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      in Television

      Ricarlo Flanagan, Comedian Who Contracted Covid, Dies at 41

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      Ricarlo Flanagan, a comedian, actor and rapper best known for his appearances on TV’s “Last Comic Standing” and “Shameless,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 41.He contracted Covid-19 a few weeks ago, said his representative, Stu Golfman, who could not confirm the disease was the cause of Mr. Flanagan’s death.On Oct. 1, Mr. Flanagan said on Twitter that “this Covid is no joke. I don’t wish this on anybody.”On “Last Comic Standing,” Norm Macdonald, a comedian and a judge on the show who died recently, said Mr. Flanagan was his favorite comic in the competition.“I was stunned,” Mr. Flanagan would later say about the exchange.After his run on “Last Comic Standing,” he appeared on several TV shows, including “Insecure” and “Shameless,” the Showtime series that featured him in a four-episode arc, according to his IMDb page.He discovered his love of stand-up after he took a comedy class that he saw advertised on a flyer in Ann Arbor, Mich., according to a statement from his representative.“After the first class, he was hooked and never stopped getting on stage,” the statement said.He had moved to Michigan after graduating from college in 2007, but his comedic talents soon brought him to Los Angeles, his representative said.Mr. Flanagan also dabbled in rap, tweeting recently that he had almost finished an album. In a song called “Revolution” that he released last year, he lamented police brutality and said, “We got to mobilize.”“I’m tired of seeing my brother on the ground with his face pinned down,” he rapped.Ricarlo Erik Flanagan was born on March 23, 1980, in Cleveland, according to a death announcement. He is survived by his mother, Katrina McLeod, his father, Keith Flanagan, and his grandmother, along with several aunts, uncles and cousins. More

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      in Theater

      Former ‘Hamilton’ Cast Member Files Discrimination Complaint Against Show

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      In the E.E.O.C. filing, the actor, who is nonbinary, describes being retaliated against after requesting a gender-neutral dressing room, among other claims. The show denies the allegations.A former “Hamilton” cast member filed a federal workplace complaint against the show on Wednesday, alleging that the show had retaliated and refused to renew a contract after the actor had requested a gender-neutral dressing room.In the complaint, filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, lawyers for the former cast member, Suni Reid (who prefers the pronouns they/them), said they were sidelined and eventually let go in September after requesting a gender-neutral space at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles where “Hamilton” was playing.In the 28-page complaint, Reid, a Black, nonbinary performer who has performed with the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles productions of “Hamilton” since 2017, outlined several other instances of discrimination and harassment by cast members and management over the years, including episodes in which Reid said they were physically threatened or intentionally and repeatedly misgendered.The complaint said Reid eventually intends to pursue legal claims in federal court. Filing a charge of discrimination and retaliation with the E.E.O.C. is a precursor to filing such a lawsuit.“Publicly, ‘Hamilton’ is a beacon of diversity and appears committed to causes seeking social justice and harmony,” Reid’s lawyers, Lawrence M. Pearson and Lindsay M. Goldbrum, said in a statement. “Behind the curtain, however, the Company’s management will force out a Black, transgender cast member simply because they stood up for themselves and advocated for a more equitable workplace, and therefore called that public image into question.”“We look forward to upholding Reid’s rights and hope this is a wake-up call for the theater industry about the systemic inequities that persist even at its greatest heights,” the statement continued.In its own statement, “Hamilton” said Wednesday that Reid had been “a valued cast member” for years and said the show had “offered them a contract to return to ‘Hamilton’ with terms responsive to their requests.”“We deny the allegations in the Charge,” the show said. “We have not discriminated or retaliated against Suni.” During the shutdown, it added, “we have given Suni direct financial support, paid for their health insurance, and paid for their housing. We wish Suni well in their future endeavors.”Reid has performed in the ensemble as well as in roles such as Aaron Burr, George Washington, Hercules Mulligan/James Madison, and Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson, according to the complaint.It comes as Broadway and touring shows are working to find their footing following a lengthy pandemic-related shutdown. Earlier this summer, as several shows like “Hamilton” were preparing to restart, some of the most powerful players on Broadway signed a pact pledging to strengthen the industry’s diversity practices.But Reid’s complaint paints a picture of a toxic workplace environment at “Hamilton” that stretched from coast to coast.Reid was cast in the Broadway production of the show in 2017 and met hostility from the start, according to the complaint. Reid eventually requested a transfer from the Broadway production and started with the Chicago company of “Hamilton” in March 2019, according to the complaint, and came out publicly as transgender and gender-nonconforming. They were constantly misgendered by co-workers, “at times in a pointedly hostile or callous manner,” according to the complaint.By 2020, Reid had begun rehearsals for the Los Angeles company, but never was able to to join the Los Angeles cast in performance because of the shutdown, the complaint said.In May, Reid was presented with a contract renewal for “Hamilton.” Around that time, they asked their agent, Michele Largé, to request a gender-neutral dressing room at Pantages that Reid and others could use. “Hamilton” officials then raised concerns about posts Reid had published on social media describing racial equity issues on the show, according to the complaint.The show would eventually agree to set up gender-neutral dressing spaces in every “Hamilton” theater. But in the fall, after Reid’s lawyers informed the show that they had legal claims of discrimination, the show told Reid’s lawyers that it was “no longer open” to having Reid perform in “Hamilton,” and that “renewal of their contract was no longer an option,” the complaint said. More

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      in Music

      At Britney Spears’s Hearing, This Twitter Feed Scooped the World

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      With a deft plan, @BritneyLawArmy kept everyone outside the courtroom abreast of developments in a crucial moment in the singer’s conservatorship.LOS ANGELES — More than 50 members of the media took their seats Wednesday afternoon in Courtroom 217 of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse here, all agreeing to abide by restrictions set by the court to govern a highly anticipated hearing regarding the conservatorship that controls Britney Spears’s life.No laptops in the courtroom. No phones visible during the proceedings. No attempts in real time to communicate with others outside the courtroom. Violators would be swiftly ejected.For those anxious to witness and understand whether Ms. Spears’s father would be removed as her conservator, as the singer had asked, it appeared the afternoon would be a frustratingly long wait to hear what had happened inside.But, then, just minutes after the Los Angeles Superior Court clerk finished his roll call, snippets, seemingly from inside the room, began trickling out on the @BritneyLawArmy Twitter account.For the next hour, the Twitter feed became a source of real-time information during the pivotal hearing, tracked both by mystified media outlets unable to talk to their own reporters inside and hundreds of Free Britney fans outside.How did they manage to pull it off?In interviews Thursday, members of the Britney Law Army described how the group, five friends all committed to seeing Ms. Spears enjoy freedom, plotted their judicial Ocean’s 11: a well-orchestrated “buddy system” that allowed them to disseminate as much information as quickly as possible without running afoul of the court’s very strict rules.“It definitely would not have worked without all five of us,” said Marilyn Shrewsbury, 32, a lawyer who focuses on civil rights cases in Louisville, Ky.The army, consisting of Ms. Shrewsbury; two other lawyers, Angela Rojas, 30, and Samuel Nicholson, 30; a legal assistant, Raven Koontz, 23; and Emily Lagarenne, a 34-year-old recruiting consultant, all from in and about Louisville, had flown into Los Angeles on Tuesday. That evening they sat outside, planning final logistics as they ate street tacos, drank beer and chain smoked.Britney’s Law Army, from left: Raven Koontz, Angela Rojas, Marilyn Linsey Shrewsbury, Samuel Nicholson and Emily Lagarenne.Laura Partain for The New York Times“We are from Kentucky,” Ms. Shrewsbury said.All four women identify as lifelong Britney fans, but Mr. Nicholson was the driving force.“From a civil rights litigation perspective, Sam really sparked my interest,” Ms. Shrewsbury said.The New York Times documentary “Framing Britney Spears” galvanized the group to rectify what they saw as a lack of consistent information available to the public about what they described as Ms. Spears’s “horrific treatment” inside the conservatorship.On Wednesday, they arrived at the entrance to the courtroom at 7:30 a.m. in hopes of securing five of the 11 seats allotted to members of the public on a first come first served basis. Another 54 seats had been reserved for members of the media. Only one person, a New York Times reporter, arrived before them.At 11 a.m. they were given red raffle tickets that ensured them spots in the courtroom when the hearing began at 1:30 p.m. Members of the public were told they would have to turn off their phones in front of deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and then put them in magnetic locked bags, which could be opened when they left.“I’ve never been so nervous for a court hearing I wasn’t an attorney on,” Mr. Nicholson said.The plan: Each of the five would take copious notes, leave the hearing one at a time, in 15-minute intervals, get their phones out of the bags and tweet out as much as possible, as quickly as possible.The one hiccup:“We were in the worst spot in the courtroom,” Mr. Nicholson recalled. “Far right corner, not anywhere near the aisle at all. The clerk obscured our view.”Some of them couldn’t see the judge or the screen for remote appearances. It didn’t matter. The doors closed, and the plan went into action.Mr. Nicholson, measuring time on his watch, cued the others one at a time to run out of the courtroom. Information flowed, and followers hung on every word.After an hour or so, Mr. Nicholson was the only Army member in the room. Judge Brenda Penny announced her ruling: Mr. Spears would be suspended as conservator of the estate, effective immediately. Reporters tried to leave the room to report the news to the outside world, but Judge Penny stopped them, saying she would let everyone out for a recess shortly.Mr. Nicholson couldn’t leave either. His phone stayed locked up. The feed went dark. Out on the street, over one hundred #FreeBritney protesters waited in near silence. Ms. Shrewsbury and Ms. Rojas joined Ms. Koontz and Ms. Lagarenne outside.When Judge Penny released the courtroom, the tweets started flying.“Judge Penny: My order suspending Jamie Spears shall remain in full force and effect until a hearing on removal,” Mr. Nicholson wrote.The other four members of the Army were with the crowd as it erupted.“Literally the moment Sam tweeted Jamie was suspended, everyone started screaming about it,” Ms. Shrewsbury said. “We were in shock for a full 45 seconds.”Julia Jacobs contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      Will the Court Address the New Britney Spears Documentaries?

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      Bugging. Restrictions on spending. Failed efforts to hire her own lawyer.In recent days, three new documentaries have come forward with revelations about the degree to which the conservatorship has exerted control over Britney Spears’s life for 13 years — and the extent to which she sought to regain that control early on, without success.On Friday, for example, The New York Times released “Controlling Britney Spears,” which detailed how Ms. Spears’s father and the security firm he hired to protect her ran an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored her communications and secretly captured audio recordings from her bedroom.Ms. Spears’s lawyer called for an investigation, writing in a court filing this week that her father had “crossed unfathomable lines,” further supporting the need to suspend him as her conservator immediately.Early on Tuesday, Netflix started streaming its own film, “Britney Vs Spears,” which used confidential documents and interviews with people who were close with Ms. Spears to detail the singer’s strong objections to the legal arrangement that went on to rule her life, as well as her attempts to escape it.A third documentary, CNN’s “Toxic: Britney Spears’ Battle For Freedom,” aired on Sunday, and included interviews with some of the singer’s friends and former employees. Dan George, who managed the promotional tour for Ms. Spears’s “Circus” album, says in the film that Ms. Spears “could only read Christian books” and “her phone was monitored.”The Times documentary includes an interview with Alex Vlasov, a former employee of a security firm, Black Box, that was hired by Mr. Spears to protect Ms. Spears. Mr. Vlasov, who worked as an executive assistant and operations and cybersecurity manager, said the firm would monitor Ms. Spears’s communications through other devices that were signed into her iCloud account and share them with her father.The surreptitious audio recording, he said, included her interactions and conversations with her boyfriend and children. (It was unclear whether the court had approved these strategies, and both Mr. Spears and the security firm said in statements that their actions were within the law.)The Netflix film, by the filmmaker Erin Lee Carr and featuring the journalist Jenny Eliscu, reported that, very early in the conservatorship, Ms. Spears had attempted to hire her own lawyer to help her escape the strict limitations of the conservatorship.Ms. Spears is heard on a 2009 voice mail addressing a lawyer, who is not identified, seeking reassurance that her effort to end the conservatorship would not jeopardize her right to time with her two sons. At the time, about a year into the conservatorship, Ms. Spears was represented by a court-appointed lawyer after a judge determined that she did not have the capacity to choose her own.Ms. Eliscu, who said that she knew Ms. Spears after profiling her twice for Rolling Stone, recounts a time when Sam Lufti, Ms. Spears’s friend and sometime manager, asked her to surreptitiously present court papers for the singer to sign; the papers stated that Ms. Spears’s court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, was not “advocating adequately on her behalf.” Ms. Eliscu said she met Ms. Spears in the bathroom of a hotel and the singer signed the document, but her wishes were not granted.Ms. Spears was represented by Mr. Ingham until July, when a judge ruled that she could choose her own lawyer.Watch The New York Times documentary that highlighted the “Free Britney” movement, which supports the pop star Britney Spears’s efforts to get out of a 13-year court-sanctioned conservatorship.G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times More

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      in Movies

      Kaycee Moore, Actress in Black Directors’ Seminal Films, Dies at 77

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      She explored her characters’ inner lives in movies like “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts,” independent works that grew out of the L.A. Rebellion movement.Kaycee Moore, whose nuanced acting documented Black American life in movies by a group of young, Black independent directors in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Aug. 13 at her home in Kansas City, Kan. She was 77.The death was confirmed by the Watkins Heritage Funeral home. No cause was given.Ms. Moore made only a handful of movies, but they had an outsize impact on American cinema. Her portrayals defied the traditional roles for Black women of her era, in action-packed or trauma-filled blockbusters, and instead laid bare the interior lives of her characters.Her debut came in “Killer of Sheep” (1978), the director Charles Burnett’s first feature. (It was his thesis for the film program at the University of California, Los Angeles.) Mr. Burnett was a member of the community of independent filmmakers that would later become known as the L.A. Rebellion.Their movies, unlike many mainstream Hollywood pictures, humanized Black characters and celebrated Black family life, though they did not shy away from hardship. Ms. Moore’s characters in “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” (1983) were both struggling wives who wanted the best for their children and husbands in a system portrayed as designed to keep Black Americans down and out.“Killer of Sheep” follows a Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker whose leading of lambs to their death takes on biblical resonance. Ms. Moore played the worker’s unnamed wife as she raises their family in the blighted Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Critics lauded the film’s stark visual style, and The Sacramento Bee called Ms. Moore’s performance “incandescent.”Upon the film’s rerelease in 2007, the critic Stuart Klawans, writing in The Nation, praised the “profoundly moving” work of Ms. Moore and Henry G. Sanders, who played her husband. “Their lives are denuded in many ways, materially impoverished and spiritually numbed,” he wrote, “but for all that, they have the grandeur of unchallengeable fact.”“Bless Their Little Hearts” came next for Ms. Moore. She played Andais, the wife of the protagonist, Charlie (Nate Hardman). The film, directed by Billy Woodbury and written by Mr. Burnett, charts Charlie’s struggle to find permanent work and the temptations he faces to turn to crime, all set against the backdrop of a newly begun extramarital affair.Looking back at the L.A. Rebellion films in an essay in The New York Times in 2020, the critic Ben Kenigsberg found Ms. Moore’s performance naturalistic. “She is shown in contrasting scenes riding the bus: in one, she nods off from fatigue; later, having discovered that Charlie is having an affair, she is wide-awake,” he wrote. “When the two finally fight about the fling, the scene, staged in a single take, feels utterly extemporaneous.”Acting in “Bless Their Little Hearts” was not always easy for Ms. Moore. She recalled in the production notes for the film that the climactic argument scene, filmed in one take, included actual physical violence. But “for the most part,” she said, “it was a film set that was full of love.”Her acting style, Mr. Woodberry, the director, said in an interview, was not naturalistic but realistic, informed by small expressions and actions and drawn from personal experience. “She’s a person who knew a lot about life,” he said of Ms. Moore, “and she could bring that to the character.”Ms. Moore later joined an ensemble cast of Black actors in Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), which is generally considered the first film by a Black woman to achieve a wide release in the United States. In the film, Ms. Moore played Haagar Peazant, a discontented member of the insular Gullah community in the islands off South Carolina during the Jim Crow era. Ms. Moore imbued the character, who wants to leave the community, with an iron will.“The film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians,” The Times critic Stephen Holden wrote in 1992.L.A. Rebellion movies have entered the pantheon of American film. “Daughters of the Dust” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” were made part of the prestigious Criterion Collection, and “Killer of Sheep” was one of the first 50 films introduced into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1990.Kaycee Collier was born in Kansas City, Kan., on Feb. 24, 1944. Her mother, Angie Mae (Sandifer) Aker, was an activist and advocate for Black Americans with sickle cell disease. Kaycee had seven siblings, two of whom died of sickle cell anemia, inspiring her mother’s devotion to the cause, according to “Kansas City Women of Independent Minds,” a 1992 book by the Kansas City historian Jane Fifield Flynn. Kaycee’s father, Andrew Collier, died shortly after her birth, Ms. Flynn wrote.She married John Moore Jr. in 1959 and later married Stephen Jones. She is survived by the two children of her first marriage, John Moore III and Michelle Moore Swinton; her siblings Margaret Hall, Angie Ruth Wesley, Frances Collier and Jimmie Collier; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.It was in the 1970s that Ms. Moore headed west to audition for Hollywood roles and met Mr. Burnett, the filmmaker who would cast her in “Killer of Sheep.” Her last major film role was in “Ninth Street” (1999), by the writer-director Kevin Willmott.After her mother died in the 1990s, Ms. Moore took over her role as executive director of the Kansas City chapter of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America. More

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      in Music

      Carl Bean, Gay Singer Who Turned to Preaching, Dies at 77

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      After recording “I Was Born This Way,” a club favorite, he entered the ministry and founded a church for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.Carl Bean, who in 1977 recorded “I Was Born This Way,” a disco song of L.G.B.T.Q. pride that became a much-remixed club favorite — and who then became a minister and AIDS activist, founding a church in Los Angeles that sought to serve the spiritual needs of gay people and others who were marginalized — died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 77.Unity Fellowship Church, which he founded in 1985 and which is guided by the slogan “God is love and love is for everyone,” announced his death on its website. It did not give a cause.Mr. Bean, who was openly gay from a young age, was a singer before he was a preacher and received the title archbishop, recording gospel songs for ABC Records in the mid-1970s as the frontman for the group Carl Bean and Universal Love. The Motown label had acquired the rights to “I Was Born This Way,” a song written by Bunny Jones, set to music by Chris Spierer and recorded in 1975 by a singer using the name Valentino (real name Charles Harris). The chorus went: “Oh yes I’m happy, I’m carefree and I’m gay, yes I’m gay./’Tain’t a fault, ’tis a fact, I was born this way.”Motown approached Mr. Bean about covering it.“I was hesitant to sign with another record label,” he told The Advocate in 1978, “but after I found out what the song was, I knew I had to do it. It was like providence. They came to me with a song I have been looking for my whole life.”The Bean version, with a more pronounced disco flair and a streamlined chorus (“I’m happy, I’m carefree and I’m gay; I was born this way”), became a favorite in gay clubs all over the country and abroad. Some 34 years later, it inspired Lady Gaga’s No. 1 hit “Born This Way.”Mr. Bean had considered the ministry before, but the song helped him focus that calling.“I suppose this song and its message is a sort of ministry to gay people,” he said in the 1978 interview. “I am using my voice to tell gay people that they can still feel good about being gay even if there are people like Anita Bryant around” — a reference to one of the most prominent opponents of gay rights in the 1970s.Archbishop Bean was ordained as a minister in 1982 and began working in Los Angeles, with a particular interest in reaching out to gay Black people and other groups who had felt unwelcome in mainstream Christianity.via Unity Fellowship Church MovementHe always praised Motown for backing the record, but, he said in a 2009 interview with the website Out Alliance, he and the company parted ways “when they wanted me to do songs like ‘Ooh girl I love you so’ — right after they promoted me as openly gay.”So he turned away from a music career and toward the ministry. He was ordained in 1982 by Archbishop William Morris O’Neal of the Universal Tabernacles of Christ Church and began working in Los Angeles, with a particular interest in reaching out to gay Black people and other groups who had felt unwelcome in mainstream Christianity. He started a Bible study group, which grew into the Unity Fellowship Church.The country was in the midst of the AIDS crisis by then, and one of his outreach efforts, the Minority AIDS Project, which he started in 1985, focused on Black and Latino residents of Los Angeles. One thing it tried to do was correct flaws in the educational material put out by the government, or by predominantly white organizations, which was not registering with people of color.“You almost had to have a college degree to understand it,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “We put people of color on the brochure so people couldn’t say, ‘This doesn’t affect me.’”The effort also sought to overcome cultural taboos in minority communities.“AIDS took the cloak off for the world that homosexuality exists, especially for minorities,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “People who wanted to think there was no such thing as a gay Black man or a gay Latino had a rude awakening.”He became a bishop in the church in 1992 and an archbishop in 1999.“While his life and spirit may have inspired Lady Gaga’s iconic song ‘Born This Way,’” Barbara Satin, faith work director of the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force, said by email, “his true legacy will be the way he lived and the countless people his ministry impacted.”Carl Bean was born in Baltimore on May 26, 1944. “Mom was 15, Dad was 16, and they never married,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I Was Born This Way: A Gay Preacher’s Journey Through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ” (2010), written with David Ritz.Archbishop Bean, who was openly gay from a young age, published his autobiography in 2010.Simon & SchusterIn the book, he portrayed his upbringing as a communal affair. “I was raised by many mothers who took me in and loved me completely,” he wrote, though he also described sexual abuse by a man he thought of as an uncle.Religion was important to him even as a young boy.“I used to carry my Bible and read it on the school bus,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. “And after school I’d go over to the church — it was a Black Baptist church — and sit in the church secretary’s office and help her with letters and things. I sang in the choir and expressed a desire to go into the Christian ministry. I was a role model in my community.”But he also knew from an early age that he was gay, and eventually the community turned on him.“A neighbor boy and I were intimate, and his parents told my parents,” he recalled in the Out Alliance interview. “I got the blame.”“I had had all this support — and suddenly I was a pariah,” he added. “I had been little Carl who did well in school and could sing, et cetera. Now suddenly I was the bringer of shame.”At 13, he said, “I went to the bathroom and took every pill in the medicine cabinet and went into my room and locked the door, and wrote a note saying ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you wanted me to be.’” The suicide attempt resulted in sessions with a psychiatrist that, Archbishop Bean said, proved life-changing.“She said she couldn’t teach me to be what my parents wanted, but she could teach me to accept myself and be comfortable with who I was,” he told Out Alliance.While still a teenager he moved to New York, where he joined Alex Bradford’s gospel singing group. In 1972 he relocated to Los Angeles.Among the many honors Archbishop Bean received over the years was one bestowed in 1992 by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a global organization: It named an AIDS hospice center in South Los Angeles the Carl Bean House.Information on survivors was not immediately available.In 1995, Archbishop Bean reflected on his experience of being an outcast, and about his motivation in creating an inclusive church.“If I can help other people not to have to face what I did,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “then that’s what Christianity and God and love are all about.” More

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      in Television

      Markie Post, ‘Night Court’ Actress, Dies at 70

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      Ms. Post played a bail bondswoman on the show “The Fall Guy” in the 1980s and starred opposite John Ritter in the sitcom “Hearts Afire” in the 1990s.Markie Post, the effervescent actress known for her roles on the television series “Night Court” and “The Fall Guy” and the movie “There’s Something About Mary” during a career that spanned four decades, died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70.Her death was confirmed by her manager, Ellen Lubin Sanitsky, who provided a statement from Ms. Post’s family specifying that the cause of death was cancer.Ms. Post had continued to act for nearly four years after her initial cancer diagnosis and while undergoing chemotherapy treatments that she referred to as her “side job,” her family said.Since her diagnosis, she had worked on a Lifetime Christmas movie and had a recurring guest role on the ABC series “The Kids Are Alright.”Frequently cast in daffy roles that emphasized her comedic timing, Ms. Post became a television fixture in the 1980s.She appeared on “The Love Boat,” “The A-Team” and “Cheers” before landing a prominent role as a bail bondswoman on “The Fall Guy,” an action show about a stuntman, played by Lee Majors, who moonlights as a bounty hunter.Her greatest success came on the sitcom “Night Court,” when she was cast as Christine Sullivan, the alluring and naïve public defender who was the romantic interest of Judge Harry T. Stone, played by Harry Anderson. The judge was not her only suitor, though. So was Dan Fielding, the lecherous prosecutor played by John Larroquette.One of her co-stars on the show, Charlie Robinson, who played the pragmatic court clerk, died last month at 75.Ms. Post with John Larrouquette in “Night Court.”NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesIn the 1990s, Ms. Post starred opposite John Ritter on “Hearts Afire,” a political sitcom in which she played a former journalist who went to work as a press aide for a Southern senator. Her father was played by Ed Asner, who paid tribute on Sunday to Ms. Post on Twitter.Born on Nov. 4, 1950, in Palo Alto, Calif., Ms. Post began her career working on game shows, writing questions for “Family Feud,” finding prizes for “The Price Is Right” and doing research for “Split Second.”“I learned more researching that game show than I did in four years of college,” Ms. Post said in an interview with Bill Tush on his show in the 1980s.In 1998, Ms. Post was cast by the Farrelly brothers as the ditsy mother of Mary, the main character in “There’s Something About Mary,” who was played by Cameron Diaz. Later in her career, Ms. Post’s acting credits included “Scrubs” and “Chicago P.D.”Ms. Post is survived by her husband, Michael A. Ross; and two daughters, Kate Armstrong Ross, an actress, and Daisy Schoenborn, who said in their statement that Ms. Post exemplified kindness.They described Ms. Post as “a person who made elaborate cakes for friends, sewed curtains for first apartments and showed us how to be kind, loving and forgiving in an often harsh world.” More

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      in Music

      Chuck E. Weiss, Musician Who, in Love, Inspired a Hit Song, Dies at 76

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      He and Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones were inseparable in the late ’70s, and when Mr. Weiss’s romantic life took a turn, Ms. Jones memorialized it in “Chuck E.’s in Love.”Chuck E. Weiss, blues musician, club owner and outsize Los Angeles character immortalized in Rickie Lee Jones’s breakout hit song, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” died on July 20 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 76.His brother, Byron, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Weiss was a voracious musicologist, an encyclopedia of obscure jazz and early R&B artists, a drummer, a songwriter and a widely acknowledged rascal who in the mid-1970s landed in Los Angeles from his native Denver with his friend the singer-songwriter Tom Waits.At the Troubadour, the venerable West Hollywood folk club, where Mr. Weiss worked for a time as a dishwasher, they met another young singer-songwriter, a former runaway named Rickie Lee Jones. Mr. Waits and Ms. Jones became an item and the three of them became inseparable as they caroused through Hollywood, stealing lawn ornaments and pranking people at music industry parties (like shaking hands with dip smeared on their palms).Ms. Jones’s song about Mr. Weiss, “Chuck E’s in Love,” was the opening track of her debut album, in 1979. “It seems sometimes like we’re real romantic dreamers who got stuck in the wrong time zone,” Ms. Jones told Rolling Stone in 1979, describing Mr. Weiss and Mr. Waits as her family at the time.They lived at the Tropicana Motel, a seedy 1940s-era bohemia on Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was a regular DMZ,” Mr. Weiss told LA Weekly in 1981, “except everyone had a tan and looked nice.”In the fall of 1977, on a trip home to Denver, Mr. Weiss called his buddies back in Los Angeles, and when Mr. Waits put down the phone, he announced to Ms. Jones, “Chuck E.’s in love!”Two years later, Ms. Jones’s fanciful riff on that declaration — “What’s her name?/Is that her there?/Oh, Christ, I think he’s even combed his hair” — had made her a star. (Though the last line of the song suggests otherwise, it was not Ms. Jones whom Mr. Weiss had fallen for; it was a distant cousin of his.)The song was a hit single, the opening track of Ms. Jones’s debut album, “Rickie Lee Jones,” and a 1980 Grammy Award nominee for song of the year. (“What a Fool Believes,” performed by the Doobie Brothers, took the honor.)Mr. Weiss in an undated photo. “He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are,” Ms. Jones said. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn an essay in The Los Angeles Times on July 21, Ms. Jones wrote that when she first met Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss, she couldn’t tell them apart. “They were two of the most charismatic characters Hollywood had seen in decades, and without them I think the entire street of Santa Monica Boulevard would have collapsed.”In a phone interview since then, she said of Mr. Weiss: “There was mischief in him, he was our trickster. He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are.”Charles Edward Weiss was born in Denver on March 18, 1945. His father, Leo, was in the salvage business; his mother, Jeannette (Rollnick) Weiss, owned a hat store, Hollywood Millinery. Chuck graduated from East High School and attended Mesa Junior College, now Colorado Mesa, in Grand Junction.His brother is his only immediate survivor.In his early 20s, Mr. Weiss met Chuck Morris, now a music promoter, when Mr. Morris was a co-owner of Tulagi, a music club in Boulder, Colo. When blues performers like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker came through, they often traveled alone, and it was up to Mr. Morris to find them a local band. He would ask Mr. Weiss to fill in as drummer.In 1973 Mr. Morris opened a Denver nightclub called Ebbets Field (he was born in Brooklyn), which drew performers like Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mr. Waits. Mr. Weiss filled in there too.Mr. Weiss performing in 1999 at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.Ebet RobertsAt the time, as Mr. Weiss recalled in 2014, he was trying to record his own music and in the habit of asking performers to play with him. That’s how he met Mr. Waits. “And I think what happened was I saw Waits do some finger-poppin’ stuff at Ebbets Fields one night,” he said, “and I went up to him after the show. I was wearing some platform shoes and a chinchilla coat, and I was slipping on the ice on the street outside because I was so high, and asked if he wanted to do some recording with me. He looked at me like I was from outer space, man.”Nonetheless, he said, they became fast friends.Mr. Waits, interviewed by The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999, described Mr. Weiss as “a mensch, a liar, a monkey and a pathological vaudevillian.”Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss ended up collaborating on a number of things, in one instance co-writing the lyrics to “Spare Parts (A Nocturnal Emission),” a barroom dirge on Mr. Waits’s album “Nighthawks at the Diner,” released in 1975. Mr. Waits produced two albums for Mr. Weiss; the first, “Extremely Cool,” in 1999, was described in one review as “a goofy, eclectic mix of loosely-played blues and boogie-woogie.”Though his songwriting was singular — “Anthem for Lost Souls” was told from the point of view of a neighbor’s cat — Mr. Weiss was best known for his live performances. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.Mr. Weiss in 2002 in Los Angeles.Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressFor much of the 1980s Mr. Weiss played at a Los Angeles club called the Central, accompanied by his band, The Goddamn Liars. He later encouraged his friend Johnny Depp to buy the place with him and others. They turned it into the Viper Room, the celebrity-flecked ’90s-era nightclub.He was often asked how he felt about his star turn in Ms. Jones’s hit. “Yeah, I was flabbergasted,” he told The Associated Press in 2007. “Little did we know that, all in all, we would both be known for that for the rest of our lives.”But the rest of their lives would no longer be intertwined.“When ‘Chuck E.’s in Love’ passed from the heavens and faded into the ‘I hate that song’ desert, from which it still has not really recovered, he and I became estranged, and everyone fell away from everyone,” Ms. Jones wrote of Mr. Weiss in her Los Angeles Times essay. “Waits left, the brief Camelot of our street corner jive ended. I had made fiction of us, made heroes of very unheroic people. But I’m glad I did.”Later, on the phone, she said, “Two of the three of us became very successful musicians, but not Chuck, and he knew a lot of people.” She added: “We think being the famous one is winning, but I’m not sure. Chuck did all right.” More