Catherine O’Hara. NYT (share link).
Other credits include “A Mighty Wind”, voice work in “Where the Wild Things Are”, and “The Greatest Event in Television History”.
Demond Wilson. Other credits include “Today’s F.B.I.”, “Dealing: Or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues”, and the original “Mission: Impossible”.
Gil Gerard, actor.
Other credits include “Airport ’77”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, and “E.A.R.T.H. Force”.
Robert Samuelson, long time economics columnist for “Newsweek” and the Washington Post.
Norman Podhoretz, conservative political writer.
(Hattip on Mr. Gerard and Mr. Podhoretz to Lawrence.)
Edited to add: archived NYT obits for Mr. Gerard and Mr. Podhoretz.
Joe Ely, one of the great Texas musicians. Variety. NYT (wow!).
I’m generally a little cynical about Texas musicians, but even I have to acknowledge that he was one of the greats. And I could just post YouTube videos all day.
This isn’t an Ely original, but I prefer this to Robert Earl Keen. That is a controversial opinion, I know.
Lawrence describes this as the greatest song ever written about a fighting rooster. Can’t argue with that.
Interestingly, he was an early adopter: he had a BBS system, back in the day when BBS systems were a thing.
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He was 78.
Anthony Geary, actor. Other credits include “UHF”, “Project U.F.O.”, “Shaft” (the TV series)…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Way to Dusty Death”, season 7, episode 2. He was “Eddie Decken”.)
Dave Ward, legendary Houston newscaster.
My family was a KPRC/Channel 2 family when I was growing up in Houston, but everyone was familiar with Dave Ward. Of course, this was back when there were only three channels…
Rob Reiner. I don’t know what to say about this: it seems to be a still breaking story, and the circumstances seem awful.
Three obits today for people who aren’t as notable as usual, but who I find interesting for one reason or another.
Stephen Downing. He was a police officer with the LAPD. One day he picked up the phone at the precinct.
Jack Webb was on the other end of the line. He was looking for a technical advisor for “Adam-12”.
Mr. Downing — who had studied creative writing in the 1960s at what is now California State University, Los Angeles — got the job and quickly surmised that he could offer more than guidance on police policy and tactics. He wanted to write a script.
“Webb said, ‘It’s harder than it looks,’” Michael Downing said in an interview, recalling what his father told him. “My father went home, wrote the script over the weekend and sold it.”
He continued to write scripts (under pen names) while still working for the LAPD.
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IMDB.
Donald McIntyre, opera singer.
The booming voice of Mr. McIntyre, a giant of a man who once seemed destined for a rugby career in his native New Zealand, rang out for more than five decades in the world’s major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where he had 16 major roles from 1975 to 1996.
But “the highlight of my career,” as he put it in his 2019 autobiography, was his performance at Bayreuth as Wotan, the king of the gods, in “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried” in a groundbreaking 1976 production of Wagner’s four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” directed by Patrice Chéreau.
I don’t get to use my “Wagner” tag enough. But anyway:
By presenting the operas, based on Germanic mythology, as a neo-Marxist allegory of capitalist exploitation in the 19th century, Mr. Chéreau’s production — the so-called centenary “Ring,” marking the 100th anniversary of the tetralogy’s premiere at Bayreuth — shattered norms and set the stage for decades of updatings of canonical operas.
Audiences around the world were used to seeing Wagner gods and heroes holding spears and wearing pseudo-Norse winged helmets. While some postwar Bayreuth productions had emptied out the stage for radically spare visions of the classic works, putting Mr. McIntyre’s Wotan in an Edwardian frock coat and dressing the Rhinemaidens as cancan girls caused a near riot at the tradition-encrusted summer festival.
As Mr. McIntyre recalled in his memoir, an enraged older lady beat another spectator over the head with an umbrella; “howls of fury” greeted his entrance onstage in the frock coat; and the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, a onetime confidant of Hitler’s, told Mr. McIntyre that if she came across Mr. Chéreau, she would “shoot him” for politicizing the “Ring.”
Over four years, however, with the production revived, revised and refined each summer, many holdouts eventually warmed to it, and at the final performances, in 1980, there was a 45-minute standing ovation. When Winifred Wagner and Mr. Chéreau finally met, she admitted that “many times I wanted to kill you,” but added, “After all, isn’t it better to be furious than bored?”
There’s something to be said for that.
George Altman, baseball player. He was one of only three people who played in the Negro Leagues, MLB, and in Japan. (Don Newcombe and Larry Doby are the other two.)
At Tennessee A&I State University (now Tennessee State University), he played basketball and baseball. After graduating in 1955 with a degree in physical education, he landed a tryout with the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro Leagues team managed by Buck O’Neil.
Altman took batting practice with the Monarchs before one of their games.
“Evidently I must have impressed them a little bit because as I was getting comfortable on the bench, sitting back to just enjoy the game, Buck came up to me and said, ‘Boy, you’re in there,’” Altman wrote. “It almost scared me to death.”
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After three months with the Monarchs, he signed with the Cubs and was assigned to the Burlington Bees, in Iowa, in the minor leagues. He was drafted into the Army in 1956, and then rejoined the Cubs organization in 1958. He was promoted to the major leagues the next year.
“The thing I like about Altman is the fact that he knows where the strike zone is,” [Ernie] Banks told The Sporting News in 1959. “That’s one thing most young ballplayers don’t know about. They swing at anything they can reach with the bat. Altman waits for his pitch.”
In need of pitching, the Cubs traded Altman to the Cardinals in 1962. St. Louis traded him to the Mets the next year, and the Mets traded him back to the Cubs before the 1965 season. By then, he was struggling with injuries, once joking that he played for Blue Cross.
After Altman hit just .111 in 15 games in 1967, his career in the majors was over. Unwilling to quit playing, he joined the Tokyo Orions in Japan. During seven seasons with the team, he hit 193 home runs, becoming a popular player for his slugging and willingness to learn Japanese phrases.
Michael DeLano, actor. Other credits include “Cover Up“, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, and “Banacek”.
Other credits include “Carnosaur”, “White Lightning”, “Then Came Bronson”, and “The Fugitive”. And the pool of living “Alice” actors gets even smaller.
Former vice president Dick Cheney. WP (archived).
Victor Conte. I’m not sure how many people will remember that name: he was the founder of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), the people who provided “performance enhancing drugs” to various athletes “including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones”.
I feel like everyone is aware of Charlie Kirk. For the historical record, here’s an archived version of the NYT obit.
I don’t mean to give the man short shrift, but I also really have nothing of significance to add.
Polly Holliday. She had a considerable body of work in theater in addition to her TV and movie work. THR. NYPost.
Other credits include “Gremlins”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, and “All the President’s Men”.
I got to wondering about this yesterday, and then a short time later someone else asked me the same question: is anybody from “Alice” still alive?
Linda Lavin, Vic Tayback, Beth Howland, and Philip McKeon are all dead. But Diane Ladd, who replaced Polly Holiday for (roughly) the season after she left, is still alive. (She was also “Flo” in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”.) Celia Weston, who replaced Diane Ladd, is also still alive.
“WKRP” was a great show, and she was a big part of what made it great. (“And, as we know, Jennifer was the smartest person in the room.” Yes, Jennifer was smart, and I’d even agree deceptively smart. But “smartest person in the room”? Hello, Bailey Quarters. Hello, Venus Flytrap. That’s another one of the things that made “WKRP” great: multiple smart people.)
Edited to add: I probably should have put in an IMDB link. Especially since Lawrence asked:
Who is killing the cast of “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain”?
Rahaman Ali. Long time readers know I don’t like covering people just because of their relationship with other famous people. But Mr. Ali has an interesting story.
He was Muhammad Ali’s brother.
Rahaman Ali was a promising amateur boxer who won his first professional fight in an undercard bout the same evening that his brother beat Liston to become the world heavyweight champion. Rahaman went on to earn a middling record of 10 wins, three losses and one draw. He retired after a technical knockout in 1972.
Several figures from the brothers’ youth later said in interviews that Rahaman Ali had been a clever, coachable fighter who just lacked Muhammad’s charisma. When a group of Louisville businessmen got together to sponsor Muhammad, then known as Cassius Clay, they left Rahaman, then Rudy Clay, out of the deal. (The two brothers changed their names and joined the Nation of Islam around the same time in the early 1960s.)
He gave up his career to become part of Muhammad’s entourage, serving as “chauffeur, sparring partner, gofer, chef and cornerman”. Also human wristwatch, because Muhammad wouldn’t wear one: he’d just ask Rahaman for the time.
In 1990, speaking to The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Rahaman Ali expressed regret for not having focused on his own boxing career.
After his own bouts, “Muhammad never said, ‘Good fight, good fight, Rahaman,’” Rahaman said. “I feel he could have come back and congratulated me.”
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Mr. Eig wrote that though Muhammad Ali had once promised always to provide for his brother, Rahaman had begun to live in poverty after a falling-out with Lonnie, Muhammad’s fourth and final wife.
He was sometimes described showing up to Ali Center events attended by his brother yet hardly speaking to him, instead wandering around to introduce himself as “Muhammad Ali’s brother.” Mr. Eig described one such occasion in 2015. Rahaman was not among the list of eminences who got a private audience with Muhammad. Afterward, he walked from table to table, collecting small decorative photographs of Muhammad and putting them into a shopping bag.
Flaco Jiménez, Tex-Mex accordion player. This isn’t my style of music, but even I’d heard of Flaco Jiménez. He was just that big a deal.
David Rendall, operatic tenor. I find this noteworthy because he had a series of…issues? Accidents?
In April 2005, Mr. Rendall was singing Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen when part of the stage collapsed, destroying the set. He was “knocked down at least 15 feet and tried to crawl to safety to avoid being crushed,” he later told The Telegraph of London. “I thought I was going to die,” a fate that awaits Radamès in the opera but is not normally faced by tenors singing the role.
Mr. Rendall had knee and hip replacements and surgery to his shoulder after the accident. Directors stopped calling, and he had to put his home up for sale. “I can’t do what some directors want onstage,” he told the British newspaper The Telegraph. He received some compensation from the theater but sued anyway.
Before that he nearly killed his singing partner.
Mr. Rendall was singing Canio in “I Pagliacci” in Milwaukee in November 1998 — his ringing performance of the great Act I aria “Vesti la giubba” is particularly noteworthy — when he nearly stabbed to death the baritone Kimm Julian.
The last scene includes, in the libretto, just such a stabbing, when Canio kills Silvio, the lover of his unfaithful wife.
“I’d been given my props when we started rehearsing, and these included a knife for the stabbing scene,” Mr. Rendall later told The New York Times. “At the crucial moment, just as I’d done 12 times before, I pushed the button to make the blade retract. But when I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the blade was still out.”
Mr. Julian, blood-soaked, collapsed. The blade had gone three inches into his chest and narrowly missed killing him.
The remaining performances of the show sold out. Mr. Julian made a full recovery. Mr. Rendall was questioned by the police, but ultimately released.
Sgt. Jake Larson (United States Army – ret.). He was 102.
In January 1942, he was stationed in Northern Ireland as part of the Army V Corps, also known as the Victory Corps. It played critical roles in the D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.
As an operations sergeant, Mr. Larson assembled the planning books for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. He ran onto Omaha Beach while German machine gunners sprayed the beach with gunfire.
He told The New York Times in 2019 that he remembered jumping off his landing craft into frigid water up to his neck amid explosions. He hid behind a pile of sand and asked a soldier if he had any dry matches to light a cigarette, as his were all wet.
“I looked again and there was no head under the helmet,” Mr. Larson said. “I thank that guy today. In that instant I had the ability to get up and run.”
He said that he weighed 120 pounds at the time.
“I don’t think the Germans were capable of shooting a toothpick, so I made it to shore,” he said. His unit, though, suffered significant losses.
During the pandemic, his grand daughter set up a TikTok account for him.
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The first video was posted in June 2020, and about 225 more followed as he quickly gained hundreds of thousands of followers.
Initially, he recounted in detail the preparations for D-Day, the operation itself, and the aftermath. But soon he added a recurring feature in which he opened letters and packages from his followers, and shared their contents in videos.
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Mr. Larson was the last surviving member of his company.
“I am the last man,” he told The Times, while wearing a pin on his hat with the shield and motto of his military regiment, “To the last man.”
The Luckiest Man in the World: Stories from the life of Papa Jake on Amazon.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner. NYT (archived). IMDB. This is being well covered everywhere, and I have nothing to add. Except maybe: be careful swimming.
Jimmy Hunt, actor. Interesting story: he retired from acting at 14, and died at 85. IMDB.
Edwin Feulner, Heritage Foundation guy.
Tom Troupe, actor. Other credits include “Planet of the Apes” (the TV series), “The F.B.I.”, “Kelly’s Heroes”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. He was “Ben Holland”.)
Eileen Fulton, actress. Other credits include “Nero Wolfe” (the 1959 series), “Naked City”, and “Our Private World”.
Fred Espenak, astrophysicist. He was known as “Mr. Eclipse”.
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In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.
Lalo Schifrin. He was 93, and dang, what a career.
(Edited to add 6/28: NYT obit, which just went up today.)
The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Fox (1968), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Sting II (1983) and for the song “People Alone” from The Competition (1980).
He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films.
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His résumé also included work on Coogan’s Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004).
An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show’s score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free.
Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s’ CBS drama, Medical Center.
Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his “Tar Sequence” music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts.
IMDB.
Rick Hurst, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Return of the Killer Shrews”, “Supertrain”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.
Carolyn McCarthy, former Congresswoman from Long Island and prominent gun control advocate.
I bet you thought I wasn’t going to post this, didn’t you? Yes, I’ve used it before (though not in this version) but for my money, I think this is the greatest TV theme of all time. (Though I admit it does have some stiff competition.)
Frederick W. Smith, founder and former CEO of FedEx. NYPost. Nothing in the paper of record yet.
Lynn Hamilton, actress. Other credits include “Hunter”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Lady Sings the Blues”, “The Marcus-Nelson Murders” (the pilot for “Kojak”)…
…and “Mannix”. (“Tooth of the Serpent“, season 3, episode 15. This is actually a pretty solid episode.)
Jack Betts, actor. Other credits include “The Assassination of Trotsky”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Dead Men Don’t Die”.
I would like to think she ended up with piles and piles of sweet “M*A*S*H” residuals, especially given how long she was on the show. But there’s a quote in Larry Linville’s IMDB entry:
Then again, she only had one ex-husband.
I have a lot of problems with “M*A*S*H”, and those problems only increase the more MeTV reruns it. But it is interesting that Major Houlihan was actually permitted to have a character arc. This is a nice moment. (It used to be on YouTube, but I think they’re scrubbing anything from “M*A*S*H” that isn’t official.)
Other credits include “Freebie and the Bean”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Mission: Impossible”, “Supertrain”…
…and she was a “Mannix” two-timer. (“Only One Death to a Customer“, season 3, episode 20. She was “Dorothy Harker”. “Figures in a Landscape“, season 4, episode 4. She was “Jill Packard”.)
Catching up from the three-day weekend:
Phil Robertson, noted beard guy and founder of Duck Commander. He was also on a TV show. NYT.
(I kid a little. I kind of liked what I saw of “Duck Dynasty”.)
Marcel Ophuls, French documentary film maker. He was pretty famous for “The Sorrow and the Pity”, but he first came to my attention when “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie” was released. I haven’t seen either one, though I feel obligated to. THR.
Charles B. Rangel, former Congressman from New York City.
James McEachin. Other credits include…well, just about every damn thing. “The F.B.I”, “Play Misty for Me”, “The Bold Ones: The Senator”, “The Bold Ones: The Protectors”…and “Mannix” (“Pressure Point”, season 2, episode 3. He was “Benjy”, but went uncredited.)
Rick Derringer, musician.
Charles Strouse, noted Broadway composer. THR.
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Some of Mr. Strouse’s numbers became so ubiquitous that they seemed revered and reviled by the public in equal measure. Each response in its own way was a badge of honor.
There was the time, for instance, that a stranger accosted Mr. Strouse at a party.
“If I have to hear my daughter sing ‘Tomorrow’ one more time,” he thundered, “I’m going to kill myself — and you!”
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