Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Music

      Nashawn Breedlove, Rapper Who Dueled Eminem in ‘8 Mile,’ Dies at 46

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      He drew praise for his scene in the film, in which he belittled Eminem’s character with sarcastic lyrics, a gruff voice and an imposing presence.Nashawn Breedlove, the actor who received acclaim for his scene in the rap-to-riches film “8 Mile,” in which he delivers a tenacious freestyle in a battle against the character portrayed by the rapper Eminem, commanding the gloomy stage with his blustery lyrics and imposing presence, has died. He was 46.Mr. Breedlove’s mother, Patricia Breedlove, confirmed his death in a statement on Facebook, though she did not share the date or a cause of his death.The 2002 film “8 Mile” starred the rapper Eminem, in a story that is loosely based on his life growing up poor in a trailer park on the northern edge of Detroit. The film is renowned for its gritty portrayal of an artist hustling to make it big in the rap world, depicting a community that can be ruthlessly critical of bland artists yet rapturous when a talent twists lyrics into a clever diss or vituperation. It regularly ranks among the best hip-hop movies ever made.Mr. Breedlove, who in the film portrayed the rapper Lotto, a member of a rival rap group, projected a sense of bravado in his scene with Eminem’s character, Jimmy, who raps as B-Rabbit.Set in a small, cramped and darkly lit venue, their battle scene shows both characters onstage — Lotto, his arms muscular and voice gruff, visibly more amped up, and Jimmy, his black beanie snugged and eyes downcast, appearing relaxed and even somewhat disinterested.After calling Jimmy a “coward,” Lotto takes the mic first and injects his rap with mentions of race and Jimmy’s lack of self-worth, all while playfully adding sarcastic notes of politeness, like when he says “I hate to do this” and tells Jimmy to “have a nice day” right after lobbing a profanity at him.In one verse, Lotto compares Jimmy to the titular character in the midcentury sitcom “Leave It to Beaver,” saying, “Call me your leader, I feel bad that I got to murder that dude from ‘Leave It to Beaver.’”After finishing his freestyle, Lotto drops the mic and receives resounding cheers from the audience.Then the mic is handed to Jimmy, who stares at Lotto before charging into his belittling verse that describes Lotto as someone “paranoid” who needs “another steroid.”Then Jimmy continues to target Lotto’s muscles: “Looking like a cyclone hit you, tank top screaming, ‘Lotto, I don’t fit you!’”Jimmy is named the winner of the battle, but compared to how others fared against Eminem’s character — including his final opponent in the film, who famously chokes when confronted with Jimmy’s self-deprecating verses — Lotto’s rap stood out for its forceful yet lucid delivery.A complete list of Mr. Breedlove’s survivors was not immediately available, and relatives could not be reached for comment on Wednesday night.Mr. Breedlove also appeared on the soundtrack to the 2001 comedy “The Wash,” which starred Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, according to the music publication HipHopDX.On Monday, Mickey Factz, a rapper, said on Instagram that Mr. Breedlove would be remembered as “one of the few emcee’s to beat Eminem.” More

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      in Music

      Terry Kirkman, Whose Band Was a Late-1960s Hit Machine, Dies at 83

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      A singer, songwriter and virtuoso musician, he was a founder of the clean-cut group the Association and wrote one of its biggest hits, “Cherish.”Terry Kirkman, a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter who was a founder of the 1960s pop group the Association, whose lush vocal harmonies and sugary melodic hooks propelled a string of indelible hits, including “Cherish” (which he wrote) and “Along Comes Mary,” died on Saturday at his home in Montclair, Calif. He was 83.His wife, Heidi Kirkman, said the cause was congestive heart failure.A gifted musician who could play up to two dozen instruments, Mr. Kirkman and Jules Alexander, a guitarist and songwriter, formed the six-member Association in 1965. With a folk-inflected sound that was both sunny and sophisticated, the Association proved a veritable AM radio hit factory in its late-1960s heyday.The band’s debut album, “And Then … Along Comes the Association,” released in 1966, spawned two signature hits of the era: “Along Comes Mary,” which hit No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 that June, and “Cherish,” which reached No. 1 in August. The group’s third album, “Insight Out,” released the next year, included two more Top 10 hits: “Never My Love” and “Windy,” the group’s second No. 1 record.Along the way, the Association made dozens of appearances on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and other television variety shows. It also made a mark on the big screen, recording four songs, including the title track for the 1969 film “Goodbye, Columbus,” starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw and based on a Philip Roth novella.The Association’s debut album, released in 1966, spawned two signature hits of the era, “Along Comes Mary” and “Cherish.”ValiantDespite the Association’s chart-topping success, the group was dismissed by some critics, in part because of its blazer-and-tie image and parent-friendly sound, which seemed dramatically out of step in a Los Angeles rock scene dominated by hard-edged, psychedelia-tinged bands like the Byrds and the Doors.In a fitting symbol of the Association’s curious place in the 1960s pop pantheon, the band opened the first night of the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 but stood out as an odd fit at a boundary-pushing musical showcase in which Jimi Hendrix famously ignited his Fender Stratocaster onstage after a mind-warping set.The three-day explosion of rock and paisley, held at the height of the so-called Summer of Love, is still celebrated as an apotheosis of the hippie era, thanks in part to “Monterey Pop,” the landmark 1968 documentary directed by D.A. Pennebaker.“It was an honor, it was historical, and it was really bad,” Mr. Kirkman said of the band’s Monterey performance in a 2015 interview with the music blogger Bo White. “We were the soundtrack and lighting check for the Monterey Pop Festival.”Their performance included a high-school-level comedy skit that they had used on television, in which the band members pretended to be robots booting up one by one. It was, Mr. Kirkman added, “one of the worst mistakes that we ever, ever, ever, ever did,” Mr. Kirkman added.He said that John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who was one of the festival’s organizers, “just said to me bluntly a couple of years later, ‘So sorry you weren’t in the film. You didn’t fit the image.’”But the Association’s relatively square public profile also helped broaden its audience to multiple generations. Mr. Kirkman’s intricate compositions like “Cherish” and “Everything That Touches You” called to mind Burt Bacharach.Mr. Kirkman laid down the basis of “Cherish” in less than seven minutes, he said in a 2015 interview with the music website The College Crowd Digs Me, while sitting down with his first wife, Judith, who had just turned the television dial to “The Tonight Show.” “When I finished it, I was just barely into Johnny Carson’s monologue,” he said.A delicate, intricately crafted love song, “Cherish” became ever-present on oldies radio over the decades, and wove its way into countless movies and television shows.But, Mr. Kirkman told the site, “It’s not always a compliment,” adding, “‘Cherish’ has been used as a gag for being a kind of conservative, old-fashioned song in an otherwise hip movie.”This was particularly galling to Mr. Kirkman, a staunch liberal who included an antiwar song, “Requiem for the Masses,” as the B-side of the “Never My Love” single.“I am a natural-born civil rights activist from Kansas, and I was on the road with three guys who were really conservative, reactionary people,” he told Mr. White. “I stood back thinking, ‘That’s cool. That’s completely fair.’ You know, walk and talk, live your life. But it’s not the art that I want to make. I want the art to be about something besides jumping in the back seat, kiss me, doo-wop, doo-wop.”Terry Robert Kirkman was born on Dec. 12, 1939, in Salina, Kan., the youngest of two sons of Millard and Lois (Murphy) Kirkman. When he was a child his family moved to Chino, Calif., near Los Angeles, where his father managed an auto-parts store and his mother taught music.After receiving an associate degree in music at nearby Chaffey College, he became enmeshed in the flourishing scene at the Troubadour, the famed West Hollywood nightclub that served as a launching pad to stardom.Before long, Mr. Kirkman and Mr. Alexander — whom he had met at a party in Hawaii in 1962, when Mr. Alexander was in the Navy — formed a loose-knit folk ensemble called the Inner Tubes, featuring some 20 members, to perform at open-mic hootenanny nights at the club, with guest appearances by the likes of David Crosby and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. The Inner Tubes eventually evolved into a 13-member band called the Men, which after a year winnowed down to the Association.In addition to his wife of 30 years, Mr. Kirkman is survived by his daughter, Alexandra Sasha Kirkman, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and two grandchildren.Mr. Kirkman left the Association in 1972, although he would later rejoin the band for tours in the 1980s and ’90s. He eventually retired from the music business and worked for decades as an addiction counselor.But he could never escape his most famous creation.“My whole name for 45 years was, ‘I would like you to meet Terry, he wrote “Cherish,”’” he told Mr. White. “That was my whole name.”He added, “I’m just going to shorten my name to Cherish.” More

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      in Movies

      Pearl Bowser, Expert in Early Black Filmmakers, Dies at 92

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      She aided in the rediscovery of Oscar Micheaux and others who were telling stories for Black audiences early in the last century.Pearl Bowser, a film historian, curator and collector who was instrumental in preserving and bringing to light the works of Black filmmakers from early in the last century, especially those of Oscar Micheaux, whom one writer described as “the Jackie Robinson of American film,” died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. She was 92.Her daughter Gillian Bowser confirmed the death.Ms. Bowser developed an interest in the forgotten works of early Black filmmakers in the 1960s when, while working as a researcher on a colleague’s idea for a book about Micheaux, she traveled to California from New York to interview aging actors who had been in movies made by Micheaux decades earlier.She began hunting down and collecting movies by Micheaux and other Black filmmakers from the early decades of the 1900s — works that were, for that period, triumphs of independent filmmaking, since they were generally made on shoestring budgets and sometimes dealt with topics that mainstream movies would not touch. Micheaux’s “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (1920), for instance, was an indictment of the Ku Klux Klan.In addition to being a student of film, Ms. Bowser made a few films herself.Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureThose films also serve as historical documents, depicting Black communities in ways not seen in mainstream movies of the time.“Oscar Micheaux’s early films are full of ordinary settings of community: the church, the house, the apartment,” Ms. Bowser told USA Today in 1998. “You see the way people lived in that period.”By the early 1970s, Ms. Bowser was curating film series, taking the works she had discovered by Micheaux and others into theaters and classrooms. She continued to do that for decades.“They were telling stories that were not being shown on the screen, Black stories,” she told students at Fort Lee High School in New Jersey in 2004 before showing them “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (a film that, like others of Micheaux’s, was shot in Fort Lee). “And by showing the Black experience, we’re telling the American story in its totality.”Donald Bogle, the noted film historian, said Ms. Bowser’s work on Micheaux was pivotal.“Not much was known or acknowledged about Micheaux for too long a time,” he said by email. “But Pearl made it her mission to bring his work and career to light. Over the years, she devotedly dug for information on him, and I can remember those occasions when she excitedly told me about new things she was unearthing.”Among the places her search took her, she said in newspaper interviews, were the national archives of Spain and Belgium, where she found silent classics by Micheaux with the title cards written in the languages of those countries, which she then had to have translated back into English.In 2000, she and Louise Spence published “Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences.”“Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence’s scholarly examination of Micheaux serves a dual purpose,” Renée Graham wrote in a review in The Boston Globe. “Through six essays, they analyze Micheaux’s work, how it was received by both Blacks and whites, and how his films encouraged fresh discussions about race. But Bowser and Spence’s book also rescues the filmmaker’s accomplishments from decades of obscurity.”Ms. Bowser’s expertise, though, encompassed much more than Micheaux-era films. Her lectures and film series covered a wide range — for instance, she presented “Films of Africa and the Caribbean” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1986. And the collection of hundreds of films, videotapes and audiotapes she donated in 2012 to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution is rich in material related to Black filmmakers in the 1960s and ’70s.“Pearl didn’t just revive Micheaux’s legacy; she helped preserve and shape the narrative of independent Black film,” Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization specialist at the museum, said by email. “Across her five-decade career she wove a continuous thread through a century of Black film that is only just now beginning to come into focus.”Pearl Johnson was born on June 25, 1931, in Harlem, where she grew up. According to a Smithsonian Institution biography, her mother, also named Pearl, was a domestic worker, and young Pearl would often accompany her to work at apartments in Lower Manhattan, helping to fold handkerchiefs in exchange for an allowance.As a child she came to know Ellsworth (Bumpy) Johnson, a Harlem underworld figure who was also well known in the borough for giving out food baskets and encouraging children to borrow books from his vast library.“I remember one time I mentioned to Bumpy that I wanted to grow up to be a philosopher,” Ms. Bowser told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997, “and he said, ‘I’ve got a book you might be interested in.’”He gave her something by Friedrich Nietzsche. She was about 15 and didn’t understand a word.“It taught me to think before I spoke to Bumpy,” she said. “because even though I was young, he took me and my dreams quite seriously.”Later, according to the Smithsonian biography, she worked in one of his numbers joints. She also studied for a time at Brooklyn College before dropping out and taking a job at CBS, where she worked on a team that analyzed television ratings.In 1955 she married LeRoy Bowser, who would later become a regional vice president of the National Urban League. He died in 1986. Her daughter Gillian survives her. Another daughter, Joralemon Bowser, died in 1978.Ms. Bowser made a few films herself, including “Midnight Ramble,” a documentary she made with Bestor Cram for the PBS series “The American Experience” about “race movies,” as films made by Micheaux and others for Black audiences were called.In the late 1960s Ms. Bowser also wrote a newspaper cooking column. In 1970, with Joan Eckstein, she published her best recipes in a book, “A Pinch of Soul.”“The authors,” one reviewer said, “provide a complete array of soul food cookery to fit the needs of today’s elegant hostess.” More

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      in Television

      David McCallum, Actor in ‘NCIS’ and ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,’ Dies at 90

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      An experienced character actor, he found fame in the 1960s as the enigmatic Illya Kuryakin, and again in the 2000s as an eccentric medical examiner on “N.C.I.S.”David McCallum, the Scottish-born actor who became a surprise sensation as the enigmatic Russian spy Illya Kuryakin on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” in the 1960s and found television stardom again almost 40 years later on the hit series “N.C.I.S.,” died on Monday in New York. He was 90.“N.C.I.S.” announced his death in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The announcement did not include any further information.Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Mr. McCallum was an experienced character actor who could use an accent or an odd piece of clothing to give depth to a role. He played a wide range of parts across theater, film and television, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park in 2000 to the voice of Professor Paradox on the animated television series “Ben 10: Ultimate Alien,” a decade later.He was hired in 1964 to play Illya Kuryakin, the Russian-accented sidekick of Robert Vaughn’s Napoleon Solo, on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” a tongue-in-cheek series about secret agents working for the fictional United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. His part was meant to be small; he had just four lines in the first episode. He suggested that Illya be made more interesting by having him be closemouthed about his personal life (“Nobody knows what Illya Kuryakin does when he goes home at night,” he told one interviewer) and somewhat antagonistic to Solo.The writers began to build up his character, and he became a fixture of the series and a two-time Emmy Award nominee. Somewhat to his annoyance, he also became a sex symbol.With his mysterious air, his Beatle haircut and his trademark black turtleneck, Mr. McCallum was a magnet for teenage fans. Sent on a publicity junket for the show to Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge in 1965, he was mobbed by screaming female students and had to be rescued by police officers.“McCallum’s motorcades are now, by order of the police chiefs of the cities he visits, forbidden to stop anywhere along the line of drive,” The New York Times reported in a 1965 profile. “If the entourage slowed, there would be carnage in the streets.”“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” ended in 1968, and Mr. McCallum retreated happily to lower-profile roles. He continued to work steadily, mostly in B-movies and in supporting parts on television. He also played the title role in the short-lived series “The Invisible Man” (1975-76) and Emperor Joseph II in a revival of “Amadeus” on Broadway in 1999.But everywhere he went, he said, the Russian secret agent stalked him. “It’s been 30 years, but I can’t escape him,” he told The Times in 1998. “Illya Kuryakin is there 24 hours a day.”In 2003, the Russian shadow finally met his match in the bow-tied, bespectacled and eccentric medical examiner Donald Mallard, better known as Ducky, on the hit CBS crime series “N.C.I.S.” He remained with the show, which consistently ranked in the Nielsen Top 10, for two decades. He was still a member of the cast at his death.Mr. McCallum as the eccentric medical examiner Donald Mallard, known as Ducky, on the CBS crime series “N.C.I.S,” a role he played for 20 years.Monty Brinton/CBSIn interviews, Mr. McCallum said that besides Julius Caesar, Dr. Mallard was his favorite role, in part because it taught him so much about forensics. He studied with pathologists in Los Angeles and even sat in on autopsies, learning enough that the show’s writers would ask him for technical advice.David Keith McCallum Jr. was born on Sept. 19, 1933, into a musical family in Glasgow. His father was the first violinist for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London; his mother, Dorothy Dorman, was a cellist. He would later tell interviewers that his Scotch Presbyterian upbringing had left him emotionally circumscribed.“We Scots, we tend to be awfully tight inside,” he told TV Guide in 1965. “It has hurt me as an actor to be so — so naturally restricted.”Expected to follow in the family footsteps and pursue a career in music, he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Music to study oboe. But he found himself drawn to acting and switched to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. (He never completely lost interest in music, however; at the height of his “U.N.C.L.E.” fame, Capitol Records released several albums under his name, on which he conducted instrumental renditions of pop hits.)Mr. McCallum was drafted into the British military in 1951 and served two years, including 10 months in what is now Ghana as a small-arms expert. Not long after his discharge, he signed with the Rank Organization, a British production company, and began acting both in movies and on television.He met Jill Ireland, already a rising actress in Britain, when they were both cast in the Rank production “Robbery Under Arms” in 1957. He proposed seven days after they met, and they married that spring. In 1961, when he was cast as Judas Iscariot in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (the movie would not be completed and released until 1965), the couple moved to Los Angeles.They appeared to flourish. They had three children. She became a busy TV actress and made several guest appearances on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” playing three different characters.But the strain of Mr. McCallum’s stardom took a toll on their marriage, and she left him for the actor Charles Bronson, whom she had met when Mr. McCallum and Mr. Bronson were both filming “The Great Escape” (1963). Less than a year after their divorce in 1967, Mr. McCallum married Katherine Carpenter, a model.She survives him. Further information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. McCallum and his wife lived in Manhattan. The Associated Press said that CBS said he died at a Manhattan hospital but did not explain why he had been hospitalized.When “N.C.I.S.” made Mr. McCallum a television star for the second time, he found fame much less oppressive than he had the first time. “In New York now I leave 15 minutes — because I walk everywhere in New York — between appointments because I am going to be stopped on the street to talk about N.C.I.S. for at least 15 minutes,” he told BBC Radio in a 2009 interview.“I love it,” he said, when asked if he ever grew tired of that kind of attention. “I’ve never got fed up with anything in my whole life.” More

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      in Theater

      Stephen Gould, Tenor Best Known for Tackling Wagner, Dies at 61

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      He was especially acclaimed for his performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. As his voice developed, he once said, so did his view of how and why to deploy it. Stephen Gould, a tenor who after a detour into musical theater established himself as a leading interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner in performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany and elsewhere, died on Tuesday in Chesapeake, Va. He was 61.His death was confirmed by his longtime agent, Stephanie Ammann. Early this month Mr. Gould announced on his website that he had bile duct cancer, that the disease was terminal and that he was retiring from singing.The Bayreuth Festival paid tribute to him on its website after that announcement.“Stephen Gould was, with interruptions, one of the mainstays of the Bayreuth Festival from 2004 to 2022,” the festival’s post said. “Highly esteemed by audiences, the press and within the festival family, he was rightly dubbed the ‘Wagner Marathon Man’ and thrilled audiences with his distinctive voice and condition in countless performances.”Mr. Gould established himself as a reliable heldentenor, a singer who takes on heroic roles, mostly in the German repertory, requiring a particularly powerful voice. Such roles are among the most demanding in opera.Mr. Gould in the title role of “Tannhäuser” at the Bayreuth Festival in 2004, with Roman Trekel as Wolfram. “This was his Bayreuth debut,” one critic wrote, “and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”Jochen Quast/European Pressphoto AgencyHe first appeared at Bayreuth in 2004, performing the title role in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” a production that dazzled Olin Chism of The Dallas Morning News.“One of the heroes was American tenor Stephen Gould, who sang the title character,” Mr. Chism wrote. “This was his Bayreuth debut, and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”He remained so over the next 18 years, performing in 20 Bayreuth productions; he regularly sang the title role in “Siegfried” and Tristan in “Tristan und Isolde.” He also performed in leading opera houses around the world, including with the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut in 2010 as Erik, the hunter, in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”Mr. Gould knew that the major roles he undertook required a certain maturity.“Everyone wants their heroes to be young and vibrant and look like Brad Pitt in his early days,” he said in a 2019 interview with the German news outlet Deutsche Welle. “But you have to give the voice time to develop.”As his voice developed, he noted in the same interview, so did his view of how and why he was deploying it.Mr. Gould as Tristan and Nina Stemme as Isolde in a production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Royal Opera House in London in 2014.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty Images“I don’t try to sing for the public anymore,” he said. “I did when I was younger, of course. You want to be popular, you want the critics to love you, you want your career to go high and all of that. Now when I’m onstage, what I enjoy most is discovering something for myself.”Stephen Grady Gould was born on Jan. 24, 1962, in Roanoke, Va. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston before joining Lyric Opera of Chicago’s developmental program for young artists, the Center for American Artists. He originally imagined himself as a baritone before switching to tenor.He was put to the test at age 27 when he had to substitute for Chris Merritt in the demanding role of Argirio in Gioachino Rossini’s “Tancredi” when Mr. Merritt became ill during a run in Los Angeles, where the opera was being staged jointly by Lyric Opera and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.Mr. Gould in the Royal Opera’s production of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” in 2009.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty Images“He gamely tackled the patriarchal ardors of Argirio with a light, often pinched voice and reasonable dramatic presence within the static staging context,” John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times. “The stratospheric climaxes were forced out as high-pressure bleats, and initially much of the passage work was smeared. But he seemed to gain strength and composure, and more than held his own in the big Act II duet with Marilyn Horne in the title role.”Soon after, on what he said was a whim, he auditioned for the national touring company of “The Phantom of the Opera” and was cast. He spent several years with that troupe, performing various roles, though not either of the male leads.“When I finished with musicals, I just was going to quit,” he said in 2019, “but I wanted to give it one more chance and met a teacher from the Metropolitan Opera who told me that I’d been singing incorrectly from the very beginning.”He rededicated himself to opera, working on his technique and growing into the Wagnerian roles for which he became best known.“By then,” he said, “I was at the right age to actually sing Wagner. Too many singers today are pushed into their big Wagnerian roles in their 20s.”Information about Mr. Gould’s survivors was not immediately available. More

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      in Movies

      Robert Klane, Writer of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’ Dies at 81

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      He also adapted his best-known novel, “Where’s Poppa?,” into the script for a raw Carl Reiner comedy and directed the disco movie “Thank God It’s Friday.”Robert Klane, a comic novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker with a taste for gleeful vulgarity who wrote the screenplay for “Weekend at Bernie’s,” the 1989 cult film about two young insurance company employees who create the illusion that their murdered boss is still alive, died on Aug. 29 at his home in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 81.His son Jon said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Klane wrote “Weekend at Bernie’s” more than two decades into a career that began with the publication of two humorous novels: “The Horse Is Dead: A Tasteless Novel” (1968) and “Where’s Poppa?” (1970). He adapted “Where’s Poppa?” into the screenplay for a twisted comedy about a single lawyer (played by George Segal) who dreams of scaring to death or institutionalizing his aged, maddening mother (Ruth Gordon).Ted Kotcheff, who directed “Weekend at Bernie’s,” wrote in his 2017 memoir, “Director’s Cut: My Life in Film,” that Mr. Klane had been inspired to write it by his time as an advertising copywriter in the 1960s, when the top executives at one of the agencies where he worked invited employees to their beach houses on Long Island.Mr. Klane with Donna Summer on the set of the 1978 disco film “Thank God It’s Friday,” which he directed. Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“But he always wondered what would happen if the underlings got a house all to themselves — inmates taking over the asylum,” Mr. Kotcheff wrote.In “Bernie’s,” the young workers (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) discover a $2 million fraud but don’t know that their boss, Bernie (Terry Kiser), is the culprit. Bernie invites them to his beach house, ostensibly as a reward, and asks his mobster partner to kill them. But the mobster tells the hit man to kill Bernie instead for sleeping with his girlfriend.The employees — fearful that they might be next on the hit list — frantically make Bernie seem alive by, among other ruses, putting sunglasses on him, rolling him out to his sun deck and rigging a device that raises his arm so he appears to be waving to people.The film, which grossed a modest $30 million (a little less than $75 million in today’s money), gained fans long after its release through home video and cable-TV viewing. People magazine wrote in 2014 that the movie “has managed to age into something close to respectability.”Mr. Klane believed that the Bernie character was too dead to revive cinematically. But a sequel was made — because Victor Drai, one of the original film’s producers, raised the money from its Italian distributor, Mr. Drai recalled in a phone interview.Mr. Klane was the director as well as the writer of “Weekend at Bernie’s II” (1993), which involves the discovery of Bernie’s offshore bank account, containing the embezzled money, and a voodoo ceremony to try reanimating him.The reviews were roundly negative.“If ever there was a career-ending movie,” the Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez wrote, “‘Weekend at Bernie’s II’ is it.”But for Mr. Klane, it wasn’t. He kept working.Robert Klane was born on Oct. 17, 1941, in Port Jefferson, N.Y., on Long Island, and grew up in nearby Patchogue and Bayport. His father, Edward, was a physician. His mother, Adele (Blum) Klane, was a homemaker.After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Mr. Klane returned to New York and found work in advertising.Over the next few years he was a commercial copywriter at two agencies, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (now BBDO) and McCann Erickson (now McCann). In 1967 he went to work at Filmex, a production house, where he directed commercials.In his spare time he wrote “The Horse Is Dead,” about a camp counselor who hates his campers. The book was labeled “filth and smut simply for the sake of smut” by a self-appointed decent literature committee that wanted it removed from a library in Bel Air, Md., in 1968. But commissioners in Harford County, Md., refused to ban it.On the other hand, Jack Benny sent Mr. Klane a fan letter telling him that it was the funniest book he had ever read.Two years later, Mr. Klane published “Where’s Poppa?,” and that same year Carl Reiner directed the film version, with a script by Mr. Klane. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film did not have “much more on its mind than a desperate desire to provoke shock and laughter” — which, he said, it did successfully.Jon Klane recalled going to a theater to see the film with his father, who stayed in the lobby. “I came out to get candy, and he was watching a matronly woman demand a refund,” he said by phone. “I went up to him, and he said, ‘This is exactly the kind of person I want to offend.’”Over the next three decades, Mr. Klane stayed busy in television and film. He wrote six episodes of the sitcom “M*A*S*H”; the 1985 film “National Lampoon’s European Vacation,” with John Hughes; “The Man With One Red Shoe,” a 1985 remake of the French comedy “The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe,” which starred Tom Hanks; and, in 1997, 11 episodes of Tracey Ullman’s sketch comedy series “Tracey Takes On …,” for which he and several others received an Emmy Award for outstanding variety, music or comedy series.His directing work included “Thank God It’s Friday” (1978), set entirely in a disco, which won the Academy Award for best original song, “Last Dance,” sung by the disco diva Donna Summer, one of its stars; and “The Odd Couple: Together Again,” a 1993 TV movie that reunited Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, the stars of that 1970s sitcom.In addition to his son Jon, Mr. Klane is survived by his wife, J.C. Scott; a daughter, Caitlin Klane; another son, David; a brother, Larry; and five grandchildren. Another daughter, Tracy Klane, died in 2011. His marriages to Linda Tesh and the actress Anjanette Comer ended in divorce.About 20 years ago, Mr. Klane worked with his son Jon on a script, set in a ski resort, that would have rebooted the “Bernie’s” franchise. It did not sell.“We wore out the carpet coming up with gags,” Jon Klane said. “It was my best memory of him. He would say, ‘It has to be a laugh a page, Jonny.’” More

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      Roger Whittaker, Balladeer With an International Following, Dies at 87

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      A Briton with a rich baritone, he charmed audiences, mostly in Europe and America, with sentimental songs, like his signature hit, “The Last Farewell.”Roger Whittaker, a British singer whose easy-listening ballads and folk songs caught the sentiments of perfect summer days and last farewells, touching the hearts of mainly older fans across Europe and America for four decades, died on Sep. 12 in a hospital near Toulouse, in the south of France. He was 87.His longtime publicist Howard Elson said the cause was “complications following a long illness.” Mr. Whittaker had retired to the region.Born to British parents in Nairobi, Kenya, Mr. Whittaker grew up there with the infectious rhythms of East African music in his bloodstream. His grandfather had been a club singer in England, and his father, a Staffordshire grocer who played the violin, had been disabled in a motorcycle crash and moved his family to Kenya for the warm climate.Roger learned to play the guitar at 7 and developed a rich baritone in school choirs, where he sometimes sang in Swahili. At 18, he was drafted into the British colonial Kenya Regiment, and for two years he fought Mau Mau rebels in the struggle that led to Kenyan independence. He then studied medicine in South Africa and science in Wales, intending to become a teacher.But music intervened. He had played club dates to pay for college, and he also recorded songs on flexible discs distributed with the campus newspaper, The Bangor University Rag. A record company liked them and in 1962 released his first professional singles, including “Steel Men,” his cover of a Jimmy Dean hit about bridge builders.“Steel Men” leaped onto the British charts, the opening wedge in a career of international tours and record albums that celebrated ethnic and working-class pride, the passing seasons and family gatherings at Christmas. Over the years Mr. Whittaker recorded for various labels, including EMI, RCA Victor and his own Tembo (Swahili for elephant) Records.Tours took him repeatedly to Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, a concert grind that often exceeded 100 gigs a year and outlasted the millennium. He learned to fly small planes and sometimes used them on his tours.He wrote much of the music he performed, made a documentary film about Kenya, wrote an autobiography, appeared frequently on television and radio and sold a reported 60 million albums worldwide. One of them, “‘The Last Farewell’ and Other Hits,” recorded in 1971 and forgotten, became a sensation later, reaching No. 1 on the pop charts in 11 countries and eventually selling 11 million copies.“‘The Last Farewell’ is an ersatz show tune about a British man-of-war, love, heartache and heroism,” Henry Edwards wrote in The New York Times in 1975. “Released four years ago, the tune was discovered by an Atlanta disc jockey while idly going through a pile of discarded LPs. He liked the song, played it on the air, and soon Atlanta was liking it too. That affection soon spread to Nashville, then to the entire country-music market, then to the pop audience at large.” It became Mr. Whittaker’s signature song.In 1980, Mr. Whittaker invited children to submit lyrics and poems about peace for a songwriting contest. It drew a million entries from 57 countries. He wrote and recorded music for the winning entry, written by Odina Batnag, 13, of Manila. She was flown to New York and introduced, with her song, “I Am But a Small Voice,” at Radio City Music Hall. Proceeds went to a UNESCO program for disabled children.By the 1980s Mr. Whittaker was performing in 50 to 70 American cities regularly. Boston was a stronghold.In addition to singing, he whistled, yodeled and had audiences sing along. Critics called it schmaltzy, but crowds loved it and joined in, especially on hits like “Durham Town (The Leavin’)” (1969) and covers of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and Jethro Tull’s “Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll, Too Young to Die.”Mr. Whittaker performing on television in about 1965 in Germany, where he had a big following.Gunter Zint/K & K Ulf Kruger OHG, via Redferns, via Getty Images“Whittaker’s audience is mostly white and middle-class, probably daytime TV watchers who enjoy the kind of plain, folksy charm he projects,” Thomas Sabulis wrote in The Boston Globe. “He’s no great singer or songwriter; he doesn’t have Neil Diamond’s talent, Tom Jones’s sex appeal or Barry Manilow’s knack for milking the obvious. What he does have is a steady, unspectacular baritone and an avuncular, almost evangelical tone as comforting as it is mediocre.”Tragedy struck in 1989. Mr. Whittaker’s parents, still living in Kenya, were victims of a brutal home invasion by four robbers. His mother was tortured for eight hours and his father murdered. The killers were never caught. His mother moved back to England.“It will affect me for the rest of my life,” Mr. Whittaker told reporters, “but I believe we should all live without hate if we can.”After a period of mourning, Mr. Whittaker resumed recording and touring. In 1995, he sang at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville at a 50th-anniversary party for former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, who were fans. In 1997, despite a surgical knee replacement, he kept some 100 concert dates in Europe and America.He stopped touring in 2013, at 77, and retired to the south of France after years living in England and Ireland.Roger Henry Brough Whittaker was born in Nairobi on March 22, 1936, to Edward and Viola (Showan) Whittaker, who, after his motorcycle accident in 1930, had settled on a farm in Thika, outside Nairobi. His father recovered and became a successful builder and businessman in Kenya. His mother managed theaters.After graduating from the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi in 1954 and finishing military service in 1956, Roger began premedical studies at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out after 18 months. He became an apprentice teacher but, needing more education, enrolled in 1959 at University College of North Wales (now Bangor University), and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1962.Still uncertain about his future, he consulted a faculty adviser, who, he later recalled, told him, “Have a try in show business and if you haven’t made it in 10 years, come back here and teach.” Mr. Whittaker soon landed a singing job at a resort in Northern Ireland and began his career.In 1964, he married Natalie O’Brien, who became his manager and co-author of his 1986 memoir, “So Far, So Good.” She survives him, as do their five children, Emily Kennedy and Lauren, Jessica, Guy and Alexander Whittaker; 12 grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and an elder sister. A documentary film, “Roger Whittaker in Kenya: A Musical Safari,” which related a history of Kenya and revisited settings of the singer’s early life there, was released in 1982.Mr. Whittaker found his greatest European success in Germany. While he admitted he could not speak German at first, he sang and recorded in German “phonetically,” as he put it, until he became more fluent. He matured into one of Germany’s favorite singers, selling 10 million albums there.He also had a devoted following in the United States, where he was best known for “I Don’t Believe in ‘If’ Anymore” (1970); his version of “Wind Beneath My Wings” (1982); and “New World in the Morning” (1971), the title track of an album that also included “The Last Farewell” and “A Special Kind of Man.”“Women do not throw underclothes or room keys onstage at his concerts,” Diane White said in a sweet-and-sour appreciation in The Boston Globe. “No one gets high. No one gets hysterical with excitement. And yet Roger Whittaker is one of the most popular entertainers in the world.”Alex Marshall More

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      Irish Grinstead of R&B Group 702 Dies at 43

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      The singer, who appeared on the hit track “Where My Girls At?,” took a “medical leave of absence” from the group late last year; a cause of death was not immediately available.Irish Grinstead, a member of the R&B trio 702, known for its 1999 hit “Where My Girls At?,” died on Saturday evening at the age of 43, according to her sister.A cause of death was not immediately available, but the group announced in December that Irish Grinstead was taking a “medical leave of absence due to serious medical issues.”LeMisha Grinstead, Irish Grinstead’s sister and bandmate, said in an Instagram post announcing her death that she had “had a long battle and is finally at peace.”“That girl was as bright as the stars! She was not only beautiful on the outside, but also within,” LeMisha Grinstead wrote. “Sharing the stage with her was a joy I will cherish for the rest of my life!”Members of 702 (from left): Kameelah Williams, LeMisha Grinstead and Irish Grinstead attending the Teen Choice Awards in 1999.Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesThe Grinstead sisters and Kameelah Williams comprised 702, which was named for the telephone area code in Las Vegas, where they were from.“Devastated & heartbroken,” Ms. Williams wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday. “There’s a lot I want to say, but there’s no way to say what your heart hasn’t fully accepted.”The group’s 1996 debut album, “No Doubt,” included a song called “Steelo,” featuring Missy Elliott. A version of the track was the theme song for the Nickelodeon show “Cousin Skeeter.” The song was also sampled in a 2019 dance music hit produced by Diplo.“Irish May your beautiful soul Rest Peacefully in the arms of the Lord,” Ms. Elliot wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday. “Multitude of prayers for the entire Grinstead family.”702’s defining hit was “Where My Girls At?,” which peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1999, according to Billboard.As news of Irish Grinstead’s death circulated, fan tributes flooded social media in the form of music video clips featuring Irish Grinstead dancing alongside her sister and Ms. Williams in distinctive ’90s glam and choreography.The group released its last album, “Star,” 20 years ago but continued to perform shows, with several scheduled through the rest of this year.Irish Grinstead’s twin sister, Orish Grinstead, died in 2008, according to IMDb. More