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      Max Morath, Pianist Who Staged a One-Man Ragtime Revival, Dies at 96

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      A student of both music and history, he entertained audiences in the 1960s and beyond while educating them about a genre whose heyday had ended decades earlier.Max Morath, who stepped out of the 1890s only a lifetime late, and with syncopated piano rhythms and social commentary helped revive the ragtime age on educational television programs, in concert halls and in nightclubs for nearly a half-century, died on Monday at a care facility near his home in Duluth, Minn. He was 96.His wife, Diane Fay Skomars, confirmed the death.Having learned the rudiments of music from his mother, who played a tinkling piano in movie theaters for silent films, Mr. Morath — after false career starts as a radio announcer, newscaster and actor — found his calling in a fascination with ragtime, the uniquely syncopated, “ragged” style whose heyday spanned two decades, roughly from 1897 to 1917.A college-educated student of both music and history, Mr. Morath fell in love with ragtime’s dreamlike, bittersweet sounds. He researched the styles and repertoires of its era. He combed libraries, studied piano rolls and old sheet music, consulted historical societies, read antique magazines and talked to folks old enough to recall the work of the ragtime greats and the milestones of their age.What emerged was a new form of entertainment that combined showmanship with scholarly commentaries on ragtime itself, on its players and fans, and on the etiquette and tastes of a long-vanished age when horses pulled streetcars and women’s suffrage was still just a dream of the future.In a straw boater and sleeve garters, pounding an old upright with a cigar clenched in his teeth, Mr. Morath played Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Tiger Rag” and Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag.” In those moments he might have been a vaudeville copycat trading on nostalgia. But his mood grew serious — and strangely more engaging — when he paused to tell audiences what they were hearing.“Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he would explain. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked.“Classic ragtime isn’t the honky-tonk music you hear today. That’s just a popular misconception. Nobody has paid the classic ragtime much attention, because of the attitude that folk music had to come from the hills. We were looking in the wrong direction.”Mr. Morath made ragtime come alive again. In the 1890s, he said, people heard it in vaudeville houses or just walking around town. There were newfangled inventions: player pianos, phonographs and nickelodeons. Middle-class homes had upright pianos. Sheet music was booming. Tin Pan Alley, the Manhattan home of the songwriters who dominated popular music, was flourishing.After a few years in clubs and on radio and television in the West and in his native Colorado, Mr. Morath broke through in 1960 at KRMA-TV, Denver’s educational TV station. He wrote and produced “The Ragtime Era,” a series of 12 half-hour shows on the music and history of ragtime and the blues, as well as the origins of musical comedy and Tin Pan Alley, for the 60-station National Educational Television network, the predecessor of PBS.Reviewing that series for The New York Times, Jack Gould wrote: “In an uncommon mixture of earthiness, emphasized by his chewing of a big cigar and wearing of loud vests, and erudition, reflected in his knowledgeable commentary on music and the social forces that influence its expression, he presides over a wonderful rag piano and lets go.”The series was bought by commercial stations, greatly expanding Mr. Morath’s audience. He was soon juggling recording dates, college gigs (some 50 a year), and concert and club bookings. He also crafted another NET series, “The Turn of the Century” (1962): 15 installments that related ragtime music to its social, economic and political period, using lantern slides, photographs and other props.Mr. Morath in 1969. “Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he said. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked.”via Colorado Music ExperienceWith its wider focus — on life in America from 1890 to the 1920s — “The Turn of the Century” was a runaway success. In addition to being seen in syndication on commercial television, it became a one-man theatrical show. Mr. Morath presented it at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard in New York, brought it to the Off Broadway Jan Hus Playhouse in 1969 and then toured nationally for many years.“In a two-hour jaunty excursion, Morath gives us a look at the 30-year period that spanned the time of McGuffey’s Reader, women’s suffrage, the grizzly bear dance, Prohibition, legal marijuana and Teddy Roosevelt,” The Washington Post said when Mr. Morath opened at Ford’s Theater in 1970. “It was a time of sweeping changes in the moral climate of our nation, and Morath uses popular music, chiefly ragtime, as the centrifugal force for sorting out the different phases.”As the ragtime revival surged into the 1970s, it was given momentum by the musicologist Joshua Rifkin, who recorded much of Scott Joplin’s work for the Nonesuch label in 1971, and by the success of George Roy Hill’s Oscar-winning film “The Sting” (1973), starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as con artists, which featured Joplin’s “The Entertainer” on the soundtrack.Mr. Morath appeared on “The Bell Telephone Hour,” “Kraft Music Hall,” “Today,” “The Tonight Show” and Arthur Godfrey’s radio and television programs. A series of Morath productions — “The Ragtime Years,” “Living the Ragtime Life,” “The Ragtime Man,” “Ragtime Revisited,” and “Ragtime and Again” — opened Off Broadway and were followed by national tours.“I must have played in 5,000 different places, and many of them were not all that classy,” Mr. Morath said in 2019 in an interview for this obituary. “Mostly they were saloons, and it wasn’t all ragtime either. Some of them were piano bars. When you work a piano bar, you’d better know 1,500 tunes. You’re playing requests. It was Gershwin. Cole Porter. Rodgers and Hart.”Mr. Morath continued touring until he retired in 2007. By then, he had long been known as “Mr. Ragtime,” the unofficial keeper of America’s ragtime legacy.Asked for a favorite memory from his life in music, he reached back to his childhood.“Actually,” he said after a moment’s thought, “it was when I was 7 and I heard my mother play something Joplin wrote, called ‘The Original Rag.’ It was published in Kansas City, and somehow my mother got ahold of it. We had a piano bench full of good stuff, mostly show tunes. But ‘Original Rag’ was my favorite.”Max Edward Morath was born in Colorado Springs on Oct. 1, 1926, the younger of two sons of Frederic Morath, a real estate broker, and Gladys (Ramsell) Morath. When Max was 4, his parents divorced. His mother became society editor of The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, and his father went to Europe, remarried and spent his days climbing in the Alps and the Pyrenees.Max and his brother, Frederic, attended local public schools. He was active in choir and theater at Colorado Springs High School and, in his senior year, got a job as a radio announcer with KVOR (the call letters stand for Voice of the Rockies). After he graduated in 1944, he paid his way through Colorado College as a pianist and newscaster for the station. He majored in English and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1948.In 1953, he married Norma Loy Tackitt. They had three children before divorcing in 1992. He married Ms. Skomars, an author and photographer, in 1993.In addition to his wife, Mr. Morath is survived by two daughters, Kathryn Morath and Christy Mainthow; a son, Frederic; a stepdaughter, Monette Fay Magrath; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson. His brother died in 2009.In a recording career that began in 1955, Mr. Morath made more than 30 albums, mostly of unaccompanied piano solos, for Epic, RCA Victor, Vanguard and other labels. His original compositions were recorded by the pianist and composer Aaron Robinson and released in 2015 as “Max Morath: The Complete Ragtime Works for Piano.”Mr. Morath wrote an illustrated memoir, “The Road to Ragtime” (1999), and “I Love You Truly: A Biographical Novel Based on the Life of Carrie Jacobs-Bond” (2008), about the first woman to establish a music publishing firm in America. She had been the subject of a paper Mr. Morath wrote for his master’s degree, which he earned at Columbia University in 1996.In 2016, Mr. Morath was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, along with the bandleaders Paul Whiteman and Glenn Miller. “It made me feel really great,” he said. “Of course, they’re both Colorado boys. I felt I was in very good company.”Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. More

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      Glenda Jackson, Oscar-Winning Actress Turned Politician, Dies at 87

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      Ms. Jackson was a two-time Oscar winner who walked away from a successful acting career to become a member of the British Parliament, before then returning to the stage.Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar winner who renounced a successful film and stage career in her 50s to become a member of the British Parliament, then returned to the stage at 80 as the title character in “King Lear,” died on Thursday at her home in Blackheath, London. She was 87.Her death was confirmed by Lionel Larner, her longtime agent, who said that she died after a brief illness.On both stage and screen, Ms. Jackson demonstrated that passion, pain, humor, anger, affection and much else were within her range. “I like to take risks,” she told The New York Times in 1971, “and I want those risks to be larger than the confines of a structure that’s simply meant to entertain.”By then she had won both acclaim and notoriety for performances in which she had bared herself physically and emotionally, notably as a ferocious Charlotte Corday in Peter Brook’s production of Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade,” and as Tchaikovsky’s tormented wife in Ken Russell’s film “The Music Lovers.”And she had won her first best actress Oscar, for playing the wayward Gudrun Brangwen in Ken Russell’s “Women in Love” (1969); her second was for her portrayal of the cool divorcée Vickie Allessio in “A Touch of Class” (1973).Ms. Jackson pivoted to politics in 1992, and was elected as the member of Parliament representing the London constituency of Hampstead and Highgate for the Labour Party. After the party took control of government in 1997, she became a junior minister of transport, only to resign the post two years later before a failed attempt to become mayor of London.She did not run for re-election in 2015, declaring herself too old, and soon returned to acting.Throughout her career, Ms. Jackson displayed an emotional power that sometimes became terrifying, and a voice that could rise from a purr to a rasp of fury or contempt, although her slight physique suggested both an inner and outer vulnerability.Her notable roles on the big screen included her depiction of the troubled poet Stevie Smith in Hugh Whitemore’s “Stevie” (1978) and as the needy divorcée Alex Greville in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971). On Broadway, she won praise as the neurotic Nina Leeds in O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” in 1985 and a best actress Tony for her role as A, a woman over 90 facing mortality, in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” in 2018.Glenda Jackson as King Lear in the play “King Lear” at the Cort Theater in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York TimesMany of Ms. Jackson’s performances provoked shock and awe with their boldness, none more so than her “Lear” in 2016. Though she had a reputation as a dauntingly confident actress, she admitted to having attacks of agonizing nerves before going onstage, and at London’s Old Vic, these were particularly acute.“I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was arrogance or just insanity,” she recalled of preparing for the most demanding of male roles in what she called “the greatest play ever written.” Her performance after 23 years away from the theater drew wide acclaim.“You’re barely aware of her being a woman playing a man,” Christopher Hart wrote in The Sunday Times of London. “It simply isn’t an issue.”Glenda May Jackson was born on May 9, 1936, in Birkenhead, near Liverpool in northwest England, the eldest of four daughters of Harry, a bricklayer, and Joan, a house cleaner and barmaid.Soon after her birth her parents moved to the nearby town of Hoylake, where home was a tiny workman’s house with an outdoor toilet, a cold water tap and a tin tub for a bath. The war increased the family’s privations. “We used to eat candle wax as an alternative to chewing gum,” she remembered. “The big treat was a pennyworth of peanut butter.”With her father called into the Navy, Glenda became increasingly crucial to an all-female household, something that explained, she said, both her defiant feminism and her “bossy streak.” She also proved bright and diligent, winning a scholarship to West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls. But she did not flourish there and left at 16. She was, she recalled, undisciplined and unhappy, “the archetypal fat and spotty teenager.”She was working at a pharmacy store and performing onstage as a member of a local theater group when, in 1954, she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, which had begun to encourage the enrollment of working-class students, including Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole. (Ms. Jackson remained convinced that she was plain, even ugly — a belief later reinforced by the academy’s principal, who told her that she could become only a character actress and “shouldn’t expect to work much before you’re 40.”)The schooling prepared her for what became six years in provincial repertory.In 1958 she married Roy Hodges, a fellow actor. Regional stage work meant periods of unemployment, odd jobs and poverty for the couple, and Ms. Jackson later admitted that she had shoplifted food and other essentials that she could conceal under her coat.Her big break came in 1964, when the director Mr. Brook brought her into an experimental group he was assembling for the recently formed Royal Shakespeare Company. He later recalled her as “a very curious figure — a hidden, shy and yet aggressive, badly dressed girl who seemed resentful of everything.” But in an audition, she had left him mesmerized by “the sudden plunges she took and by her intensity.”Mr. Brook cast her in “Marat/Sade,” which transferred to Broadway in 1967, leading to a Tony nomination for Ms. Jackson’s Charlotte Corday.But she disliked the experience, which, she said, left the company “in hysterics — people twitching, slobber running down their chins, screaming from nerves and exhaustion.” Nor did she enjoy the three years she spent with the R.S.C., though her roles included a sharp, shrewd Ophelia in Peter Hall’s revival of “Hamlet” and several characters in Mr. Brook’s anti-Vietnam War show, “US.” She was not, she decided, a company woman.Such did her reputation as a “difficult” actress begin. She was regarded as aloof and egoistic, and could be contemptuous of actors she found lacking in commitment, bellicose in rehearsal rooms and unafraid of challenging eminent directors. Gary Oldman, who starred with her in Robert David MacDonald’s play “Summit Conference” in 1982, called her “a nightmare.”Yet Trevor Nunn, who wrangled with her in rehearsals, later called her “direct, uncomplicated, honest, very alive.”“Of all the actors I’ve worked with, she has a capacity for work that’s phenomenal,” Mr. Nunn said. “There’s an immense power of concentration, a great deal of attack, thrust, determination.”Motivated in part by her dislike of Hollywood glitz, Ms. Jackson did not attend either of the Academy Award ceremonies for which she was honored as best actress.What mattered more, she said, was “the blood, sweat and tears” of creating a role. For her Emmy-winning performance in the television serial “Elizabeth R” (1971), she learned to ride sidesaddle and to play the virginals, and mastered archery and calligraphy. She also shaved her head — all to add authenticity as her queen evolved from youth to crabbed old age.Subsequent stage roles included Cleopatra in Mr. Brook’s revival of “Antony and Cleopatra” for the R.S.C. in 1978, Racine’s Phèdre at the Old Vic in 1984, Lady Macbeth in a disappointing “Macbeth” on Broadway in 1988, and the title character in Brecht’s “Mother Courage” in 1990.Though she won awards for “Stevie,” including one for best actress from the New York Film Critics Circle, and received good reviews for her work in the television movie “The Patricia Neal Story” (1981) and Robert Altman’s “Beyond Therapy” (1987), her later screen work was generally less successful.With characteristic candor she was often withering about her own efforts, calling her performances in the film version of Terence Rattigan’s play “Bequest to the Nation” (released as “The Nelson Affair” in 1973) and as Bernhardt in the movie “The Incredible Sarah” (1976) “ghastly” and “lousy,” respectively.She brought that candor to Parliament in 1992, when she declared, “Why should I stay in the theater to play the Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’?”Most scripts she had been sent were poor, she said, and contemporary dramatists were not writing good roles for women. Moreover, she said, she had a hatred of a Conservative government which, inspired by “that dreadful woman Margaret Thatcher,” seemed to be dismembering the welfare state the Labour Party had created after the war.In Parliament, Ms. Jackson took an interest in homelessness, housing, women’s rights, disability issues and, especially, transportation. After resigning from her transport post, she was a Labour backbencher, joining those who opposed Britain’s part in the Iraq war in 2003, declaring herself “deeply, deeply ashamed” of her government and calling for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s resignation.Ms. Jackson and Mr. Hodges divorced in 1976. In later years she shared a London house with her only child, the political journalist Dan Hodges, and his wife and children. She preferred, she said, to remain unmarried, explaining that “men are awfully hard work for very little reward.”Ms. Jackson also shunned the trappings of celebrity, dressing inexpensively, using public transportation and relegating her Oscars to the attic. She was, she admitted, a solitary person with not many friends.But she did perhaps fulfill her own ambition: “If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady,” she said. “I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”Emma Bubola More

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      Roger Payne, Biologist Who Heard Whales Singing, Dies at 88

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      His underwater microphones recorded “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” inspiring a movement that led to national and international bans on commercial whaling.Roger S. Payne, a biologist whose discovery that whales serenade one another prompted him to record their cacophonous repertoire of baying, booming, shrieking, squealing, mooing and caterwauling, resulting in both a hit album and a rallying cry to ban commercial whaling, died on Saturday at his home in South Woodstock, Vt. He was 88.The cause was metastatic squamous cell carcinoma, his wife, Lisa Harrow, said.Dr. Payne combined his captivating scientific research with the emotive power of music to spur one of the world’s most successful mammal conservation campaigns. He amplified whales’ voices to help win a congressional crackdown on commercial whaling in the 1970s and a global moratorium in the ’80s. And he established Ocean Alliance, a research and advocacy organization, as well as programs at the Wildlife Conservation Society and elsewhere that continue his groundbreaking work.“He was instrumental in protecting and saving those large animals throughout the world,” Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants program, said in an interview.Prof. Diana Reiss, director of the Animal Behavior and Conservation Program at Hunter College of the City University of New York, said in an email that Dr. Payne’s album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” “had a profound effect in raising global awareness and empathy for whales” and “became a national anthem for the environmental movement.”In a Time magazine essay published just days before he died, Dr. Payne warned that human survival would be jeopardized unless efforts were made “to try to save all species of life, knowing that if we fail to save enough of the essential ones, we will have no future.”In pursuing those efforts, he wrote, society must heed other voices — including nonhumans, like whales — and listen to “what they love, fear, desire, avoid, hate, are intrigued by and treasure” in confronting threats like climate change and increasing acidity in the ocean.“Fifty years ago, people fell in love with the songs of humpback whales, and joined together to ignite a global conservation movement,” Dr. Payne wrote. “It’s time for us to once again listen to the whales — and, this time, to do it with every bit of empathy and ingenuity we can muster so that we might possibly understand them.”A humpback whale and her calf in a scene from the 1978 documentary “Humpbacks: The Gentle Giants,” one of the first films made about whales. It featured Dr. Payne, his wife, Katy Payne, and Sylia Earle.In 1971, Dr. Payne founded Ocean Alliance, now based in Gloucester, Mass., to study and protect whales and their environment. He was an assistant professor of biology at Rockefeller University and a research zoologist at what is now known as the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Center for Field Biology and Conservation, both in New York; he was also scientific director of the society’s Whale Fund until 1983. He was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 1984.Dr. Payne was the author of several books, including “Among Whales” (1995), and produced or hosted six documentaries, including the IMAX movie “Whales: An Unforgettable Journey” (1996). More recently, he signed on as the principal adviser to Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), founded in 2020 with the goal of translating the communication of sperm whales.In the early 1960s, Dr. Payne was a moth expert who had never seen a whale. His curiosity was piqued when a porpoise washed up on a Massachusetts beach and he heard whale sounds recorded by William Schevill of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, Mass.A friend suggested that he would have a better chance of seeing and hearing live whales in Bermuda. It was there that he met a Navy engineer who, while monitoring Soviet submarine traffic off the East Coast with underwater microphones, had detected another source of undersea sounds that formed thematic patterns and appeared to last as long as 30 minutes.The sounds emanated from whales, whose sequence of sounds Dr. Payne defined as songs, sung both solo and in ensemble. The songs could sometimes be audible for thousands of miles across an ocean.“What I heard blew my mind,” he told The New Yorker last year.Dr. Payne and a fellow researcher, Scott McVay, confirmed in 1967 that humpback whales sing in what Dr. Payne described as a chorus of “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound.”He analyzed the audio with a sound spectrograph, and with collaborators including his wife and fellow researcher, Katherine (Boynton) Payne, known as Katy, as well as Mr. McVay and an engineer, Frank Watlington. They notated the rhythmic melody in what resembled an electronic-music score. Dr. Payne then wrote, in Science magazine in 1971, that humpback whales “produce a series of beautiful and varied sounds for a period of seven to 30 minutes and then repeat the same series with considerable precision.”How, why and even if the whales were actually communicating remained a mystery. Whales have no larynxes or vocal cords, so they appear to make the sounds by pushing air from their lungs through their nasal cavities. Male humpbacks seem to make the sounds especially during breeding season.Notwithstanding whatever advocacy and research Dr. Payne and his colleagues did, it was the whale songs that caught the public imagination and fired the global movement.The music critic Donal Henahan wrote in The New York Times in 1970 that the whales produced “strange and moving lyricism,” which the Times described in a separate article as akin to a haunting oboe-cornet duet trailing off to an eerie wailing bagpipe.“Songs of the Humpback Whale” landed on the Billboard 200 album chart and stayed there for several weeks in 1970, initially selling more than a hundred thousand copies. The track list included “Solo Whale,” “Slowed‐Down Solo Whale,” “Tower Whales,” “Distant Whales” and “Three Whale Trip.”“If, after hearing this (preferably in a dark room), you don’t feel you have been put in touch with your mammalian past,” Mr. Henahan wrote, “you had best give up listening to vocal music.”Some of the whales’ melodies were incorporated by Judy Collins on one track of her album “Whales and Nightingales.” Pete Seeger was inspired by the melodies to write “Song of the World’s Last Whale.” And the New York Philharmonic performed “And God Created Great Whales,” composed by Alan Hovhaness and incorporating recorded whale songs — sounds that, Mr. Henahan wrote, “carried overtones of ecological doom and a wordless communication from our primordial past.”In 1977, when NASA launched Voyagers 1 and 2 to probe the far reaches of the solar system, the songs of the humpback whales were carried into space on records that could be played by any alien with a stylus.Dr. Payne in the Gulf of Mexico in 2014, studying the effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill on whales.Ocean AllianceRoger Searle Payne was born on Jan. 29, 1935, in Manhattan to Elizabeth (Searle) Payne, a music teacher, and Edward Benedict Payne, an electrical engineer. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1956 and earned a doctorate in animal behavior from Cornell University in 1961.He married Katherine Boynton in 1960; their marriage ended in divorce in 1985. He and Ms. Harrow, an actress and environmentalist, married in 1991. In addition to her, he is survived by four children from his first marriage, John, Holly, Laura and Sam Payne; a stepson, Timothy Neill-Harrow; and 11 grandchildren.“Roger‘s career, his life, was marked by his deep commitment to the lives of whales and other marine life, and then to the interdependence of all species,” Prof. Stuart Firestein, a former chairman of the biology department at Columbia University, said by email. “Roger’s way was not coercion but creating in others the awe and wonder he felt for the beauty of life on this planet.”In his Time essay, Dr. Payne looked both backward and to the future. “As my time runs out,” he wrote, “I am possessed with the hope that humans worldwide are smart enough and adaptable enough to put the saving of other species where it belongs: at the top of the list of our most important jobs. I believe that science can help us survive our folly.” More

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      Jacques Rozier, Last of the French New Wave Directors, Dies at 96

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      Though he never achieved the fame of Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, he was considered by many to be their equal.Jacques Rozier, who directed critically acclaimed films like “Adieu Philippine” and “Du Côté d’Orouët” and who was considered the last surviving member of the French New Wave, if an underrated one, died on June 2 in the village of Théoule-sur-Mer in southern France. He was 96.His death was announced on social media by his friend and former collaborator Michèle Berson.Mr. Rozier was in his 30s when he emerged as part of the French film vanguard of the late 1950s and 1960s, channeling the same insurrectionary spirit as New Wave contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose last names became one-word signifiers of swashbuckling directorial brilliance.Such luminaries acknowledged him as a member in good standing in what amounted to one of cinema history’s most exclusive clubs, collectively committed to reinventing the art form by upending conventional notions of what a movie could be.And he outlasted them all. After the death in 2019 of Agnès Varda, another director associated with the movement, Mr. Godard said in an interview with the Swiss public broadcasting network RTS that there were now only two of the original New Wave directors left, himself and Mr. Rozier. Mr. Godard, a longtime friend of Mr. Rozier, died last year.“Adieu Philippine” (1962) was Mr. Rozier’s debut feature, a story about a young television technician’s breezy seaside dalliance with two teenage girls before he heads off to serve in the Algerian War.While the film was not a commercial success, it inspired an emerging generation of mavericks.Cahiers du Cinéma, the French film magazine that served as the bible of the movement, put the movie’s female stars, Yveline Céry and Stefania Sabatini, on the cover of an issue titled “Nouvelle Vague” (“New Wave”) and described the film as “the paragon of the New Wave, the one where the virtues of jeunes cinéma shine with their purest brilliance.”The celebrated directors Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, who were also aligned with the movement, declared “Adieu Philippine” a masterpiece. Mr. Truffaut wrote that it was “the clearest success of the new cinema where spontaneity is all the more powerful when it is the result of long and careful work.” Before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Godard called the film “quite simply the best French film of recent years.”Even so, it took Mr. Rozier, a single-minded director known for feuding with his producers, years to achieve even modest acclaim across the Atlantic. When “Adieu Philippine” finally premiered in New York in 1973, the critic Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote in his review that it was “especially ironic” that “perhaps the most agreeable, and surely one of the loveliest, of all New Wave movies” should have “had to wait so long.”Even then, Mr. Rozier spent the next decades largely as a darling of critics and cineastes. The New Yorker called him the “odd man out” in a 2012 appreciation by the critic Richard Brody, a champion of his work. Observing that none of his five feature films were available in the United States, Mr. Brody wrote that Mr. Rozier “gets the award for Best French Director Undistributed Here.”Mr. Rozier was born on Nov. 10, 1926, in Paris. After graduating from the Institute for Advanced Film Studies (now La Fémis) in his home city, he worked as an assistant in television and on film productions, including “French Cancan,” a 1955 musical directed by Jean Renoir. Mr. Rozier would go on to direct many French television shows throughout the 1960s.Information on his survivors was not immediately available. His former wife, Michèle O’Glor, a writer and actress, died last year, following the death in 2021 of their son Jean Jacques Rozier, who worked as an operator on several of his father’s films.Nine years after “Adieu Philippine” premiered at Cannes, Mr. Rozier returned to that fabled French Riviera festival with “Du côté d’Orouët,” a rambling comedy released in 1973 that was shot on 16-millimeter film. It followed three young women from Paris embarking on a vacation on the west coast of France.More than two and a half hours long “and ultra casual, ‘Du côté d’Orouët’ is the epitome of what Quentin Tarantino would term a ‘hang out’ movie,” the Australian film site Senses of Cinema noted in 2018.A scene from ”Adieu Philippine” (1962), about a young television technician’s dalliance with two teenage girls.via UnifranceRambling seaside films were common for Mr. Rozier. Among them are the 1976 comedy “Les Naufragés de l’île de la Tortue” (“The Castaways of Turtle Island”), about a travel agent who sets up Robinson Crusoe-style vacations in Caribbean islands, and “Maine-Océan” (“Maine-Ocean Express”), a 1986 road comedy set on a train traveling from Paris to Saint-Nazaire on the coast of Brittany.His movies, including his final one, the theater-world comedy “Fifi Martingale,” from 2001, “are deliciously unstrung,” Mr. Brody wrote in his New Yorker appreciation.“He builds them on the basis of elaborate improvisations, constructing long scenes of comic misadventures and amorous misunderstandings,” he wrote. “He casts the minutiae of daily life as cosmic playthings of destiny and invests them with an extraordinary, bittersweet romantic energy.” More

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      Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Dead at 89

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      “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders.Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Knopf, his publisher, said in a statement that his son John had confirmed the death. Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”His characters were outsiders, like him. He lived quietly and determinately outside the literary mainstream. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books. He never committed journalism or taught writing. He granted only a handful of interviews.The mainstream, however, eventually came to him. “All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective western that cut against the grain of his previous work, won a National Book Award in 1992, and “The Road” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Both were made into films, as was Mr. McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2008.Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in the 2007 film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture.Richard Foreman/Miramax Films and Paramount VantageThat film, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, gave the world the indelible image of Javier Bardem as Mr. McCarthy’s nihilistic hit man Anton Chigurh, dispatching his victims with a pneumatic bolt gun meant for cattle.Mr. McCarthy had in recent years been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and called Mr. McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian” (1985), a bad dream of a Western, “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’”Saul Bellow noted Mr. McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”Acclaim for Mr. McCarthy’s work was not universal, however. Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as “a colossally gifted writer” and “one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.”But Mr. Wood accused Mr. McCarthy of writing sentences that sometimes veered “close to nonsense,” of “appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records,” and of being hostile to intellectual consciousness.The language and tone of Mr. McCarthy’s novels changed markedly over the decades. Among academics and Mr. McCarthy’s legion of obsessive readers, the essential question about his oeuvre has long been: What’s better, early McCarthy or late?Mr. McCarthy in 1965 when he published his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” It was a bleak fable set in the Appalachian South.Joe BlackwellHis first four novels — “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), “Outer Dark” (1968), “Child of God” (1973) and “Suttree” (1979) — are bleak fables, set in the Appalachian South, related in tangled prose that owes an acknowledged debt to William Faulkner. Indeed, the editor of Mr. McCarthy’s first five books, Albert Erskine, of Random House, had been Faulkner’s last editor.These early novels could be carnivalesque in their humor. In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field. The farmer sues, alleging bestiality, but the man later brags, “My lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast.”Mr. McCarthy’s later period began in earnest with “All the Pretty Horses,” the first volume in his Border Trilogy, which includes the novels “The Crossing” (1994) and “Cities of the Plain” (1998). These novels put on display his powerful and intuitive sense of the American landscape. His prose was now rich but austere, shorn of most punctuation. It owed more to Hemingway than to Faulkner. The location in his fiction had shifted as well, to the desert Southwest.The elegiac quality of “All the Pretty Horses,” with its existential cowboys, surprised some of his admirers. One of Mr. McCarthy’s friends, the novelist Leslie Garrett, was quoted as remarking about it, “Cormac finally has succeeded in writing a book that won’t offend anybody.”“All the Pretty Horses” attracted a vast audience, and was made into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. It was not merely Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller; it was his first novel to sell many copies at all. None of his previous books had by then sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover.“All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective Western, won a National Book Award in 1992 and was adapted for film in 2000.Matt Damon in a scene from the 2000 film “All the Pretty Horses.” The book was Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller.Van Redin/Columbia – TriStar, via Getty ImagesEarly Life in TennesseeHe was born Charles McCarthy on July 20, 1933, in Providence, R.I., the third of six children and the oldest son born to Charles J. and the Gladys (McGrail) McCarthy. Within a few years the family moved to Knoxville, Tenn., where Mr. McCarthy’s father, who had graduated from Yale Law School, worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.According to one account, Mr. McCarthy adopted the name Cormac, a family nickname, to avoid associations with Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy. By another account, given on a website devoted to Mr. McCarthy, he renamed himself Cormac after an Irish king. Still another has it that Mr. McCarthy’s family had legally changed his name to the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles.”The McCarthy family was affluent for Knoxville, its large white house staffed with maids. The young Mr. McCarthy was drawn, however, to the city’s seedier side. “I felt earlier on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen,” he told the Times Magazine. “I hated school from the day I set foot in it.”He attended Knoxville’s Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee, where he studied physics and engineering in 1951 and 1952. He joined the Air Force in 1953 and served four years, several of them stationed in Alaska. To quell his boredom, he said, “I read a lot of books very quickly.”Mr. McCarthy returned to the University of Tennessee from 1957 to 1959. He learned that he had a knack for language, he once said, after a professor asked him read a collection of 18th-century essays and repunctuate them for a textbook. He began to publish short stories in the student literary magazine. He never graduated, however, and he moved to Chicago, where he worked in an auto-parts warehouse while writing his first novel.He sent the manuscript of that novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” to Random House, he said, because “it was the only publisher I’d heard of.”Reviewing “The Orchard Keeper” in The Times in 1965, Orville Prescott called it “impressive” but noted that Mr. McCarthy deployed “so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half-submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.”Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”Mr. McCarthy’s second novel, “Outer Dark,” was about a woman who bears her brother’s baby; he leaves it in the woods to die. Guy Davenport, writing in The Times Book Review in 1968, praised its language as “compounded of Appalachian phrases as plain and as functional as an ax.”His third novel, “Child of God,” was about a cave-dwelling mass murderer and necrophiliac. Reviewing it at length in The New Yorker, the author and child psychiatrist Robert Coles called Mr. McCarthy a “novelist of religious feeling” and likened him to the classical Greek dramatists.Mr. McCarthy moved to El Paso in 1976 after separating from Ms. DeLisle. The couple later divorced. The settings of his novels soon changed as well.His last of his early novels to be set in the South, “Suttree” (1979), was his most autobiographical. It is set among the fringe characters who populated Knoxville’s waterfront, a milieu he knew intimately. “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous lifestyle,” Mr. McCarthy once said.Mr. McCarthy in 1979, the year “Suttree” was published. In the book, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field.Dan MooreSome saw the novel as a farewell to his raucous old life. He stopped drinking before the novel was published. “The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,” he said. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”Mr. McCarthy was briefly living in a motel in Knoxville when he learned, in 1981, that he had won a MacArthur fellowship. (In praise of his many mailing addresses, he commented: “Three moves is as good as a fire.”)‘A Legion of Horribles’The MacArthur money gave him the time to write “Blood Meridian,” which many critics feel is his finest book. A surreal and blood-drenched anti-western about a gang of scalp hunters and outlaws in Texas and Mexico, the book features among its central characters a crazed, hairless, brilliant, seven-foot tall albino judge who put many readers in mind of Melville’s Captain Ahab.The book delineated what he called “a legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners.”After the retirement of Mr. Erskine, his longtime editor, Mr. McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf and acquired a new editor, Gary Fisketjon, who also worked with Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, among other writers. It was before the release of “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992 that Mr. McCarthy agreed to talk to The Times Magazine for his first major interview.The author of the article, Richard B. Woodward, noted at the time that Mr. McCarthy “cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.”In that interview, Mr. McCarthy named the “good writers” as Melville, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, a list that omitted writers who, as he put it, don’t “deal with issues of life and death.” About Proust and Henry James, he commented: “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”“All the Pretty Horses” is a gritty but often romantic narrative about a young man named John Grady Cole who, evicted in 1950 from the Texas ranch where he grew up, heads for Mexico on horseback along with his best friend. The book sold nearly 200,000 copies within six months.The next two books in the Border Trilogy also sold well, although some critics were not as taken with them. “It’s axiomatic in publishing,” Mr. Fisketjon said in a 1995 interview, “that the thrill of discovery is followed by a backlash.”Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.Mr. McCarthy published his stripped-down existential thriller “No Country For Old Men” in 2005. The next year he published “The Road,” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape.“The Road” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007.The novel is dedicated to his son.“I think about John all the time and what the world’s going to be like,” Mr. McCarthy told Rolling Stone. “If the family situation was different, I could see taking John and going to New Zealand. It’s a civilized place. ”In the same interview, Mr. McCarthy said he had never voted: “Poets shouldn’t vote.”Writing Till the EndMr. McCarthy sold his archives, 98 boxes of letters, drafts, notes and unpublished work, to Texas State University in 2008 for $2 million. A year later, the Olivetti typewriter on which he’d written each of his novels sold at auction for $254,500. He immediately began working on a new Olivetti, the same model, purchased for less than $20.The Olivetti manual typewriter on which Mr. McCarthy typed all of his novels from 1958 to 2009, the year it sold at auction for $254,500.Christie’s, via Associated PressIn 2012, Mr. McCarthy wrote a screenplay, “The Counselor,” about a lawyer in the Southwest who falls into the drug business. Ridley Scott adapted it for a film in 2013 starring Michael Fassbender and Cameron Diaz.Mr. McCarthy was married for a third time, to Jennifer Winkley, in 1998, when he was 64 and she was 32. The marriage ended in divorce in 2006. In addition to his son John, from Mr. McCarthy’s third marriage, he is survived by another son, Chase, from his first marriage; two sisters, Barbara Ann McCooe and Maryellen Jaques; a brother, Dennis; and two grandchildren. His first wife, Ms. Holleman, died in 2009.Late in 2022, Mr. McCarthy released a pair of ambitious linked novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” to mostly adulatory reviews. “The Passenger” is about a racecar driver turned salvage diver named Bobby Western — he somewhat resembles Mr. McCarthy in his taciturnity, his Knoxville childhood and his fondness for New Orleans and its nightlife — who sees things he should not see. Before long he is pursued not only by G-men but, it can seem, also by all the ghosts of the 20th century. It’s a novel of ideas — about mathematics, the nature of knowledge, the importance of fast cars — that slips into pretentiousness at times but also contains flatulence jokes.The title of the second novel, “Stella Maris,” refers to a psychiatric hospital in Black River Falls, Wis. That is where 20-year-old Alicia Western, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has checked herself in because she’s been hallucinating. Central among her visions is the Thalidomide Kid, a shambolic dwarf with flippers and a bent sense of humor. Alicia is carrying a plastic bag stuffed with $40,000, which she tries to give away to the receptionist. Alicia also happens to be Bobby’s sister. Their father was a physicist on the Manhattan Project.Shortly before Mr. McCarthy’s death, it was announced that he had been at work on a screenplay for a film adaptation of “Blood Meridian,” to be directed by John Hillcoat, who directed the film of Mr. McCarthy’s “The Road.”In 2007, Mr. McCarthy took part in one of the most unlikely cultural collisions of the new century when he agreed to be interviewed on daytime television by Oprah Winfrey. She had chosen “The Road” for her book club.He seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight. “I don’t think it’s good for your head,” he told Ms. Winfrey about being interviewed. “You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”Alex Traub More

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      Treat Williams, Actor Known for ‘Hair’ and ‘Everwood,’ Dies at 71

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      The veteran actor also starred in the movie “Deep Rising.” He died after a motorcycle accident in Vermont.Treat Williams, the actor known for his roles in the movies “Hair” and “Deep Rising” and the TV show “Everwood,” has died. He was 71.Mr. Williams died on Monday after an S.U.V. crashed into his motorcycle in Dorset, Vt., the Vermont State Police said in a statement.The crash occurred in the late afternoon near the Vermont-New York State border.The Vermont State Police said that a southbound S.U.V. attempting to turn left into a parking lot drove into the path of Mr. Williams’s northbound Honda motorcycle, adding that Mr. Williams was “unable to avoid a collision and was thrown from his motorcycle.”Mr. Williams, who was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident, suffered critical injuries and was pronounced dead at a medical center in Albany, N.Y., after being airlifted there, the state police said. The 35-year-old man whose vehicle hit Mr. Williams was not hospitalized.The police said an investigation was underway. No other details were immediately available.Richard Treat Williams was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1951. “Treat” is a Welsh name that has been in his family for generations.Mr. Williams moved with his family to Rowayton, Conn., as a young child, he told Vermont Magazine in a 2021 interview. His father was a World War II veteran who later worked for the Merck pharmaceutical company. His mother owned a sailing and swimming school on Long Island Sound.“Looking back on my younger years, I had an idyllic childhood, but I didn’t initially realize how idyllic it truly was until I grew older,” he told the magazine.Mr. Williams began acting in seventh grade, he told Vermont Magazine. Later, at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, he quit the football team to focus on acting.Within a few years, he was on Broadway as the understudy to four of the male leads in “Grease,” including John Travolta. Then he began picking up roles in films starring James Earl Jones, Michael Caine and other A-list stars. One of his highest-profile roles was playing a hippie in the 1979 film version of “Hair,” directed by Milos Foreman.But his success wasn’t always assured. After a movie he starred in flopped in 1980 — the comedy “Why Would I Lie?” — Mr. Williams started flying planes for a company in Los Angeles.“I’d done eight films, none of which had been successful,” he told The New York Times in 1981. “I felt so out of control. I wasn’t working with people I wanted to work with. I was very frustrated.”Mr. Williams eventually came back to show business and racked up four more decades of roles in a wide variety of film and television projects.Among other highlights, he played the lead roles of a police officer-turned-informant in the 1981 film “Prince of the City” and a boat captain in the 1998 action movie “Deep Rising.”He also starred in “Everwood,” a WB television series about a New York neurosurgeon who starts a new life with his family in the mountains of Colorado after his wife dies in a car accident. The show debuted in 2002 and ran for four seasons.More recently, Mr. Williams played the impossibly single old flame of a woman who tries to sell her hometown in the 2020 Netflix musical “Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square.” He also played a retired detective in the 2022 HBO series “We Own This City.”Information about Mr. Williams’s survivors was not immediately available.Hours before he died, Mr. Williams, who lived in Manchester Center, Vt., posted a photo on Twitter that he appeared to have taken from the seat of his lawn mower.“Mowing today,” he wrote. “Wish I could bottle the scent.”Jesus Jiménez More

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      Jessie Maple, Pathbreaking Filmmaker, Is Dead at 86

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      She was believed to be the first Black woman to produce, write and direct an independent feature film. She also broke ground as a union cinematographer.Jessie Maple, who built careers as a camerawoman and an independent filmmaker when Black women were almost nonexistent in those fields, and who then left meticulous instructions for later generations to follow in her footsteps, died on May 30 at her home in Atlanta. She was 86.Her death was confirmed by E. Danielle Butler, her longtime assistant and the co-author of her self-published 2019 memoir, “The Maple Crew.”Director and camerawoman were just two of Ms. Maple’s many jobs. She also worked as a bacteriologist; wrote a newspaper column; owned coffee shops; baked vegan cookies; and ran a 50-seat theater in the basement of her Harlem brownstone.Ms. Maple had been writing a column called Jessie’s Grapevine for The New York Courier, a Harlem newspaper, when she moved to broadcast journalism from print in the early 1970s because she wanted to reach more people.After studying film editing in programs at WNET, New York’s public television station, and Third World Cinema, the actor Ossie Davis’s film company, and working as an apprentice editor on the Gordon Parks films “Shaft’s Big Score!” (1972) and “The Super Cops” (1974), Ms. Maple realized that she yearned to be behind the camera.In 1975 she became the first African American woman to join New York’s cinematographers union (now called the International Cinematographers Guild), according to Indiana University’s Black Film Center and Archive, which holds a collection of her papers and films. But, she said, the union banned her after she fought to change rules that required her to complete a lengthy apprenticeship.“If I had waited, I never would have become a cameraperson,” Ms. Maple told The New York Times for a 2016 article about women who broke barriers to work on film crews. “So I took ’em to court.”Ms. Maple with cast members on the set of her second feature film, “Twice as Nice,” the story of twin sisters who are college basketball stars.Black Film Center Archive, Indiana University, BloomingtonShe sued several New York television stations for gender and racial discrimination in the mid-1970s, and she won a lawsuit against WCBS in 1977 that earned her a trial period with the station. That blossomed into a freelance career there and at the local ABC and NBC stations.Ms. Maple wrote that she faced crew members who did not want to work with her and nasty whispers, sometimes quite audible, behind her back. But she persevered, even when she got assignments that felt especially difficult — for example, flying in a helicopter to get aerial footage on a near-daily basis even though she had motion sickness.In 1977 Ms. Maple wrote about her experiences in “How to Become a Union Camerawoman,” a detailed guide to succeeding in a forbidding industry.But as TV news moved from film to video, Ms. Maple decided that she would rather become an independent filmmaker, with complete control of her work. She made short documentaries with Leroy Patton, her husband, including “Methadone: Wonder Drug or Evil Spirit?,” before turning to features.Ms. Maple said she wanted to shoot films about issues that were important to her community.“I want to tell the stories about things that bother me which may not otherwise be told,” she wrote in her memoir. “I strive to use the resources that are around me. Most importantly, I work to give voice to my people and the challenges we face.”According to the Black Film Center and Archive, Ms. Maple was the first known African American woman to produce, write and direct an independent feature film. That film, “Will” (1981), followed a former college basketball player struggling with addiction (played by Obaka Adedunyo) who takes in a 12-year-old boy to prevent him from developing a habit of his own. Loretta Devine, in her first film role, played Will’s significant other.Ms. Maple said she wanted to shoot films in her community about issues that were important to it. “I work, she said, “to give voice to my people and the challenges we face.”Black Film Center Archive, Indiana University, BloomingtonMs. Maple’s second feature, “Twice as Nice” (1989), was the story of twin sisters, both college basketball standouts, who are preparing to take part in a professional draft. The movie starred Pamela and Paula McGee, twins who won back-to-back N.C.A.A. basketball championships at the University of Southern California but were not professional actors.In 1982 Ms. Maple and Mr. Patton opened a theater to show “Will” and other independent films in the basement of their brownstone on 120th Street in Harlem. They called it 20 West, billed it as “the home of Black cinema” and featured movies by up-and-comers like Spike Lee. They closed it about a decade later — because, she said, she wanted to focus more on her own films.Ms. Maple’s films have achieved greater recognition in recent years than they did when they were released. In 2015 the Museum of Modern Art screened “Will”; that same year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center (now Film at Lincoln Center) showed both her features as part of a series called “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986.”Ms. Maple in 2016. A year earlier, her films had been shown at both the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesMs. Maple was born on Feb. 14, 1937, in McComb, Miss., about 80 miles south of Jackson, the second oldest of 12 children. Her father was a farmer, her mother a teacher and dietitian.Her father died when she was 13, and her mother sent her and many of her siblings to the Northeast, where she went to high school.After high school she studied medical technology and then started working in bacteriology. She eventually ran a lab at the Hospital for Joint Diseases and Medical Center (now part of New York University’s hospital system) in Manhattan while the hospital administration searched for a permanent replacement because, she wrote, she did not have a Ph.D. She was credited with leading the preliminary identification of a new strain of bacteria; on her lunch breaks, she joined other, lower-paid workers who were trying to organize.It was a steady, well-paying job, but Ms. Maple, who was married and had a young daughter, tired of the work and left bacteriology in 1968 to pursue journalism. She was on assignment for a magazine in Texas when she met Mr. Patton, a photographer for Jet and Ebony magazines who lived in Los Angeles, and they developed a bicoastal relationship.Ms. Maple had separated from her husband; Mr. Patton was still living with his wife. In time they divorced their spouses and married, and Mr. Patton moved to Manhattan. (Ms. Maple was sometimes billed as Jessie Maple Patton in her film work.)Ms. Maple is survived by her husband; her daughter, Audrey Snipes; five sisters, Lorrain Crosby, Peggy Lincoln, Debbie Reed, Camilla Clarke Doremus and Stephanie Robinson; and a grandson.Ms. Maple worked relentlessly to accomplish her dreams. She supplemented her income through ventures including two Harlem coffee shops she ran with Mr. Patton and a line of vegan cookies she made in the 1990s, which were eventually available at retailers on the East Coast.“I was too busy doing the work to slow down,” she wrote in her memoir. “I’d like to believe that my efforts have paved the way for the people behind me to work just as hard but struggle a little less.” More

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      Michael Batayeh, Comedian and ‘Breaking Bad’ Actor, Dies at 52

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      Mr. Batayeh starred in three episodes of the Emmy-winning series and performed stand-up comedy.Michael Batayeh, an actor best known for his brief role in the Emmy-winning series “Breaking Bad” and a comedian who was popular in the Arab-American community, died at his home in Ypsilanti, Mich. He was 52.His sister Ida Vergollo said he died on June 1 in his sleep after a heart attack. A coroner later found issues with his heart, she said.Mr. Batayeh appeared in “Breaking Bad” as Dennis Markowski, the steady manager of a laundromat that was a front for a meth lab. The character was killed after he showed interest in speaking to the Drug Enforcement Administration in exchange for immunity.As a comedian, Mr. Batayeh performed in major clubs in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as around the country and internationally.He also had credits on several popular television series, including “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “The Bernie Mac Show” and “Boy Meets World.”Mr. Batayeh’s role as a cabdriver on “Everybody Loves Raymond” in 1998 signaled to his family that he had arrived as an entertainer, according to Ms. Vergollo, “because that’s when my dad first saw his last name on TV.” She said, “My dad was so proud of him and let him know that.”Michael Anthony Batayeh was born on Dec. 27, 1970, in Detroit, the seventh child of Abraham Batayeh, a Ford factory worker, and Victoria (Dababneh) Batayeh.The couple immigrated to the United States from Jordan in 1955. Michael Batayeh attended Wayne State University for three years before dropping out and moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the arts and start his own comedy troupe with a friend.“He was actually made to be a performer since he was very, very young,” said Ms. Vergollo, who recalled that her brother began playing the tabla, a pair of hand drums, at 5 years old and continued throughout his adult life.“My dad used to drag him up onstage at all the weddings,” she said.Mr. Batayeh is survived by his sisters Ida Vergollo, Diane Batayeh-Ricketts, MaryAnn Joseph, Madeline Sherman and Theresa Aquino. His eldest sister, Jeannie Batayeh, died from cancer in 2016.Mr. Batayeh often used his family as fodder for comedy. “He made fun of us a lot,” Ms. Vergollo said.And an affinity for accents made him popular in the Arab-American community, said Ms. Vergollo, who called him “so spot on.”At the invitation of the Jordanian royal family, his sisters said, he performed at a comedy festival in Amman, Jordan’s capital. He was also featured in a comedy special for Showtime Arabia.The family is asking for memorial contributions to an organization that provides recreation and mentoring programs for youth in southwest Detroit.“He would voice to us how important it was and how good he felt when he went back home and talked to kids or mentored people who wanted to start out,” Ms. Vergollo said. She noted that Mr. Batayeh moved back to Michigan from California permanently in 2016 when his sister Jeannie was ill, but would travel back and forth for work.“He cared about his community and wanted to give back,” she said, “and that’s the type of person he was.” More