Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Television

      Cody Longo, ‘Days of Our Lives’ Actor, Dies at 34

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      Mr. Longo died in his sleep, likely from accidental alcohol poisoning, at his Austin, Texas, home on Wednesday, his representative said.Cody Longo, an actor known for his roles in the television series “Hollywood Heights” and “Days of Our Lives,” was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 34.He died in his sleep, likely from accidental alcohol poisoning, his representative, Alex Gittelson, said. Mr. Gittelson said that Mr. Longo had struggled with alcohol addiction for several years, but he believed that Mr. Longo had recently been sober.Mr. Longo was a singer, songwriter, musician and music producer and served as a music supervisor and executive producer on film and television projects. He released his first EP, “Atmosphere,” in 2012 and the single “She Said” in 2013.Mr. Longo starred in episodes of “Days of Our Lives” as Nicholas Alamain in 2011 and in the Nick at Nite drama “Hollywood Heights” as Eddie Duran, a music superstar, in 2012.In 2016, he had roles on the ABC series “Nashville,” “Secrets and Lies” and “The Catch.” Mr. Longo starred in the pilot for “Santa Cruz” on Fox and in the ABC Family teen drama “Make It or Break It.” He also appeared in the movies “High School” and “Piranha 3D” in 2010.Mr. Longo was born in Colorado on March 4, 1988, and studied psychology and film at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began acting professionally in 2009, according to his website.“He had taken some time away from acting to pursue his music career and spend more time with his family in Nashville,” Mr. Gittelson said, “but we had kept in touch regularly and he was excited to get back into acting this year.”Mr. Longo is survived by his wife, Stephanie, and three children, Lyla, Elijah and Noah. More

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      in Movies

      Solomon Perel, Jew Who Posed as a Hitler Youth to Survive, Dies at 97

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      His masquerade — a tale recounted in a memoir and in the film “Europa Europa” — saved his life. But “to this day,” he said, “I have a tangle of two souls in one body.”Solomon Perel, a German Jew who saved himself from death by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and later felt gratitude for the Nazi he pretended to be in order to live, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Givatayim, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.His great-nephew Amit Brakin confirmed the death.Mr. Perel, who was also known as Shlomo and Solly, recounted his survival story in a 1990 autobiography. It was adapted into a German movie, “Europa Europa,” released in the United States in 1991, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.Like many other Holocaust survival stories, Mr. Perel’s began with Nazi oppression, which led his family to move in 1936 from Peine, Germany, to Lodz, Poland. After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, they were forced into a ghetto that would house as many as 164,000 Jews. He fled later that year with an older brother, Isaac, in the hope of finding relative safety in Soviet-controlled eastern Poland.In Bialystok, where he parted with Isaac, Solomon was placed by a Jewish assistance organization in a Soviet orphanage in Grodno (now part of Belarus). He stayed for two years, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941; he recalled that the Jewish children at the orphanage were roused from their sleep and told to flee the German attack.Solomon became one of many refugees captured by the German Wehrmacht in an open field near Minsk.Fearful that his captors would learn he was Jewish and shoot him in a nearby forest, he dug a small pit in the soft ground with the heel of a shoe and buried his identification papers.After waiting on a long line, Solomon was asked by a German soldier, “Are you a Jew?” Heeding his mother’s last words to him, “You must live,” but not his father’s, “Always remain a Jew,” he lied: “I’m not a Jew. I’m an ethnic German.”Not only did the Germans believe him; they welcomed him into their unit under the name Josef Perjell, and made him an interpreter. One interrogation in which he participated was of Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili.“I became a split personality — a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel told The Week, an Indian magazine, in 2019. He remained there until his commanding officer sent him to the Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Germany, during the winter of 1941-42.If anyone discovered he was Jewish, “they’d deal with me like cannibals,” he said in “Because You Must Live: The Story of Shlomo (Solly) Perel,” a part of the Survivors Testimony Films Series produced by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He was relieved that the school’s showers had separate stalls, which prevented anyone from seeing that he had been circumcised.But, he said, “nobody suspected me because it was impossible to think that some Jewish boy would sneak into the center of that protected country.”He became, to the young Nazis surrounding him, a true believer, absorbing the lessons of National Socialism, wearing a uniform with a swastika and a Nazi eagle on his chest and preparing for military service.“I was a Hitler Youth completely,” he said in the Yad Vashem film. “I began telling myself, ‘Wow, I’m part of a force that’s conquering the world.’”But he could not switch off his real self entirely. In 1943, during the Christmas holiday, he received a holiday pass and took a train back to Lodz. For 12 days, wearing the black winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, he searched for his parents in the ghetto.He rode a streetcar, which Jews could not board, back and forth. He walked the city’s streets. He saw men rolling carts piled with Jewish corpses.But he did not find his mother, his father or his sister, Bertha, none of whom he would ever see again. His brothers, Isaac and David, survived.Marco Hofschneider portrayed Mr. Perel in the critically acclaimed German movie “Europa Europa.” Delphine Forest played his teacher. Orion ClassicsSolomon Perel was born in Peine on April 21, 1925. His father, Azriel, owned a shoe store. His mother, Rebecca Perel, was a homemaker.Solomon was nearly 8 years old when Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, but his life did not change appreciably until two years later, when antisemitic laws stripped Jews of their rights and citizenship. He was expelled from school.“It was my most traumatic childhood experience,” he said in “Because You Must Live,” “that barbaric expulsion from school because somebody considered me different.”The family moved to Lodz after his father was forced by the Nazis to sell his store for nearly nothing. Solomon attended a Polish state school for Jews. It was after the Germans invaded Poland and Jewish families were ordered into the Lodz ghetto that he started on the path that led to his lifesaving masquerade as a Nazi.Simmy Allen, a spokesman for Yad Vashem, said that Mr. Perel’s life as a Jew among the Hitler Youth was more than unusual.“We know of Jews using false papers and presenting themselves as non-Jews, even Aryans, during the Holocaust in different places throughout Europe, even in Berlin,” Mr. Allen said in an email. “But to be in the heart of the lion’s den, under that level of scrutiny all the time and, in a sense, part of the ideology of the ‘enemy,’ as Shlomo was, is a very unique and rare position.”Mr. Perel recalled how invested he had become in the Nazi philosophy even as the war turned against Germany.“I was deeply involved in a world that had been forced upon me, my reasoning powers had finally been completely anesthetized,” he wrote in his memoir, published in English and French as “Europa, Europa,” “and my mental faculties were so befogged that no ray of reality could penetrate. I continued to feel just like one of them.”Mr. Perel at his home in Israel. He lectured widely about his wartime experiences, condemning racism in any form. Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, via Associated PressAs the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding bridges. When American soldiers arrested him and his squad and briefly held him in a prisoner-of-war camp, his war was over. He was no longer Josef Perjell. He was once again Shlomo Perel.Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he was a translator for the Soviet Army during interrogations of Nazi war criminals. He emigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, fought in the Israeli war of independence and managed a zipper factory.In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by a son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.For many years Mr. Perel put his memories of the Holocaust aside. But in the late 1980s, after a near-fatal heart attack, he began to discuss his past and to write his memoir.The film adaptation, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland, starred Marco Hofschneider as Mr. Perel. It earned Ms. Holland an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.In addition to winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the movie was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. But the German Export Film Union declined to select it as its entry for an Academy Award for best foreign film — a decision that prompted many of Germany’s leading filmmakers, including Wolfgang Petersen and Werner Herzog, to sign a letter of protest that was published in Daily Variety.Mr. Perel attended the film’s premiere in Lodz.In 1992, he reunited with some of his former Hitler Youth comrades and revealed to them that he was Jewish. Some years earlier, he had gotten together with surviving members of the Wehrmacht unit that had accepted him as a German.He lectured about his experiences in Israel and around the world.“He insisted on including, with every lecture or talk he gave, a message for accepting the other,” Mr. Brakin, his great-nephew, said in a text message, “including the one that is different, and a message against racism in any form it might take.”But Mr. Perel never fully purged himself of the Nazi identity he had adopted.“To this day, I have a tangle of two souls in one body,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “By this I mean to say that the road to Josef, the Hitler Youth that I was for four years, was very short and easy. But the way back to the Jew in me, Shlomo, or Solly, was much harder.”“I love him,” he said, referring to Josef, “because he saved my life.” More

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      in Music

      AKA, Influential South African Rapper, Is Fatally Shot

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      The rapper, whose legal name was Kiernan Forbes, was one of the most formidable songwriters in South African hip-hop. He and another man were killed outside a restaurant on Friday.AKA, a generation-defining South African rapper whose blend of local sounds with American hip-hop vaulted him into stardom, was fatally shot on Friday night outside a restaurant in the coastal city of Durban.The police said that AKA, 35, had been walking to his car on a popular nightlife strip shortly after 10 p.m. when two armed people approached from across the street and fired several shots at close range before running away.AKA, whose legal name was Kiernan Forbes, and another man died at the scene, the police said. Although the police did not name the second victim, South African news reports identified him as AKA’s close friend Tebello Motsoane, a 34-year-old chef and music entrepreneur known as Tibz.The police said on Saturday that they were still searching for the suspects.The killing drew an outpouring of grief from around the country, with fans, artists, major political parties and the government sending out messages of condolence. On Saturday, fans gathered outside the restaurant where he was killed, Wish on Florida, to pay their respects, with some blasting his music from their cars.“AKA was counted amongst the best rappers on the continent,” South Africa’s Department of Sport, Arts and Culture said in a statement. “AKA was one of the most patriotic artists who literally flew the South African flag high everywhere he went around the globe.”Born in Cape Town, AKA moved to Johannesburg as a child. He attended an elite private school, the sort of setting where hip-hop first became popularized in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent because affluent students had access to rap from its birthplace, the United States. In a 2014 article in the South African publication The Sunday Times, AKA described his parents as being “scared but excited” when he told them that he wanted to pursue a music career.He produced for several artists before his own big breakout in 2011 with his hit single “Victory Lap” on his debut album, “Altar Ego.”He went on to become known as one of the most formidable songwriters in South African hip-hop, noted Cedric Dladla, a music and culture journalist based in the country. AKA would take beats and samples from popular South African genres like amapiano and kwaito and incorporate them into his music, Mr. Dladla said. That helped influence a new generation of rappers, some of whom became rivals of AKA.“AKA was a person who was an advocate for the South African identity of music,” Mr. Dladla said. “That’s what made him stand out, no matter where he went.”Some of his songs were laden with references that only people in South Africa would understand, like his single “Lemons (Lemonade),” which made reference to a derogatory term used for foreigners and the practice of police officers asking for a “cold drink” when they want a bribe. But AKA also gained acclaim across Africa, collaborating with popular artists like Burna Boy, the Nigerian Afrobeats star.What also set AKA apart, Mr. Dladla said, was his performance style — an energetic and captivating aura, often with the backing of a band. He once performed with an orchestra.“That’s when the evolution from him being a rapper to him being a well-rounded musician started,” Mr. Dladla said.Whatever international acclaim he received, AKA seemed to embrace being a star who catered to Africa rather than the United States.“Why not be big in Africa?” he told The Sunday Times. “The States know what they want and consume it. There are lots of dollars on the continent.”Two years ago, AKA lost his fiancé, Anele Tembe, to tragic and controversial circumstances when she fell to her death from the 10th floor of a hotel in Cape Town. The two had a rocky relationship, according to news reports, including an altercation about a month before Ms. Tembe’s death when AKA was accused of breaking down a door at the couple’s Johannesburg apartment after Ms. Tembe locked herself inside a room. A friend of Ms. Tembe’s told News24, a South African online publication, that AKA had slammed his fiancée’s head against a wall, but AKA denied ever abusing her.AKA had been scheduled to perform at a nightclub on Friday night in Durban as part of an extended celebration of his birthday, which was late last month. Earlier in the day, he had posted videos on Instagram of himself dancing in a gym, getting his hair cut and eating a plate of seafood at the restaurant he visited before his death. He had also plugged his upcoming album, “Mass Country,” which is due to be released in about two weeks.“Our son was loved and he gave love in return,” his parents, Tony and Lynn Forbes, posted in a statement on his social media accounts.AKA is also survived by a young daughter he had with D.J. Zinhle, a popular South African D.J. In an Instagram post on his birthday last month, AKA had posted a picture of his daughter and a cake.“Thank God for another year on this earth,” he wrote. “Looking forward to seeing what he has in store for me in 2023.” More

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      in Theater

      Eugene Lee, Set Designer for Broadway and ‘S.N.L.,’ Dies at 83

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      He won Tony Awards for “Wicked” and other shows while also overseeing the sets for the late-night franchise’s fast-paced sketch comedy.For decades it was possible for Saturday night theatergoers in New York to get a double dose of Eugene Lee’s work, though it’s likely that few would have realized they were doing so. They might have taken in “Sweeney Todd,” “Ragtime,” “Wicked” or other Broadway shows whose striking sets were designed by Mr. Lee, then could arrive home in time to tune into “Saturday Night Live” — a show for which he served as production designer when it began in 1975, and on which he was still working this season.Mr. Lee, an inventive and remarkably prolific set designer who was also known for his decades with Trinity Repertory Company, a respected regional theater in Providence, R.I., died on Monday in Providence. He was 83.His family announced the death, after a short illness that was not specified.Mr. Lee won or shared three Tony Awards for his Broadway sets — for “Candide” in 1974, “Sweeney Todd” in 1979 and “Wicked” in 2003 — and six Emmy Awards for “Saturday Night Live,” most recently in 2021.In theater, he was known for imaginative designs imbued with authenticity.“Eugene loved real objects, objects with history,” Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, who worked with Mr. Lee at Trinity Rep and elsewhere, said by email, “but he’d use them in utterly nonrealistic ways onstage.”He was known for reconfiguring entire theaters, as he did for “Candide,” the musical based on Voltaire, which was staged at the 180-seat Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973 before moving to the much larger Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year. Mr. Lee, working with his partner at the time, Franne Lee, and the director Harold Prince, turned the Chelsea into “a ramped and runwayed circus midway,” The New York Times wrote, “surrounded by booths and mini-stages that could be changed, in a twinkling, from a corpse-littered battlefield to a vizier’s seraglio.”The “Saturday Night Live” stage crew at work in 2012. Mr. Lee created the basic stage look that has remained largely unchanged since the show began in 1975.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“The audience sat up, down and all around,” The Times said, “on stools, benches and ballpark-style ‘bleachers,’ between the ramps or along the runways or anywhere they wouldn’t be in the actors’ way.”Preserving that staging when the show transferred to Broadway took some effort, which included removing numerous seats, and for the first few performances some theatergoers asked for refunds because of problems with sight lines and other issues. But eventually the bugs were worked out.The show ran for almost two years and won five Tonys, including one for Mr. Lee and Franne Lee for scenic design. (Their relationship lasted for most of the 1970s but they were nevermarried, Patrick Lynch, Mr. Lee’s assistant and fellow designer, said by phone.)Five years later, for the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd” (which, like “Candide,” had a book by Hugh Wheeler and was directed by Mr. Prince), Mr. Lee brought pieces of an old iron foundry from Rhode Island and turned the Uris Theater into a stylized Industrial Age scene out of Victorian London.“The stagehands at the theater still remember how heavy the set was,” Mr. Lee told The Boston Globe in 2007. “You had to knock away bricks to support it. You can still see the scars all these years later.”Kristin Chenoweth left, and Idina Menzel in “Wicked,” for which Mr. Lee won a Tony.Sara KrulwichThe designs won him a second Tony Award, and a third came with “Wicked.” For that show, whose set featured an imposing dragon and a time motif, Mr. Lee drew inspiration in part from smashing apart old clocks in his Providence workshop and fiddling with the innards.Mr. Lee had more than two dozen Broadway credits, including “Agnes of God” (1982), “Show Boat” (1994), “Ragtime” (1998), “Glengarry Glen Ross” (2012) and, most recently, “Bright Star” (2016). While working on those projects and others, he oversaw the sets for “Saturday Night Live,” including creating the basic stage look that has remained largely unchanged since the show began in 1975.Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and executive producer, said in a phone interview that when he began formulating “S.N.L.,” he had recently seen “Candide” and was impressed with the look the Lees had created.“In those days, television was always on the floor,” he said — filmed on one level, with a polished sort of look — but Mr. Lee, still working with Franne Lee, had a different idea.“He said, ‘Well, I think we should probably build stages,” Mr. Michaels said. “And that meant we’d build a balcony, basically turn the studio into a theater.”“It looked like the city,” Mr. Michaels added of the look Mr. Lee created. “Something about it rang true.”Over the decades — taking a break only when Mr. Michaels did for five years in the 1980s — Mr. Lee would travel from his home in Providence to oversee the show’s design each week, whether it included a living room, a fake Oval Office or a special setting for the musical guest.In his work on “S.N.L.” Mr. Lee encountered many up-and-coming comedians, and he helped some of them branch out, working on the Broadway shows of Gilda Radner (“Live From New York,” 1979), Colin Quinn (“An Irish Wake,” 1998) and Will Ferrell (“You’re Welcome, America,” 2009). He also became production designer for “The Tonight Show” when Jimmy Fallon took it over in 2014.“When we were discussing the ‘Tonight Show’ set, he just had such a clear vision on the look and the stage and the curtain and the color of the wood,” Mr. Fallon said by email. “Every inch of it had meaning.”Whoever was in the “S.N.L.” cast in a given year, Mr. Michaels said, owed a debt to Mr. Lee.“He built this place for us to play in and do the show,” he said, “and it feels whole when we’re in it.”For “Sweeney Todd,” Mr. Lee turned the Uris Theater into a stylized Industrial Age scene out of Victorian London.Martha Swope/The New York Public LibraryEugene Edward Lee was born on March 9, 1939, in Beloit, Wis. His father, also named Eugene, was an engineer, and his mother, Elizabeth (Gates) Lee, was a pediatric nurse.His academic history was a patchwork.“I don’t think I have a degree from any place,” he told American Theater magazine in 1984. “Maybe I have a degree from Yale; I can’t remember.”He started out studying at the University of Wisconsin.“Then I saw Helen Hayes talking on television about Carnegie Tech and the stage,” he told The Times in 2000, referring to what is now Carnegie Mellon University. “So I got in my Volkswagen, which my grandmother had given me, and I arrived at the front door and said, ‘I’m here.’”He had a similarly casual approach to the Yale School of Drama, where he arrived in 1966 and studied for a time, although he did not finish his degree. (Some two decades later, the school granted him a master’s degree — “a real degree, not even an honorary one,” he told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2017.)With or without degrees, by the second half of the 1960s he was getting plenty of design work, including at Trinity Rep, where Adrian Hall, the founding artistic director, brought him in as resident designer. (Mr. Hall died on Feb. 4 in Van, Texas.) When Mr. Hall added the job of artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center in 1983, Mr. Lee worked with him there as well.Wherever he was working, Mr. Lee favored the genuine over the artificial.“Once you start painting, it has a painted look,” he told American Theater. “What please me are real textures used in the way nature left them. There’s nothing like a real piece of rusted tin — really rusted — put up on the stage. I don’t care how heavy it is, how dirty it is.”Mr. Eustis recalled one production — “Hope of the Heart” in 1990 — on which Mr. Lee’s enthusiasm for the realistic had to be reigned in.“Eugene could be risky, even reckless,” he said. “When I first worked with him at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, he insisted that the actors should use live ammunition (mercifully, only BBs) in the course of the show. We had to do a full-scale test, with a dozen of us wearing goggles, to prove to him that BBs would fly all over the auditorium and blind the audience if we used them. Reluctantly, he agreed to abandon the idea.”A model by Mr. Lee, later revised, of a proposed set for “The Tonight Show.” Mr. Lee became the show’s production designer when Jimmy Fallon took over as host in 2014. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMr. Lee married Brooke Lutz in 1981. She survives him, along with his twin brother, Thomas; a son from his relationship with Franne Lee, Willie; a son from his marriage, Ted; and two grandchildren.Mr. Lee was known as a man of few words, and a man who loved the water. Mr. Eustis recalled that Mr. Lee took him out on Narragansett Bay on his sailboat when they were working on Trinity’s production of “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1995.“We spent a couple hours on the water, talking but not referring to the play, and then he said, ‘It would be too bad if they actually left the stage when they say they are leaving,’” Mr. Eustis recalled. “That was our whole conversation. He delivered one of the most brilliant and beautiful designs I’d ever seen.”Iris Fanger, reviewing the production in The Boston Herald, described that set as a series of rooms “that seem to stretch back into eternity.” More

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      in Music

      Burt Bacharach, Composer Who Added a High Gloss to the ’60s, Dies at 94

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      His sophisticated collaborations with the lyricist Hal David — “The Look of Love,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie” and many more hits — evoked a sleek era of airy romance.Burt Bacharach, the debonair pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the 1960s distilled that decade’s mood of romantic optimism, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His publicist Tina Brausam confirmed the death. No specific cause was given.A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.Bacharach-David songs like “The Look of Love” (Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1967 hit, featured in the movie “Casino Royale”), “This Guy’s in Love With You” (a No. 1 hit in 1968 for Herb Alpert), and “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (a No. 1 hit in 1970 for the Carpenters) evoked an upscale world of jet travel, sports cars and sleek bachelor pads. Acknowledging this mystique with a wink, Mr. Bacharach appeared as himself and performed his 1965 song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in the 1997 movie “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” which spoofed the swinging ’60s ambience of the early James Bond films. He also made cameo appearances in its two sequels.Mr. Bacharach with Hal David, his most frequent collaborator, and Dionne Warwick, the pair’s definitive interpreter. Together they turned out a steady stream of pop hits.Frank Driggs Collection/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach collaborated with many lyricists over the years, and even wrote some of his own words. But his primary collaborator was Mr. David, seven years his senior, whom he met in a music publisher’s office in 1957. The team’s artistic chemistry solidified in 1962, beginning with the hits they wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick, a gifted young gospel-trained singer from East Orange, N.J.Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases.The artistic synergy of Mr. Bacharach, Mr. David and Ms. Warwick defined the voice of a young, passionate, on-the-go Everywoman bursting with romantic eagerness and vulnerability. Their urbane style was the immediate forerunner of the earthier Motown sound of the middle and late 1960s.Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David worked in the Brill Building, the Midtown Manhattan music publishing hub, and they are frequently lumped together with the younger writers in the so-called Brill Building school of teenage pop, like the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But they rarely wrote explicitly for the teenage market. Their more sophisticated songs were closer in style to Cole Porter, and Mr. Bacharach’s fondness for Brazilian rhythms recalled lilting Porter standards like “Begin the Beguine.”Hits and a MissBeginning with “Don’t Make Me Over” in 1962, the team turned out a steady stream of hits for Ms. Warwick, among them “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” Accepting the Academy Award for the score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1970. Mr. Bacharach also won the Oscar for best song that year, for the film’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”Associated PressMr. Bacharach’s success transcended the Top 40. He won two Academy Awards for best song: for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” written with Mr. David, in 1970, and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” written with Peter Allen, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross, in 1982. His original score for the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which included “Raindrops” (a No. 1 hit for B.J. Thomas), won an Oscar for best original score for a nonmusical motion picture. And the Bacharach-David team conquered Broadway in December 1968 with “Promises, Promises.”Adapted by Neil Simon from “The Apartment,” Billy Wilder’s 1960 film about erotic hanky-panky at a Manhattan corporation, “Promises, Promises” was one of the first Broadway shows to use backup singers in the orchestra pit and pop-style amplification. Along with “Hair,” which opened on Broadway that same year, it presaged the era of the pop musical.“Promises, Promises” ran for 1,281 performances, yielded hits for Ms. Warwick in the catchy but fiendishly difficult title song and the folk-pop ballad “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and was nominated for seven Tony Awards. (Two of its cast members won, but the show itself did not. Both “Promises, Promises” and “Hair” lost in the best-musical category to the much more traditional “1776.”) It was successfully revived on Broadway in 2010.At the piano in 1968 with the “Promises, Promises” team, from left: the actor Jerry Orbach, who won the Tony for his role; the actress Jill O’Hara; the director Robert Moore; the playwright Neil Simon, who adapted the musical from Billy Wilder’s 1960 film “The Apartment”; the producer David Merrick; and the actor Edward Winter.Bob Wands/Associated PressWith success both in Hollywood and on Broadway, as well as a high-profile movie-star wife, Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, Mr. Bacharach entered the 1970s not just a hit songwriter but a glamorous star in his own right. It seemed as if he could do no wrong. But that soon changed.In 1973, Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David wrote the score for the movie musical “Lost Horizon,” adapted from the 1937 Frank Capra fantasy film of the same name. The movie was a catastrophic failure. Shortly after that, the Bacharach-David-Warwick triumvirate, which had already begun to grow stale, split up acrimoniously amid a flurry of lawsuits.Reflecting on his split with Mr. David in 2013 in his autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music,” written with Robert Greenfield, Mr. Bacharach acknowledged that “it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart.”A New PartnershipMr. Bacharach endured several fallow years, personal as well as professional — his marriage to Ms. Dickinson was over long before they divorced in 1981 — but experienced a commercial resurgence in the 1980s through his collaboration with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom he married in 1982.Mr. Bacharach and Ms. Sager hit their commercial peak in 1986 with two No. 1 hits: the Patti LaBelle-Michael McDonald duet “On My Own” and the AIDS fund-raising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For,” which went on to win the Grammy for song of the year. Originally recorded by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of Ron Howard’s 1982 movie “Night Shift,” and redone by an all-star quartet billed as Dionne and Friends (Ms. Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John), “That’s What Friends Are For” was Mr. Bacharach’s last major hit. He and Ms. Sager divorced in 1991.Mr. Bacharach married the actress Angie Dickinson in 1965; they divorced in 1981. At the time of their marriage, he was not just a composer but a debonair, glamorous star in his own right. Associated PressBurt Freeman Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 12, 1928. His father, Bert Bacharach, was a nationally syndicated columnist and men’s fashion journalist who moved his family to Forest Hills, Queens, in 1932. His mother, Irma (Freeman) Bacharach, was an amateur singer and pianist who encouraged him to study music. He learned cello, drums and piano.While still underage, he sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs and became smitten with the modern harmonies of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which would exert a huge influence on him.After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he studied music at several schools, including McGill University in Montreal and the Mannes School of Music in New York. Among his teachers were the composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. While serving in the Army in the early ’50s, he played piano, worked as a dance-band arranger and met the singer Vic Damone, with whom he later toured as an accompanist.He became the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich’s musical director in 1958 and toured with her for two years in the United States and Europe. Other performers he accompanied in the 1950s included the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen, Georgia Gibbs, Joel Grey, Steve Lawrence and a little-known singer named Paula Stewart, who in 1953 became his first wife. (They divorced in 1958.)Mr. Bacharach spent the 1950s accompanying famous performers, including the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, pictured with him in 1960.Werner Kreusch/Associated PressThe Bacharach-David songwriting team enjoyed immediate success in 1957 with Marty Robbins’s “The Story of My Life” and Perry Como’s “Magic Moments.” Mr. Bacharach’s emerging melodic signature was discernible in early 1960s hits like Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now” (lyrics by Mr. Hilliard) and “Make It Easy on Yourself” (lyrics by Mr. David), a success for Jerry Butler in the United States and the Walker Brothers in Britain. In their Gene Pitney hits “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” and “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa,” the team adopted a swaggering quasi-western sound.All the elements of Mr. Bacharach’s style coalesced in Ms. Warwick’s recordings, which he produced with Mr. David and arranged himself. In the typical Warwick hit, her voice was surrounded by strings and backup singers, the arrangements emphatically punctuated by trumpets echoing the influence of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.Among the other artists who had hits with the team’s songs were Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”), Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love”), Tom Jones (“What’s New Pussycat?”) and the 5th Dimension (“One Less Bell to Answer”). But Ms. Warwick was their definitive interpreter.A ReunionAfter the “Lost Horizon” debacle, Mr. Bacharach worked predominantly as a concert performer, conducting his own instrumental suites and singing his own songs in an easygoing voice with a narrow range. He periodically released solo albums, of which the most ambitious was “Woman” (1979), a primarily instrumental song cycle recorded with the Houston Symphony. But these records had a negligible commercial impact.Time eventually healed the wounds from Mr. Bacharach’s split with Mr. David and Ms. Warwick, and he reunited first with Ms. Warwick (most notably for “That’s What Friends Are For”) and later with Mr. David (for “Sunny Weather Lover,” recorded by Ms. Warwick in the early 1990s). He found his greatest interpreter since Ms. Warwick in the pop-soul balladeer Luther Vandross, whose lush 1980s remakes of “A House Is Not a Home” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” transformed them into dreamy quasi-operatic arias decorated with florid gospel melismas.He married Jane Hansen, his fourth wife, in 1993. She survives him, along with their son, Oliver; their daughter, Raleigh; and a son, Cristopher, from his marriage to Ms. Sager. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Angie Dickinson, committed suicide in 2007.Mr. Bacharach accompanied the singer-songwriter Elvis Costello at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1998.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn his 60s, Mr. Bacharach found himself regarded with awe by a younger generation of musicians. Bands like Oasis and Stereolab included his songs in their repertoire. The British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, a longtime admirer, collaborated with him on the ballad “God Give Me Strength” for the 1996 film “Grace of My Heart,” loosely based on the life of Carole King. That led them to collaborate on an entire album, “Painted From Memory” (1998), arranged and conducted by Mr. Bacharach, for which they shared music and lyric credits.A track from that album, “I Still Have That Other Girl,” won a Grammy for best pop vocal collaboration. It was the sixth Grammy of Mr. Bacharach’s career; he would win one more, in 2006, when his “At This Time” was named best pop instrumental album, as well as a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2008. The Bacharach-David team was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Forty years later, shortly before Mr. David died at age 91, the two received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.Mr. Bacharach in 2007. “Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I get to make a direct connection with people.”Lisa Maree Williams/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach remained in the public eye until the end. In December 2011, “Some Lovers,” a musical for which he wrote the music and Steven Sater wrote the lyrics, opened at the Old Globe in San Diego. “What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined,” a New York Theater Workshop production built on his songs, opened Off Broadway in December 2013. (An earlier revue based on the Bacharach-David catalog, “The Look of Love,” had a brief Broadway run in 2003.) As recently as 2020, Mr. Bacharach was still writing new music, releasing a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Melody Federer.In 2013, Mr. Bacharach began collaborating with Mr. Costello, Mr. Sater and the television writer and producer Chuck Lorre on a stage musical based on the “Painted From Memory” album but also including new songs. That project never came to fruition, although some of the new material ended up on Mr. Costello’s recent albums. All the music from the “Painted From Memory” project is included in “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a boxed set that also includes Mr. Costello’s recordings of Bacharach songs, which is scheduled for release next month.Looking back on his career in his autobiography, Mr. Bacharach suggested that as a songwriter he had been “luckier than most.”“Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote. “People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television.” Because he was also a performer, he noted, “I get to make a direct connection with people.”“Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written,” Mr. Bacharach added, “that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.”Alex Traub More

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      in Television

      Bob Orben, One-Man Gag Factory and Speechwriter, Dies at 95

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      He wrote tens of thousands of jokes in his career. Among those who told them were Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton — and, for a while, President Gerald R. Ford.Bob Orben, who after writing jokes for Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton and others in the 1960s found a new avenue for his wit when he became a speechwriter for President Gerald R. Ford in 1974, died on Feb. 2 in Alexandria, Va. He was 95.His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his great-niece, Yvette Chevallier.Mr. Orben was a one-man gag factory. He wrote joke books. He dispatched one-liners to entertainers, politicians and disc jockeys through his subscription newsletter, Current Comedy. And he wrote a column, My Favorite Jokes, for Parade magazine.“I don’t mean to blow my own horn,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “but between Johnny Carson’s monologues, the political cartoonists such as Herblock and Oliphant, and me, if we all decide what the hot subject in the country is, that’s what it is.”In 1968, Gerald Ford, a Michigan Republican who was then the House minority leader, needed someone to spice up a speech he was going to give to the Gridiron Club, an organization of journalists whose annual dinner was an opportunity to lampoon political figures. George Murphy, the former actor and United States senator, knew Red Skelton, for whom Mr. Orben was a writer, and recommended him.Mr. Orben’s goal was to make Ford funny, or at least funnier than Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, another speaker at the dinner. After listening to tapes of Ford’s delivery, Mr. Orben came up with a few zingers.“Ford was the surprise hit,” Mr. Orben recalled in 2008 in an oral history interview with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. Among the Orben lines Ford delivered was the observation that he had no interest in the presidency, except that “on that long drive back to Alexandria, Virginia, where I live, as I go past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I do seem to hear a little voice within me saying, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’”Mr. Orben continued to feed jokes to Ford during his vice presidency. When Ford became president in 1974, after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, he hired Mr. Orben.A 1975 profile of President Ford in The New York Times Magazine quoted him reading aloud from a speech written by Mr. Orben that he was going to give to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association. It included references to a prominent Democratic senator and an agriculture secretary known for his off-color remarks.“I have only one thing to say about a program that calls for me to follow Bob Hope,” he read. “Who arranged this? Scoop Jackson? It’s ridiculous. Bob Hope has enormous stage presence, superb comedy writing and the finest writers in the business. I’m standing here in a rented tuxedo — with three jokes from Earl Butz!”Mr. Orben cautioned the president not to pause when delivering a good one-liner.“Watch Hope,” he told him. “You’ll see he really punches through a line.”Mr. Orben fed Ford self-deprecating lines that suited his personality. One of those lines, also delivered in 1975, played off something Lyndon B. Johnson had famously said about him.“It’s a great pleasure — and great honor — to be at Yale Law’s Sesquicentennial Convocation,” he said. “And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.”Mr. Orben became the director of the White House speechwriting staff in early 1976 and served through the end of the Ford administration.Mr. Orben at the White House with President Ford in 1976. He fed jokes to the president and coached him on how to deliver them.Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.John Mihalec, a speechwriter for President Ford during the 1976 presidential campaign, said it was not surprising that a comedy writer should excel at writing speeches.“Comedy writing is so precise — the setup and the punch line and everything has to be at exactly the right volume and in the right place,” Mr. Mihalec said in a phone interview. “It’s good training for the precision of presidential speechwriting.”Robert Orben was born on March 4, 1927, in the Bronx to Walter and Marie Orben. His father was in the hardware business. Bob was smitten by magic at an early age, and when he was 12 he and his brother, Walter, performed a mentalist act in the Catskill Mountains, “The Boy With the Radio Mind.” It flopped.After graduating from high school in 1943, he attended Drake Business School. He also started his short-lived career in magic.He was hired as a magic demonstrator in a shop in Manhattan, but he found his métier not in performing magic but in writing about magicians; he was impressed by one magician’s onstage comedic patter, which led him to publish a pamphlet, “The Encyclopedia of Patter,” in 1946.Over the next decade he would publish books like “Blue Ribbon Comedy,” “The Working Comedian’s Gag File,” “Tag-Lines,” “Bits, Boffs and Banter” and “The Emcee’s Handbook.” He published dozens of joke collections in his career.He began writing his comedy newsletter in 1958, and in the 1960s he wrote for “The Jack Paar Program” and then for “The Red Skelton Hour.”After coming to the attention of the groundbreaking Black comedian Dick Gregory, Mr. Orben said, he sent him a page of jokes every day. Another one of Mr. Orben’s clients was someone very different from Mr. Gregory: the conservative Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he wrote during his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964.“One of the jokes that I wrote for Greg was talking about Goldwater,” Mr. Orben said in the Ford Presidential Foundation interview. “And as you know, the campaign slogan was, ‘In your heart, you know he’s right.’ And Greg used to say, ‘In your heart, you know he’s white.’”Mr. Orben never returned to the White House. But he kept writing joke books, among them “2500 Jokes to Start ’Em Laughing” (1979), “2100 Laughs for All Occasions” (1983) and “2000 Surefire Jokes for Speakers” (1986).He also continued to write his newsletter through 1989, as well as writing speeches for business executives and working as a consultant to IBM.Mr. Orben’s wife, Jean (Connelly) Orben, died last year. He leaves no immediate survivors.In 1974, Mr. Orben was helping Vice President Ford rehearse his speech for the Gridiron Club dinner. One line, about Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California, worried Ford: “Governor Reagan does not dye his hair. Let’s just say he’s turning prematurely orange.”He asked Mr. Orben, “Do you think the governor would take offense at that?”“Now, I’m looking at this blockbuster joke of the year go up in smoke, but I think I gave him a fair, honest answer,” Mr. Orben said in the 2008 oral history interview. “I said, ‘You know, Mr. Vice President, Reagan has been in show business a good part of his life. He has gone through a thousand roasts and I’m sure he has heard dyed-hair jokes. So I really don’t think so.’”To Mr. Orben’s relief, Vice President Ford delivered the line. More

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      in Music

      Charlie Thomas, a Drifter Nearly All His Life in Song, Dies at 85

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      He was heard on hits like “There Goes My Baby,” “Under the Boardwalk” and “Up on the Roof.” He kept singing them for decades.Charlie Thomas, who recorded memorable songs like “There Goes My Baby” and “Under the Boardwalk” with the Drifters, the silken-voiced R&B group that had a long string of hits from 1959 to 1964 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Fame, died on Jan. 31 at his home in Bowie, Md. He was 85.The singer Peter Lemongello Jr., a close friend, said the cause was liver cancer.Mr. Thomas, a tenor, was a Drifter for more than 60 years, from the version of the group that had its first hits in the late 1950s to the version he led and toured with until the pandemic struck.“He was aging, but he was active almost every weekend,” Mr. Lemongello, a former lead singer of the Crests, which performed on bills with Mr. Thomas, said in a phone interview. “Unfortunately, he went from being active to being at home and he started going downhill.”Mr. Thomas became a Drifter by chance. He was singing with the Crowns, an R&B group, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1958 when they came to the attention of George Treadwell, the manager of the original Drifters, who were also on the bill.After one of the Drifters got drunk and cursed out the owner of the Apollo and the promoter of the show, the music historian Marv Goldberg wrote, Mr. Treadwell, who owned the name, fired all its members and replaced them with members of the Crowns, including Mr. Thomas and Ben Nelson, who would later be known as Ben E. King, and rechristened them the Drifters.Asked how it felt to suddenly become a Drifter, Mr. Thomas told Mr. Goldberg: “As a kid, I used to play hooky to see the Drifters at the Apollo. It felt good!”The new Drifters fulfilled the former group’s road obligations and began recording the next year for Atlantic Records, produced by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.Mr. King had written “There Goes My Baby” for Mr. Thomas to sing. But Mr. Thomas froze at the studio microphone, according to Billy Vera’s liner notes for “Rockin’ and Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (1996), and Mr. King took over. The song rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.The hits continued for several years, as the Drifters became one of the most successful groups of the era. They followed “There Goes My Baby” with songs like “This Magic Moment,”“Up on the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “On Broadway” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” “Save the Last Dance for Me” was their only song to reach No. 1.Mr. Lewis in performance in Holmdel, N.J., in 2016. He performed for many years with a group billed as Charlie Thomas’s Drifters.Bobby Bank/Wireimage, via Getty ImagesCharles Nowlin Thomas was born on April 7, 1937, in Lynchburg, Va. His father, Willis, was a minister, and his mother, Lucinda (Nowlin) Thomas, was a homemaker whose singing voice Charlie admired.“My dad was a holy roller preacher down in Virginia,” Mr. Thomas said in an interview in 2013 with Craig Morrison, a musician and ethnomusicologist. “At my father’s church, I used to take the tambourine and do collection, and my mother used to sing in the choir. That’s where I really got my training from singing.”He moved to Harlem with his mother and a sister when he was 10 and eventually got a job pushing a hand truck in the garment district. He sang on street corners and came to the attention of Lover Patterson, the Crowns’ manager, who hired him in 1958. The group recorded “Kiss and Make Up” for the songwriters’ Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman’s short-lived RnB label before Mr. Treadwell turned them into the Drifters.The lead singers on most of the group’s hits were Mr. King and, after he left for a solo career in 1960, Rudy Lewis and Johnny Moore, who had been in the group’s first incarnation and rejoined it in 1964.But Mr. Thomas sang lead on “Sweets for My Sweet,” which reached No. 16 on the Hot 100 in 1961, and “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” which peaked at No. 28 the next year. Mr. Thomas also took over the lead on the ballad “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You” a day after Mr. Lewis’s death in a hotel room in 1964.“When he died, I was the one who closed his eyes,” Mr. Thomas told Goldmine magazine in 2012. He added, “I really do love that song because that one, in particular, brings back a lot of memories.”The Drifters broke up in the late 1960s, but they didn’t disappear. Some members headed to England, where they performed as the Drifters and were managed by Mr. Treadwell’s widow, Faye, who vigorously defended her legal right to the name.Bill Pinkney, a member of the mid-1950s lineup fired by Mr. Treadwell, went on to form a group called the Original Drifters. He died in 2007, but the group continues to perform under that name.Mr. Thomas later joined them briefly before starting Charlie Thomas’s Drifters, which performed until 2020. Still other groups have claimed the Drifters name over the years as well.Mr. Thomas is survived by his wife, Rita Thomas; his daughters, Crystal Thomas Wilson and Victoria Green; his sons, Charlie Jr., Michael Sidbury and Brian Godfrey, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted seven of the Drifters in 1988, it recognized members of the 1953-58 lineup — Mr. Pinkney, Clyde McPhatter, Gerhart Thomas and Johnny Moore — as well as those from the later years: Mr. Thomas, Mr. King and Mr. Lewis.“Time has hardly made their work seem quaint,” Michael Hill wrote in the induction essay, “rather their work has withstood the ravages of the years to become even more special, more knowing.” More

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      in Movies

      Melinda Dillon, 2-Time Oscar Nominee, Is Dead at 83

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      She was a Broadway star at 23 and then quit acting, but later re-emerged in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “A Christmas Story.”Melinda Dillon, who shot to Broadway stardom at 23, withdrew from acting after a mental breakdown, and then, in her late 30s, staged a comeback, receiving best supporting actress Oscar nominations for her roles in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Absence of Malice,” died on Jan. 9. She was 83.Her death, which was announced by a cremation service, came to public notice in recent days. The announcement did not specify the cause or location of her death.Ms. Dillon was best known for playing mothers coping with grave or silly problems in popular movies of the 1970s and ’80s. In “Close Encounters,” the enduring Steven Spielberg hit from 1977, she played an artist and single mother living on a rural farm who watches her son get abducted by aliens.She played more explicitly archetypal mothers in “Harry and the Hendersons” (1987), a family comedy about having Bigfoot as your pet, and “A Christmas Story” (1983), a series of vignettes depicting an all-American Christmas in midcentury Indiana.The latter film, long a classic of the holiday season on television, inspired a 2020 tribute in The New York Times, which hailed Ms. Dillon’s character, a frazzled Everymom, as a “damn hero.”In “Absence of Malice” (1981), Ms. Dillon played against maternal type as a Catholic woman who must admit to having an abortion.Her star turn of that era came late for an actress — in Ms. Dillon’s late 30s and 40s — and it constituted an unexpected re-emergence, following a crisis that seemed to halt her promising career.Ms. Dillon in the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” with, clockwise from left, Peter Billingsley, Ian Petrella and Darren McGavin.PictureLux, via AlamyMelinda Ruth Clardy was born in Hope, Ark., on Oct. 13, 1939. Her father, Floyd, worked as a traveling salesman, and her mother, Noreen, was a volunteer at a U.S. Army hospital. Noreen fell in love with Wilbur Dillon, a wounded veteran, and Melinda’s parents divorced when she was 5.She took her stepfather’s surname and had the peripatetic upbringing of a child of the military, living for a while in Germany. She left home at 16 and soon began pursuing an acting career.She moved to New York City in 1962, fresh out of acting school. In just a matter of weeks, she landed one of four parts in the Broadway debut of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”She played Honey, the wife in a young couple invited to the home of an older couple for a drink. The premiere, on Oct. 13, fell on her 23rd birthday.“Critics unanimously hailed her performance as superb,” The Daily News announced in a profile published that month that described Ms. Dillon’s “overnight rise from obscurity to stardom.”Her agent, Peter Witt, told The News, “What has happened to her is a one in a million shot paying off the first time out in the theater.”In a 2014 New York Times review of a recording of the play’s original cast, the theater critic Charles Isherwood called the production “one of the seminal theatrical events of the 20th century” and said the actors’ performances, including Ms. Dillon’s, “still feel fresh, fierce and definitive.”But as time went on, the pressure bore down on Ms. Dillon. Sometimes she would perform in a three-hour matinee in the afternoon, then study acting with Lee Strasberg for two hours, and then do another three-hour performance in the evening. Talking to sophisticated, powerful people in the New York theater world terrified her.Ms. Dillon in 1998. After suffering a breakdown, she said: “I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”CBS, via Getty ImagesAfter nine months, she left the play and checked into the mental ward of Gracie Square Hospital in New York, where she found herself feeling suicidal.“I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”After her release from the hospital, she took a few acting roles but then sought safe harbor in marriage, to the actor Richard Libertini, and in motherhood, raising their son, also named Richard.But she did not find contentment in life away from the spotlight. By the mid-1970s, she was single and being cast in multiple major Hollywood productions, including “Slap Shot,” a 1977 film starring Paul Newman.“I spent 10 and a half hours naked in bed with Paul and absolutely loved it,” she told People magazine in 1978.After the apex of her Hollywood career, she continued acting, and into the 21st century she occasionally made appearances on television shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dillon sang in the choir of a Methodist church as an adult, and she threw herself into film roles as mothers. But she came to reject what she had once sought in the life of a traditional suburban housewife.“I left home so early that when I found somebody who wanted to take care of me, I just stopped everything; I could have soared ahead — I really know that — and I chose not to,” she told The Times. In marriage, “I got buried alive,” she continued. “That’s what got me to act again.” More