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentmentI’ll wait in this place where the sun never shinesWait in this place where the shadows run from themselvesMr. Brown in concert in 1970 in Copenhagen. He found his voice as a singer in the decade after Cream broke up, performing with a number of bands.Jorgen Angel/Redferns, Getty ImagesPeter Ronald Brown was born on Dec. 25, 1940, in Surrey, England, with World War II underway. His parents had moved there after fleeing London during the Blitz. His father, Nathan Brown, whose birth name was Nathan Leibowitz, and his mother, Kitty Cohen, sold shoes.Peter started writing poems as a teenager, fired up by the works of Dylan Thomas, Federico García Lorca and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But he detoured, at least temporarily, to journalism, which he studied for nine months in 1958 at the Polytechnic-Regent Street (now the University of Westminster) in London.He returned to verse and published his first poem in 1961 in Evergreen Review, the boundary-breaking literary magazine based in the United States that filled its pages with work by luminaries like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.In one early poem, “Few,” composed under the fear of nuclear war, Mr. Brown wrote:Alone and half drunk hopefulI staggered into the bogsat Green Park stationand found 30 written on the wall.Appalled I lurched outInto the windy blaring Piccadilly nightthinking surely,Surely, there must be more of us than that.Over the next few years, he was a working poet. He was part of the First Real Poetry Band, which included the guitarist John McLaughlin, and he had a jazz poetry residency at the Marquee Club in London.In 1965, he and more than a dozen other poets from around the world, including Mr. Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael Horovitz and Andrei Voznesensky, read their work at the International Poetry Incarnation, which filled Royal Albert Hall in London. On its website, the venue recalled the event as one “where beatniks met the emerging hippie culture.”The call for help from Mr. Baker jump-started a long songwriting career, first with Cream and then, when Cream split up after two years, with Mr. Bruce on his solo work. He wrote the lyrics to songs on nearly all of Mr. Bruce’s albums, from “Songs for a Tailor” (1969) to “Silver Rails” (2014). One of their collaborations, “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” became a staple in the repertoire of the band Mountain.“I was in awe of Jack,” Mr. Brown told The Guardian in an interview last month. But, he said, “Sometimes we had to have a rest from each other — two very big personalities in the same room sometimes wasn’t good, plus his addictions got in the way.”Mr. Brown, right, with Jack Bruce in 2005. The two began collaborating on songs when Mr. Bruce was the bassist and lead vocalist in Cream, and they continued writing together for nearly five decades.Brian Rasic/Getty ImagesMr. Brown found his own voice, as a singer, in the decade after Cream broke up. He performed with the bands Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments, Piblokoto!, Back to the Front, Flying Tigers and Bond & Brown, which he formed with the British rock and blues musician Graham Bond. He also began a long songwriting collaboration in the early 1980s with the keyboardist Phil Ryan, a former member of Piblokto!, that produced several albums through 2013.He also helped write most of the songs on “Novum” (2017), Procol Harum’s last studio album. (He replaced Keith Reid, Procol Harum’s longtime lyricist, who died this year.)Mr. Brown’s autobiography, “White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns: On the Road With Ginsberg, Writing for Clapton and Cream — An Anarchic Odyssey” (2010), is being adapted as a documentary by the director Mark Aj Waters but has not yet been finished. Mr. Brown had recently been working on an album, “Shadow Club”; one of his collaborators was Mr. Bruce’s son Malcolm, an electric bassist like his father. (Jack Bruce died in 2014.)“We’ve naturally gravitated to each other,” Mr. Brown told The Guardian, adding that he was planning to write songs with Malcolm Bruce for his next album “as long as I can stay alive for a reasonable amount of time.”Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Sheridan MacDonald; his daughter, Jessica Walker; his son, Tad MacDonald; and a grandson.Even after he began singing, Mr. Brown said, his admiration for Mr. Bruce initially led him to avoid singing the Cream songs he had helped write.“You know, ‘I’m not good enough,’” he told Dutch television. “Then I suddenly thought, ‘OK, I wrote those songs as well,’ and I thought, ‘It’s kind of about time I started singing some of these songs.’” More

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      Rolf Harris, Disgraced British Entertainer, Dies at 93

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      His career as a musician and a painter over six decades ended abruptly when he was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls.Rolf Harris, the Australian-born entertainer whose decades-long career on British television ended in disgrace after he was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls, died on May 10 at his home in Berkshire, England. He was 93.His family announced the death in a statement released on Tuesday. The PA news agency reported that a death certificate gave the cause as neck cancer and “frailty of old age.”Mr. Harris’s career on British television spanned 60 years, but it collapsed in 2013 when he was arrested and charged with a total of 12 attacks on four young girls from 1968 to 1986. He was later sentenced to five years and nine months in prison. At the time of the offenses, the girls ranged in age from 8 to 19, although his conviction for the assault on the 8-year-old girl, an autograph hunter, was later overturned.One of Mr. Harris’s victims was a close friend of his own daughter, Bindi. He was convicted of abusing the girl over the course of six years, beginning when she was 13.“Your reputation lies in ruins, you have been stripped of your honors, but you have no one to blame but yourself,” Judge Nigel Sweeney told Mr. Harris at his sentencing in 2014.“You have shown no remorse for your crimes at all,” he added.Mr. Harris died without apologizing to his victims.The son of Welsh immigrants, Agnes Margaret and Cromwell Harris, Mr. Harris was born on March 30, 1930, in a suburb of Perth, Australia. He moved to Britain when he was 22 — with, he later said, “nothing but a load of self-confidence” — to study at the City and Guilds of London Art School. He made his first appearance on the BBC in 1953, drawing cartoons on a children’s television show.That kicked off a storied career that included everything from international hit songs to lighthearted television shows on which he would demonstrate his skills as a quick-fire painter (think Britain’s version of Bob Ross).“Can you tell what it is yet?” became his famous catchphrase as he brought the canvases to life. It also became the title of his autobiography, published in 2001.A 1964 album by Mr. Harris. He had several hit records in Britain and Australia, and his “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” reached No. 3 in the United States.JP Roth CollectionOne of Britain’s best-known artists, Mr. Harris was even commissioned in 2005 to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II for her 80th birthday — the whereabouts of which remains a great source of mystery. It was previously voted the British public’s second-favorite portrait of the queen, but it received a notably colder reception from critics.“I was as nervous as anything,” Mr. Harris told the British press in 2008, describing the two sittings he had with the monarch. “I was in a panic.”As a musician, he was known for his use of a colorful array of instruments, including the didgeridoo and the so-called wobble board — an instrument he invented. He featured it in his best-known song, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” a novelty number about an Australian stockman’s dying wishes, which he wrote in 1957.His 1963 rerecording of the song, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, catapulted him to stardom in the United States. That same year, he recorded a version with the Beatles for a BBC radio show — the names of each band member playfully incorporated into the lyrics. (“Don’t ill-treat me pet dingo, Ringo.”)The song’s original fourth verse courted controversy because of its use of the word “Abo,” a derogatory slang term for Aboriginal Australians. The verse was included on Mr. Harris’s first recording of the song but omitted from later versions, and he later expressed regret about the lyrics.His career ultimately ended in disgrace a decade ago when he was one of several older media personalities arrested as part of Operation Yewtree, a British police investigation arising from the sexual abuse scandal involving the television presenter Jimmy Savile. Among the others convicted as part of the investigation were Britain’s best-known publicist, Max Clifford, and Stuart Hall, a former BBC broadcaster.After Mr. Harris was convicted in 2014, he was stripped of the honors he had been awarded throughout his career, and reruns of his television shows were taken off the air. He was released on parole in 2017 after serving three years in prison, after which he sank into a reclusive life at his family home in Bray, Berkshire, a quaint village west of London on the banks of the River Thames. Bray is said to have more millionaires than any small town in Britain.Mr. Harris’s survivors include his daughter, Bindi Harris, and his wife, Alwen Hughes. The two married in 1958 after meeting in art school, and she and his daughter stuck with him throughout his trial and prison term.After Mr. Harris’s sentencing in 2014, Judge Sweeney depicted him as an offender who had manipulated his fame.“You took advantage of the trust placed in you because of your celebrity status,” he said.Mr. Harris’s lawyer at the time, Sonia Woodley, pleaded with the judge to be lenient because of his age.“He is already on borrowed time,” she said. More

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      Kenneth Anger, 96, Dies; Experimental Filmmaker Left a Pop Culture Legacy

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      His movie, “Scorpio Rising,” proved that sound and image could be combined to create something powerful, influencing the rise of music video.Kenneth Anger, a child of Hollywood who became one of the most important experimental filmmakers of his generation and whose influence can still be felt in popular visual culture, from movies to music videos, died on May 11 in Yucca Valley, Calif., a town bordering Joshua Tree National Park. He was 96.His death, at an assisted living center, was confirmed on Wednesday by Spencer Glesby, a spokesman for Sprüth Magers, a gallery that has represented Mr. Anger since 2009. He said an announcement of the death had been delayed while matters involving Mr. Anger’s estate were being put in order.Mr. Anger embodied the love-hate relationship between underground art and mass culture. Few other avant-garde filmmakers borrowed so liberally or so subversively from popular iconography. And with his sensuous, mystical imagery and pioneering use of pop soundtracks, perhaps none saw their work so readily absorbed back into the mainstream.Mr. Anger’s best-known film, “Scorpio Rising” (1963), a fetishistic look at a gang of Brooklyn bikers with a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop hits — sung by Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Ray Charles and Little Peggy March, among others — proved that sound and image could be combined to create something more potent than the sum of their parts. It is widely considered a precursor of the music video, and its influence can be felt in movies as varied as Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” (The Bobby Vinton hit that gave the Lynch film its title is also heard in “Scorpio Rising.”)Hailed in his later years as a progenitor of remix culture, Mr. Anger prided himself on being an outsider who belonged to no particular movement. Asked in 2004 about his stature as a godfather of queer cinema, he responded, “I don’t like being put in a cubbyhole.”An image from Mr. Anger’s best-known film, “Scorpio Rising,” a fetishistic look at a gang of Brooklyn bikers with a soundtrack of pop hits. PhotofestHe was comfortable in the company of the famous. His acquaintances, some of whom collaborated with him, included the poet and artist Jean Cocteau, the playwright Tennessee Williams, the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, the writer Anaïs Nin and members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.But he also scandalized the celebrated in his lurid tell-all book, “Hollywood Babylon.” That book, rife with Tinseltown scandals and rumors about the sexual habits of stars like Rudolph Valentino — Mr. Anger’s grandmother was a wardrobe mistress in silent films — was first published in France in 1959 and widely bootlegged before its official publication in the United States in 1975.Mr. Anger’s reputation as a filmmaker rested on a relatively small body of work: nine short, wordless films, totaling under three hours and made between 1947 and 1972, that came to be known as the Magick Lantern Cycle. Some of them, like “Puce Moment” (1949) and “Kustom Kar Kommandos” (1965), were fragments of longer works that were never finished for lack of money. Mr. Anger often abandoned and restarted projects, and he sometimes revised his films and presented slightly modified versions of them.He was intrigued by the interplay of ancient myths and pop culture. Several of his films simultaneously portray and enact rituals, using sound and editing to create trancelike, incantatory works, such as “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954), which depicts a party whose guests are dressed as pagan deities. Mr. Anger likened the making of a movie to the casting of a spell.Mr. Anger’s memoir scandalized the celebrated, its pages rife with Tinseltown scandals and rumors about the sexual habits of stars.Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer was born on Feb. 3, 1927, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Wilbur and Lillian (Coler) Anglemyer. His father was an electrical engineer at Douglas Aircraft. Many details of his biography as he told it — much like the scandalous stories in “Hollywood Babylon” — are hard to corroborate. (He claimed to have had the role of the young prince in the 1935 movie “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” though Mickey Rooney, a star of the film, said the part was played by a girl.) He said he started making films as a child.Mr. Anger’s earliest surviving film, “Fireworks” (1947), made when he was 20, is a cinematic landmark in both form and content: a dreamlike psychodrama and an autobiographical coming-out movie, shot in his parents’ house while they were away for a funeral. Mr. Anger appears in it as a young man who has a sadomasochistic encounter with a group of musclebound sailors, one of whom undoes his pants to reveal a Roman candle.According to Mr. Anger, the guests at the film’s first screening included Alfred Kinsey, who he said bought a print of “Fireworks” for his collection, and the filmmaker James Whale, best known for “Frankenstein.” In 1950, encouraged by an admiring letter from Jean Cocteau about “Fireworks,” Mr. Anger moved to Paris, where he spent much of the following decade and worked as an assistant to Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française.Mr. Anger completed one film during his time in Europe: “Eaux d’Artifice” (1953), shot in the fountain-filled gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy. The footage for another, “Rabbit’s Moon,” which features characters from the commedia dell’arte theater tradition, was left in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française for two decades; two versions of the film were released in the 1970s.He shot “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” while on a visit home to Los Angeles. With financing hard to come by, he supported himself by writing “Hollywood Babylon.” Images from Mr. Anger’s film “Lucifer Rising,” from 1972. Its theme of rebirth, stands in contrast to his death-obsessed work of the previous decade. Mary Evans/Ronald Grant, via Everett CollectionBack in the United States in the 1960s, Mr. Anger entered a productive phase that resulted in some of his most admired works. “Scorpio Rising,” one of the best-known experimental movies of all time, shows leather-clad bikers tending to their motorcycles, fueling a raucous Halloween party and desecrating a church. Mr. Anger included provocative juxtapositions: Nazi imagery and excerpts from a life-of-Jesus movie.The manager of a Los Angeles theater that showed “Scorpio Rising,” which contains frontal nudity, was arrested on an obscenity charge, and an indecency case against the film went to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in Mr. Anger’s favor.As the counterculture movement crested in the mid-1960s, Mr. Anger moved to San Francisco, where his associates included Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, and Bobby Beausoleil, a musician who became a member of the so-called Manson family.Mr. Anger spent much of this period developing and shooting a project called “Lucifer Rising,” which envisioned Lucifer not as the devil but as a god of light and “the patron saint of movies,” as Mr. Anger put it. A disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, Mr. Anger referred to cinema as an “evil force.” He had the name Lucifer tattooed on his chest.Much of the original footage of “Lucifer Rising” was said to be lost — Mr. Anger accused Mr. Beausoleil, who played Lucifer, of stealing it — but some salvaged material made its way into the orgiastic “Invocation of My Demon Brother” (1969), which features a synthesizer score by Mick Jagger.Completed in 1972 and revised several times, “Lucifer Rising,” with its theme of rebirth, stands in contrast to Mr. Anger’s death-obsessed work of the previous decade. Mr. Beausoleil, by then serving a life sentence for murder, wrote the score from prison.The film concluded the Magick Lantern Cycle, and afterward Mr. Anger withdrew almost entirely from filmmaking for about 20 years. He published “Hollywood Babylon II” in 1984, but this was otherwise a period of relative inactivity for Mr. Anger, though it coincided with the arrival of the music video and the rise of quick-fire editing in mainstream cinema, and he came to be recognized for his influence on both.Many would agree that his pseudonym was aptly chosen: Mr. Anger’s volatility is the stuff of many an anecdote. Friendships and collaborations were known to end with Mr. Anger threatening to put a curse on the offending party, as happened with Mr. Beausoleil and the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who was originally hired to produce the “Lucifer Rising” score.Mr. Anger in 2006. Many would agree that his pseudonym was aptly chosen: his volatility is the stuff of many an anecdote. Stuart Wilson/Getty ImagesMr. Anger returned to filmmaking in 2000, producing a flurry of short films, including “Mouse Heaven” (2004), about the cult of Mickey Mouse; “Elliott’s Suicide” (2007), an elegy to the singer Elliott Smith; and “Ich Will!” (2008), a short assembled from archival footage of the Hitler Youth movement. The critical response to the new work was generally lukewarm, and the focus remained on his earlier movies. The Magick Lantern works have been issued on DVD in restored versions and installed in gallery exhibitions in New York and London.Mr. Anger left no immediate survivors. Before moving to the assisted living facility, he lived in Los Angeles.In an essay for a 2007 DVD release, Martin Scorsese extolled the poetic rhythms of Mr. Anger’s films and what he called their “inevitable” logic.“The structure, the form, the feel of these films,” Mr. Scorsese wrote, “appears to be less invented than received from a source hidden from the rest of us.”Alex Traub More

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      Bill Lee, Bassist and Composer of Son Spike Lee’s Films, Dies at 94

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      He accompanied a wide range of jazz and folk musicians and scored “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze” “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues.”Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early films of his son Spike Lee, wrote folk-jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists and was a prolific sideman for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and others, died on Wednesday morning at his home in Brooklyn. He was 94. Spike Lee confirmed the death.Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.Mr. Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, a musical challenge that called for capturing the independence of a romantic Black woman in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a satirical look at life at a Black college in “School Daze” (1988), racial violence in “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and the poignant hardships of a Black jazz musician in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990).Bill Lee had small parts in all but “Do the Right Thing,” and Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, had roles in all four. Bill Lee also scored an early Spike Lee short, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the first student film to be showcased at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival, in 1983.The feature films won largely positive reviews and reaped sizable profits. Bill and Spike Lee had a falling-out in the early 1990s, over family matters, money and other issues, that ended their collaboration. Later Spike Lee films — he has directed more than 30, appearing in many of them himself — were scored by the trumpeter Terence Blanchard.Mr. Lee, right, on bass, at the Five Spot in New York in 1960 with the saxophonist John Handy’s quartet. Don Friedman was on piano and Joe Hunt on drums.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesBorn into an Alabama family of musicians and educators who instilled a passion for music in him and his siblings, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated small-town public schools and studied music at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta.Inspired in his early 20s by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the largest and lowest-pitched stringed instrument, and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before migrating to New York City in 1959.Over the next decade, Mr. Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between numbers, performed often in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-drums trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western edge of Greenwich Village, squeezed among meatpacking houses and trucking depots on Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a musician-owned label, and founded and directed the New York Bass Violin Choir, a troupe of seven basses, sometimes accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics lauded the ensemble for weaving an agile harmony of pastel and harsh moods in performing Mr. Lee’s folk operas at Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival.His numerous operas, including “One Mile East,” “The Depot” and “Baby Sweets,” were based on people and events from his early life in the South. They sometimes drew on the singing talents of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a jazz pianist and music teacher at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, whose voices lent grandiloquent color to the tales.In a review of a performance by the Violin Choir at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1971, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Lee served as bassist, singer and narrator of his sketches of small-town life in Snow Hill, Ala., building both his stories and his music from a rich vein of folk sources. His team of bassists, bending over their unwieldy instruments, produced ensemble passages that were by turns gorgeously warm and singing or so surprisingly light and airy that one suspected a couple of flutes might be hiding among them.”Mr. Lee in an undated portrait. His numerous operas were based on people and events from his early life in the South.David LeeIn the 1970s, when the electric bass became an instrument of choice in many jazz ensembles because its thumping tones suited the commercial sounds of jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Lee, an acoustic bass purist, refused to go along and lost work as a result. “Some things you just can’t live with,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. “Just thinking about doing it, my gut reaction hit me so hard in the stomach. I knew I could never live with myself.”Spike Lee explored the problem of commercialism, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white club owners.“Musicians are low-priced slaves, whereas athletes and entertainers are high-priced slaves,” Spike Lee told The Times when the film opened. “It’s their music, but it’s not their nightclub, it’s not their record company. They have an understanding only of the music, not of the business, so they get treated any old way.”Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed about integrity. “Everything I know about jazz I got from my father,” Spike Lee told The Times in 1990. “I saw his integrity, how he was not going to play just any kind of music, no matter how much money he could make.”Bill Lee in front of his brownstone across from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 2013. The house was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesWilliam James Edwards Lee was born in Snow Hill on July 23, 1928, to Arnold Lee, a cornet player and band director at Florida A&M University, and Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee, a classical concert pianist and teacher. In addition to his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had four other siblings, Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard and Clarence.Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, a graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded a log-cabin arts school for Black students in Snow Hill in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 to 400 students pursuing academic subjects and vocational training. Mr. Edwards died a few years later, but the institute survived as a segregated public school until 1973, when it closed. Bill Lee graduated from there in the mid-1940s.Mr. Lee and his first wife, Jacquelyn (Shelton) Lee, an art teacher, had five children: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joie and Cinque. After Jacquelyn’s death in 1976, Mr. Lee married Susan Kaplan. They had one son, Arnold. Christopher died in 2013. Mr. Lee’s sister Consuela died at 83 in 2009.In addition to Spike Lee, he is survived by his wife; his sons David, Cinque and Arnold; his daughter, Joie; a brother, A. Clifton Lee; and two grandchildren.After arriving in New York, Mr. Lee settled in Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood that became a magnet for Black musicians and other creative artists who took pride in their lifestyles and their art. The neighborhood was the setting for “She’s Gotta Have It.”Mr. Lee with his son Spike in 2009 for a 20th-anniversary screening of the Spike Lee movie “Do the Right Thing,” for which Bill Lee wrote the soundtrack.Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan via Getty ImagesThe Lee household, overlooking Fort Greene Park, all but banished television but was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night, prompting noise complaints from neighbors but spawning jazz artists who found their sounds in the heart of Brooklyn.During a 2008 interview with The Times at his home, Mr. Lee played piano and double bass. “His music has the complex harmonies of bebop and hard bop, but it also has a sincere, down-home, churchy feel,” the reporter Corey Kilgannon wrote. “His passages move in interesting and unexpected places, but they resolve before long in a way that is simple and sincere, earthy and somehow very satisfying.” More

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      Ray Stevenson, Actor in ‘Thor’ and Other Films, Dies at 58

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      His wide-ranging roles included fantasy characters, a knight, a Roman soldier and a Punisher.Ray Stevenson, who in a 30-year career played a wide range of roles in television and films, among them a talkative soldier in the HBO historical drama “Rome,” the pirate Blackbeard in the Starz series “Black Sails” and the Asgardian warrior Volstagg in the “Thor” fantasy movies, died on Sunday. He was 58.His publicist, Nicki Fioravante, confirmed his death but provided no further details. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica said Mr. Stevenson died on the Italian island of Ischia, where he had been filming a movie.Mr. Stevenson was born on May 25, 1964, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, according to the Internet Movie Database. He had begun a career in interior design when, in his mid-20s, he decided to try acting. Seeing John Malkovich in the Lanford Wilson play “Burn This” in London’s West End in the early 1990s was the catalyst.“I was dumbstruck by John’s performance,” he told the California newspaper The Fresno Bee in 2008. “Everybody else disappeared. I knew at that moment there was something very valid about being an actor.”He studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in England, where in 1993 he played the title role in a production of “Macbeth.” Before the year was over he had landed a recurring role in a British mini-series, “The Dwelling Place.” He had worked more or less steadily ever since.In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Stevenson appeared on various British TV series, including the crime drama “Band of Gold.” He landed his first significant film role in 2004, playing the knight Dagonet in “King Arthur,” with Clive Owen in the title role.Then came “Rome,” a breakthrough role in a big-budget HBO series about ancient Rome that was the network’s attempt to create the next buzz-generating series after “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.”Mr. Stevenson’s character, Titus Pullo, was, as Alessandra Stanley put it in a 2005 review in The New York Times, “a drunken, womanizing lout — a soccer hooligan in sandals.” Titus Pullo’s friendship with another Roman soldier, played by James Purefoy, was among the show’s most appealing subplots, and Mr. Stevenson, a large man at 6-foot-4, seemed on the verge of something big.“He’s kind of George Clooney on steroids,” Chase Squires of The St. Petersburg Times of Florida wrote in 2005. “By the time ‘Rome’ completes its run, the Irish-born English actor will probably be a star, and a very real candidate to replace Russell Crowe when Hollywood gets tired of that actor’s notoriously bad behavior.”But “Rome” flamed out after two seasons, and Mr. Stevenson never quite achieved Clooneyesque stature. He did, however, land a number of meaty roles in lavish projects, including three movies from the Marvel Comics universe: “Thor” (2011), “Thor: The Dark World” (2013) and “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017). All three were box-office smashes.He often referred to the “Thor” stories as “Vikings in space,” and in 2020 he got a taste of the earthbound version of that life when he joined the cast of the long-running History channel series “Vikings.” He appeared throughout its sixth season.His other roles included a gangster in the 2011 movie “Kill the Irishman” and a British colonial official in the Indian film “RRR” (2022). He also played the vigilante Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, another character based on a comic book. He took on that role in 2008 in “Punisher: War Zone,” after Dolph Lundgren had played Castle in a 1989 movie and Thomas Jane had taken his turn in 2004.The 2008 movie was an orgy of violence, as A.O. Scott noted in his review in The Times.“Guys get their heads blown off, or severed, or pierced with chair legs, or pulverized with fists,” he wrote, “because that’s what they have coming and that’s what the fan base will pay money to see.”His character, Mr. Stevenson told The Oklahoman, was supposed to be not a hero but an antihero.“He really is on a one-way path and in his own hell,” he said. “You don’t want to be Frank Castle.”Mr. Stevenson’s marriage to the actress Ruth Gemmell ended in divorce. He and his partner, Elisabetta Caraccia, had three children. More

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      Leon Ichaso, Whose Films Explored Latino Identity, Dies at 74

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      His first feature, “El Super,” was critically acclaimed. He continued to examine culture and exile in “Crossover Dreams,” “El Cantante” and “Piñero.”Leon Ichaso, a Cuban American filmmaker who in “El Super,” “Crossover Dreams,” “Piñero,” “El Cantante” and other movies examined themes of Latino assimilation and cultural identity, died on Sunday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 74.His sister, the journalist Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Ichaso, who came to the United States as a teenager, was writing advertising copy and making television commercials in New York in 1977 when he saw an Off Broadway play called “El Super,” written by Ivan Acosta, and decided to try a new career.“I remember he went to see it and said to me, ‘I’m going to make that movie,’” his sister said.He proceeded to do just that, on a shoestring budget.“I paid for the production car,” she added. “My father paid for the catering.”The movie, released in 1979 and directed by Mr. Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, is about a Cuban man (played by Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato) living in exile in New York who works as the superintendent of an Upper West Side tenement, resisting assimilation. Critics were impressed.“It’s a funny, even-tempered, unsentimental drama about people in particular transit,” Vincent Canby wrote in a review in The New York Times. Decades later, The Miami Herald, assessing Mr. Ichaso’s career, called “El Super” “the quintessential Cuban-exile film.”He followed “El Super” in 1985 with “Crossover Dreams,” about a salsa star on the rise who hopes to break out of Spanish Harlem and into the mainstream. The film, which Mr. Canby called “a sagely funny comedy, both heartfelt and sophisticated,” gave the singer Rubén Blades his breakout acting role.The singer Rubén Blades played a salsa star who hopes to break and into the mainstream in Mr. Ichaso’s “Crossover Dreams” (1985).Miramax, via Everett CollectionAfter “Crossover Dreams,” Mr. Ichaso moved away from Latino-themed films for a time and worked steadily directing television movies and episodes of “The Equalizer,” “Miami Vice” and other series. But he returned to that territory in 1996 with “Bitter Sugar,” a movie set in contemporary Cuba.“Bitter Sugar” went against the romanticized view of life in Havana that was popular in some artistic circles at the time, painting an ugly picture of the city that included drugs and prostitution. Its protagonist starts out pro-Communist but ends up so disillusioned that he tries to assassinate Fidel Castro.Mr. Ichaso resented that many festivals did not pick up the movie — a result, he said, not only of the film world’s leftist leanings but also of festival officials’ desire not to offend the organizers of the Havana Film Festival.“They don’t want to lose the Cuba account,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “Part of the film community very much flirts with a dictator and a country and says it’s cute to travel, have a daiquiri and ignore what’s going on just 50 yards outside the Hotel Nacional.”Mr. Ichaso’s next major project would become perhaps his most acclaimed film: “Piñero” (2001), about Miguel Piñero, a former prison inmate turned playwright whose “Short Eyes” made it to Broadway in 1974, but who died young in 1988.Benjamin Bratt, who was familiar to TV audiences from “Law & Order,” played Mr. Piñero, a Nuyorican, in what Stephen Holden, reviewing the movie in The Times, called “a career-defining performance.” Mr. Bratt attributed much of his success in the role to Mr. Ichaso.“His utter faith in my ability never faltered even when mine did,” Mr. Bratt said by email. “He loved his actors, understood our delicate temperament and nurtured a trust that would embolden you to walk out on a wire with no net. He was the net, and it was very easy to love him back for this.”Benjamin Bratt starred as the prison inmate turned playwright Miguel Piñero in Mr. Ichaso’s “Piñero” (2001). “His utter faith in my ability never faltered,” Mr. Bratt said of Mr. Ichaso, “even when mine did.” Abbot Genser/MiramaxIn “El Cantante” (2006), Mr. Ichaso told the story of the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe. The singer Marc Anthony, portrayed Mr. Lavoe with Jennifer Lopez (Mr. Anthony’s wife at the time) as Mr. Lavoe’s wife.In Mr. Ichaso’s movies, “you can almost smell the rooms the actors are in,” Mr. Anthony told The New York Times in 2007. “He knows how to create a period piece; he understands the streets, the humanity of it and the poetry of it all. He captures the essence of our people, our neighborhoods.”Although Mr. Ichaso continued to direct for television until recently, his last Latino-themed film was “Paraiso” in 2009. Considered the third film in his trilogy about the Cuban exile experience (following “El Super” and “Bitter Sugar”), it tells the story of a man who arrives in Miami by raft and proceeds to wreak his own brand of havoc. It was, Mr. Ichaso acknowledged in a 2009 interview with The Miami Herald, evidence of his ever-darkening view of Castro’s government.“I do think of the three films as a trilogy, and this one is the end,” he said, “exploring the new arrivals, these new little Cuban Frankensteins that Castro makes and sets loose on the world.”Leon Rodriguez Ichaso was born on Aug. 3, 1948, in Havana. His father, Justo Rodriguez Santos, was a poet and writer, and his mother, Antonia Ichaso, wrote for Cuban radio.When Leon was 14, he left Cuba for Miami with his mother and his sister; his father joined them there in 1968. By then, Mr. Ichaso had tried college briefly but dropped out. The family soon moved to New York, and there Mr. Ichaso learned about filmmaking by shooting commercials for Goya Foods and other clients.Mr. Ichaso’s marriages to Karen Willinger and Amanda Barber ended in divorce. His sister survives him.Though Mr. Ichaso’s films were generally well regarded, he never quite ascended to the directorial A list.“There are some directors who make a film, and they are set for life; that’s not my case,” Mr. Ichaso said in a 2007 interview with The Times. “Every time I make a film, I think, ‘This is the one.’ But then nothing happens.”Mr. Bratt, who met his wife, the actress Talisa Soto, while they were working on “Piñero,” said he admired Mr. Ichaso’s risk-taking.“There was a lively curiosity to him, a twinkle in the eye that hinted of mischief and knowing, a survivor’s wink that told you he had been to hell and back and probably enjoyed it,” Mr. Bratt said. “He had a deep passion for poetry and music, and his films — inspired by the work of his heroes, Miles, Monk and Coltrane — were pure jazz, respectful of compositional structure but most alive when he played outside the lines, riffing, daring you to follow along.” More

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      Linda Lewis, British Singer Whose Voice Knew Few Limits, Dies at 72

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      Inspired by Motown early in her career, she became an acclaimed singer-songwriter and backed the likes of David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Cat Stevens.Linda Lewis, a critically acclaimed soul singer and songwriter whose pyrotechnic voice propelled four Top 10 singles as a solo artist in her native Britain and led to work as a backup vocalist on acclaimed albums by stars like David Bowie, Cat Stevens and Rod Stewart, died on May 3 at her home in Waltham Abbey, outside London. She was 72.Her sister Dee Lewis Clay confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Ms. Lewis drew raves for her soaring five-octave vocal range and impressed listeners with her genre-hopping instincts, drawing from folk, R&B, rock, reggae, pop and — with more than a nudge from label executives — disco.She grew up studying Motown hits note by note, and her first single, “You Turned My Bitter Into Sweet” (1967), was a joyous up-tempo number that sounded straight out of Berry Gordy’s recording studio on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit.After that she joined the Ferris Wheel, a rock and soul band that was popular on Britain’s club circuit, before moving on to a solo career as a guitar-strumming singer-songwriter and signing with Reprise Records in 1971.“That was a great time,” she said in a 2007 interview with Record Collector magazine. “I was living in a sort of commune, and loads of people were popping in and out. Cat Stevens turned up a lot, as did Marc Bolan and Elton John. There was a lot of jamming going on there, some very creative vibes.”She ended up touring the world with Mr. Stevens (who later took the name Yusuf after converting to Islam), as well as lending her voice to albums like David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” (1973) and Rod Stewart’s “Blondes Have More Fun” (1978).Ms. Lewis in concert in 1981. Her record company chose to package her as a disco diva in the late 1970s, but she saw herself differently.Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesHer first solo album, “Say No More,” released in 1971, failed to make a splash commercially. The next year she released “Lark,” an album marked by a California breeziness that received strong reviews and included the song “Old Smokey,” which the rapper Common sampled in his 2005 song “Go!” An American tour in 1973 helped create buzz.But still, she needed a hit.She found one that same year, with the buoyant, racy single “Rock a Doodle Doo,” which hit No. 15 in Britain (although it failed to chart in the United States). It showed off her range with vocals that swung from husky lows to shimmering highs, to the point that the song could be mistaken for a duet.In the mid-1970s, she signed with Arista Records, whose founder, Clive Davis, chose to package her as a disco diva like Gloria Gaynor. That decision paid dividends, at least commercially. Her 1975 single “It’s in His Kiss,” a Studio 54-ready spin on Betty Everett’s 1964 hit “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss),” reached No. 6 in Britain, although it, too, barely made a splash in the United States.But Ms. Lewis bristled at the forced career turn. “I didn’t really stick to my guns, I’m afraid,” she later said. “I saw myself as a singer-songwriter; they didn’t.”Even so, the album with the single, “Not a Little Girl Anymore,” hit No. 40 in Britain, with Rolling Stone noting that it brought “this multi-styled English artist into the mainstream of contemporary R&B.”By the 2000s, her music had crossed over to a new generation, as she sang on albums by Oasis, Basement Jaxx and Jamiroquai.Ms. Lewis at a festival in Chichester, England, in 2010. By the 2000s, her music had crossed over to a new generation.Chris Jackson/Getty ImagesLinda Ann Fredericks was born on Sept. 27, 1950, in Custom House, an area in the docklands of East London. She was one of six children of Eddie Fredericks, a musician, and Lily Fredericks, who worked as a bus conductor and managed pubs. (It is unclear why the singer chose Lewis as her stage surname.)Her mother had great ambitions for her as a performer and enrolled her in stage school, an experience on which Ms. Lewis did not look back fondly.Her compass was set toward music. She got her first taste of the limelight in her early teens, when her mother took her to see John Lee Hooker perform at a club and pushed her to the stage to belt out, with the blues titan’s permission, a rendition of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.”In addition to Ms. Lewis Clay, she is survived by two other sisters, Shirley Lewis and Patsy Wildman; her brothers, Keith and Paul Fredericks; and her son, Jesse. Her three marriages ended in divorce.While Ms. Lewis angled to escape stage school at the earliest possible opportunity, her flirtation with acting was not a complete waste. She made a brief appearance in the Tony Richardson film “A Taste of Honey” (1961). She also popped up as a screaming fan in the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964).She was not the only future musical notable in the crowd of hysterical Beatlemaniacs. Phil Collins, in his schoolboy jacket and tie, was also on set as an extra. “Many years later, I bumped into him and said, ‘Hey, we made a film together,’” Ms. Lewis told Record Collector. “He gave me a very funny look. I think he thought I was a nutter.” More

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      Helmut Berger, Actor Known for His Work With Visconti, Dies at 78

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      He first made his mark in “The Damned” as a character one critic said personified “the outright perversion” of Nazism. He went on to have a long career, mostly in Europe.Helmut Berger, a handsome Austrian movie star who was best known for appearing in three feature films by the Italian neorealist director Luchino Visconti, his lover for a dozen years, died on Thursday at his home in Salzburg. He was 78.His death was announced by his agent, Helmut Werner, who did not give a cause.“Many years ago,” Mr. Werner said in a statement, “Helmut Berger told me, ‘I have lived three lives. And in four languages! Je ne regrette rien.’”Mr. Berger was studying Italian in Perugia in 1964 when a friend introduced him to Mr. Visconti, who was on location directing a film that starred Claudia Cardinale.“I was there watching, I was fascinated,” he told the website Europe of Cultures in 1988. “I wanted to see how they shot a film.”They began a relationship soon after that, personal as well as professional. Mr. Visconti cast Mr. Berger in “The Damned” (1969), the story of a German steel family, inspired by the Krupps, in the early years of the Third Reich. As Martin, the grandson of the family’s patriarch, Mr. Berger imitates Marlene Dietrich in full costume during a party for his grandfather, which ends with word of a fire at the Reichstag. Martin later molests younger relatives and rapes his mother (Ingrid Thulin).Ann Guarino, reviewing the movie for The Daily News of New York, said Mr. Berger personified the “outright perversion” of Nazism. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Berger “gives, I think, the performance of the year.” He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for most promising male newcomer.Mr. Berger said that working with Mr. Visconti was like being onstage.“You don’t do 10-minute, five-minute takes but whole scenes, sometimes 20 minutes long,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1970. “He uses three cameras so you never know which one is on you. You get really into it, the whole atmosphere. He doesn’t limit you, he wants you to be free.”Mr. Berger appeared in two more feature films directed by Mr. Visconti: “Ludwig” (1973), in which he played the mad 19th-century king of Bavaria, for which he won a David di Donatello Award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar; and “Conversation Piece” (1974), which starred Burt Lancaster as an art historian living quietly in Rome whose life is changed by several people, including a pushy marchesa and her gigolo lover, played by Mr. Berger.Mr. Canby had a radically different assessment of Mr. Berger’s work this time, calling him “a lightweight” who “can function no more than as an ideogram for decadence.”By then, Mr. Berger and Mr. Visconti had been living together for some time.“During the 12 years with Luchino Visconti, I was faithful,” he told Gala magazine in 2012.“But were you dating model Marisa Berenson at the time?” the magazine’s interviewer asked.“Of course, I’m bisexual,” he said. “This is not a problem.”Mr. Berger fell into a deep depression after Mr. Visconti’s death in 1976.“At first I drank a lot, gluckgluckgluck, and then the pills came,” he told Gala. “My housekeeper wasn’t supposed to come until 5 p.m. but happened to drop by at 10 a.m. and saved me.”Mr. Berger on the set of Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” (1969).Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesHelmut Berger was born Helmut Steinberger on May 29, 1944, in Bad Ischl, Austria. His parents, Hedwig and Franz Steinberger, ran a hotel.Fleeing his father, who he said was brutal to him, Helmut moved first to England and then to Italy, where he made his film debut in “The Witches” (1967), an anthology movie consisting of five stories, each made by a different director. He played a hotel page in the segment directed by Mr. Visconti.After a few other films, including “The Damned,” Mr. Berger was cast in the title role of Massimo Dallamano’s “Dorian Gray” (1970), which billed itself as a “modern allegory” based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” set in sexy present-day London. He was one of a reported 500 actors who auditioned.Mr. Berger “gives a trance-like performance, looking simply beautiful — if you like the type,” Ms. Guarino wrote.He continued to work, mostly in Europe, until a few years ago. He notably played the sickly son of a rich Jewish family facing Fascism in Italy in Vittorio De Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970), which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, and the playboy who seduces Elizabeth Taylor’s character after she undergoes cosmetic surgery in “Ash Wednesday” (1973).He also portrayed the millionaire boyfriend of Fallon Carrington (Pamela Sue Martin) on “Dynasty,” the prime-time soap, in a story arc from 1983 to 1984, and the Vatican’s chief accountant, who tries to swindle Michael Corleone, in “The Godfather III” (1990).Information about survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Berger was known for his jet-setting lifestyle, for being photographed by Andy Warhol, for being linked to women like Bianca Jagger, and for being called “the most beautiful man in the world” in the German media.But when Gala interviewed him after the publication of the book “Helmut Berger: A Life in Pictures,” he said he was no longer seeking his earlier life’s social hustle and bustle.“I’ve experienced everything,” he said. “I don’t feel like Helmut Berger, either; I’m not him. It’s a stage name. My name is Helmut Steinberger. And that’s what I’ll be until I’m dead.” More