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Obit watch: October 18, 2022.

Tuesday, October 18th, 2022

General James A. McDivitt (USAF – ret.), Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 astronaut.

When he joined the Air Force in 1951 as an aviation cadet after attending junior college, Mr. McDivitt had “never been in an airplane, never been off the ground,” as he recalled in an interview for NASA’s Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.
He went on to fly 145 fighter missions during the Korean War, became an Air Force test pilot, then was selected by NASA in September 1962 as one of nine astronauts for the Gemini program, the bridge between the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the Apollo missions leading to the moon landings.
Mr. McDivitt was in command of the Gemini 4 capsule, which orbited the earth for nearly 98 hours over four days in June 1965, a record for a two-person spaceflight.

…

Mr. McDivitt’s second and last space mission came in March 1969, when he commanded the Apollo 9 flight, a 10-day orbiting of the earth by a three-person crew. Mr. McDivitt flew with Russell L. Schweickart in a pioneering test of the lunar module, the prototype of the space vehicle that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon four months later. With David R. Scott piloting the Apollo 9 craft, the lunar module disengaged from it, orbited more than 100 miles away and then returned to it.

Official statement from NASA.

His numerous awards included two NASA Distinguished Service Medals and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal. For his service in the U.S. Air Force, he also was awarded two Air Force Distinguished Service Medals, four Distinguished Flying Crosses, five Air Medals, and U.S. Air Force Astronaut Wings. McDivitt also received the Chong Moo Medal from South Korea, the U.S. Air Force Systems Command Aerospace Primus Award, the Arnold Air Society JFK Trophy, the Sword of Loyola, and the Michigan Wolverine Frontiersman Award.

Mike Schank, from “American Movie”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Movies, Obits, Science | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 14, 2022.

Friday, October 14th, 2022

Robbie Coltrane. THR.

He wasn’t someone whose work I have a lot of familiarity with, though I’ve heard good things about “Cracker”. Other credits included some “Blackadder”s, “The Pope Must Diet”, Falstaff in “Henry V”, and “Frasier”.

Dr. Vincent DiMaio, forensic pathologist. He was the chief medical examiner of Bexar County (which covers San Antonio) from 1981 to 2006. In that capacity, he testified for the prosecution against Genene Jones, who was convicted of killing a 15-month-old baby, and may have killed up to 60 other children.

Dr. DiMaio, who had been a medical examiner in Dallas from 1972 to 1981, was later called on to look into allegations that President Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a look-alike whom Soviet officials had trained to assume his identify. Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer and restaurateur, had made the allegations in a 1975 book, “Khrushchev Killed Kennedy,” which he published himself.
After the author persuaded Oswald’s wife, Marina, to have his body exhumed in 1981, Dr. DiMaio was recruited to help examine the remains. But his team quickly debunked the theory, confirming through forensic dentistry that the physical characteristics of the man buried as Oswald matched those on Oswald’s passport and his Marine Corps records.

As a private consultant, he also worked with the authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh and came to the belief that Vincent van Gogh’s death was murder, not suicide. He also testified for the defense in the George Zimmerman trial.

He also wrote four books: Morgue: A Life in Death (with Ron Franscell) was nominated for a “Best Fact Crime” Edgar award. (The NYT says it won, but the Edgar Awards database says The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale was that year’s winner.)

He could bring firsthand experience to his expertise in gunshot wounds: He himself had survived being shot four times by his second wife in a fit of anger. They divorced.

Bernard McGuirk, Don Imus’s producer.

Posted in Books, Law, Movies, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 12, 2022.

Wednesday, October 12th, 2022

Angela Lansbury. THR. Appreciation. Variety.

Everybody has something to say about this, and I don’t have anything profound to add.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 11, 2022.

Tuesday, October 11th, 2022

Austin Stoker, actor. Other credits include “Riding with Death” (“Dimwitted, meaty guy foils criminals by turning invisible.”), “Airwolf”, “Lou Grant”, “Chopper One”, “McCloud”, and “Airport 1975”.

Lawrence sent over an obit from Publisher’s Weekly for Jill Pinkwater, author, illustrator, and spouse of Daniel Pinkwater.

Eileen Ryan. Credits include “Eight Legged Freaks”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Cannon”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.

NYT obit for Nikki Finke, just for the record.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 6, 2022.

Thursday, October 6th, 2022

Kitten Natividad, Russ Meyer star. (Alt link.)

Mr. Meyer also fell for Ms. Natividad, who was married at the time, and they began a relationship that lasted for the rest of the 1970s. And he made her the star of his next movie, which would be his final feature film: “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979).
The movie is often described as Mr. Meyer’s riff on “Our Town” — for instance, it employed an onscreen narrator named “The Man From Small Town U.S.A.” Ms. Natividad plays a woman whose husband’s preoccupation with anal sex leaves her sexually frustrated.
Critics didn’t have much good to say about the movie, which Mr. Meyer wrote with Mr. Ebert.
Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Ebert’s television partner on the film review show then known as “Sneak Previews,” wrote that Mr. Meyer’s “Vixen,” released in 1968, had been “an enjoyable nudie film because it featured the first joyfully aggressive woman we’d seen in a skin flick.” But he added, “Meyer hasn’t grown up in 10 years; if anything, he’s deteriorated.”

…

In 1973 she won the Miss Nude Universe title in San Bernardino, Calif.
She was dancing at the Classic Cat, a club in Hollywood, when a fellow dancer, Shari Eubank, who had starred in the 1975 Meyer film “Supervixens,” suggested she introduce herself to the director. She is said to have done so by poking him in the back with her bare breasts.

…

After Mr. Meyer’s career died out, Ms. Natividad appeared in numerous other movies, including some hard-core pornography, and had small parts in “Airplane!” (1980), “My Tutor” (1983) and a few other mainstream films.

IMDB, probably not safe for work. (In case you were wondering: “Bouncy Topless Woman on Plane (uncredited)”. Also “Airplane II” as “Woman in ‘Moral Majority’ Shirt (uncredited)”.)

Laurence Silberman, noted judge and legal scholar. Lawrence sent over a nice obit from the Volokh Conspiracy.

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 4, 2022.

Tuesday, October 4th, 2022

Loretta Lynn. Alt link. THR.

Her voice was unmistakable, with its Kentucky drawl, its tensely coiled vibrato and its deep reserves of power. “She’s louder than most, and she’s gonna sing higher than you think she will,” said John Carter Cash, who produced Ms. Lynn’s final recordings. “With Loretta you just turn on the mic, stand back and hold on.”

…

In “Hey Loretta,” a wry 1973 hit about walking out on rural drudgery written by the cartoonist Shel Silverstein, she sang, “You can feed the chickens and you can milk the cow/This woman’s liberation, honey, is gonna start right now.” Silverstein also wrote the beleaguered housewife’s lament “One’s on the Way,” a No. 1 country hit for Ms. Lynn in 1971.

…

Survivors include a younger sister, the country singer Crystal Gayle; her daughters Patsy Lynn Russell, Peggy Lynn, Clara (Cissie) Marie Lynn; and her son Ernest; as well as 17 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, and another son, Jack, died before her.
She also leaves legions of admirers, women as well as men, who draw strength and encouragement from her irrepressible, down-to-earth music and spirit.
“I’m proud I’ve got my own ideas, but I ain’t no better than nobody else,” she was quoted as saying in “Finding Her Voice” (1993), Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s comprehensive history of women in country music. “I’ve often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that’s the reason. I think I reach people because I’m with ’em, not apart from ’em.”

Joan Hotchkis. A lot of theater work, and a fair number of TV credits. “The F.B.I.”, “My World and Welcome to It” (somebody needs to release that on home video), “Medical Center”, “Marcus Welby, M.D.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“To Draw the Lightning”, season 5, episode 22. “With Intent to Kill”, season 4, episode 17.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 3, 2022.

Monday, October 3rd, 2022

Sacheen Littlefeather. Alt link. THR.

Ms. Littlefeather was most famous as Marlon Brando’s stand-in at the 1973 Academy Awards. She read part of his prepared speech refusing the award. (The speech was eight pages long, but “but telecast producer Howard Koch informed her she had no more than 60 seconds”.

Robert Brown. Other credits include an episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Primus”, “Run for Your Life”, “Perry Mason”…

…and “Mannix” (“The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress”, season 7, episode 1.)

Posted in 1970s, History, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 28, 2022.

Wednesday, September 28th, 2022

Robert Cormier, actor. He was 33: according to reports, he died from “injuries suffered in a fall”.

Venetia Stevenson. Other credits include “77 Sunset Strip”, “The Third Man” (the TV series), and “The Sergeant Was a Lady”.

Ray Edenton, noted Nashville studio musician.

Ms. Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass,” Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” and Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough” were among the blockbuster country singles, many of them also pop crossover successes, that featured his guitar work.

…

On the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love,” both of which reached the pop, country and R&B Top 10 in 1957, Mr. Edenton played driving, syncopated acoustic guitar riffs alongside Don Everly.

…

Mr. Edenton’s work as a session musician reached beyond country music, with singers like Julie Andrews, Rosemary Clooney, Sammy Davis Jr. as well as rock acts like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and the Sir Douglas Quintet. He played on Mr. Young’s acclaimed 1978 album, “Comes a Time.”

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 26, 2022.

Monday, September 26th, 2022

Dale McRaven. He co-created “Mork & Mindy” (with Garry Marshall) and created “Perfect Strangers”.

…McRaven wrote and produced The Partridge Family while also producing albums from the “band” made up of castmates Shirley Jones, David Cassidy, Danny Bonaduce and Susan Dey.

Zack Estrin.

Estrin had a successful career in TV, starting with credits on Charmed, Dawson’s Creek and Tru Calling, before rising through the ranks to serve as co-executive producer of Fox’s Prison Break.
Estrin was showrunner and executive producer of two ABC paranormal thrillers, The River and The Whispers, as well as co-creator and executive producer of ABC’s Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.

He was only 51.

Rita Gardner.

In 1960, Gardner, who had recently appeared Off Broadway in the Jerry Herman musical review Nightcap, was cast in what would be her signature role: Luisa, or “The Girl,” in the Harvey Schmidt-Tom Jones musical The Fantasticks. Based loosely on Edmond Rostand’s 1894 play The Romancers, the musical told the allegorical story of two fathers who trick their children – The Girl, Luisa, and The Boy, Matt – into falling in love by pretending to oppose the union.
The production, at a tiny Off Broadway venue in Greenwich Village called the Sullivan Street Playhouse, became a huge success, spawning a hit song (“Try To Remember”), running 42 years and boosting the careers of Gardner and other cast members (including Kenneth Nelson, who went on to star in The Boys in the Band, and, most notably, Jerry Orbach, the Law & Order star who enjoyed a long career on stage, film and television).

She did a considerable amount of theater work, both on and off Broadway. She also did some TV, including three of the shows in the “Law and Order” franchise.

Jim Florio. former governor of New Jersey, “who then pushed through a record increase shortly after taking office, incurring public wrath that led to his defeat in his bid for a second term“.

Nancy Hiller, woodworker. (Alt link.)

…she steadily built a quiet but forceful reputation as one of the best woodworkers in the country, turning out custom, precisely built cabinets, side tables and whole kitchens for clients as far as New York and Chicago. The actor Nick Offerman, himself an accomplished woodworker and a member of Ms. Hiller’s legion of admirers, called her an “Obi-Wan Kenobi level master.”

…

There was nothing fancy about her work. She resisted the label “artist,” though people tried to pin it on her. And she deliberately charged less than her peers, not to undercut them, but to make her work affordable to middle-class clients who appreciated good design and hard work.
“She didn’t want to do work that was only accessible to a few people,” Megan Fitzpatrick, a woodworker and editor, said in an interview. “She wanted work that was accessible to everybody.”

Just Jaeckin, director. His most famous film was probably the 1974 soft-core porn film “Emmanuelle”. Other credits include “The Story of O”, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, and “The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak”.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 24, 2022.

Saturday, September 24th, 2022

This is shaping up to be another one of those busy weekends: Mike the Musicologist is in town and we’re going to a fun show.

However, I have a few minutes, and I didn’t want to let Louise Fletcher get past me. THR.

Other credits include “Perry Mason” (the original, twice), “Maverick”, “The Untouchables”, and several appearances on one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Edited to add: slipping another one in. John Hartman, drummer for the Doobie Brothers. I apologize that I don’t have more time to go into detail: I might try to do a musical interlude on Monday.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2022.

Friday, September 23rd, 2022

Hilary Mantel, author of historical fiction.

Ms. Mantel was one of Britain’s most decorated novelists. She twice won the Booker Prize, the country’s prestigious literary award, for “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” both of which went on to sell millions of copies. In 2020, she was also longlisted for the same prize for “The Mirror and the Light.”

She was someone I’d heard of, but never read. I didn’t know, until I read the obit, that those three books are a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, and now I kind of want to read them.

Maarten Schmidt, astronomer. He did a lot of work on quasi-stellar radio sources, or “quasars”.

In 1962, two scientists in Australia, Cyril Hazard and John Bolton, finally managed to pinpoint the precise position of one of these, called 3C 273. They shared the data with several researchers, including Dr. Schmidt, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.
Using the enormous 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in rural San Diego County, Dr. Schmidt was able to hone in on what appeared to be a faint blue star. He then plotted its light signature on a graph, showing where its constituent elements appeared in the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared.
What he found was, at first, puzzling. The signatures, or spectral lines, did not resemble those of any known elements. He stared at the graphs for weeks, pacing his living room floor, until he realized: The expected elements were all there, but they had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum — an indication that the object was moving away from Earth, and fast.
And once he knew the speed — 30,000 miles a second — Dr. Schmidt could calculate the object’s distance. His jaw dropped. At about 2.4 billion light years away, 3C 273 was one of the most distant objects in the universe from Earth. That distance meant that it was also unbelievably luminous: If it were placed at the position of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would outshine the sun.

…

The question remained: If these objects weren’t stars, what were they? Theories proliferated. Some said they were the fading embers of a giant supernova. Dr. Schmidt and others believed instead that in a quasar, astronomers could see the birth of an entire galaxy, with a black hole at the center pulling together astral gases that, in their friction, generated enormous amounts of energy — an argument developed by Donald Lynden-Bell, a physicist at Cambridge University, in 1969.
If that was true, and if quasars really were several billion light years away, it meant that they were portraits of the universe in its relative infancy, just a few billion years old. In some cases their light originated long before Earth’s solar system was even formed, and offered clues to the evolution of the universe.

Sara Shane, actress. Other credits include the 1950s “Dragnet”, “The Outer Limits”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, and the “I Led 3 Lives” TV series.

The Times has published two obits over the past couple of days for people who weren’t all that famous, but were interesting for reasons.

John Train. He was a co-founder of “The Paris Review”. He was an author: among other things, he wrote three books about “remarkable names of real people”.

And he was also kind of a shadowy power broker:

Yet he was also an operator in high finance and world affairs who, by one researcher’s account, had ties to U.S. secret services. Mr. Train founded and ran a leading financial firm devoted to preserving the money of rich families, and he worked to support the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The multifariousness of his career defies definition, but one quality did underlie his many activities. Mr. Train exemplified the attitudes and values of the exalted class he was born into: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the postwar era. He was globe-bestriding but also self-effacing, erudite but also pragmatic, cosmopolitan but also nationalistic, solemn at one moment and droll the next.

Allan M. Siegal. This is one of those internal NYT obits, but Mr. Siegal was an old-line Times guy, so his obit is of some interest.

Mr. Siegal, who started at The Times as a copy boy in 1960, was widely respected, often revered and sometimes feared in the newsroom. Though never the face of The Times — he worked in relative anonymity — he was something like its collective conscience, an institutionalist watching over a place whose folkways he was often called on to codify.

…

“Readers will believe more of what we do know if we level with them about what we don’t” was one of Mr. Siegal’s favorite injunctions, articulated long before media outlets in the digital era began emphasizing transparency in news gathering and editing.
Another: “Being fair is better than being first.”
Mr. Siegal’s knowledge of grammar, history, geography, nomenclature, culture and cuisine was expansive. But on no subject was he more authoritative than The Times itself.

…

In 2003, in the aftermath of a scandal in which the fabrications of a reporter, Jayson Blair, led to the fall of the newsroom’s top two managers, Mr. Siegal headed an internal committee that reviewed the paper’s ethical and organizational practices.
Among its recommendations was the creation of a new job: standards editor. Mr. Siegal was the first to be named to the position, adding the title to that of assistant managing editor, a post he held from 1987 until his retirement in 2006. At the time, his name had been listed among the paper’s top editors on the masthead, which appeared on the editorial page, more than twice as long as anyone else’s.

…

Mr. Siegal was capable of withering criticism. His post-mortem critiques to subordinate editors and reporters — written in precise penmanship with a green felt-tip pen (known as “greenies” among the staff, they showed up well against black-and-white newsprint, he found) — could be as terse as “Ugh!” “How, please?” “Name names” and “Absurd!”
Once, having demanded that a headline combine several complex elements in a short word count, he found the result wanting: “As if written by pedants from Mars,” he declared.
But his rockets were also astute and instructive, guiding generations of editors and reporters in the finer points of style and tone. And perhaps because he was so demanding, his not-infrequent notes of praise were cherished all the more. “Nice, who?” was his trademark comment when he thought a headline or caption, by an anonymous editor, was especially artful. (The answer, the name of the editor, would appear — to the editor’s great pride — in the next day’s compilation of post-mortems, run off and stapled together by copy machine and distributed throughout the news department.)< Other critiques showed a biting sense of humor. “If this bumpkin spelling is the best we can do,” he once wrote of a subheadline that included a reference to “fois gras” (rather than foie gras), “we should stick to chopped liver.” When a headline allowed that the football coach Mike Ditka “should recover” from a heart attack, Mr. Siegal wrote: “Unless God returns our call, we shouldn’t predict in such cases.”

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Science, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 19, 2022.

Monday, September 19th, 2022

Henry Silva, actor. THR. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Bearcats!”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, and “Quark”.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Cristobal Jodorowsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s and the star of “Santa Sangre”.

There was a fatal crash at the Reno Air Races on Sunday. The pilot’s name has not been released yet, as far as I can determine, but I will update when I have more information. Coverage from the Reno paper (by way of archive.is).

Posted in Movies, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Brief note on film.

Wednesday, September 14th, 2022

Lawrence has posted his review of “Soylent Green”, which we watched (in the uncut blu-ray version) recently.

Remember: if the future was bad, Heston was there!

Here: have a clip.

According to IMDB, this scene was ad-libbed by Heston and Robinson.

In his book The Actor’s Life: Journal 1956–1976, Heston wrote, “He knew while we were shooting, though we did not, that he was terminally ill. He never missed an hour of work, nor was late to a call. He never was less than the consummate professional he had been all his life. I’m still haunted, though, by the knowledge that the very last scene he played in the picture, which he knew was the last day’s acting he would ever do, was his death scene. I know why I was so overwhelmingly moved playing it with him”.

Posted in Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 14, 2022.

Wednesday, September 14th, 2022

Ken Starr.

For a time, Mr. Starr was a household name, and his investigation into Mr. Clinton’s affair with a former White House intern, Monica S. Lewinsky, propelled issues of sex, morality, accountability and ideology to the center of American life for more than a year.
He became a Rorschach test for the post-Cold War generation, a hero to his admirers for taking on in their view an indecent president who had despoiled the Oval Office, and a villain to his detractors, who saw him as a sex-obsessed Inspector Javert driven by partisanship. His investigation tested the boundaries of the Constitution when it prompted the first impeachment of a president in 130 years and scarred both Mr. Clinton’s legacy and his own.

…

He went on to serve as dean of the Pepperdine University’s law school in California and as president of Baylor University, but was demoted and later resigned from Baylor after an investigation found that the university had mishandled accusations of sexual assault against members of the football team. The investigators rebuked the university leadership, saying it had “created a perception that football was above the rules.”
Mr. Starr also drew criticism for representing the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein when he was accused of sex crimes against young girls in Florida and eventually made a plea agreement accepting only minor charges and a light sentence.

Borepatch.

Irene Papas. THR. Other credits include “Z”, “The Guns of Navarone”, “We Still Kill the Old Way”, and “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”.

Posted in History, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 13, 2022.

Tuesday, September 13th, 2022

An era has ended. Jean-Luc Godard has died at 91: per his legal advisor, he chose assisted suicide in a Swiss clinic due to “multiple disabling pathologies”. Alt link. THR. Variety.

As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard was one of several iconoclastic writers who helped turn a new publication called Cahiers du Cinéma into a critical force that swept away the old guard of the European art cinema and replaced it with new heroes largely drawn from the ranks of the American commercial cinema — directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.
When his first feature-length film as a director, “Breathless” (“À Bout de Souffle”), was released in 1960, Mr. Godard joined several of his Cahiers colleagues in a movement that the French press soon labeled La Nouvelle Vague — the New Wave.
For Mr. Godard, as well as for New Wave friends and associates like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, the “tradition of quality” represented by the established French cinema was an aesthetic dead end. To them it was strangled by literary influences and empty displays of craftsmanship that had to be vanquished to make room for a new cinema, one that sprang from the personality and predilections of the director.
Although “Breathless” was not the first New Wave film (both Mr. Chabrol’s 1958 “Beau Serge” and Mr. Truffaut’s 1959 “400 Blows” preceded it), it became representative of the movement. Mr. Godard unapologetically juxtaposed plot devices and characters inherited from genre films and emotional material dredged up, in almost diarylike form, from the filmmaker’s personal life.

…

In 2010, Mr. Godard, long at odds with Hollywood, was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, but not without controversy. The award brought into focus long-simmering accusations that Mr. Godard held antisemitic views. He did not attend the ceremony at which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed the honor, and when an interviewer afterward asked him what the award meant to him, he was blunt.
“Nothing,” he said. “If the academy likes to do it, let them do it.”

…

When his parents refused to support him financially, hoping that he would take more responsibility for himself, Mr. Godard began stealing money — from his family members and their friends and even from the office of Cahiers du Cinema. This went on for five years.
He distributed some of the proceeds to fellow filmmakers, lending Rivette enough money to make his film debut with “Paris Belongs to Us.”
“I pinched money to be able to see films and to make films,” he told The Guardian in 2007.
After his mother secured a job for him with a Swiss television outfit, he stole from his employer and, in 1952, landed in jail in Zurich. His father obtained his quick release, but only after Mr. Godard agreed to spend several months in a mental hospital.

…

As the 1960s unfolded, Mr. Godard continued to work at a breakneck pace, turning out sketches for compilation films — including “RoGoPaG” (1963) and “Paris vu Par ” (1965) — alongside features like “Band of Outsiders” (1964), “Une Femme Mariée” (1964), “Pierrot le Fou” (1965) and “Masculin Féminin” (1966).
In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard plucked a character from the French popular cinema, the private detective and secret agent Lemmy Caution, along with the expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine, who had played Caution (or variations on the character) in many films, and dropped him down in a dystopian future ruled by a giant computer.

…

As he grew older, Mr. Godard seemed more intolerant of other film directors. He quarreled bitterly with Truffaut, once his closest friends among the New Wave directors. He was especially scathing toward Steven Spielberg. In the 2001 film “In Praise of Love,” he portrays Spielberg representatives trying to buy the film rights to the memories of a Jewish couple who fought in the French Resistance. Commenting on the film’s sourness, the Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2002 that it “completes Mr. Godard’s journey from one of the cinema’s great radicals to one of its crankiest reactionaries.”
Mr. Godard’s personality was as difficult to warm to as many of his films were. Biographers filled paged after page with details of his feuds and schisms. He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984. When a talk show interviewer reunited Mr. Godard and Ms. Karina in 1987, Mr. Godard’s indifferent response to a question about their romance caused Ms. Karina to leave the set.

This goes unmentioned in the obits, but I have to bring it up: “Made In U.S.A.”, about which I have written before. In brief: Goddard adapting a Westlake Parker novel, except he changed it around considerably and didn’t actually pay Westlake, leading to legal action. Pay the writer, you clown!

Lance Mackey. He won the Iditarod four times.

After receiving a diagnosis of throat cancer in 2001 and undergoing major health problems, Lance emerged to dominate the race, winning an unprecedented four straight Iditarod championships, from 2007 through 2010. During that run he also twice won the 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race between Canada and Alaska with only two weeks’ rest between races.

…

But after his string of wins, he was burdened by personal problems, health scares and drug issues that prevented him from ever again reaching the top of the sport.
The treatment for his throat cancer cost him his saliva glands and ultimately disintegrated his teeth. He was then diagnosed with Raynaud’s syndrome, which limits circulation to the hands and feet and is exacerbated by the cold weather that every musher must contend with in the wilds of Alaska.
In the 2015 race, he couldn’t manipulate his fingers to do simple tasks, like putting bootees on his dogs’ paws to protect them from the snow, ice and cold. His brother and fellow competitor Jason Mackey agreed to stay with him at the back of the pack to help him care for the dogs.

…

Mackey and his wife divorced after splitting up in 2011. She had earlier had three children who Mackey embraced as his own, Outside reported. During Mackey’s last Iditarod, in 2020, he raced with his mother’s ashes. He was later disqualified after testing positive for methamphetamine, and he entered rehab on the East Coast.
Months after the 2020 race finished, his partner, Jenne Smith, died in an all-terrain vehicle accident. They had two children.

He was 52. Cancer got him.

Javier Marías, prominent Spanish novelist. I’d never heard of the guy, though his name got mentioned a lot as a Nobel Prize candidate. But he sounds like someone I would have enjoyed drinking with.

Mr. Marías occupied a reputational perch in Spanish culture that would be almost inconceivable for an American author. His novels were greeted like blockbuster summer films, he received practically every prize available to a Spanish writer, and he was regularly considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the few awards to elude his grasp. Most critics considered him the greatest living Spanish writer; some said the greatest since Miguel de Cervantes.
He was more than just a famous novelist. Mr. Marías wrote a widely read weekly column in El País, Spain’s leading newspaper, where he set down his thoughts on everything from bike lanes (he hated them) to the Spanish government (which he also detested, regardless of the party in power).
He cultivated a public image as a curmudgeon, but in person he was generous and witty, inviting interviewers for long conversations in his dimly lit study, his fingers tweezering an ever-present cigarette. (One column he wrote in 2006, for The New York Times, castigated Madrid’s antismoking laws as “far more befitting of Franco than a democracy.”)

…

He wore his fame lightly, and joked that such comparisons said less about his talents than they did about a general decline in literary achievement. When “The Infatuations” won the state-run National Novel Prize, one of Spain’s highest literary awards, he rejected the $20,000 in prize money, saying he did not want to be indebted to a government of any kind.
He did maintain one such relationship, though: In 1997 he became king of Redonda, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. The fictional Kingdom of Redonda is something of a running in-joke among European artists, who occupy the throne and make up most of its peerage. After his predecessor, the author Jon Wynne-Tyson, abdicated in his favor, Mr. Marías took the royal name Xavier I.
Like most modern monarchs, his role was largely ceremonial, his primary duty being to dispense noble titles to other artistic worthies — he named the director Pedro Almodóvar the Duke of Trémula and Mr. Ashbery the Duke of Convexo.
As of press time, a successor to King Xavier I had not been named, though several pretenders claim the throne as theirs.

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