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      in Music

      Archie Roach, Who Lived and Sang the Aboriginal Blues, Dies at 66

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      His song “Took the Children Away,” inspired by his childhood, shook Australians into confronting a grim era when their government tore apart Aboriginal families.One day in 1970, Archie Cox’s high school English class in Melbourne, Australia, was interrupted by a voice from the intercom: “Could Archibald William Roach come to the office?”An uncanny feeling took hold of 14-year-old Archie: This name, which he had no recollection of, he somehow knew to be his own.A letter to Archibald William Roach awaited him. It announced that Nellie Austin, a name he had never heard, was his mother, and that she had just died. His father and namesake was dead, too, the letter said. It was signed by Myrtle Evans, who identified herself as his sister.Within a year, Archie had dropped out of school, abandoned Dulcie and Alex Cox — who, he realized, were only his foster parents — and embarked on a quest to discover who he really was.He spent years without a home. He was imprisoned on burglary charges twice. He tried to kill himself. All the while, he kept bumping into revelations about his family and why he had been taken away from them.When he left home, there was not a name for what Archie was. But today people like him are considered part of the Stolen Generations — Indigenous Australians seized from their families as children to be assimilated into white society.This history is known thanks in no small part to Mr. Roach, who turned his wayward life into the material for a career as one of Australia’s best-loved folk singers, and who in doing so dramatized the plight of his people.He died on July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, a city in southeastern Australia, his sons Amos and Eban announced on his website. He was 66.The announcement did not cite the cause, but Mr. Roach had struggled with lung cancer and emphysema, requiring him to perform while breathing through a nasal cannula.His rise to prominence began in the late 1980s and early ’90s, on the strength in particular to one autobiographical song: “Took the Children Away.” He performed it at Melbourne Concert Hall when he opened for the popular Australian rock singer Paul Kelly.“There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed,” Mr. Kelly recalled to The Guardian for a 2020 article about the song’s impact. “Then this wave of applause grew and grew. I’d never heard anything like it.”Mr. Kelly was a producer of Mr. Roach’s first album, “Charcoal Lane,” released in 1990. When the two toured together, Aboriginal audience members approached Mr. Roach, saying they, too, had been taken from their families.“He started to realize it was a much broader story,” Mr. Kelly said.The song became a national hit. “When he sings ‘Took the Children Away,’ or any of the tracks on ‘Charcoal Lane,’ it cuts through like great blues should,” Rolling Stone Australia wrote in 1990. “The experience becomes universal.”In a 2020 article commemorating the 30th anniversary of “Charcoal Lane,” Rolling Stone Australia credited “Took the Children Away” with helping to inspire a landmark 1997 government report estimating that as many as one in three Indigenous children were seized from their families between 1910 and 1970.Fourteen more albums followed “Charcoal Lane,” ranging in style from blues to gospel, while Mr. Roach’s wife, Ruby Hunter, gained renown of her own as a musical partner of Mr. Roach’s, and as a songwriter in her own right.The Aboriginal singer and songwriter Emma Donovan told The Guardian that when she was growing up, “we’d see Archie and Ruby on TV.”“They were our royalty, our king and queen,” she said.Archibald William Roach was born in the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve, in southwestern Australia, on Jan. 8, 1956. When he was older, he recovered a memory of a tall man with long limbs and curly hair reaching toward him while police officers were grabbing him. That man, he realized, was Archibald, his father.He was raised largely by the Coxes. The implications of the fact that he was Black and that the Coxes were white dawned on Archie only gradually.His foster father, who was Scottish, longed for his homeland, and at night tears came to his eyes as he sang ballads around the family’s organ. “For years I thought I missed Scotland,” Mr. Roach wrote in “Tell Me Why,” his 2019 memoir. “I took great joy in sharing those songs with Dad Alex, because I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to understand the power that the songs had over him.”Mr. Cox gave Archie his first guitar. After Archie left home at 15, he never saw his foster parents again.He took a circuitous path to the return address on the letter he had received, in Sydney; by the time he arrived, his sister had left, without informing her neighbors of her next destination.A homeless one-armed Aboriginal man named Albert took care of Archie, showing him where in Sydney to sleep free of charge and teaching him how to panhandle. Archie began drinking with his new Aboriginal friends from morning till night.“I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry,” he wrote in his memoir. “We were part of an obliterated culture.”He built a life from openness to chance and the coincidences that ensued. Archie found his family by running into one of his sisters at a bar in Sydney. On a coin flip, he decided to visit the South Australia city of Adelaide, where he met Ms. Hunter, who would become the love of his life. She, too, was an Aborigine who had been taken from her parents.Chance also granted Mr. Roach knowledge about his past. In 2013, he stumbled across the first photographs he had ever seen of his father as a boy, and of his grandmother.He learned that there were dangers in trying to recover tradition. He and his peers sought approval from elders before going on dates with other Aboriginal people, to ensure that they were not related. Taking up the old profession of his father and brother, Mr. Roach became an itinerant boxer. He realized in the middle of one bout that he was fighting his own first cousin.At other times he earned a living by picking grapes, pushing sheep up kill runs at an abattoir and doing metalwork at a foundry. He often lost jobs in a blur of drunkenness. The binges induced seizures. During one bender, overcome with despair at his prospects as a father and husband, he tried hanging himself with a belt. After more than a decade of patience, Ms. Hunter left him.Mr. Roach was jolted into sobriety. He found work as a health counselor at a rehab center in Melbourne. He rejoined Ms. Hunter and their two sons, and he threw himself into writing songs.“Like my daddy before me/I set ’em up and knock ’em down/Like my brother before me/I’m weaving in your town,” he wrote in “Rally Round the Drum,” a song from the early 1990s about his boxing days.“Have you got two bob?/Can you gimme a job?,” he wrote in the 1997 song “Beggar Man.”“At 15 I left my foster home/Looking for the people I call my own/But all I found was pain and strife/And nothing else but an empty life,” he wrote in “Open Up Your Eyes,” which was not released until 2019.Mr. Roach at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, in 2018. His songs helped uncover the history of the Indigenous Australians known as the Stolen Generations.Dita Alangkara/Associated PressComplete information about his survivors was not available, but in addition to his sons, Mr. Roach and Ms. Hunter unofficially adopted 15 to 20 children. The impetus in some cases was simply encountering a young person on the street looking “a little worse for wear,” he told the Australian newspaper The Age in 2002.Ms. Hunter died suddenly in 2010 at the family home in Gunditjmara country, in southeast Australia, the ancestral land of Mr. Roach’s mother.As “Took the Children Away” grew in fame, even to the point of overshadowing Mr. Roach’s other work, he was often asked whether he got sick of singing it.“I say, ‘Never,’” he told ABC News Australia in 2019. “It’s a healing for me. Each time I sing it, you let some of it go.” More

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      in Television

      Richard Roat, Seen on ‘Cheers,’ ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 89

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      A familiar TV face for years, he appeared on many of the most popular prime-time shows of recent decades.Richard Roat, a versatile character actor whose half-century-long career was punctuated by notable guest appearances on three of the most popular sitcoms of recent decades, “Cheers,” “Friends” and “Seinfeld,” died on Aug. 5 in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 89.Kathy (Arntzen) Roat, his wife and only immediate survivor, said the cause was a heart attack. She said Mr. Roat, who lived in Glendale, died in a condo while on vacation.On a 1985 episode of “Cheers,” as the imperious boss of the barstool habitué Norm Peterson (George Wendt), he threatened to fire Norm if he didn’t accept a promotion (and raise) to become the company’s “corporate killer” — the person who terminates people.“Studies have shown that it’s particularly humiliating when you’re fired by someone who is clearly and markedly superior to yourself,” Mr. Roat’s character tells Norm coldly. “That wouldn’t be the case with you, Norman. You’re just an ordinary Joe. We checked out your home life. You have absolutely nothing that anyone could possibly envy or resent.”In 1996, on “Seinfeld,” Mr. Roat was a dermatologist who labeled Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) a “difficult” patient when she sought treatment for a rash. His character turned from friendly to stern when he checked her patient history.“Well, that doesn’t look serious,” he says, barely examining her. “You’ll be fine.” He then adds notes to her history when she complains that the rash is “really itchy.”And on “Friends,” in 2000, he was a professor at the college where Ross (David Schwimmer) taught. At one point he tells Ross that he was violating campus rules by dating a student.“They’re going to fire you,” he says.“Really, it’s not just frowned upon?” Ross asks.Mr. Roat worked primarily in television, starting in 1962 with two very different series about police officers: the sitcom “Car 54, Where Are You?” and the drama “Naked City.” He was a regular on the daytime soap opera “The Doctors” from 1963 to 1964, and over the next 45 years was seen on comedies like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Murphy Brown” and “Ellen” and dramas like “The Fugitive,” “Columbo,” “Matlock” and “Dynasty.”In a 1986 episode of “The Golden Girls,” as the boyfriend of Rose (Betty White), he dies in bed after they sleep together.He also worked regularly in regional theater. He starred with Jo Anne Worley in Ken Ludwig’s theatrical farce “Moon Over Buffalo” at the Pasadena Playhouse, and in William Luce’s one-man show “Barrymore,” about the actor John Barrymore, at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont. He played the title role, based on Lyndon B. Johnson, in Barbara Garson’s political satire “Macbird!” at the Players’ Ring Gallery in Los Angeles, and a married character in Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band,” about a group of gay men, at what is now the Montalbán Theater, also in Los Angeles.In 1962 he played Mark Antony in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Julius Caesar.” Mr. Roat, seated, with Jay Leno and Ellen Reagan in the 1978 television movie “Almost Heaven.”G Stein/ABC via Getty Images
      Richard Donald Roat Jr. was born on July 3, 1933, in Hartford, Conn. His father was a glazier, and his mother, Lois (Bowan) Roat, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Trinity College in Hartford in 1956, Mr. Roat acted with the Mark Twain Masquers and other local theatrical groups. He also earned a living by driving a bakery truck and holding other odd jobs.In 1961 he made his Broadway debut as a replacement for Michael Ebert in “The Wall,” a play about Jews in occupied Poland during World War II. Mr. Roat played Dr. Jerry Chandler during 172 episodes of “The Doctors” and told The Portland Press Herald that he felt grateful for the opportunity to act regularly.“There’s room for less than one percent of the new actors in nighttime television,” he said. “Unless you’re a ‘regular’ and get a running assignment for a season-long series, your chances in nighttime television are practically nil.”His last television role was in the drama “24” in 2009.Mr. Roat had another long-running role, which he pursued as an actor and continued after he retired that year: as a tax preparer for people in the entertainment business. During a slow period in his acting career in the late 1960s, he took a job in an accountant’s office. On April 15 of that first year, the accountant had a nervous breakdown, Kathy Roat said, and Mr. Roat “took some tax forms and decided to become a tax preparer.” More

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      in Movies

      Amy Stechler, Documentarian Who Helped Define a Style, Dies at 67

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      She worked on early projects at Florentine Films, where Ken Burns, her husband for a time, would find fame with “The Civil War.”Amy Stechler, who was instrumental in the early years of Florentine Films, the company behind the Ken Burns series “The Civil War” and numerous other acclaimed documentaries, and who went on to make an Emmy-nominated documentary of her own on the artist Frida Kahlo, died on Aug. 26 at her home in Walpole, N.H. She was 67.Her daughters, Sarah and Lilly Burns, said the death was probably related to her declining health from primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which had been diagnosed in 2005.Ms. Stechler, who was married to Mr. Burns from 1982 to 1993, was credited as the writer and a producer on “Brooklyn Bridge,” the 1981 documentary that was Mr. Burns’s first major directing credit and the first major project of Florentine Films. The company had been formed in 1976 by Mr. Burns and two college friends, Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires, with Ms. Stechler joining soon after.The four were recent graduates of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where, Mr. Burns said in a phone interview, two professors in particular, Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes, had influenced their thinking about storytelling and the power of still images. They plunged right into the “Brooklyn Bridge” project, learning by doing.“Everybody told us we couldn’t do it,” Mr. Burns said. “‘Why aren’t you apprenticing?’”Mr. Squires said that Ms. Stechler was a key part of that learning process.“It’s really important to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,” he said. “We were all just sort of making it up as we went along.”“Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.Mr. Burns had been inspired to tell the story of the Brooklyn Bridge by the 1972 book “The Great Bridge,” by the historian David McCullough, who provided narration for the documentary. Mr. Burns recalled a moment during a recording sessions when Mr. McCullough, who died on Aug. 7, told him and Ms. Stechler that the writing needed work, hauled them aside and gave them an impromptu three-hour tutorial.“We came back in with a much improved script,” Mr. Burns said. “It was the single greatest three hours of learning we’d ever had in our lives.”The project took several years. Mr. Burns said that in 1979 he and Ms. Stechler were living together in the Chelsea section of Manhattan when a rent increase — to $325 a month from $275 — drove them out of the city and to Walpole, N.H., and a house where Mr. Burns still lives.“Forty-three years ago last week,” he said on Wednesday, “we packed up a green van and moved up here.”They and the rest of the team finished editing the documentary there. The results were a breath of fresh air for the somewhat staid documentary genre. “Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.“‘Brooklyn Bridge’ is more than just a short course in one colorful phase of American history,” Kenneth R. Clark wrote in a review for United Press International in 1982. “It is a thing of grace and beauty — one of television’s few truly golden hours.”The film put Florentine and especially Mr. Burns on the map. In 1984 he and Ms. Stechler jointly directed “The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God,” another well-received documentary, on which Ms. Stechler was also a writer and producer. She was also one of the writers of “The Statue of Liberty” (1985), directed by Mr. Burns, which was nominated for an Oscar.She and Mr. Burns had married in 1982 and by 1986 had two daughters. Ms. Stechler stepped away from filmmaking for some two decades and took up painting, although she had consulting credits on “The Civil War,” Mr. Burns’s Emmy Award-winning 1990 mini-series, which transformed the documentary landscape.Ms. Stechler returned to filmmaking in 2005 long enough to write and direct “The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, about the Mexican painter known for her colorful artwork and eventful life. Robert Koehler, reviewing it in Variety, called it “uncommonly smooth, fluid and richly textured.”Mr. Squires was her cinematographer on that project. He said the choice of subject did not surprise him.“I really feel that she saw Frida as a kindred spirit,” he said, “an uncompromising woman who was trying to tell her truth as she saw it.”Ms. Stechler in an undated photo. “It’s really important,” a colleague at Florentine Films said, “to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,”Florentine FilmsAmy Georgeanne Stechler was born on June 23, 1955, in New Haven, Conn. Her father, Gerald, was a psychologist, and her mother, Ellen (Bodner) Stechler, was a social worker.She grew up in Lexington, Mass. Mr. Squires said that as an undergraduate at Hampshire College she was outraged by the white response to efforts to desegregate Boston schools in the mid-1970s and made a student film about it, a project for which he was part of her crew. She was a year or two behind Mr. Burns in school, graduating in 1977, and was part of the crew for his senior film project.Mr. Squires said that although the young filmmakers’ education at Hampshire had grounded them in ideas and theories, it was not a traditional film curriculum and was short on practical matters. Once the group was in the real world trying to get Florentine going, it was often Ms. Stechler who figured out the nuts and bolts.“She was always innovating, always saying, ‘OK, we have a problem, how do we fix this?’” he said, adding, “It’s far harder to figure out how to do something than how to make minor improvements along the way.”He saw a through line connecting the varied subjects of the films she worked on — Kahlo, the Shakers, the visionaries behind the Brooklyn Bridge — and including her as well.“They were all people who had the courage of their convictions,” Mr. Squires said.Ms. Stechler’s second marriage, to Rod Thibeault, also ended in divorce. In addition to her daughters, she is survived by her partner, Bill Patterson; a sister, Nancy Stechler Gawle; and five grandchildren.Ms. Stechler split her time between Brooklyn and Walpole, where she lived not far from Mr. Burns. He said she was “as fiercely her own person as anybody I’ve ever met, but also kind of graceful — there was a kind of grace in who she was.”He summed up her influence on his career simply.“I don’t think you’d have ever heard of me had she not been there,” he said. More

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      in Theater

      Robert LuPone, Actor Who Became a Behind-the-Scenes Force, Dies at 76

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      After playing a critical Broadway role in “A Chorus Line,” he helped start the vibrant Off Broadway MCC Theater. TV watchers knew him from “The Sopranos” and “Law and Order.”Robert LuPone, an actor and dancer who originated the role of the driven director-choreographer in the musical “A Chorus Line” on Broadway and later helped run a vibrant Off Broadway theater company known for thought-provoking new works, died on Saturday in Albany, N.Y. He was 76.His wife, Virginia (Robinson) LuPone, confirmed the death, at a hospice near his home in Athens, N.Y. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. LuPone was familiar to television audiences from his roles on “The Sopranos” and the “Law & Order” franchise. But his first love, like that of his sister, Patti LuPone, was the theater.By 1975, when Mr. LuPone auditioned for “A Chorus Line,” he had been dancing since childhood and had been in a few Broadway shows. Initially cast as Al, one of the dancers vying for a spot in the chorus line of a Broadway musical, Mr. LuPone persuaded Michael Bennett, who conceived and directed the show, that he could play the director, Zach, after Barry Bostwick, who had been cast in the part, left the show during the workshop phase.“Michael has trouble directing actors,” Mr. LuPone said in an interview on the website of the Muny, the musical theater in St. Louis, when it staged “A Chorus Line” in 2017. “No, let me put it this way: Michael has trouble directing egos. He has a tremendous ego. And I have a tremendous ego. Barry Bostwick obviously has a bigger ego than I do.”At the Public Theater, and then on Broadway, “A Chorus Line” was an enormous hit. When it opened at the Shubert Theater — where it would run for 15 years — Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times that as Zach, Mr. LuPone “retires to a godlike perch at the rear of the auditorium and wheedles out of the brassy and the giggly, the pleading and the nonchalant, snippets of their pasts.”The show was nominated for 12 Tony Awards — Mr. LuPone received a nomination for best featured actor in a musical — and won nine, including best musical. That year, his sister was nominated for best featured actress in a musical, for “The Robber Bridegroom.”“A Chorus Line” proved pivotal for Mr. LuPone: His future was no longer in dancing.Ms. LuPone said that her brother had been an “extraordinary dancer,” and that his decision to give up dancing “haunts me.” In an email, she wrote, “I think he couldn’t take the dictatorial environment that choreographers at that time created.”Mr. LuPone said that dancing in musicals had become a “hollow experience.” In an oral history interview in 2018 with Primary Stages, an Off Broadway theater company, he said, “I wasn’t really able to speak, and the ideas were, for me, superficial.”That realization led him to study at the Actors Studio and perform with the Circle Repertory Company. He began teaching acting at New York University in 1981 and showed a very direct demeanor that his students at first found surprising.“Who was this guy from musical theater talking to us actors?” Bernie Telsey, one of those students, said in a phone interview. “He’d never taught before. But it became the best class ever.” Some students continued to study with him after they graduated.In 1986 Mr. LuPone and Mr. Telsey formed the Manhattan Class Company, which later became MCC Theater. Will Cantler soon joined them as associate artistic director and was named an artistic director in 2011.Over nearly 40 years, the company has sought to produce challenging, original plays and musicals, with a view to what Mr. LuPone called a “third act” — affecting audience members enough to keep them talking about the shows after they returned home.Three MCC productions transferred to Broadway and received Tony nominations for best play: “Frozen,” the story of the aftermath of a 10-year-old girl’s murder, which opened in 2004; “Reasons to Be Pretty” (2008), about people’s obsession with beauty; and “Hand to God” (2014), a dark comedy about a teenager and his profane, possibly demonic sock puppet. An Off Broadway MCC production of “Wit,” Margaret Edson’s play about a woman’s reflections on dying after she learns that she has ovarian cancer — which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Drama Desk Award for outstanding play in 1999 — also moved to Broadway.Mr. LuPone in the 1998 Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” He was also a familiar face on “The Sopranos” and “Law and Order.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRobert Francis LuPone was born on July 29, 1946, in Brooklyn and grew up in Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Orlando Joseph LuPone, was an elementary school principal in Northport. His mother, Angela (Patti) LuPone, a homemaker, encouraged Robert and Patti’s show business ambitions, driving them to classes. Robert and Patti danced together as children, winning third prize at a Jones Beach talent contest.“I still have the trophy,” Ms. LuPone said. “It was a tango.”Robert took tap lessons after school before enrolling in the Martha Graham School, where as a teenager he studied modern dance with Graham, José Limón and Antony Tudor. He attended Adelphi University, on Long Island, but, spurred by meeting a dancer better than he was who had gone to the Juilliard School, he transferred there. He majored in ballet and minored in modern dance and graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree.By then he had been in the ensemble of a 1966 production of “The Pajama Game” at the Westbury Music Fair (now the NYCB Theater at Westbury) on Long Island. He made his Broadway debut as a dancer in 1968, in “Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato,” and danced in three more Broadway shows before his agent sent him to audition for “A Chorus Line.”Mr. LuPone worked steadily as an actor in theater, in movies and on television. He played the Apostle Paul in the film version of “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973); was in six daytime soap operas (earning a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for his role on “All My Children”);was seen on series like “Gossip Girl,” “Ally McBeal” and “Billions”; and, between 1997 and 2001, was in Broadway productions of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” Sam Shepard’s “True West” and Herb Gardener’s “A Thousand Clowns.”In six episodes of “The Sopranos,” he played Bruce Cusamano, Tony Soprano’s neighbor and physician, who recommends that Tony see a psychiatrist.In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. LuPone is survived by his son, Orlando, and his twin brother, William.Mr. LuPone’s acting career was secondary to his work at MCC, where he not only developed, oversaw and produced four or five shows a year but also raised money for the theater’s permanent home, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, on West 52nd Street in Manhattan, which opened in 2019.“Bob was fearless,” Mr. Telsey said, adding that playwrights often found it hard to accept the candid notes that Mr. LuPone would write them during previews. “They’d be so stressed, but three days later realized that Bobby was right. He pulled no punches.” More

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      in Movies

      Charlbi Dean, Star of ‘Triangle of Sadness,’ Dies at 32

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      A South African-born actress and model, she had a breakout role in the satirical “Triangle of Sadness,” due in theaters in the fall.Charlbi Dean, an actress and model who plays a lead role in the film satire “Triangle of Sadness,” which won the top award at the Cannes Film Festival this year and will be released in the fall, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 32.The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a representative from her publicity agency. The cause was not given.“Triangle of Sadness,” an English-language satire of the ultrawealthy from the Swedish director Ruben Östlund, stars Ms. Dean and Harris Dickinson as models aboard a luxury cruise that goes awry. It took the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes and is scheduled to play at both the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival in September. The independent studio Neon is expected to release the film to theaters on Oct. 7.The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote that the film was a “blunt, ugly sendup of class politics” that “sharply divided critics.”In a promotional interview for the film, Ms. Dean welcomed such a polarized response.“Hopefully people will leave the theater wanting to talk about it and discuss it,” she said. “Those are my favorite films: the ones that get my mind going, piss me off a little, make me laugh and cry.”In a statement posted on Instagram, Mr. Östlund called Ms. Dean’s death “a shock and a tragedy.”“Charlbi had a care and sensitivity that lifted her colleagues and the entire film crew,” he wrote.Charlbi Dean Kriek was born on Feb. 5, 1990, in Cape Town, South Africa, to Johan Kriek and Joanne Muller. In 2008 and 2010, she appeared on the covers of the South African editions of GQ and Elle magazines.She appeared in her first feature film role in 2010, playing a popular boarding school student alongside Troye Sivan and John Cleese in the movie “Spud.” From 2018 to 2021 she portrayed Syonide — a villain with deadly marksmanship skills — in the CW Network superhero drama “Black Lightning.”She is survived by her parents; her brother, Alex Muller; and her fiancé, the South African actor and model Luke Volker. More

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      in Music

      Jaimie Branch, Trumpeter Who Crossed Genre Lines, Dies at 39

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      One of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, she forged a direct emotional, and even spiritual, connection with her listeners.Jaimie Branch, an innovative avant-garde trumpet player and composer whose punk-rock intensity and commitment to experimentation and to dissolving the distinctions between genres invigorated the music scenes of New York and Chicago, died on Aug. 22 at her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She was 39.Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released albums by her groups Fly or Die and Anteloper. No cause was given.Over the last decade, Ms. Branch emerged as one of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, coaxing a remarkable range of sounds from her horn. She used electronic effects and toy noisemakers (including a Fisher Price Happy Apple from the 1970s) to further extend her sonic spectrum. She would often play a complicated passage, step back and scream, and then plunge back into playing without missing a beat.“I mean every note that I play,” she told the online music journal Aquarium Drunkard in 2019. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. It’s like high risk, high reward.”Ms. Branch forged an emotional, even spiritual, connection with listeners. Her energy could barely be constrained by the stage, filling a room not just with the sound of her trumpet but also with the force of her presence.Offstage, she was just as magnetic. Known to friends as Breezy, she was a gregarious figure, as averse to formality and affectation as she was to capital letters (she preferred her name and song titles lowercase).Ms. Branch was conservatory-trained, but her stage attire was unconventional for jazz circles: an Adidas track suit, a kimono draped over a “Young Latin & Proud” T-shirt, a baggy Outkast “ATLiens” baseball jersey. Her head was always covered, whether by a hoodie, a jauntily askew baseball cap or a knit toque, and her forearms were festooned with colorful tattoos.“She was the quintessential example of ‘honest music,’” Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder and director of artists and repertoire, said in an interview. “Music that has the capacity to change people’s lives and change the world, which everyone needs now more than ever.”Ms. Branch composed most of the music with Fly or Die, a quartet whose other members were Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass and Lester St. Louis on cello (who replaced Tomeka Reid after the group’s first album, called simply “Fly or Die”). She favored improvisation for Anteloper, a dub-influenced duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, both of whom also doubled on synthesizers and other electronic gear.While she regularly performed concerts for cultural programmers like Roulette (where she was a 2020 resident artist) and Arts for Art, Ms. Branch was equally at home creating dissonant synthesizer squiggles on a noise-rock bill at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, or playing an impromptu jam session at the San Pedro Inn in Red Hook with her most recent trio, c’est trois, with the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Tcheser Holmes.In a 2017 article on women in jazz, the New York Times critic Giovanni Russonello described “Fly or Die” as one of “the most startling debut albums in jazz this year,” adding that “Ms. Branch uses extended technique and blustery abstraction to a dizzying effect.” In DownBeat magazine’s 2020 critics poll, Ms. Branch was voted “rising star” on trumpet.Ms. Branch in action with her group Fly or Die at the Winter Jazzfest in New York in 2018.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesOn the 2019 album “Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise,” she revealed her impressive singing voice on two songs, one of which, “prayer for amerikkka pt. 1 & 2,” recounts the story of a young Central American woman detained after crossing the Southern border. (The song was based on the actual case of an El Salvadoran teenager whom Ms. Branch’s mother had assisted.)Despite the power of her trumpet playing, Jaimie felt very vulnerable, her sister, Kate Branch said in an interview, and she felt even more so when singing, adding, “She really cared about the message.”Jaimie Rebecca Branch was born on June 17, 1983, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. Her father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer; her mother, Soledad (Barbour) Branch, known as Sally, is a psychotherapist and social worker. “Jaimie” is spelled the way it is, her sister said, because the girls’ Colombian maternal grandmother couldn’t understand why their mother would call her daughter Jaime, a boy’s name, “so my mom added another ‘i’ so my grandmother could properly pronounce it.”Jaimie started playing piano at age 3 and wrote her first song, “My Dreams End in the Sky,” at 6. A small orchestra at the family’s church in Long Island performed it, and Jaimie sang it and dedicated it to a retiring minister.When she was 9, the family moved to Kenilworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where she began playing trumpet in the school band. After playing extensively at New Trier High School in Winnetka (including a stint in a ska-punk group, the Indecisives), she moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied jazz performance.After graduation Ms. Branch moved to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the jazz scene. “You could hear her all-encompassing sound just by looking her straight in the eyes,” the trumpeter Rob Mazurek, a frequent Chicago collaborator, said in an email.She left Chicago in 2012 to attend graduate school at Towson University in Baltimore, but departed a few credits short of a master’s degree in jazz performance. She told The Chicago Reader in 2017 that she had begun using heroin in 2008, and she struggled with opioids for years, enrolling in multiple inpatient treatment programs, most recently on Long Island in 2015.Following her time in that program, Ms. Branch moved to Red Hook. She gigged constantly, whether as the leader of her own groups or as a guest in the ensembles of the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the vocalist Fay Victor.“She was a true collaborator, and that’s why she was so damn good at playing this music,” said the Brooklyn composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who began improvising with Ms. Branch soon after she arrived in Brooklyn. “She could listen, give and receive in equal measure with an unparalleled generosity. She had so many extremely close friends who also were collaborators, and because of that she wanted each individual to be really strong and strengthen the community as a whole.”In addition to her sister, Ms. Branch is survived by her mother and two half brothers, Clark and Russell. Her father died in 2017; the first Fly or Die album was dedicated to him.Ms. Branch had recently finished mixing Fly or Die’s third studio album. Ever seeking new sounds, she was also discussing potential projects like dub remixes of Anteloper and exploring her interest in the Chicago electronic dance music genre known as footwork.“A lot of her collaborators were jazz musicians,” said Piotr Orlov, a friend and supporter who wrote the liner notes for the 2021 album “Fly or Die Live,” “but ‘the music’ for her was much broader, always filled with rhythm for moving, improvisation for keeping it interesting or unexpected, and camaraderie. Which is why the connections she made between so-called jazz and contemporary classical, beats and electronic music, rappers and dancers, standards and the hard-core songbook, were completely organic, and always fascinating.”On Wednesday night, as news of Ms. Branch’s death spread, about 75 of her friends and fellow musicians gathered on Valentino Pier in Red Hook, a few blocks from her apartment. As “Fly or Die Live” played through a phone propped up against a small, tinny-sounding megaphone, some in the crowd tapped out beats on drums or on the concrete, others banged tambourines and sleigh bells, and the young saxophonist Zoh Amba played melancholic funereal blasts.From across the Red Hook Channel the distant sound of another trumpet could be heard, most likely from a mariachi band in a waterfront bar, joining the music in a phantom collaboration. More

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      Joey DeFrancesco, Reigning King of the Jazz Organ, Dies at 51

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      A prodigy whose playing had drawn raves since he was a teenager, he helped bring the Hammond B3 back into the jazz lineup.Joey DeFrancesco, who was widely credited with bringing the organ back into vogue in jazz circles in recent decades, has died. He was 51.His wife, Gloria, posted news of his death on Facebook on Friday. She did not say where or when he died or cite the cause.Mr. DeFrancesco had musicianship in his genes: His father, John DeFrancesco, has been playing jazz organ since the 1950s. He was dazzling listeners when he was a teenager.“DeFrancesco — whose infectious, imp-of-the-perverse expressions make him as much fun to watch as listen to — can stride, flatten fifths and string together quotes from Bird, Diz, Monk and Miles with the polished resourcefulness of the eight-year veteran that he is,” Gene Seymour of The Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 1986 after observing the Settlement Jazz Ensemble at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, where the young Mr. DeFrancesco was then a student.“And all the while you watch and listen,” Mr. Seymour added, “you find a little voice inside yourself chanting: ‘He’s 15 years old!’”Within two years Mr. DeFrancesco had toured with Miles Davis and opened for Bobby McFerrin and Grover Washington Jr. In 1989, at 17, he played at Duke University with well-known musicians like the trumpeter Clark Terry in a concert that announced the forthcoming Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which would open soon after.“As Mr. DeFrancesco played Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady,’ the elder musicians beamed and whispered encouragement,” Jonathan Probber wrote of that show in The New York Times. “The distinct impression was that Mr. DeFrancesco was an example of hopes on the way to realization.”Certainly he was on the way to a formidable career, one that included more than 30 recordings as a bandleader, numerous others as a sideman and countless concerts. Along the way he brought the organ back into fashion in jazz.The Hammond B3 organ became a favorite in jazz circles in the 1950s, with Jimmy Smith, who had numerous hit albums on the Blue Note label, leading the way. But in 1975 the Hammond company stopped making the instrument, and the trend of organ-based trios in jazz clubs faded.Mr. DeFrancesco was a multi-instrumentalist; he also played trumpet, saxophone, piano and synthesizer. But he built his career playing an old-school B3.“I love the synthesizers and play all that stuff, but you can’t beat the sound of the B3,” he told The Associated Press in 1991. “The instrument has a very warm tone. It’s got the contrasts. It just has all those emotions in it. It’s got little bits of every instrument in it. It’s like having a whole orchestra at your fingertips.”Mr. DeFrancesco’s first album, “All of Me,” was released in 1989, and dozens more followed, with his musical interests ranging far and wide. He recorded his own original music. A 2004 album was called “Joey DeFrancesco Plays Sinatra His Way.” His “Never Can Say Goodbye” in 2010 reimagined the music of Michael Jackson. And he collaborated on albums with Van Morrison, the guitarist Danny Gatton and others.The bassist Christian McBride had known Mr. DeFrancesco since they were students at the Settlement School.“Joey DeFrancesco was hands down the most creative and influential organist since Jimmy Smith,” he said in a statement. “In terms of taking the organ to the next level and making it popular again for a younger generation, no one did it like Joey.”Mr. Seymour, who decades ago wrote about the teenage Mr. DeFrancesco in Philadelphia and later became a critic at Newsday, remembered Mr. DeFrancesco in a Facebook post on Friday.“His meteoric rise to fame didn’t surprise me at all,” he wrote. “What did, over time, was how deeply and consummately he mastered the jazz organ tradition at all ends of the musical spectrum, from blues and funk to post-bop and avant incantations. He fulfilled the obligations of his calling by never standing still, never being complacent.”Mr. DeFrancesco in performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 2011.Erik Jacobs for The New York TimesMr. DeFrancesco was born on April 10, 1971, in Springfield, near Philadelphia. He didn’t wait long to pick his career path.“When I was 4, my father brought in this monstrous thing, a B3, and he turned it on,” he told The Boston Herald in 1994. “It has a motor and a generator. I started playing it and the sound just moved me. Being a 4-year-old and making up your mind about what you want to do for the rest of your life — I was very fortunate.”He of course credited his father with being his first influence.“You can’t be better off than having a dad who plays the same instrument that you do,” he said. “The music that I heard from the time I was born was jazz.”Happenstance helped propel his career: As a teenager he was performing on a local television show in Philadelphia when Miles Davis was the featured guest. The veteran jazzman was impressed, and Mr. DeFrancesco ended up touring with him for six months.He released a steady stream of albums, five of which received Grammy Award nominations, including, most recently, “In the Key of the Universe” (2019). On his latest album, “More Music” (2021), which features 10 original compositions, he played six different instruments and threw in some vocals well.A full list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. DeFrancesco was something of a showman, even when he was a sideman. In 2010, for instance, he played with a trio led by the saxophonist David Sanborn. Mr. Sanborn was the headliner, but, as Nate Chinen wrote in The Times of the trio’s gigs, “It’s often as much Mr. DeFrancesco’s show, and sometimes more so.”If he was more flamboyant than some of his contemporaries, that was deliberate, Mr. DeFrancesco told The Buffalo News in 2004.“I think these new players are too damn serious,” he said. “The joy of it, the fun of it, is something that jazz has lost. I mean, we are entertainers, after all. If you don’t look like you’re having fun onstage, how is anyone in the audience supposed to?” More

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      Virginia Patton Moss, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Actress, Dies at 97

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      The last surviving adult member of the film’s cast, she played the sister-in-law to James Stewart’s George Bailey. Three years later, she quit Hollywood.Virginia Patton Moss, the last surviving adult member of the cast of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” who, three years after that film was released, left Hollywood to find her own wonderful life raising a family in Ann Arbor, Mich., died on Aug. 18 in Albany, Ga. She was 97.The death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her son, Michael Cruse Moss.As Virginia Patton, she began her movie career at 18. She had appeared in 10 films, mostly in uncredited roles, when she was cast in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), which stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a frustrated banker in the town of Bedford Falls who, when he faces financial ruin, contemplates suicide, but who is saved by a guardian angel who shows him what the lives of everybody in town would have been like without him.Miss Patton appears in the film when her character, Ruth Dakin, steps off a train with George’s younger brother, Harry (Todd Karns), at the railroad station in Bedford Falls, bearing news that they had married. Harry introduces her as Ruth Dakin, but she adds confidently, “Ruth Dakin Bailey, if you don’t mind.”“What’s a pretty girl like you doing marrying this two-headed brother of mine?” George asks.“Well, I’ll tell you,” Ruth says. “It’s purely mercenary. My father offered him a job.”George is shaken, realizing that if Harry takes the job, he can’t flee Bedford Falls and leave his family’s building-and-loan association to his brother to run, as he had long hoped. Then, when a still dazed George catches up to Ruth, who has walked ahead of him eating popcorn, she tells him, “George, George, George … that’s all Harry ever talks about.”Before that scene was filmed, Miss Patton was worried that she would be eating buttered popcorn and that the camera would zoom in and show butter on her white gloves.“We rehearsed it,” she recalled in 2013 when the St. Nicholas Institute, which promotes the ideals of Santa Claus, gave her its first Spirit of Christmases Past, Present & Future Award. Mr. Capra, she recalled, “didn’t say anything about it. His assistant didn’t say anything about it. His cameraman didn’t say anything about it.” So, she decided, “I’ll just pretend everybody eats buttered popcorn with gloves.”Virginia Ann Marie Patton was born on June 25, 1925, in Cleveland and grew up in Portland, Ore. Her father, Donald, was an aeronautical engineer, and her mother, Marie (Cain) Patton, was a homemaker. Virginia was a great-niece of General George S. Patton, the bold World War II Army commanderAfter her family moved to Los Angeles, she attended classes at the University of Southern California and appeared in a play written by William C. deMille (the older brother of the director Cecil B. DeMille, who capitalized the “D” in his family’s last name). That performance led her to Hollywood.At 18 she appeared in a musical number with Ann Sheridan in her first film, the Warner Bros. musical “Thank Your Lucky Stars” (1943); she was in a string of other Warner Bros. films before Mr. Capra signed her for “It’s a Wonderful Life.”She appeared in four more films — including starring roles in “The Burning Cross” (1947) and “Black Eagle” (1948)— but left Hollywood for good after marrying Cruse Watson Moss, who became an automotive executive, in 1949, when she was 24.“It’s Tinsel Town,” she said of Hollywood when she was interviewed in 2010 by Lucy Ann Lance on WLBY, a radio station in Ann Arbor, where Mrs. Patton Moss lived for most of her life. “And that’s not the life that I wanted. I got what I wanted in Ann Arbor.”In that university town, she raised her three children and was a Boy Scout and Girl Scout leader; studied art history and archaeology at the University of Michigan; served on the boards of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments, both at the university; was a docent at the school’s Museum of Art; and raised funds for various organizations. She was also president of the Patton Company, her family’s real estate investment firm.Joseph Lam, a former director of the Stearns collection, said in an email that Mrs. Patton Moss “was very creative in setting the scenes of fund-raising activities,” adding, “Her flower decorations, and other artistic details, contributed much to the artistic and jovial atmosphere of the parties.”In addition to her son, Mrs. Patton Moss is survived by a daughter, Carol Moss Loop; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2018. Another son, Stephen, died in 1997.When reminiscing about “It’s a Wonderful Life,” she spoke extensively about Mr. Capra and his message, delivered through the life of George Bailey, about the impact a single person’s life can have on his community.“Capra knew we were coming out of a war, we were in terrible shape and there needed to be some type of stimulus,” she told the St. Nicholas Institute. She then rang a bell, which, in the film, signified that an angel had gotten its wings.She added, “Go get ’em, Capra.” More