Deaths (Obituaries)

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

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

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      in Movies

      Jessie Maple, Pathbreaking Filmmaker, Is Dead at 86

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

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

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

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      in Movies

      Barry Newman, Star of the Cult Film ‘Vanishing Point,’ Dies at 92

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      Panned when it was released in 1971, the movie gained acclaim decades later. Mr. Newman also starred on TV in the legal drama “Petrocelli.”Barry Newman, whose terse integrity and understated rebelliousness made the 1971 movie “Vanishing Point” an enduring hit in the annals of American cinema about the open road, died on May 11 in Manhattan. He was 92.The death, in a hospital, which was not widely reported until this week, was confirmed by his wife, Angela Newman. While seeking treatment for back pain, she said, he came down with a lung infection that spread to his spine and heart.Mr. Newman was briefly a leading man in movies and television in the 1970s. He starred as a Harvard-educated defense attorney who moved to a small Southwestern town to work criminal cases in the 1970 feature film “The Lawyer,” and he reprised the character, Tony Petrocelli, in an NBC legal drama, “Petrocelli,” which ran from 1974 to 1976.Two decades later, he returned to prominence as a character actor, with small roles in memorable movies like Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999); “Bowfinger,” also in 1999, alongside Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; and “40 Days and 40 Nights” (2002), a romantic comedy starring Josh Hartnett.But Mr. Newman’s most notable performance was undoubtedly in “Vanishing Point.”In that film, he played Kowalski, a one-named car-delivery driver who makes a bet with his drug dealer while buying Benzedrine: If he can make it from where they are in Denver to San Francisco in about 15 hours, then Kowalski gets the amphetamines for free.“Vanishing Point” then becomes one long psychedelic car chase. Kowalski skillfully evades highway cops, nonchalantly accepts his deification by a rhapsodic radio D.J. named Super Soul (played by Cleavon Little), and befriends a succession of slender hippie-ish blondes. From conversations among police officers and Kowalski’s own flashbacks, we learn about his past as a decorated Vietnam War veteran, frustrated police officer and demolition derby racer.The bulk of the movie replaces dialogue with the sounds of a revving car engine, a police siren and a shredding electric guitar. The camera is often trained on Mr. Newman’s face — its shaggy hair, stubble, righteous sideburns, sharp jawline and watery blue eyes — as he stares ahead resolutely but wearily at desert highways that never seem to end.The other star of the movie is Kowalski’s car, a souped-up white 1970 Dodge Challenger that can go up to 160 miles per hour. It remains fairly pristine even as it kicks up enough dust to confound the highway patrols of several Western states.With characters making druggy proclamations about “the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul,” the movie did not initially attract critical praise. Roger Greenspun, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it “a dumb movie that is nothing but an automobile chase,” and added, “I suspect that Barry Newman really can act, though in ‘Vanishing Point’ all he needs is a driver’s license.”Yet it is now regularly featured on lists of the best American road movies, car movies and action movies. Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg have both ranked “Vanishing Point” among their favorite films.“It became a cult film without me even realizing it,” Mr. Newman told the movie journalist Paul Rowlands in 2019. “To this day, I’m always being asked to talk about it somewhere.”Barry Foster Newman was born on Nov. 7, 1930, in Boston, where he grew up. His father, Carl, managed the Latin Quarter nightclub. Barry visited on Sundays and saw performances by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Berle and others. His mother, Sarah (Ostrovsky) Newman, worked a variety of jobs, including saleswoman at Filene’s Basement and ticket seller at a movie theater.Mr. Newman earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brandeis University in 1952. He then served in the Army until 1954, playing saxophone and clarinet in a military band.Several years later, while studying for a master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, Mr. Newman tagged along with a friend to an acting class being taught by Lee Strasberg. He was “mesmerized,” he told Mr. Rowlands, and soon began pursuing a career as an actor.He married Angela Spilker in 1994. They divorced in 2007 but got back together and remarried in 2018. She is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Newman lived in the same apartment in Midtown Manhattan from 1962 until his death.In portraying both the quick-witted lawyer Petrocelli and the stoic hot-rodder Kowalski, Mr. Newman became known for characters with opposing types of masculinity. That paradox, he told Mr. Rowlands, inspired him to take on the part of Kowalski in the first place.“I had just done ‘The Lawyer,’ where I was speaking nonstop for 90-odd minutes, and I got the script for ‘Vanishing Point,’” he said. “I wasn’t even thinking of the idea of the film or the existentialism of the character — I just thought it would be interesting to do a part where I am playing the antithesis of the character I had just played.” More

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      in Television

      The Iron Sheik, Villainous Hall of Fame Wrestler, Is Dead

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      Khosrow Vaziri drew on his Iranian heritage to create a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain and became one of the most memorable heels in wrestling history.The Iron Sheik, a Hall of Fame wrestler who became a villainous star in the 1980s, facing off against Hulk Hogan and teaming up with a wrestler who claimed to represent the Soviet Union, died in his sleep early Wednesday morning at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was either 81 (according to his passport) or 80 (according to him).The death was confirmed by his managers, Page and Jian Magen, who said they did not know the cause.Foreign-style heels are a time-honored tradition in professional wrestling, and the Iron Sheik, whose legal name was Khosrow Vaziri, became one of the most recognizable of them all.The Sheik drew loosely on his Iranian heritage to build a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain. He wore a thick mustache, boots with curled toes, and kaffiyeh, Middle Eastern head scarves — which are not generally worn in Iran.At the height of the Sheik’s infamy, and in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, he often stomped into the ring waving an Iranian flag emblazoned with the face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, to take on stereotypically American wrestlers.The Sheik’s signature move was the camel clutch, in which he sat on an opponent’s back, locked his fingers beneath the other wrestler’s chin and pulled up. His unfortunate opponent’s spine seemed to bend like a drawn bow.In 1983 the Sheik defeated Bob Backlund to win the World Wrestling Federation championship. But his time with the title was short.About a month later, on Jan. 23, 1984, the Sheik defended his title against Hulk Hogan, then a relatively new face in the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE), in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden.The match seemed to be going the Sheik’s way, and he trapped Hogan in a camel clutch. But Hogan stood up with the Sheik on his back and slammed him into a corner pylon.The Sheik flopped to the mat. Hogan launched off the ropes, leaped into a leg drop on the Sheik and then pinned him. It was the first of Hogan’s six WWE championships and the beginning of Hulkamania.The defeat continued to sting even decades later, the Sheik, very much in character, told WWE in an interview in 2014.“Hulk Hogan, only thing he had was luck,” he said. “I have one bad night, I lost my belt.”Sgt. Slaughter was a regular opponent for the Sheik, who lost a major match to him at Madison Square Garden later in 1984.The next year the Sheik teamed up with Nikolai Volkoff, a heel supposedly wrestling for the Soviet Union (he was actually from Croatia), and went on to win the World Tag Team Championship at the inaugural Wrestlemania.The Sheik also dialed up his character’s anti-American rhetoric. He often snatched the microphone from an announcer and shouted “Iran No. 1! Russia No. 1!”Then he would glare at the audience, shout “U.S.A.!” and spit on the ground.The audience reaction could be so vicious that despite his ferociousness in the ring, the Sheik sometimes feared for his safety.Keith Elliot Greenberg, a wrestling historian and writer, said in a phone interview that he thought fans sometimes believed the Sheik’s character too much.“The reality was he was actually a very loyal American, and was grateful to the United States for the opportunities it afforded him,” Mr. Greenberg said.The Iron Sheik in action against Chavo Guerrero in the 1980s.George Napolitano/MediaPunch, via Associated PressHossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri was born in Damghan, a town about 200 miles east of Tehran. His birth date appeared as March 15, 1942, on his passport, but he was not certain that it was accurate and celebrated his birthday on Sept. 9. His parents, Ghassem and Maryam Vaziri, owned a farm that grew pistachios, grapes and other crops.When he was a boy, his family moved to Tehran and opened a wrestling gym where some of Iran’s foremost wrestlers trained. He grew up immersed in the sport.Vaziri became a talented wrestler, and his prominence helped him secure a job as a bodyguard for the family of the shah of Iran. But after the Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler Gholamreza Takhti died under mysterious circumstances in 1968, perhaps for displeasing the shah, Vaziri left Iran for the United States and settled in Minneapolis.He wrestled with an amateur club in Minnesota, winning an Amateur Athletic Union Greco-Roman wrestling tournament in 1971, and served as an assistant coach for the U.S. Olympic team in 1972 and 1976 before making the transition to full-time professional wrestling.Vaziri trained under Verne Gagne, the promoter of the American Wrestling Association. The idea for the Iron Sheik came from Mary Gagne, Verne’s wife, Mr. Greenberg said, though Vaziri experimented with other versions of the character over the years.In 1975 he married Caryl Peterson, who survives him. He is also survived by their daughters, Nicole and Tanya; a sister; and five grandchildren.During the 1980s the Sheik started using drugs and drinking heavily. In 1987 he and Hacksaw Jim Duggan — a babyface, as good-guy wrestlers are known — were arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike after police officers found cocaine and marijuana in their car.The Sheik appeared in a match as an ally of Sgt. Slaughter’s in 1991, and in 1997 he managed another wrestler, the Sultan. But his professional career mostly dried up as his drug use accelerated in the 1990s. He struggled with substance abuse for a long time, but according to an article Mr. Greenberg wrote for Bleacher Report in 2013, he had more recently been able to stay off drugs, except for an occasional beer.In 2003 his daughter Marissa, 27, was killed by her boyfriend, Charles Reynolds. Vaziri said that he contemplated attacking Mr. Reynolds with a razor blade in court, Mr. Greenberg wrote, but that his family kept him from doing it. Mr. Reynolds was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2016.In 2005 the Iron Sheik was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.Beginning in the early 2000s, the Sheik brought a less inhibited version of his character to Howard Stern’s radio show to rant about different wrestlers. He threatened to sodomize rivals like Hogan and used homophobic slurs to describe the Ultimate Warrior.In more recent years the Sheik’s diatribes appeared on social media. His managers often posted profanity-laced messages in all capital letters on a Twitter account that has nearly 650,000 followers. A recent one just said “HOGAN,” preceded by an expletive.But, the Sheik allowed in 2014, things were more civil when he met Hogan outside the ring.“Nobody talk bad about the past,” he said. “I get along with him.”Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

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      in Music

      George Winston, Pianist With a Soothing ‘New Age’ Sound, Dies at 74

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      His top-selling records for the Windham Hill label helped define a genre that took off in the 1970s, but his interests also included Hawaiian guitar and the Doors.George Winston, who during decades when pop and rock dominated the musical landscape became a best-selling musician by playing soothing piano instrumentals in a style that was often described as new age but that he liked to call “rural folk piano,” died on Sunday in Williamsport, Pa. He was 74.His publicist, Jesse Cutler, said the cause was cancer. Mr. Winston, who lived in the Bay Area, had dealt with several cancers for years while continuing to record and perform; he credited a 2013 bone marrow transplant with extending his life. He was staying in Williamsport near where his tour manager lives, Mr. Cutler said.Mr. Winston released his first album, “Ballads and Blues,” in 1972, but it was “Autumn,” released in 1980 on the fledgling Windham Hill label, based in Palo Alto, Calif., that propelled his career. It consisted of seven solo piano compositions that were, like most of his music, inspired by nature. They bore simple titles — “Sea,” “Moon,” “Woods” — and hit a sweet spot for many listeners. Sales soared into the hundreds of thousands.“By attuning his emotions to the serenity, order and power of nature rather than to the violently frenetic tones of our contemporary cityscape,” Lee Underwood wrote in a review in DownBeat, “Winston provides us with a perfect aural and psychological antidote to the urban madness.”Mr. Winston continued the calendar theme with two 1982 albums, “December” and “Winter Into Spring,” and again with a 1991 release, “Summer.” His 1994 record, “Forest,” won a Grammy Award for best new age album — a category that was relatively new at the time — and he was nominated four other times.The calendar theme that Mr. Winston established with the album “Autumn” in 1980 was continued in 1982 with “December” and “Winter Into Spring.”Those nominations were evidence of the range of his musical interests. Two — for “Plains” (1999) and “Montana: A Love Story” (2004) — were for best new age album, but he was also nominated for best recording for children for “The Velveteen Rabbit” (1984; Meryl Streep provided the narration) and for best pop instrumental album for “Night Divides the Day: The Music of the Doors” (2002).Mr. Winston recorded two albums of the music of Vince Guaraldi, the jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated “Peanuts” television specials. In 2012, he released “George Winston: Harmonica Solos,” and in 1983 he created his own label, Dancing Cat Records, to record practitioners of Hawaiian slack-key guitar, a genre he particularly admired.He never cared much for efforts by critics and others to pigeonhole his music or his musical interests.“I think putting a label on music is the most useless endeavor,” he told United Press International in 1984, “except for putting a name on religion.”George Otis Winston III was born on Feb. 11, 1949, in Hart, Mich., near Lake Michigan, to George and Mary (Bohannon) Winston. His father was a geologist, and his mother was an executive secretary.He grew up in Mississippi, Florida and Montana. He said that his years in Montana were instrumental in instilling the profound appreciation of nature and the changing seasons that later inspired his music. Even after he left the state to live in other places, including on the West Coast, he would return occasionally to be re-energized.“I am very grateful for having spent a lot of time growing up in this beautiful state,” he wrote in “Montana Song,” a 1989 essay posted on his website, “and I can say that the modest, workable level I have managed to get to, both musically and spiritually, would not have been possible without the inspirations and feelings I get from Montana now, and from my memories of growing up there.”Mr. Winston took piano lessons as a child but didn’t stick with it. Hearing the Doors’ debut album in 1967 reawakened his musical interest.“When I heard the first song on Side One, ‘Break On Through (to the Other Side),’ to me it was the greatest piece of music I’d ever heard,” he said in a 2004 interview.The playing of the Doors’ organist, Ray Manzarek, inspired him to take up the organ, which he played alongside fellow students at Stetson University in Florida in a group called the Tapioca Ballroom Band. But in 1971 he became enthralled by recordings of Fats Waller from the 1920s and ’30s and decided that piano was his future.He was mostly self-taught, although he studied for a time with James Casale, a jazz pianist in Miami.“He got me straight on chords, music theory, the basics,” Mr. Winston told The Charleston Daily Mail of West Virginia in 2005.Mr. Winston in 2004. Critics sometimes found his playing unsophisticated or repetitive, but he sold millions of albums and drew enthusiastic audiences wherever he played. Reed Saxon/Associated PressMr. Winston, who is survived by a sister, said he was also influenced by the music of two New Orleans pianists, Professor Longhair and James Booker. All of his influences merged into the style he called rural folk piano, a term he came up with to encompass music that, as he said on his website, “is melodic and not complicated in its approach, like folk guitar picking and folk songs, and has a rural sensibility.”Critics sometimes found his piano work to be unsophisticated or repetitive, but he sold millions of albums and drew enthusiastic audiences wherever he played. His concerts generally included a charitable component, benefiting food banks or other causes.Mr. Winston knew his music wasn’t for everyone, and he was self-deprecating about that.“One person’s punk rock is another person’s singing ‘Om’ or playing harp,” he told The Santa Cruz Sentinel of California in 1982. “It’s all valid — everybody’s got their own path. I wouldn’t want to sit around and listen to me all day.”Jay Gabler, writing on the website Your Classical in 2013, summed up Mr. Winston’s appeal and skill.“Love him or hate him,” he wrote, “George Winston is the kind of artist who demonstrates what fertile ground there is to be trod in the vast open spaces among musical genres.” More

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      in Theater

      John Beasley, Late-Blooming Actor Known for Playing Sages, Dies at 79

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      A former railroad clerk, he didn’t became a full-time actor until his 40s, but he made up for lost time in films like “Rudy” and TV shows like “Everwood.”John Beasley, who left his job as a railroad clerk in his mid-40s to pursue acting full time, bringing an understated power to films like the inspirational 1993 football movie “Rudy” and television series like the WB drama “Everwood” and the TV Land comedy “The Soul Man,” died on May 30 in Omaha. He was 79.His son Michael said his death came after he was admitted to a hospital for liver tests, but he did not specify a cause.Mr. Beasley’s tenure at the Union Pacific Railroad marked just one stop on a long journey toward a Hollywood career. “I was a longshoreman,” he said in a 2002 interview with The Associated Press. “I even worked one day as a bill collector and knew that wasn’t for me. All I wanted to do was be an actor.”His perseverance paid off. Mr. Beasley became an in-demand character actor in the 1990s and went on to appear in nearly 70 movies and television shows, often playing steady, dignified men of integrity.He first drew notice for his work with Oprah Winfrey in four episodes of “Brewster Place,” a short-lived spinoff of the 1989 television movie “The Women of Brewster Place,” based on a novel by Gloria Naylor about the intertwined lives of Black women living in tenements on a dead-end street.He also earned plaudits for his work in “The Apostle,” a 1997 film starring Robert Duvall (who also wrote and directed) as Sonny, a fiery Pentecostal preacher who flees trouble with the law to start over in Louisiana. “John Beasley is especially good as the retired Black preacher who is suspicious of Sonny at first,” Janet Maslin wrote in a review for The New York Times. “‘I tell you what,’ he says, ‘I’m going to keep my eye on you. And the Lord keep his eye on both of us. And we all three keep an eye out for the Devil.’”His many other film credits included the 1992 family hockey comedy “The Mighty Ducks,” starring Emilio Estevez; the 1999 John Travolta drama “The General’s Daughter”; the 2002 Ben Affleck terrorism thriller “The Sum of All Fears”; and the 2014 gore-fest “The Purge: Anarchy.”He is perhaps best remembered for his role as a kindly school-bus driver on “Everwood,” which starred Treat Williams as a New York neurosurgeon who starts a new life in the mountains of Colorado after his wife dies in a car accident. Mr. Beasley was in every episode from the show’s debut in 2002 until it ended in 2006.Starting in 2012, Mr. Beasley also turned heads for five seasons on “The Soul Man” as the father of the R&B star turned preacher played by Cedric the Entertainer.Last fall, Mr. Beasley scaled a personal peak as a stage actor with a prominent role as the older incarnation of Noah, the love-struck male protagonist, in a musical adaptation of the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel “The Notebook,” and the 2004 film based on it, at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He died before the production could make its anticipated move to Broadway.John Beasley was born on June 26, 1943, in Omaha, the oldest of five sons of John Wilfred Beasley, who owned an electrical supply business, and Grace (Triplett) Beasley.He was active in theater in high school, and after graduating he briefly studied the subject at the University of Nebraska Omaha before dropping out to join the Army.After being discharged, he married Judy Garner. She survives him. In addition to his son Michael, Mr. Beasley is also survived by another son, Tyrone; his brothers Gary, Steven and Leon; and six grandchildren, including the basketball player Malik Beasley.By 1968, he had became active in the civil rights movement, and he ended up moving his family to Philadelphia because of threats he faced after participating in protests of policing practices in Omaha’s Black community.After returning with his family to Omaha in the early 1970s, he kept his acting dreams alive by appearing in industrial films and stage productions, honing his talent locally before being cast in regional theater roles in Minneapolis, Chicago and Atlanta. Through it all, however, he stayed focused on his home life — and on Omaha.“We were going through some ups and downs early in our relationship, my wife and I,” Mr. Beasley said in an interview last year with American Theatre magazine. “There were things to work through — and we did. I felt it would be better for me to stay here with my wife and family. It turned out to be the best decision I made.” More

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      Pat Cooper, Comedian of Outrage, Is Dead at 93

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      He built his act on making fun of his Italian American heritage. He later publicly insulted stars he had worked with, including Frank Sinatra and Howard Stern.Pat Cooper, the stand-up comic who made outrage his act, progressing from mocking Italian American families like his own to publicly insulting celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Howard Stern, died on Tuesday night at his home in Las Vegas. He was 93.The death was announced in a statement by his wife, Emily Conner.For more than 50 years, Mr. Cooper, clad in a tuxedo and Clark Kent spectacles, ranted comedically about his background, his family, the people who he felt had wronged him and just about anything else that bothered him.He developed the act, laced with sound effects, in small clubs in Baltimore and New York in the 1950s, and it proved a novelty at the time, when there were far more Jewish than Italian American comedians making jokes about their families and their culture.He broke through with an appearance on “The Jackie Gleason Show” in 1963, then became a regular opening act for entertainers like Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr. at clubs and casinos, including the Copacabana in Manhattan and the Sands in Las Vegas. He appeared on television shows hosted by Merv Griffin, Dean Martin and Mike Douglas, and released several albums, most memorably “Spaghetti Sauce and Other Delights” (1966).The title of that album was a parody of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” (1965), whose cover depicted a woman apparently clothed only in whipped cream. Mr. Cooper’s cover depicted him slathered in marinara sauce, apparently naked but for a mound of spaghetti.“I got a genuine Italian mother — four feet eleven,” Mr. Cooper said during a typical routine, included on his album “Our Hero” (1965). “She has a bun over here, knitting needle over here, gold tooth over here, mole over here.”“She says, ‘Put garlic around your neck, it keeps away the evil spirits,’” he continued. “I ain’t got no friends, what spirits?”Mr. Cooper’s 1966 album cover was a spoof of one put out by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass the year before.J.P. Roth CollectionAudiences laughed at the Italian stereotypes, but an Italian American anti-defamation group did not get the joke and threatened to sue him. (No suit was ever filed.)Mr. Cooper’s act had dire consequences in his personal life. He became estranged from his parents and siblings, then from his first wife, Dolores Nola, and his children. He said they could not stand his success.“The only way I can beat them, I made fun of them,” Mr. Cooper said in an interview for this obituary in 2014.Later in his career he let the world know when he thought that stars had wronged him. In “How Dare You Say How Dare Me!” (2011), a memoir he wrote with Rich Herschlag and Steve Garrin, he accused Paul Anka of never saying hello when they did more than 50 shows together and then firing him for bringing it up. He claimed that an inebriated Johnny Carson once urinated on his foot in a men’s room, and that after loudly objecting with an expletive, he was not invited back on Carson’s “Tonight Show.”Another time, opening onstage for Sinatra, Sinatra asked him to remove a joke from his set. As Mr. Cooper told The Daily News of New York in 1997, he replied, “Hey, Frank, do I tell you what songs to sing?” Sinatra fired him.During an interview with the talk show host Tom Snyder on NBC in 1981, Mr. Cooper castigated Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett and Lola Falana, saying they did not treat their opening acts respectfully. When Mr. Snyder asked whether Mr. Cooper might be jealous, he denied it. “I want to stop the nonsense of some of the stars in my business who think they own a Pat Cooper,” he said.“We’re comics,” he added. “We’re not dogs.”His agent called him afterward and told him that he was finished in show business. But Mr. Cooper disagreed, and the episode actually raised his profile.“Everybody thought I lost my career — I raised my price!” he said in the 2014 interview. “In those days that was a terrible thing to say, what I did. Now it’s a reality show!”Howard Stern, drawn to Mr. Cooper’s vitriol, invited him on his radio show in the mid-1980s. But perhaps predictably they had a falling-out. Mr. Stern put Mr. Cooper’s estranged son, Michael, and his former wife on the air, and Mr. Cooper refused to interact with them. Then Mr. Cooper began berating Mr. Stern. Mr. Stern stopped having him on the show.Mr. Cooper continued performing at clubs and casinos and at Friars Club roasts until he retired in 2012. And he continued to insist that the industry had treated him poorly. “They don’t want me because I say what’s on my mind,” he said, “and they punish it.”Mr. Cooper in Las Vegas, where he made his home, in 2005 at a screening of “The Aristocrats,” a popular documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke. He also appeared with Robert De Niro as a mobster in the hit comedy “Analyze This” and its sequel, “Analyze That.” Bryan Haraway/Getty ImagesPasquale Vito Caputo was born on July 31, 1929, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and raised in the Midwood and Red Hook sections of the borough. His father, Michele, was a bricklayer, and his mother, Louise (Gargiulo) Caputo, was a homemaker. He did not have a happy childhood.“I think I broke a record in my neighborhood — I think I must have run away 14 times,” he said. “People don’t run away from good homes.”He tried to escape, seeking to join the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy, but he was rejected from each branch because of “hammerhead toes,” he wrote in his memoir. He was drafted into the Army in 1952 and stationed at Fort Jackson, S.C., but he was soon discharged, because of his disruptive behavior, according to Mr. Cooper.He then returned to New York, where he married Ms. Nola and had two children with her. He also began developing his act while supporting himself by driving a cab. “I was a stand-up comic who happened to be sitting down at the time,” he said.Mr. Cooper Americanized his name while performing in the Catskills in the early 1960s, a decision that further infuriated his family. The Oxford English Dictionary says that he coined the term “Bada-bing,” heard during a routine titled “An Italian Wedding” on the “Our Hero” album. (Mr. Cooper himself did not claim authorship.)He went on to appear alongside Robert De Niro as a mobster in the hit comedy “Analyze This” (1999) and its sequel, “Analyze That” (2002), which also starred Billy Crystal; and alongside many other comedians in “The Aristocrats” (2005), the acclaimed documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke.Mr. Cooper’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1961. He almost never saw his children, Michael and Louise Caputo, again. Michael Caputo wrote a book about their poor relationship and appeared on the talk show “Geraldo” in 1990 to discuss what he saw as his father’s neglect.Mr. Cooper called in to “Geraldo” to argue that he was not at fault, and to castigate his son.“Let me tell you something, I don’t have to be your father, you’re not that thrilling,” Mr. Cooper said, adding, “And I don’t want to be your father.”The show’s host, Geraldo Rivera, interrupted him, saying: “Pat, enough, enough. You’re upsetting me even.”Mr. Cooper’s second wife, the singer Patti Del Prince, died of cancer in 2005. He married Ms. Conner in 2018. In addition to her, he is survived by his children from his first marriage as well as a daughter from his second marriage, Patti Jo Weidenfeld; three sisters, Grace Ferrara, Carol Caputo and Marie Caputo Mangano; and five grandchildren.Mr. Cooper said his son Michael had tried to reconcile with him over the years. He remained uninterested.“He said, ‘Well, now I want’ — what’s it? — ‘closure,’” Mr. Cooper said. “I said, ‘Well, then get a closet.’” More