He was apparently most famous for “Police Academy 2” and “Police Academy 3”, but he had a pretty lengthy career before those. He was prolific on TV, appearing on “Movin’ On” and a lot of ’70s cop shows…
…including “Mannix”. (“Deathrun”, season 2, episode 13. This is one of the ones with an old Army buddy of Mannix: however, Mr. Metrano was not the Army buddy.)
Michael Constantine, noted actor.
He gets a lot of press for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” but he did a lot of other work before (and after) that. No “Mannix”, but “Kojack”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Law and Order: Original Recipe”, “Hunter”, multiple appearances on “Quincy, M.E.”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, late period “Perry Mason”, and the list goes on. He was even in “The Hustler”, which we watched just a few weeks ago.
As someone who enjoys mystery fiction and well-written true crime, I find CrimeReads to be about 50% interesting…and about 50% woke bushwa.
On the interesting side: “Remembering Harry O, The Seventies’ Second Best, Mostly Forgotten Private Eye Series” by J. Kingston Pierce (editor of “The Rap Sheet“).
I’m pretty much in the same boat: “Harry O” was right at the edge of my consciousness, but I don’t remember ever seeing an episode. (As the author notes, the series has been released on DVD, but Amazon shows them as “temporarily out of stock”, and it isn’t on Prime.)
I was thinking about this yesterday, and I kind of put David Janssen and Darren McGavin into the same mental bucket: they both seem to me to be two guys who has some success as actors, but were still the kind of people you could have a shot and a beer and a conversation with.
In case you were wondering about that “second best”, I kind of think my readers can draw their own conclusion about which series was the best. But if you’re still wondering, at the tone leave your name and message, I’ll get back to you.
Stipulated: he was a cranky old liberal whose politics drove me up a tree.
But: Lou Grant.
He made a point of largely avoiding comedy — out of fear, he said in a 2002 appearance at Vanderbilt University, and because “in those days you got discovered by doing the drama shows as a guest star.” But he agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as he said in an Archive of American Television interview, Lou Grant “was the best character I’d ever been asked to do” in either television or film.
Lou was a hard-drinking, straight-shooting, short-tempered journalist who had tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era; and “a great common core of honor,” as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, the authors of “Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’”
416 credits in IMDB as an actor. That’s impressive. And he did do more than a few cop shows, including both the good and bad “Hawaii 5-0”, but never a “Mannix”.
(Here’s an IMDB list of people with over 300 acting credits. Mr. Asner is listed at #92, but the list hasn’t been updated and his count is off. Also, many of the people ahead of him are either porn actors or voice actors: Mel Blanc comes in at #9 with 1,220 credits. Eric Roberts and James Hong are the first two non-porn, not primarily a voice actor, people I recognize: Roberts with 638 credits and Hong with 444 to date.)
(What about “Up”? No comment. I’ve never seen it.)
There are times when I just want to quote the entire NYT lead: not because I’m lazy (though I am) but because they encapsulate the obit so perfectly, anything I could say would be superfluous.
Seriously, just go read this one.
For the historical record, obits from the paper of record for:
Alex Cord. He may have been best known as “Archangel” in “Airwolf”, but he had a significant body of work going back to the 1960s. No “Mannix”, but a lot of other cop shows, and multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, among other credits.
Patricia Hitchcock. Yes, Alfred’s daughter.
She had a few other credits, but retired in the 1970s.
Tony Esposito, Hall of Fame goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks.
Walter Yetnikoff, legendary head of CBS Records.
In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff somewhat reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the head of CBS’s Epic label, sign the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Records (which retained the rights to the group’s original name, the Jackson 5), and though Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ initial albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the young singer’s interest in expanding into solo work.
In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” still one of the top-selling albums in history.
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Unfortunately, he was one of those people who didn’t just have issues: he had a lifetime subscription and a complete run of bound volumes.
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Brian Mulheren. He was the man in the NYPD in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, and to quote the NYT, he was a “veteran detective who as an audacious, deft and indefatigable one-man emergency management liaison between City Hall and the New York Police and Fire Departments became known as ‘Mr. Disaster’ and the ‘Night Mayor’…”
Mr. Mulheren played an outsize role for a first-grade detective. He was armed with a gold shield, but his uniform, such as it was — it typically consisted of a rumpled beige trench coat and a crumpled Irish tweed hat — was devoid of the stars and bars that define status on the police force.
Yet by sheer force of personality and the connections he had cultivated, he was deferred to by city commissioners and by police supervisors who outranked him when he arrived, often first, at the scene of a crisis in his black Lincoln Town Car, which was crowned with a forest of antennas that linked him to every emergency radio frequency in the city.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he served as City Hall’s wake-up call when an officer was shot or a firefighter was felled. Before the city established a full-fledged emergency management department, he seamlessly and almost single-handedly coordinated interagency strategies.
“He was one of those rare people who kept the N.Y.P.D. and the Fire Department together,” John Miller, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said in an interview. “He basically created the organized response to chaos that we replicated and have used ever since.”
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Mr. Mulheren was credited by Officer Steven McDonald’s family with saving his life when he was shot in Central Park by a teenage bicycle thief in 1986 and rushed in a patrol car to Metropolitan Hospital, where doctors said he was unlikely to survive.
In 2016, Mr. McDonald told Columbia, the Knights of Columbus magazine, that he vividly remembered Mr. Mulheren’s dauntless intervention.
“You might think he’s not going to make it, but we’re going to Bellevue,” Mr. Mulheren announced on his own initiative, according to “New York’s Finest,” a forthcoming book by Michael Daly.
“He had no rank or high station but stepped forward and said, ‘No, he’s not going to die; he just needs a second chance,’” Mr. McDonald recalled. “I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking through Brian to everyone there. Just like that like they loaded me up on a special ambulance and flew down to Bellevue Hospital, where they saved my life by the grace of God.”
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In another emergency, when a firefighter was overcome and no ambulance was immediately available, Mr. Mulheren was said to have commandeered a city bus, told the passengers to debark and ordered the driver to take the injured man to the hospital.
Serving mostly under Mayors John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins, Mr. Mulheren, a police buff since childhood, insinuated himself into the department’s decisions to buy smaller patrol cars to economize on gas; change their color from green, black and white in the early 1970s to “grabber blue” with white accents to make them more visible and less intimidating; modernize lights and sirens; air-condition the cars; and improve radio communications. He also encouraged the Fire Department to requisition a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber to treat burn victims.
He was 73 years old, and passed away due to COPD. His family attributes his condition to inhalation of debris at the WTC site after the 2001 attacks.
It was a busy weekend, and I’ve got a backlog. I hope I don’t miss anybody.
Damn. Said it before, I’ll say it again: “Night Court” was a swell show, and she was part of what made it swell.
Trevor Moore, comedian (“The Whitest Kids U Know”).
Jane Withers, actress.
She did other movie and TV work, including “Giant”, and played “Josephine the Plumber” in the Comet commercials.
Bobby Bowden, football coach.
“When I was at Alabama the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Auburn,’ he recalled in “The Bowden Way” (2001), his book on leadership written with his son Steve. “When I was at West Virginia they read ‘Beat Pitt.’ When I came to F.S.U., the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Anybody.’”
Bowden’s Seminoles beat most everybody. He coached Florida State to national championships in 1993 and 1999 and his teams finished in the top five of the Associated Press rankings every season from 1987 to 2000. The Seminoles were unbeaten in bowl games from 1982 to 1995.
He was, for a period of time, the coach with the most wins in college football. I phrase it that way, though, because this was after the NCAA vacated 111 of Joe Paterno’s victories over the Penn State scandal:
Coach Bowden now ranks second, with 377 career wins.
Paul Cotton, of Poco.
Mr. Cotton joined Poco, replacing the founding member Jim Messina in 1970, just in time to appear on the group’s third studio album, “From the Inside” (1971). Produced by Steve Cropper, the guitarist with the Memphis R&B combo Booker T. & the MGs, the project signaled a new artistic direction for the band, maybe nowhere so much as on the three songs written by Mr. Cotton.
Rooted more in rock and soul than in the country and bluegrass that had hitherto been the group’s primary influences, Mr. Cotton’s sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals on songs like the ballad “Bad Weather” greatly expanded Poco’s emotional and stylistic palette.
Herbert Schlosser, TV executive. Among other accomplishments: “Saturday Night Live” and “Laugh-In”.
Jon Lindbergh. Yes, he was Charles Lindbergh’s son, but he led an interesting life of his own.
He didn’t go into aviation like his father: instead, he became a pioneer of undersea research.
After college, he did postgraduate work at the University of California San Diego and spent three years as a Navy frogman, working with the Underwater Demolition Team. He appeared as an extra in the television series “Sea Hunt” and had bit parts in a few movies, including “Underwater Warrior” (1958).
He also worked as a commercial deep-sea diver and participated in several diving experiments. They included a 1964 project in the Bahamas called “Man-in-Sea” in which a submersible decompression chamber devised by Edwin Link allowed divers to stay deeper under water for longer periods.
As part of that project, Mr. Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit, a Belgian engineer, set a record by staying in a submersible dwelling for 49 hours at a depth of 432 feet, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen that allowed them to swim outside the dwelling without harm despite the enormous pressure of the water above. Mr. Sténuit wrote an account of the experiment in the April 1965 issue of National Geographic.
Mr. Lindbergh was also involved in the development and testing of the Navy’s Alvin deep-ocean submersible, which he used during the recovery of the hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean. An American bomber had hit a refueling tanker in midair and dropped four hydrogen bombs, two of which released plutonium into the atmosphere, though no warheads detonated.
He later helped install Seattle’s water treatment system in icy waters as deep as 600 feet. Finding that he liked the area, he bought a secluded Georgian-style home on Bainbridge Island in the mid-1960s and raised his family there. He later farmed salmon in Puget Sound and in Chile as part of an emerging aquaculture industry and sold the fish to airlines and restaurants.
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Charles Lindbergh lived long enough to see Jon flourish in his career and was relieved that his son had not followed him into aviation. “He removed any burden of his own career from his son’s shoulders,” Mr. Berg wrote in his biography, by telling Jon that much of what had first attracted him to aviation in the 1920s no longer existed.
“Thirty years ago, piloting an airplane was an art,” Charles Lindbergh told his son, but it no longer seemed like an adventure.
Rather than become a flyer, Charles Lindbergh added, “I think I would follow your footprints to the oceans, with confidence that chance and imagination would combine to justify the course I set.”
Nach Waxman. He founded Kitchen Arts and Letters, a Manhattan bookstore specializing in food related books.
In one instance, Mr. Waxman counseled Citibank on its banquet menu for the Venezuelan finance minister; in another, he found Indigenous recipes from New Guinea for the American Museum of Natural History’s dining room during an exhibition on rain forests.
“He could make helpful recommendations, obtain the very cookbook you needed, search for out-of-print editions and discuss the authors,” said Florence Fabricant, a food and wine writer for The New York Times.
Mr. Waxman once said that about two-thirds of his customers were culinary careerists purchasing professional tools. “Knives are one tool,” he told The Times in 1998. “Books are another.”
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“It’s really the professional business that’s the gratifying business,” Mr. Waxman told The Times in 1995. “People who are expanding their skills and the scope of their work. I will tell you, when the lease was up a few years ago, I gave serious thought to moving the store to a second floor somewhere just to make it a place for motivated people, not casual drop-ins. The people who come here have a language in common.
“Just sitting and selling books is boring,” he said. “It’s making change and putting books in bags. What’s fun is helping people solve their problems.”
Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.
Jackie Mason, comedian.
Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”
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After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”
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For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.
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Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.
Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.
After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”
The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.
She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.
A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.
A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.
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In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.
John Erman, TV director. Credits include episodes of “Roots”, “Roots II: The Next Generation”, “The Outer Limits”, “Peyton Place”, “My Favorite Martian”, and one episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
NYT obit for John Langley, which (as usual) went up after I posted the other day.
Stuart Damon. He played “Dr. Alan Quartermaine” on “General Hospital” basically forever. He has a few other credits – mostly soaps – beyond that, including “Space: 1999” and “Star 80”.
Robert Sacchi, most famous for “The Man With Bogart’s Face”.
Joanne Linville, actress.
84 credits in IMDB. She did a few 70s cop shows (“The Streets of San Francisco”, “The Blue Knight”, “Barnaby Jones”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, “Columbo” and “Mrs. Columbo”, etc.). She also did a “Twilight Zone” (“The Passerby”), “The Invaders”, and an episode of a minor 1960s SF series.
Sang Ho Baek. He played baseball for George Mason University as a freshman this past season. After the season, he decided to have Tommy John surgery. He had the surgery on June 8th, and passed away on June 12th from complications.
He was 20 years old.
George Stranahan, colorful figure.
His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.
So he did:
The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”
He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.
He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.
He also did some ranching:
In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.
Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.
Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”
For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.
He was, of course, most famous as Herb Tarlek on “WKRP In Cincinnati” (and “The New WKRP in Cincinnati”, which I don’t think I ever saw an episode of).
His second credit in IMDB is “Equinox“, an odd film that we watched one Halloween season. I remember us saying, “Hey, is that Herb Tarlek? It sure looks a lot like him. Wait, it is!” (His first credit is “The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural”, the short film that was expanded into “Equinox”.) And somewhat oddly, he has some pre “WKRP” cop show credits…
…including, believe it or not, “Mannix”. (“Catspaw”, season 5, episode 13. He’s listed in IMDB as “Hypnotized man (uncredited)”.)
Heidi Ferrer, writer for “Dawson’s Creek”. She also wrote “The Hottie & the Nottie”. According to her family, she had been fighting COVID-19 for over a year, and took her own life.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Janet Malcolm, who you may remember from “The Journalist and the Murderer”.
Her essay began with one of the most arresting first sentences in literary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
Her pronouncement enraged the journalistic firmament. Many writers insisted that this was not how they treated their subjects and accused Ms. Malcolm of tarring everyone with the same broad brush.
But what galled some journalists about the piece the most, The Times reported in 1989, “was her failure, and that of her magazine, to disclose that Miss Malcolm had been accused of the same kind of behavior, in a lawsuit filed against her by the subject of an earlier New Yorker article.”
That earlier article, a 1983 profile of the flamboyant psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, led to a libel suit against Ms. Malcolm that hung over her during a decade of litigation and clouded her reputation even longer.
The legal allegations were different: The MacDonald suit accused Mr. McGinniss of fraud and breach of contract; the Masson suit accused Ms. Malcolm of libel. But both suits raised serious questions about journalistic ethics — Dr. MacDonald’s about the nature of writers’ obligations to their sources, and Mr. Masson’s about what constitutes quotations and what license, if any, reporters may take with them.
The journalistic community generally judged Ms. Malcolm harshly, mostly for the finding in the Masson case that she had cobbled together 50 or 60 separate conversations with the loquacious Mr. Masson and made them appear as if he had spoken them in a single lunchtime monologue.
“This thing called speech is sloppy, redundant, repetitious, full of uhs and ahs,” Ms. Malcolm testified in her defense in 1993 during the first of two jury trials. “I needed to present it in logical, rational order so he would sound like a logical, rational person.”
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Ned Beatty. THR. Variety.
Damn. 165 acting credits in IMDB. The man worked. And as far as I’m concerned, he classed up everything he was in.
I apologize, but this is the best Big Man scene I can find on the ‘Tube.
John Gabriel, long time actor on “Ryan’s Hope”. He did a decent amount of other stuff, including several appearances on “77 Sunset Strip”. Interestingly, he was also one of the (uncredited) newsreaders in “Network”.
Lawrence forwarded me an obit for Douglas S. Cramer, TV producer. I wasn’t really planning on noting this, but Lawrence pointed out that his credits do include “Mannix”…
Mudcat Grant, pitcher for the Twins and the Indians.
Grant led the American League in victories, winning percentage and shutouts in 1965 and pitched for 14 major league seasons.
He was remembered as a leading right-hander of his time, but also for his intriguing nickname, his second career singing and dancing at nightspots, and his book profiling outstanding Black pitchers.
Grant, a two-time All-Star, was a mainstay in the starting rotation for the Indians and the Twins for much of his career, then became a reliever, most notably with the Oakland A’s and Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Indians traded Grant to the Twins in June 1964. His best season came the following year, when he went 21-7, turned in a winning percentage of .750 and threw six shutouts. He pitched two complete-game victories against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, losing once, and hit a three-run homer as the Dodgers went on to win the series in seven games.
Cited by Sporting News as the A.L. pitcher of the year, Grant headed a staff that included Jim Kaat, Jim Perry and Camilo Pascual, backed by a lineup featuring Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Bob Allison and shortstop Zoilo Versalles, the league’s most valuable player.
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As a youth Grant performed in a choir. Following the 1965 World Series, he founded Mudcat and the Kittens, a song and dance group that played at nightclubs and hotels during the off-seasons and that also gained international bookings.
“First his musicians — up to seven of them — begin, playing dance music and jazzier stuff, and then the Kittens, some very sexy girls in spare feline outfits, take over the stage to sing and dance and purr,” Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1968. “Then Mudcat comes on. He sings — everything from show tunes to rock ‘n’ roll — and tells jokes and dances.”
“I made way more money in music than I did in baseball,” Grant once said.
Claudia Barrett. She did some Westerns and detective shows (including an appearance on “77 Sunset Strip”, making her the second person from that series to get an obit this week), but was out of acting by 1964.
She may be most famous as the female lead in “Robot Monster“.
Ernie Lively. He knocked around quite a bit (his first credit was 1975, and his last was 2020). He appeared multiple times on “The West Wing”, “Murder She Wrote” and “The Dukes of Hazzard”. However, he seems to be most famous as the father of “Bridget” in the two “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” movies. (“Bridget” was played by his daughter, Blake Lively.)
Professor Hollander joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1962 and taught beloved classes on Dante for 42 years. For medievalist scholarship, the three-volume translation he produced with Ms. Hollander found a wide degree of public interest, including two admiring reviews in The New Yorker.
In one, in 2007, the New Yorker critic Joan Acocella called all three volumes of their translation “the best on the market.” (The Hollanders produced “Inferno” in 2000, “Purgatorio” in 2003 and the last volume of the epic allegorical work, “Paradiso,” in 2007.)
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The couple brought complementary strengths to the project. Ms. Hollander, the author of five books of poetry, attended to the music of the language. Professor Hollander ensured the translation’s accuracy and wrote introductions to each volume, along with notes to the text.
Ms. Acocella estimated that the notes amounted to 30 times the length of “The Divine Comedy” itself. That was Professor Hollander’s style. He interpreted moralistically and theologically passages usually appreciated for their beauty. His erudition wore down fellow scholars. He reported that A.B. Giamatti, the Renaissance expert and former president of Yale University, once asked him, “Are you going to try to ruin this scene for me too, Hollander?”
One of the reasons I wanted to post this here (other than, he sounds like a really nifty guy: you should read the whole obit, especially the part about his stroke) is that I wanted to ask the huddled, wretched masses: does anybody have any experience with Dante translations, and can you recommend a good one?
Other than the Hollander one, Thomas Harris (yes, that Thomas Harris) likes the Robert Pinsky translation. Anthony Esolen (a writer I greatly admire) has also done a transalation
I could just read Rod Dreher’s book and see if he recommends one: I do want to read How Dante Can Save Your Life (and that’s actually what started me on this quest), but I’m having trouble finding a decent copy at a decent price.
(All links are Amazon affiliate links, for the record.)
Speaking of Rod Dreher, this is a beautifully written post about the death of a friend. Followup.
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After the show ended, Mr. Williams dropped out of sight for a while, expressing disappointment in the kinds of roles available to Black men. He returned to Broadway, appearing as an African head of state, with Maggie Smith, in a Tom Stoppard drama, “Night and Day” (1979).
Beginning in the 1980s, he had a busy film career. He played Prince’s abusive father in “Purple Rain” (1984) and Wesley Snipes’s heroin-addicted father in “Sugar Hill” (1993). He was a crazed blackmailer in John Frankenheimer’s “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and a wild-eyed storytelling mortician in “Tales From the Hood” (1995). He had small roles in the blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” (1988) and in Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (1987).
Television brought Mr. Williams new opportunities too. He was a leader of the Attica prison riots in HBO’s “Against the Wall” (1994); a segregationist governor’s manservant in the mini-series “George Wallace” (1997); Muhammad Ali’s father in “Ali: An American Hero” (2000); and a retired C.I.A. operative in 10 “Mystery Woman” movies (2003-07). He did guest appearances on close to 40 series, from “Hill Street Blues” to “Empire.”