Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: November 9, 2020.

Monday, November 9th, 2020

A few obits from over the weekend. I’ll start by just quoting the lead from this NYT one:

Norm Crosby, the comedian known as the master of malaprop because he spoke from his diagram and related many funny antidotes, often to a standing ovulation, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 93.

More:

He was trying to develop new material when a club owner made an offhand comment about one of the club’s cabaret dancers. The owner, who had given the young woman a ride, “came into my dressing room and he said to me, ‘Find out if the girl is staying over or if she communicates,’” Mr. Crosby recalled. “I said, ‘My God, a lot of people talk like that. Maybe that would be fun.’ So I started the play on words.”
He tried it in Massachusetts, he added, “and the places I worked, unfortunately, people didn’t get the difference.”
Because of the particulars of his Latin Quarter booking, Mr. Crosby’s routine was not an immediate breakthrough with Times Square audiences either. He started out performing 12-minute filler sets between stage acts during his weeklong engagement, and his jokes were largely ignored. “I was on for five minutes before anybody knew I was out there,” he said.
At the end of the week, a dejected Mr. Crosby packed his bags and went to pick up his check from the manager, who apologized for the difficult assignment and promised him a better slot in the show. Once audiences had a chance to get the joke, he was a hit. He stayed at the Latin Quarter for 18 weeks, after which the prestigious William Morris Agency began representing him.

…

Speaking of Senator Goldwater, he said, “When President Johnson declared war on puberty, it was Senator Goldwater who said, and I quote, ‘Wherever there is unemployment, you’ll find men out of work.’”
He was a pitchman in the late 1970s and early 1980s for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer, appearing in commercials with Mickey Mantle, Henny Youngman and Joe Frazier.
In one commercial, he declared, “I always keep Natural on hand while I watch these athletes perspiring to achieve victory, cause these sporting computations make me so dehybernated.”

Robert Sam Anson, noted magazine writer and author.

Marguerite Littman.

By all accounts hypnotically charming, Ms. Littman, who landed in Los Angeles at midcentury, counted among her closest friends the writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy, as well as Gore Vidal, David Hockney and, famously, Truman Capote, who is said to have distilled that charm into his most famous character, Holly Golightly of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

…

An oft-told story about Ms. Littman goes like this: Mr. Capote and Ms. Littman were sitting at the pool at Cipriani’s in Venice in the late 1970s when Ms. Littman pointed out an extremely thin woman. “That is anorexia nervosa,” she declared. And Mr. Capote replied, “Oh Marguerite, you know everybody.”

Finally, Eddie Johnson. My feelings about the NBA are well known, but this is a depressing story.

Johnson, who was nicknamed Fast Eddie for his explosive first step, was drafted out of Auburn University in 1977 by the Atlanta Hawks. He soon became one of the team’s top players and started the 1980 and 1981 All-Star Games.
“He was built like a linebacker and was as fast as they come with the ball in his hands, putting it on the floor, attacking someone off the dribble,” Mike Fratello, who coached the Hawks during some of Johnson’s nine seasons with the team, said in a phone interview. “And he could defend because of his strength and his ability to move his feet.”

But he also got into cocaine.

Johnson began to use cocaine in college and continued using it during his N.B.A. career. During his professional playing days, he was charged with cocaine possession, writing bad checks and car theft; he was hospitalized at least twice for treatment of manic-depressive disorder; and he successfully fled two men shooting at him in a motel parking lot after what the police said was a drug deal gone wrong.
In 1981, Johnson discussed his cocaine use in an interview with Sports Illustrated. “I partied a little extensively, but I wasn’t abusing it,” he said. “The whole idea of me abusing drugs is outlandish.”

He was traded to Cleveland, went to Seattle briefly, and was banned by the NBA in 1987.

When there were no games left to play, Johnson’s life unraveled. By his own count, he was arrested at least 100 times. Between 1987 and 2001, he was convicted, among other crimes, of burglary, battery, drug sale and possession, violently resisting arrest and grand theft.
He committed his most serious crime in 2006. Prosecutors said he had entered the unlocked front door of an apartment in Ocala where an 8-year-old girl and her three brothers were alone watching television; a babysitter had stepped outside.
The girl testified at Johnson’s trial in 2008 that he had followed her to her bedroom, locked the door and pushed a dresser in front of it before sexually assaulting her. He was convicted of sexual battery and molestation. He received a mandatory life sentence.

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Obit watch: November 8, 2020.

Sunday, November 8th, 2020

Alex Trebek. Jeopardy. Variety. THR.

The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.

Alex is survived by his wife of 30 years, Jean, and children Matthew, Emily, and Nicky. The family has announced no plans for a service, but gifts in Alex’s memory could go to World Vision.

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Obit watch: November 6, 2020.

Friday, November 6th, 2020

Elsa Raven.

She was the real estate agent in “The Amityville Horror” and “Clocktower Lady” in “Back to the Future”. She also did a bunch of TV: no “Mannix”, but “Quincy, M.E.”, “The A-Team”, “Wiseguy”, and one of the “Rockford Files” movies, among other credits.

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Obit watch: November 2, 2020.

Monday, November 2nd, 2020

Great and good FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for actor Eddie Hassell. HouChron.

The Dallas Morning News is basically unreadable if you are not a subscriber, so I can’t link to that. According to the reports I’ve seen, Mr. Hassell died as a result of an apparent carjacking.

Nikki McKibbin. She finished third in the first round of “American Idol”.

Ms. McKibbin rose to national fame in 2002 as a contestant on “American Idol,” the Fox reality show in which singers competed for a record deal. Appearing with an unabashedly punk style, complete with a shock of dyed red hair, she was praised for her soulful covers, including “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler, “Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles and “Piece of My Heart,” which Janis Joplin made famous with Big Brother and the Holding Company.

She was only 42, and passed away due to complications from a brain aneurysm.

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Obit watch: October 31, 2020.

Saturday, October 31st, 2020

Sean Connery. Man, I love that photo. Borepatch. Variety. THR.

I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t been better said by other people. Borepatch beat me on “The Wind and the Lion“. “The Untouchables”. “The Man Who Would Be King”.

And “Zardoz“.

Edited to add: “15 Sean Connery Movies to Stream” from the NYT. Which includes a couple of Bond films, a couple of movies I mentioned above, “The Hunt For Red October”, some other interesting stuff…

…and “The Rock” and “Zardoz”.

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Obit watch: October 30, 2020.

Friday, October 30th, 2020

Dan Baum, journalist and author.

He was somewhat famous for being fired by the New Yorker: more specifically, for tweeting about being fired by the New Yorker.

Over three days in May 2009, he tapped out his saga in more than 350 tweets, each less than 140 characters.
The media world, which always paid close-attention to Twitter, hailed the result as a breakthrough in storytelling: Not only was Mr. Baum pulling back the curtain on an august legacy publication; he was also unspooling his tale in real time, one tweet after another. (He learned as he went along not to do things like break up sentences between entries.)
Mr. Baum ended up producing one of the first examples of what is now called a Twitter thread, in which multiple tweets are linked together to provide more information than can be captured in one entry; today, entire novels are written in threads.

He went on to write several books. The NYT singles out Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans (affiliate link) as his “most acclaimed” book. Among his other books is Gun Guys: A Road Trip (affiliate link), a book that great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn recommends.

NYT obit for Billy Joe Shaver.

Travis Roy.

In the opening seconds of a televised college hockey game on Oct. 20, 1995, Roy, a forward, skated in to body-check an opposing defenseman, crashed into the boards and fell to the ice.
“It was as if my head had become disengaged from my body,” he recalled in a book, “Eleven Seconds: A Story of Tragedy, Courage & Triumph,” written with E.M. Swift. “I was turning the key in the ignition on a cold winter morning, and the battery was completely dead. Not a spark. Just click, and nothing. And right away it passed through my mind I was probably paralyzed.”
He had shattered his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. The injury left Roy a quadriplegic. Eventually he regained some movement in his right arm, which he used to work the joystick on his wheelchair.
College hockey is held in awe in Boston, its athletes worshiped and its fallen participants mourned. Shortly after Roy’s accident, more than 200 special church masses and prayer services were held in his honor, according to his father, Lee.
That reverence for the younger Roy grew as he gave motivational speeches and raised money to help those with spinal injuries and to fund research.
The Travis Roy Foundation, established in 1996 to support people with spinal cord injuries, has given nearly $5 million in research grants and helped more than 2,100 quadriplegics and paraplegics, according to its website.

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Obit watch: October 29, 2020.

Thursday, October 29th, 2020

Cecilia Chiang has passed away at 100.

She was the woman who brought traditional Mandarin cooking to America.

The Mandarin, which opened in 1962 as a 65-seat restaurant on Polk Street in the Russian Hill section and later operated on Ghirardelli Square, near Fisherman’s Wharf, offered patrons unheard-of specialties at the time, like potstickers, Chongqing-style spicy dry-shredded beef, peppery Sichuan eggplant, moo shu pork, sizzling rice soup and glacéed bananas.
This was traditional Mandarin cooking, a catchall term for the dining style of the well-to-do in Beijing, where family chefs prepared local dishes as well as regional specialties from Sichuan, Shanghai and Canton.
In a profile of Ms. Chiang in 2007, The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that her restaurant “defined upscale Chinese dining, introducing customers to Sichuan dishes like kung pao chicken and twice-cooked pork, and to refined preparations like minced squab in lettuce cups; tea-smoked duck; and beggar’s chicken, a whole bird stuffed with dried mushrooms, water chestnuts and ham and baked in clay.”

The NYT obit mentions Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America (affiliate link), in which The Mandarin is profiled. My copy was a Christmas gift last year from my beloved and indulgent sister, and it is a swell book that I enthusiastically recommend. (Here’s a pretty good interview with Mr. Freedman from the “Eat My Globe” podcast.)

Billy Joe Shaver, Texas musician.

He was a close friend and associate of Connie Nelson’s ex-husband, Willie Nelson, who recorded many of Shaver’s songs over the years. He performed here often, in settings ranging from the Austin City Limits Music Festival to honky-tonk haven the White Horse. He appeared four times on the TV show “Austin City Limits.”
In addition to releasing his debut album “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” in 1973, he wrote almost all the songs on Waylon Jennings’ landmark album “Honky Tonk Heroes,” released that same year.
A song Jennings and Shaver co-wrote, “You Asked Me To,” was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1975. That was just one of many Shaver songs eventually recorded by hundreds of artists. Among them: “Ride Me Down Easy” (Jerry Lee Lewis), “Georgia on a Fast Train” (Johnny Cash), “Black Rose” (Willie Nelson) and “Live Forever” (actor Robert Duvall, on the soundtrack to the film “Crazy Heart”). Nelson also included Shaver’s song “We Are the Cowboys” on his latest record “First Rose of Spring,” released in July.
Shaver released more than two dozen albums of his own across the ensuing decades, initially for major labels such as Columbia Records and later for indies like New West and Houston-based Compadre. The most recent, “Long in the Tooth,” came out in 2014 on the Lightning Rod label.

South Texas Pistolero has a nice tribute up to Mr. Shaver and Jerry Jeff Walker.

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Obit watch: October 26, 2020.

Monday, October 26th, 2020

Jerry Jeff Walker.

A waltzing ballad about an old street dancer Mr. Walker had met in a New Orleans drunk tank, “Mr. Bojangles” was first recorded by Mr. Walker for the Atco label in 1968. The song achieved its greatest success in a folk-rock version that reached the pop Top 10 in 1971 with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and went on to be covered by a wide range of artists, among them Nina Simone, Neil Diamond and even Bob Dylan. Sammy Davis Jr. included it in his stage show and performed it on television.

…

The song was by far Mr. Walker’s best-known composition, the only original of his — he typically performed songs written by others — to become a major hit. But perhaps his most enduring contribution to popular culture was as an architect of the so-called cosmic cowboy music scene that coalesced around Armadillo World Headquarters, an iconoclastic nightclub in Austin.
The reception Mr. Walker received in Austin, he often said, signaled the first time he felt truly validated as an artist. “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy,” he told Rolling Stone in 1974, referring to the freewheeling ethos he cultivated with fellow regulars at Armadillo World Headquarters like Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
“It was the first place where, when I got on the stage to play, they said, ‘Of course, why not?’ Other places, they said, ‘Aw, you’re just another Bob Dylan, trying to make it with your guitar.’”

…

In a career that spanned six decades, Mr. Walker never had a Top 40 pop hit. But in his 1970s heyday, he and the Lost Gonzo Band, his loose-limbed group of backing musicians, made a number of definitive Texas outlaw recordings.
Foremost was “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” a boozing, brawling anthem written by Ray Wylie Hubbard that appeared on Mr. Walker’s 1973 album, “Viva Terlingua.”

“Viva Terlingua,” recorded live in Luckenbach, Texas, included other tracks that became signature recordings for Mr. Walker: among them are a dissolute take on Michael Martin Murphey’s “Backsliders Wine,” and “London Homesick Blues,” a tribute to Armadillo World Headquarters, written and sung by Gary P. Nunn of Mr. Walker’s band, with Mr. Walker on backing vocals. With a memorable refrain that began, “I wanna go home with the armadillo,” “London Homesick Blues” later became the theme song of the long-running PBS concert series “Austin City Limits.”

“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most vivid and intense and productive period of my life,” Mr. Walker wrote in his memoir.
“Greased by drugs and alcohol, I was also raising the pursuit of wildness and weirdness to a fine art,” he wrote. “I didn’t just burn the candle at both ends, I was also finding new ends to light.”

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James Randi.

Thursday, October 22nd, 2020

He was 92. NYT. James Randi Educational Foundation.

The rest of Penn’s Twitter feed is worth reading, too. I love the lead of the NYT obit:

James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 92.

But in later years, Mr. Randi was not so much an illusionist as a disillusionist. Using a singular combination of reason, showmanship, constitutional cantankerousness and a profound knowledge of the weapons in the modern magician’s arsenal, he traveled the country exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others.
Their methods, he often said, were available to any halfway adept student of conjuring — and ought to have been transparent to earlier investigators, who were sometimes taken in.
“These things used to be on the back of cornflakes boxes,” Mr. Randi, his voice italic with derision, once told the television interviewer Larry King. “But apparently some scientists either don’t eat cornflakes, or they don’t read the back of the box.”

…

Though his pursuit of Mr. Popoff was a consuming passion, Mr. Randi’s white whale was indisputably Mr. Geller, who had been famed since the 1970s for feats like bending keys and spoons, which he said he accomplished by telepathy.
Not so, said Mr. Randi, who explained that these were ordinary amusements, done by covertly bending the objects in advance.
In 1973, Mr. Geller made a disastrous appearance on “The Tonight Show” in which he was unable to summon his accustomed powers: On Mr. Randi’s advice, the show’s producers had supplied their own props and made sure Mr. Geller had no access to them beforehand.

…

Though he remained a dyed-in-the wool rationalist to the last, Mr. Randi did have a contingency plan for the hereafter, as he told New Times in 2009. “I want to be cremated,” he said. “And I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller’s eyes.”

The world is a smaller, colder, lesser place today.

Randi, responding to someone who compared psychic debunking to “the machine-gunning of butterflies”:

That writer never saw the distraught faces of parents whose children were caught up in some stupid cult that promises miracles. He never faced a man whose life savings had gone down the drain because a curse had to be lifted. He never held the hand of a woman at a dark seance who expected her loved one to come back to her as promised by a swindler who fed on her belief in nonsense. “Nothing is funnier…?” Tell that to the academics who lost their credibility by accepting the nonsense about telepathy that came out of the Stanford Research Institute. “The machine-gunning of butterflies?” Explain that to those whose spent their time and money trying to float in the air because a guru said they could. Are the “dangers of mass popular delusion” not “so menacing”? Mister, go dig up one of the 950 corpses of those who died in Guyana and shout in its face that Reverend Jim Jones was not dangerous.

—Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

Posted in Geek, Magic, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 22nd, 2020.

Thursday, October 22nd, 2020

It is going to be one of those two obit watches days, for reasons.

Marge Champion, of Marge and Gower Champion fame. She was 101.

Ms. Champion was a child of Hollywood, the daughter of a dance coach who taught her ballet, tap and the twirls, kicks and glorious sweeps of the ballroom. She performed at the Hollywood Bowl as a girl and as a teenager was a model for three Walt Disney animated features, her graceful moves transposed to the heroine of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), to the Blue Fairy that gave life to the puppet in “Pinocchio” (1940) and to the hippo ballerinas tripping lightly in tutus for “Dance of the Hours” in “Fantasia” (1940).
But her career came to little until 1947, when she and Gower Champion, a childhood friend, became partners both professionally and personally. In the next few years, they were pivotal in a transition from the escapist musicals of the Depression to an exuberant new age of postwar television, successors to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first dance team to achieve national popularity through television.
The Champions did not possess the sheer magic of Astaire and Rogers or rival their stardom in Hollywood. But as television began to permeate American homes in 1949, they joined the weekly “Admiral Broadway Revue,” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, on the Dumont and NBC networks, and delivered something new: narrative dances that sparkled with pantomime, satire, parody and touches of nostalgia.

…

As their audiences grew into the millions, Hollywood beckoned. The Champions played themselves in “Mr. Music” (1950), a light comedy with Bing Crosby about a sidetracked songwriter. In “Show Boat” (1951), with Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, the Champions were members of the onboard troupe of entertainers and sang as well as danced. In “Lovely to Look At” (1952), a remake of “Roberta” also with Keel and Grayson, the Champions sang and danced a memorable number, “I Won’t Dance.” In their first roles with top billing, they played married dancers loosely based on themselves in “Everything I Have Is Yours” (1952).
The Champions radiated the vitality of young America, looking even in middle age like a couple of fresh-scrubbed teenagers. They were extraordinarily handsome — she a petite brunette with the blushing cheeks and sincere brown eyes of the girl next door; he a tall, slender letterman with a crew cut and a dreamboat face. They were in constant motion, swirling, dipping, leaping. John Crosby of The New York Herald Tribune called them “light as bubbles, wildly imaginative in choreography and infinitely meticulous in execution.”

Father John Vakulskas. No, you probably never heard of him. He was an ordained Catholic priest and spent 45 years in the Sioux City Diocese.

But his major ministry was to carnival workers.

Father Vakulskas was all of 25 and an assistant pastor in Le Mars, Iowa, when he received a call from a carnival owner’s wife. Her husband was seriously ill, and her frantic first impulse was to call a priest for help — because in the days before 911, as Father Vakulskas learned, few hospitals would send help for a carnival worker.
Father Vakulskas prevailed upon a doctor in town to visit the man, as Mr. Hanschen, of the Showmen’s League, noted in a speech in 2016, when Father Vakulskas was inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame. The diagnosis was exhaustion, ptomaine poisoning and double pneumonia. (It had been a cold and rainy summer, and the man had been working around the clock.) The doctor ordered bed rest, the man recovered, and the couple proposed that Father Vakulskas begin a ministry for carnival people.
On his retirement in 2014 from the Sioux City Diocese, Father Vakulskas moved to Florida and served six parishes there.

…

Often clad in robes emblazoned with circus insignia, he baptized babies in fonts sometimes improvised from buckets or tubs, officiated at marriages and heard confessions from Catholics who were, in carnival parlance, copping a plea.
You didn’t have to be Catholic, though, to be welcomed by the man everyone learned to call Father John, a big, burly priest who embraced those of all faiths and of no faith at all. His work began mostly after midnight, when the crowds had left the midway, the lights had been dimmed and the growl of generators ruffled the silence.
“I’m just a common priest,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “It might sound schmaltzy, but I love families and the good times. But I’m there for the sorrows, too. To be accepted on the carnival fairground is a good indication that God is representative.”

…

Pope John Paul II — one of three popes to honor his work — appointed Father Vakulskas International Coordinator of Carnival Ministries in 1993.

And by the way:

He wrote his own obituary, and in it he noted that he was a licensed, instrument-rated airline pilot and an amateur radio operator, and that his passions included sailing, snow skiing, water skiing and cheering for the Chicago Cubs.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Religion, Theatre | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: October 21, 2020.

Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

Spencer Davis, of the Spencer Davis Group.

Mr. Davis co-wrote “Gimme Some Lovin’,” his group’s biggest hit. He played rhythm guitar in the band and occasionally sang lead vocals, lending his baritone voice mostly to blues-oriented material.
But it was Mr. Winwood, who was only 15 when Mr. Davis discovered him, who emerged as the group’s star, singing lead on its hit singles and later becoming an essential figure in British rock through his work with the bands Traffic and Blind Faith and in a long solo career.
After Mr. Winwood abruptly left the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form Traffic, Mr. Davis kept the band going through multiple incarnations. In 1968, a new iteration of the Spencer Davis Group enjoyed two Top 40 hits in Britain, “Time Seller” and “Mr. Second Class.”
The band did not have similar success in the United States, but a song co-written by Mr. Davis and recorded by the band that year, “Don’t Want You No More,” became significant in 1969 when the Allman Brothers recorded a cover version as the opening track on their debut album.

Jon Gibson, minimalist saxophonist.

…best known as a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble from its founding in 1968 until last year. He participated in the first performances of watershed Glass works like “Music in Twelve Parts” and “Einstein on the Beach” and performed with Mr. Glass around the world until health problems prompted his departure in 2019. His mastery of circular breathing and other techniques made him a crucial asset to the development of Mr. Glass’s sound.
“His technical abilities were beyond what anyone else was able to do,” Mr. Glass said in a phone interview, “and he brought everyone else around him up to his level. He was very gentle with everyone, and very generous.” Without Mr. Gibson, Mr. Glass added, “the music wouldn’t have grown in a certain way that it could grow.”
Mr. Gibson collaborated as well with the other three composers now recognized for establishing Minimalist music in the United States: He participated in the world premieres of Terry Riley’s “In C” and Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” and he was briefly a member of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. An inveterate and eager collaborator, Mr. Gibson also worked with composers who had little or no connection to Minimalism, including Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley and Annea Lockwood.
As a composer, he pursued a panoramic span of disciplines, from unaccompanied saxophone performance and tape collage to fully staged opera. His most ambitious creations include “Voyage of the Beagle,” a music theater piece about Charles Darwin, which Mr. Gibson created with the director JoAnne Akalaitis from 1983 to 1987; and “Violet Fire,” an opera about the inventor Nikola Tesla, which was introduced in Belgrade in 2006 and staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the same year.

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Obit watch: October 19, 2020.

Monday, October 19th, 2020

Rhonda Fleming.

She had a heck of a career, going from “Out of the Past” to “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” to “The Nude Bomb” and “Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood”. Never did a “Mannix”, but she did do some Western series, “Police Woman”, “McMillan and Wife”, and “Search”.

(“Search” is apparently available from Amazon as a slightly pricey DVD set. I think it’s print-on-demand, but can’t tell from the listing. I may have to pick this up: on the one hand, it isn’t like we don’t already have enough TV series to watch on Saturday nights. But on the other hand, “Search” only had 23 episodes.)

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Obit watch: October 15, 2020.

Thursday, October 15th, 2020

Erin Wall.

She was a soprano.

Lyric Opera [of Chicago] was an artistic home base for Ms. Wall, who received her professional start as a member of the company’s prestigious young artist program, now known as the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center. Chicago was the site of the dramatic season-opening performance that jolted her nascent career in 2004, when she jumped in with just a few hours’ notice to replace an ill colleague as Donna Anna in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

…

From Rice, she entered Lyric Opera’s young artist program in 2001. She swiftly established herself as a rising talent: a lyric soprano with a full-bodied yet agile voice and dazzling facility in her top register. It was an instrument ideal for youthful roles like Marguerite in Gounod’s “Faust,” which she sang in Chicago in 2003, as well as Mozart’s Donna Anna, Pamina (in “The Magic Flute”) and Konstanze (in “The Abduction From the Seraglio”).
“The voice definitely evolved,” Michael Benchetrit, Ms. Wall’s manager, said in an interview. “The middle and lower parts became richer with time.”
This evolution came as she increasingly took on Strauss roles that benefited from more tonal opulence, like Arabella, Chrysothemis (in “Elektra”) and Daphne. When she starred in “Daphne” at the Santa Fe Opera in 2007, Mr. Benchetrit said, the effect was overwhelming.

…

Ms. Wall made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2009, as Donna Anna. She returned as Helena in Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 2013 and Arabella in 2014. Though acclaimed in staged opera, she concentrated more of her time on concert work, in pieces like Strauss’s “Four Last Songs,” Britten’s “War Requiem,” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and, especially, Mahler’s mighty choral Eighth Symphony, in which she was captured on several recordings.
She was a frequent partner of prominent conductors, including Donald Runnicles, Christoph Eschenbach, Michael Tilson Thomas, Andris Nelsons and, perhaps most notably, Mr. [Andrew] Davis [Lyric Opera’s music director – DB]. Earlier this year, he and Ms. Wall released a recording of Massenet’s “Thaïs,” an opera they also performed together in concert at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011.

She was only 44 years old. Cancer got her.

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 14, 2020.

Wednesday, October 14th, 2020

Conchata Ferrell.

Yes, yes, “Two and a Half Men”, but she did a lot of other work too.

Ms. Ferrell had achieved acclaim decades earlier in New York theater, appearing as the prostitute April in Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot L Baltimore” (1973), a role he wrote for her. The play won multiple awards, including an Obie for best Off Broadway play, and ran for three years.
Ms. Ferrell collected her own Off Broadway prizes, including the Drama Desk Award for best actress in a play and an Obie, for her performance as a disillusioned waterfront-bar owner in “The Sea Horse” (1973).
She received her first Emmy nomination in 1992 for a recurring role as Susan Bloom, a ruthless entertainment lawyer with more money than manners, on “L.A. Law.”
She later said the three favorite characters she had played were Berta, April and Susan Bloom. What they had in common, she said in a 2018 interview with The Huntington Quarterly, a West Virginia magazine, was “a zest for living life to the fullest in the best way available to them.”

…

She notably played the judge who refused to annul Ross and Rachel’s Las Vegas marriage on “Friends” (1999). But she often went dramatic too, playing a homesteader’s wife in the 1979 movie “Heartland” and appearing on series including “Knots Landing,” “Lou Grant” and “Touched by an Angel.” In a 1986 television version (and Los Angeles stage version) of William Inge’s heart-wrenching drama “Picnic,” she played the kind widow who hires a dangerous drifter.
Ms. Ferrell also had small roles in big movies, including “Network” (1976), as a television executive appalled by Faye Dunaway’s series ideas, and “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), as a neighborhood lady in pink hair rollers. She starred as a pizzeria owner in “Mystic Pizza” (1988), with a cast that included a young Julia Roberts. The two reunited in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), with Ms. Ferrell as Albert Finney’s secretary.

She never did a “Mannix”, but she did appear on “The Rockford Files” and “Quincy, M.E”, and had a recurring role as “The Fox” on both “B.J. and the Bear” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, along with a bunch of other guest shots.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 13, 2020.

Tuesday, October 13th, 2020

Joe Morgan, baseball player and television commentator.

At 5-foot-7 and 160 pounds, Morgan, who was sometimes called Little Joe, was among the smallest great players in the history of the game. He was also among the greatest second basemen, and some, like Bill James, the groundbreaking interpreter of statistics, say he was the greatest of all.
He won five consecutive Gold Gloves, led National League second basemen in fielding percentage three times and finished second six others. In an era when sliding base runners routinely tried to take out the second baseman to prevent double plays, Morgan was known as especially tough in the pivot.

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In 1975, that team, whose stars included future Hall of Famers at catcher (Johnny Bench), first base (Tony Perez) and second base (Morgan), and the all-time hits leader (Pete Rose) at third, won 108 games and defeated the Boston Red Sox in one of the most memorable World Series in history.
Morgan, the league’s M.V.P., batted .327 for the season, hit 17 homers, drove in 94 runs, stole 67 bases and won a Gold Glove. He didn’t have a great postseason, but in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the Series, he drove in the winning run with a single to center. The next year, again the league M.V.P., his production was arguably even better: a .320 batting average, 27 homers, 111 runs batted in, 60 stolen bases in just 69 attempts, a league-leading slugging percentage (.576) and another Gold Glove.
The Reds weren’t quite as dominant during the season — they won six fewer games — but they powered through the postseason, sweeping the Philadelphia Phillies in three games for the National League pennant and the Yankees in four games in the World Series.
“Joe Morgan was a genuinely great player,” Bill James wrote in his analytic volume, “The Bill James Historical Abstract.” His 1976 season, James wrote, which included leading the league in sacrifice flies (12) and fewest double plays hit into (two), “is the equal of anything ever done by Lou Gehrig or Jimmie Foxx or Joe DiMaggio or Stan Musial.”

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He began working as a broadcaster in the mid-1980s, first locally in Cincinnati and San Francisco, later for ABC, CBS and NBC. But his public profile did not prevent his being mistaken for a drug courier and knocked to the ground by policemen at Los Angeles International Airport in 1988. Morgan, who claimed he was targeted because he was Black, sued the city. The case was settled in 1993 for $796,000.
Morgan’s most prominent television role was on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball,” where he appeared from 1990 to 2010. Teamed as color commentator with Miller, an upbeat play-by-play man who was the lead broadcaster for the Giants and a Hall of Fame inductee in 2010, Morgan was a popular figure within the game and with many fans, but over time he grew crusty and disputatious on the air — “the Grumpy Old Analyst,” Richard Sandomir called him in The New York Times.
A self-described “baseball traditionalist,” Morgan was especially known, and sometimes ridiculed, for the disdain he frequently expressed for the statistics-based approach to the game described in Michael Lewis’s best-selling 2003 book, “Moneyball” — a philosophy of roster-building and game management that has now been accepted as wisdom by analysts of every stripe and adapted in various modifications by virtually every team in the major leagues.

NYT obit for Margaret Nolan.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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