His birth name was Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani. To the world at large he was Valentino, the last emperor of fashion. The Chic. He passed away at one of his residences, in Rome, on Monday, January 19. He was 93 years old
Valentino was the definition of fashion, luxury, and pure aesthetics—you need only look to his collections for proof as much: simplicity distorted by a single theatrical touch (a bow, a puff, a neckline, a detail, a plunge bearing the heart). Look to that shade of red which takes his name to understand that he wasn’t just an excellent couturier (itself no small thing), he was a master of dreams devoted to beauty and enchantment. Beauty has always been the pinnacle to which Valentino relentlessly aspired, a passion he could not do without. And we are not just talking about red carpets or princess gowns, but the all-around beauty that permeated every moment of his life, flowing out of everything he did.
He was born on May 11, 1932, in Voghera, in the province of Milan. His father, Mauro Garavani, married Valentino’s mother, Teresa, and opened a barbershop before turning to a career in wholesaling electrical equipment, which guaranteed the family a certain affluence. In 1925 his mother gave birth to Valentino’s sister, Wanda, then, in 1932 came a baby boy who was given the same name as his paternal grandfather, Valentino.
The little boy went to school but was absent-minded, always hunched over books and filling the pages with endless drawings. He always loved to draw: he did it all the time. From those mountains of sketches came his wonderful ideas, recounting that the thunderbolt for fashion struck him very early, when he was six years old. That’s when the official engagement of Maria Francesca of Savoy, the last daughter of Victor Emmanuel III, to Prince Louis of Bourbon Parma was announced, with Maria dressed in a green lamé dress for the occasion. It was this sight that sparked an interest in fashion for young Garavani.
From there, he began spending more time in his aunt’s fabric store, making design his primary hobby. Which, of course, soon became more than a pastime. He’d eventually take a course in figurine design at the Santa Marta Institute in Milan. While pursuing his dreams Valentino enjoyed financial support of his father without much drama, even when he decided to move to Paris to further his education. Improvisation was not for him, he preferred to learn the fundamentals, get into the thick of things, make the art of the couturier his own. He enrolled in the prestigious school of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and was put in Jean Dessès’s workshop, where he learned everything about technical construction, fabrics and color relationships.
Roger Allers, the Oscar- and Tony-nominated animated film director best known for helming 1994’s The Lion King, died Saturday. He was 76.
Allers died suddenly at his home in Santa Monica following a short illness, a Disney Animation spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter.
Born on June 29, 1949, in Rye, New York, Allers found a passion for animation at a young age and went on to receive a fine arts degree from Arizona State University.
He made his directorial debut with The Lion King animated feature for Walt Disney Animation Studios alongside co-director Rob Minkoff. The movie was a massive box office success, earning nearly $979 million worldwide, not adjusted for inflation, in its initial theatrical run, making it the highest-grossing film of 1994.
Before The Lion King, Allers worked on several other Disney animated features, including Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Oliver and Company and Rescuers Down Under. He also helped develop 1982’s Tron, the first major feature film to extensively use CGI.
“Roger Allers was a creative visionary whose many contributions to Disney will live on for generations to come,” Disney CEO Bob Iger shared in a statement. “He understood the power of great storytelling — how unforgettable characters, emotion and music can come together to create something timeless. His work helped define an era of animation that continues to inspire audiences around the world, and we are deeply grateful for everything he gave to Disney. Our hearts are with his family, friends and collaborators.”
Allers also adapted the screenplay for the Lion King Broadway musical with Irene Mecchi, earning him a Tony nomination in 1998 for best book of a musical.
In 2006, he co-directed the animated movie Open Season for Sony Studios and wrote and directed the animated adaptation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in 2015.
Allers also received an Academy Award nomination for best animated short film for 2006’s The Little Matchgirl.
His other credits include Watership Down, The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie, Return to Never Land, Ted, Back to the Jurassic and Ted 2.
Allers is survived by his children, Leah and Aidan, and his partner, Genaro.
“Every once in a while, life puts someone in our path who helps us see more clearly,” Lion King producer Don Hahn wrote in a tribute. “Roger was that person for me, and for so many of us who worked with him. He was the rarest of people: endlessly curious, playful and deeply human, always eager to tell stories that reminded us of the wonder in life. He lives on in his work, and in the hearts of all of us who were lucky enough to know him.”
Princess Irene of Greece and Denmark, the inseparable younger sister of Spain’s Queen Sofía, has passed away in Madrid’s Zarzuela Palace. A statement from the Royal House reads: “It is with deep sadness that the Greek Royal Family announces that HRH Princess Irene, beloved sister and aunt, passed away on Thursday, January 15th 2026, at 11:40 local time, in Zarzuela Palace in Madrid surrounded by loved ones. Details will follow regarding the funeral procession.”
Princess Irene was 83 at the time of her death. She leaves behind her a silent, but decisive mark in the history of the Greek and Spanish monarchies. Close confidant of King Felipe VI’s mother, for decades, Princess Irene became a silent witness of the ins and outs of the Spanish monarchy. She led an interesting life marked by her constant renunciation of the limelight, absolute loyalty to her family, and a spirituality influenced by the years she lived with her mother in India.
In her last moments, she had been accompanied by Queen Sofía, who canceled her schedule of activities in Palma de Mallorca to be by her sister’s side, Hello! magazine reported.
Settled in Zarzuela since the mid-eighties, for more than forty years, Princess Irene became the main support of her older sister, although she used to say that her role was not “official.” With an intense, unpredictable, and luminous personality, Irene won the affection of her large family, who affectionately called her “Aunt Pecu” (for being so peculiar), with whom she spoke in English and Greek despite speaking correct Spanish, and who loved and accompanied her until the end. She never married, but remained close with her kin. Queen Sofía and King Juan Carlos of Spain’s daughter, PrincessCristina, even named her only daughter Irene in her aunt’s honor.
Princess Irene was born on April 11, 1942 in Cape Town, South Africa, in the middle of World War II, while her family lived in exile due to the Nazi occupation of Greece. The first months of her life were spent on a farm, surrounded by domestic animals and wild landscapes, in an environment far from the European palaces that would come to define her adulthood.
From an early age, Princess Irene showed a personality of her own. She studied archaeology in Greece, another common interest with her sister, but soon broadened her horizons to the East. She spent six years in India, where she came into contact with the Gandhi family and was trained in comparative religious studies in ancient Madras.
Princess Irene of Greece performing Bach at the Royal Festival Hall in London, 1969.
Con Pederson, the CGI pioneer who spent two and a half years alongside Douglas Trumbull creating the dazzling Oscar-winning visual effects for the Stanley Kubrick masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died. He was 91.
Pederson had Alzheimer’s and died Friday at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills,his son, Eric Pederson, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Two-time Oscar-winning VFX artist John Nelson noted in a statement that Pederson “could animate by hand and could program the computer to do animation that normal programs could not achieve. He was a Renaissance man and an artist.”
While working for Southern California-based Graphic Films, which produced content for NASA, Pederson wrote and directed To the Moon and Beyond, a 15-minute film narrated by Rod Serling that screened at the Transportation and Travel Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. (Trumbull, hired by Pederson a few years earlier, painted a rotating spiral galaxy for the project.)
Kubrick saw To the Moon and Beyond and invited Pederson to his Manhattan apartment to read the script and view storyboards for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He and Trumball were hired in summer 1965 to go to England, and they worked on the movie through March 1968.
As one of four special photographic effects supervisors credited on the 1968 classic — Trumbull, Wally Veevers and Tom Howard were the others — Pederson helped create stars, planets, spaceships and the unforgettable five-minute Star Gate sequence.
Kubrick would receive the Academy Award for special effects in 1969, the only Oscar of his sterling career.
“Stanley had this sense of adventure when it came to filmmaking,” Pederson said in a 1999 interview. “He was a cameraman. He was a photographer. He was an extraordinary filmmaker. I once asked him kind of stupidly how he thought a certain director would have done something we were discussing, and he said, ‘How would I know? I’ve never seen anyone direct.’”
Conrad Alan Pederson was born in Minnesota on April 15, 1934. With his parents and two older sisters, he moved to Inglewood in 1943, and his folks helped build bombers and fighters on assembly lines during World War II.
Pederson began writing science fiction at age 14 and after two years at Los Angeles City College majored in Art and Anthropology at UCLA. He discovered animation in Westwood in the college theater department, made a couple of student films and was hired at Disney, where he was introduced to German American aerospace engineer and space architect Wernher von Braun.
In 1956, Pederson was drafted into the U.S. Army and through his Disney connections wound up working for von Braun in graphic engineering, drawing illustrations about rockets and space travel. After the service, he went back to Disney before heading to Graphic Films.
In Michael Benson’s 2018 book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, Trumbull noted that the postproduction process on 2001 was “epic in its complexity, and Con was the smartest guy in the room. 2001 absolutely would not have happened without Con.”
Pederson ran a “war room” where VFX camera shots were planned, scheduled, tracked and evaluated. Eight to 10 elements frequently were added to the original camera negative one by one before the film would be processed. It could take months to see the finished shot, and should Kubrick not approve, each step would have to be repeated.
Pederson took a couple years off after 2001 and eventually teamed with Robert Abel to launch the production company Robert Abel & Associates, creating animated logos for ABC and the Whirlpool Corp. using techniques he had developed for Kubrick.
Nelson first met Pederson at Able’s and said “he taught me (among many other things) that computer camera moves need imperfection to feel more realistic.”
Pederson’s son remembers his dad coming home from work sometime in the 1970s and saying, “We’re going to use computers” on the job.
After Abel’s shuttered in 1987, Pederson joined Metrolight Studios and served as a creative lead alongside Tim McGovern. There, he was a VFX supervisor on HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, the 12-part 1998 documentary about the Apollo space program, and an animator on the films Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), Imposter (2001), Gods and Generals (2003) and View From the Top (2003).
He also served as an animator for Rhythm & Hues on the 2004 movies Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed and Garfield: The Movie.
In addition to his son, survivors include his second wife, Carole; his first wife, Sharleen; and his grandchildren, Alexandre and Viviane.
Former THR staffer Carolyn Giardina contributed to this report.
Meyer Gottlieb, the Holocaust survivor who helped relaunch Samuel Goldwyn Films, where he produced features including Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and the 2013 remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, has died. He was 86.
Meyer died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, his wife, Pattikay Gottlieb, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Gottlieb was named president and COO of Samuel Goldwyn Co. in 1988, having assisted Samuel Goldwyn Jr., son of the Oscar winner and legendary Hollywood mogul, in reviving the label a decade earlier.
He served as a co-producer on Master and Commander (2003), a co-production with 20th Century Fox, Miramax and Universal that was directed by Peter Weir and starred Russell Crowe as a brash Royal Navy captain doing battle during the Napoleonic Wars.
The epic — a passion project of then-Fox executive Tom Rothman — won two Oscars and was a critical and commercial hit.
“Meyer was a gentleman of the old school,” Rothman, now chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, said in a statement. “I was fortunate to work for him when he ran the Samuel Goldwyn Co., in the heyday of independent film. I learned an enormous amount from him — most importantly, that it is possible to make a life in Hollywood without sacrificing integrity and honesty, both of which he embodied entirely, along with smarts, wisdom and kindness.”
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based on James Thurber’s 1939 short story, starred Ben Stiller in the role of the daydreamer made famous by Danny Kaye in the 1947 Samuel Goldwyn original.
As an executive, Gottlieb also had a hand in such other films as Mystic Pizza (1988), Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994), The Preacher’s Wife (1996), Lolita (1997), Tortilla Soup (2001), Super Size Me (2004), The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Amazing Grace (2006).
Gottlieb was born in Poland in September 1939, shortly before Germany invaded his country. After the Nazis’ rout, he and his family went on the run for months, retreating with the Russians before winding up in Ukrainian labor camps for four years.
In a 2016 interview with THR’s Peter Flax, Gottlieb recalled the wintry night when he was 3 or 4 and his father — a carpenter who had become an officer in the Polish army — wrapped the body of his baby brother in a tallis (prayer shawl) and carried it from a camp into the woods for a proper burial. (Ninety percent of his family was killed by the Nazis, he said.)
Gottlieb also remembered watching his dad being taken away in a black bus, conscripted by the Russian military to fight the Germans near the end of the war. He died while fighting in 1945. Meyer and his seamstress mother would be expelled with thousands of others to a displaced-person camp in the U.S. sector in Germany.
Meyer Gottlieb’s parents, Nechama and Schlomo, circa 1936.
WESLEY MANN/COURTESY OF SUBJECT
“I have a very vivid memory of running after a truck to get some food and being so weak from hunger that I passed out,” Gottlieb said in 2007. “When I see news footage today of what is happening in Africa and other countries where genocide is taking place, it brings back the same horrible memories.”
After another stretch behind barbed wire, he and his mom were about to immigrate to Israel when a great aunt in Los Angeles spotted their name on a Red Cross list and sponsored their journey on the USS Pershing to the U.S.
“I feel like I have two lives,” Gottlieb said. “I was born in Poland initially, and I was born again in America.”
They arrived in Boston, then took a train to Los Angeles. Gottlieb spoke only Yiddish but learned English from schoolmates and went on to receive his undergraduate degree and his master’s from UCLA. He served as a senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP before he helped launch the new Samuel Goldwyn Films in June 1978, shortly after Goldwyn Jr. had gained possession of a library of 52 classic films from his dad’s studio. (Goldwyn Jr. died in 2015.)
In 2007, inspired by the Margarethe von Trotta-directed film Rosenstrasse (2003), a true story about German women who protested in Berlin in 1943 to save their Jewish husbands, Gottlieb began to speak publicly about his Holocaust experience. Later, he would make appearances on behalf of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Los Angeles.
“As a survivor, you have to prove that there is a reason for your existence,” he told Flax. “You are driven to justify the fact that you survived what others did not. And part of that justification is to do something that will help repair the world.”
In addition to his wife, survivors include his daughters, Deborah and Robin, and their husbands, Steve and Golan; and his grandchildren, Sabrina and Eric.
The world lost a host of icons in 2025, from nonagenarians with decades of great work behind them to younger stars whose lives were cut tragically short. Read on to remember 23 cultural figures who left their marks on the world of film, TV, music, fashion, sports, and, in one case, science—and find out where you can read more about each of them in the pages of Vanity Fair. Though their bright lights have dimmed, they won’t be forgotten.
Brigitte Bardot, the iconic international screen siren who retired from acting to become an animal rights activist, died Sunday, according to a representative from animal protection charity The Brigitte Bardot Foundation. She was 91.
Bardot ranked among the most beautiful women of all time, according to Esquire and legions of admirers. At the height of her fame, her last name was as indelible as Marilyn Monroe’s first. “Along with General de Gaulle and the Eiffel Tower, I am perhaps the best-known French person in the world!” she once wrote. French writer Simone de Beauvoir observed in 1962 that “Bardot is as important an export [to France] as Renault automobiles.” In 1970, she was immortalized in sculpture by artist Aslan as Marianne, the personification of the French Republic.
Bardot, also known as B.B., rose to stardom in the 1950s and ’60s, when foreign films found mainstream success in America, partly because of their more sexually explicit content. In Bardot’s 1956 breakout film, her then husband Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, she is first glimpsed sunbathing naked. Playing off the film’s title, the provocative tagline for the American release was, “But the Devil invented Brigitte Bardot.”
According to Vadim’s New York Timesobituary, a climactic scene in that film in which Bardot danced barefoot on a table “is often cited as a breakthrough in what was considered permissible to show on screen.” Vadim is quoted: “There was really nothing shocking in what Brigitte did. What was provocative was her natural sensuality.”
The luxuriantly blonde Bardot was a fresh, naturalistic departure from the more glamorous and studied stars of the era. She was “a sex symbol, but talked like a woman you could meet on the street,” according to the documentary Discovering Brigitte Bardot.
Bardot made roughly 50 films between 1952 and 1973, the year she quit acting. Though none of her films are considered classics, she was a major box office draw, and she herself became a style icon who popularized the bikini and wearing tops off the shoulder. She worked with several distinguished directors, including Anatole Litvak (Act of Love, 1953), Henri-Georges Clouzot (La Vérité, 1960), Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt, 1963) and Louis Malle (Viva Maria!, 1965).
In her memoir, Initiales B.B.—published in France in 1996—Bardot also dished about her many lovers, including actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Warren Beatty and musician Serge Gainsbourg. She wrote of gaining entrance to Marlon Brando’s hotel room disguised as a chambermaid, then fleeing because of the room’s smell and slovenliness.
Filipino tech entrepreneur Diosdado “Dado” Banatao died at the age of 79.
Banatao is known for pioneering the technology that made personal computers possible, thus putting Silicon Valley on the map. He also co-founded three technology companies and started a nonprofit to help support Filipinos in STEM fields.
“Rising from humble beginnings in Cagayan, he went on to co-found transformative technology companies and played a pivotal role in advancing the global semiconductor and graphics industries,” said the National Federation of Filipino American Associations on LinkedIn in honor of Banatao’s passing. “Just as importantly, he invested deeply in people opening doors, mentoring founders and strengthening communities.”
According to a post on his website by his family, Banatao passed away peacefully on Christmas Day, surrounded by family and friends. His family said he “succumbed to complications from a neurological disorder that hit him late in his life.” He would have been 80 in May.
His family wrote, “We are mourning his loss, but take comfort from the time spent with him during this Christmas season, and that his fight with this disease is over.”
Banatao was born to a rice farmer and housekeeper in Iguig, Cagayan, according to ABS-CBN. According to his 2015 documentary, he didn’t have access to electricity growing up and was taught math using bamboo sticks. He said it was typical for his classmates to stop going to school after sixth grade to help their parents work in the fields, but his father told him to continue studying.
He developed a love for engineering and graduated with a degree in electric engineering from Mapua Institute of Technology, a private research university in Manila. He said in his documentary that there were no design jobs for engineers in the Philippines, so he moved to the U.S. and pursued a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University. He graduated in 1972.
Soon after college, Banatao worked as a design engineering at Boeing. ABS-CBN reported that he then went on to work for other technology companies, like National Semiconductor and Intersil. While at Commodore International, he designed the first single chip, 16-bit microprocessor-based calculator.
He is credited with developing the first 10-Mbit ethernet CMOS chip in 1981 while working at Seeq Technology. He also developed the first system logic chipset for IBM’s PC-XT and PC-AT and one of the first graphics accelerators for personal computers. These inventions allowed for faster computer performance, according to Inquirer.net. The Harvard Club of Southern California credited Banatao for bringing GPS technology to consumers.
“Dado is the man who invented a graphical chipset that took us from black screens with green writing to the dynamic displays we have today,” the club wrote for a description of a lecture he gave in 2017 for the Harvard Business School Association of Orange County.
Banatao founded the chipset company Mostron with a business partner in 1984. One year later, he also co-founded Chips and Technologies, a graphics adapter company that Intel later acquired for around $430 million.
The CEO of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, expressed his grief at Banatao’s passing on LinkedIn, crediting his friend for challenging him when he became CEO of Cadence Design in 2009.
“I am forever grateful for your challenge and encouragement as I continue my life journey following your footstep as CEO of Cadence Design for 12 years and continuing as CEO intel,” Tan said in his post. “Dado, you are the best technology entrepreneur and legend from (the) Philippines.”
He then founded S3 Graphics in 1989, which led the local bus concept and developed Windows accelerator chips, becoming the third-most profitable technology company in 1993. In 2000, Banatao entered the world of venture capital by founding Tallwood Venture, a firm focused on investing in semiconductor technology, and served as managing partner.
While working at Tallwood in 2011, Banatao told Bloomberg News that he encouraged his companies to expand internationally, focusing particularly in China, due to greater government support and lower production costs.
“It used to be that we started companies here and we didn’t think about going offshore until we were substantially big,” Banatao said when he was 64 at his office in Palo Alto. “At the outset now, as we fund the company, we think about going outside right away.”
Dinakar Munagala, co-founder and CEO at Blaize, Inc., a computer hardware manufacturer in El Dorado Hills, wrote on LinkedIn that he was “deeply saddened” by Banatao’s death.
“Dado was instrumental in shaping Blaize during its formative years,” Munagala said. “His belief in our mission, steady counsel, and generous spirit left a lasting mark on all of us who had the privilege of learning from him.”
Banatao has received several awards and recognitions for his contributions, including the Pamana ng Filipino Award in 1997, Asian Leadership Award in 1993, and the Ramon V. Del Rosario Award in 2018, according to ABS-CBN. In 2003, the Asian American Activities Center at Stanford recognized Banatao in the university’s Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame.
Inquirer.net also reported that an institute at the University of California bears his name: the Banatao Institute at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.
Banatao founded the Philippine Development Science and Technology Foundation, a nonprofit also known as PhilDev that provides scholarships, mentorship and training programs to young Filipinos in STEM fields. His family urged people to donate to PhilDev in Banatao’s memory.
“We (Filipinos) know hardship,” Banatao said in his documentary. “It’s time we learn success.”
Staff writer Kyle Martin contributed to this report.
Marilyn Granas, who served as the first stand-in for Shirley Temple in films including Bright Eyes, Curly Top and The Little Colonel, has died. She was 98.
A longtime Beverly Hills resident, Granas died Oct. 21, her family announced. Her nephew, film historian Arthur Grant, said she had dementia.
After Temple had joined Granas and her classmates to work on a number in a dance studio, Granas was asked to stand back-to-back with the child star. “We were exactly the same size, and they hired me as her stand-in,” she recalled.
The next day, Granas reported for work on Temple’s Baby, Take a Bow (1934) — they were 6 when it reached theaters — followed by such other films as Bright Eyes (1934), Now and Forever (1934), Curly Top (1935) and The Little Colonel (1935).
“Shirley and I were best friends,” she noted. “We had a wonderful time together. We invented all kinds of games, and of course when the sets weren’t being used, we got to play ‘house’ in all these wonderful places.”
Born in Los Angeles on Aug. 15, 1927, Marilyn Rowena Granas had appeared alongside Temple in the 1933 short films Glad Rags to Riches, Kid in Hollywood and The Kid’s Last Fight before getting the stand-in gig.
In a 2016 interview with Closer, Granas said she felt sorry for Temple “because her childhood was so unnatural. She didn’t get to go to public school. She didn’t have a lot of friends or get to do kid things, like ride bikes. On the set, it was exclusively the two of us. We never played with other kids.”
According to Grant, Granas “kept her Jewish heritage a secret over worries that Shirley’s mother Gertrude’s perceived prejudice might negatively impact both Marilyn’s professional and personal relationship with Shirley,” he wrote in a recentpost on CinemaCafe.com.
In 2020, Granas recalled being on the playground at Wilton Place Elementary when an older girl got off her bicycle, hit her in the face and said, “You’re a nasty little brat and I hate you. I thought, ‘What is her problem?’ and I thought, ‘You know, this celebrity thing has got two sides to it and maybe it’s not so much fun.’”
Granas traveled the world with her mother and was in art class at Beverly Hills High School when she met Kenneth Anger. She then starred for the director in his first publicly seen film, the 35-minute Escape Episode, made in 1944 but not released until a few years later.
Granas graduated from UCLA in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in Speech and English, worked in a mailroom at CBS and became a secretary and then an assistant casting director at NBC, where she competed in a “Miss Cinderemmy” glamour contest held by the Television Academy on New Year’s Eve in 1955.
Over more than three decades in casting, she helped set up William Morris’ casting department, had her own Beverly Hills-based agency — in the 1970s, she brought in actors for the bilingual kids series Villa Alegre over — and was an agent as well.
Granas avoided talking about working with Temple until she was in her 40s. “I made a new life and chose not to be remembered as being Shirley Temple’s stand-in,” she said.
Mohammad Bakri, a Palestinian director and actor who sought to share the complexities of Palestinian identity and culture through a variety of works in both Arabic and Hebrew, has died, his family announced. He was 72.
Bakri was best known for Jenin, Jenin, a 2003 documentary he directed about an Israeli military operation in the northern West Bank city the previous year during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising. The film, focusing on the heavy destruction and heartbreak of its Palestinian residents, was banned by Israel.
Over the years, he made several films that spanned the spectrum of Palestinian experiences. He also acted in Hebrew, including at Israel’s national theater in Tel Aviv, and appeared in a number of famous Israeli films in the 1980s and 1990s. He studied at Tel Aviv University.
Bakri, who was born in northern Israel and held Israeli citizenship, dabbled in both film and theater. His best-known one-man-show from 1986, The Pessoptimist, based on the writings of Palestinian author Emile Habiby, focused on the intricacies and emotions of someone who has both Israeli and Palestinian identities.
During the 1980s, Bakri played characters in mainstream Israeli films that humanized the Palestinian identity, including Beyond the Walls, a seminal film about incarcerated Israelis and Palestinians, said Raya Morag, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who specializes in cinema and trauma.
“He broke stereotypes about how Israelis looked at Palestinians, and allowing someone Palestinian to be regarded as a hero in Israeli society,” she said.
“He was a very brave person, and he was brave by standing to his ideals, choosing not to be conformist in any way, and paying the price in both societies,” said Morag.
Bakri faced some pushback within Palestinian society for his cooperation with Israelis. After Jenin, Jenin, he was plagued by almost two decades of court cases in Israel, where the film was seen as unbalanced and inciting.
In 2022, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld a ban on the documentary, saying it defamed Israeli soldiers, and ordered Bakri to pay tens of thousands of dollars in damages to an Israeli military officer for defamation.
Jenin, Jenin was a turning point in Bakri’s career. In Israel, he became a polarizing figure and he never worked with mainstream Israeli cinema again, Morag said. “He was loyal to himself despite all the pressures from inside and outside,” she added. “He was a firm voice that did not change during the years.”
Local media quoted Bakri’s family as saying he died Wednesday after suffering from heart and lung problems. His cousin, Rafic, told the Arabic news site Al-Jarmaq that Bakri was a tenacious advocate of the Palestinians who used his works to express support for his people.
“I am certain that Abu Saleh will remain in the memory of Palestinian people everywhere and all people of the free world,” he said, using Mohammed Bakri’s nickname.
In the end, Alex Hunter picked the day of his death.
Boulder’s longest-serving district attorney — who defined more than a quarter century of criminal justice for the region and oversaw the early years of the JonBenét Ramsey case — had exhausted all options for medical care after suffering a heart attack in mid-November.
The 89-year-old spent several days in Colorado hospitals, alert and cogent, saying goodbye to colleagues, friends and family.
Then he picked 1:30 p.m. Friday as the time for medical staff to stop the life-supporting medicines keeping him alive. He drifted off and died later that evening, a month shy of his 90th birthday, said his son, Alex “Kip” Hunter III, who is acting as a spokesman for the family.
“He was just crystalline clear,” Hunter III said Monday. “He was intentional and purposeful, gracious and elegant. …He had come to a place where he was totally at peace with the scope of his life.”
Hunter spent 28 years as Boulder County’s elected top prosecutor, serving seven consecutive terms between 1973 and 2001. He forged a community-driven, progressive, victim-focused approach to prosecution and helped shape Boulder’s reputation as a liberal enclave.
He faced intense public scrutiny in the late 1990s after 6-year-old JonBenét was killed and, in the ensuing media firestorm, he chose not to bring charges against her parents — even after a grand jury secretly returned indictments against them during his final term.
Hunter kept a picture of the young beauty queen in his office and, throughout, stood by his controversial decision in the city’s highest-profile murder case, his son said.
“He probably suffered more criticism as a result of that than any other moment in his career,” Hunter III said. “And yet he remained confident till he died that that was the right decision.”
In 1997, Hunter named JonBenét’s parents, John and Patsy, as a focus in the investigation into their daughter’s killing. More than a year later, Hunter announced that Boulder County’s grand jury had completed its work investigating the case, and that there was not sufficient evidence for charges to be filed against the Ramseys.
He was roundly criticized during the early years of the Ramsey case, featured in tabloids and The New Yorker. Some called for a special prosecutor to replace him, and a Boulder detective resigned from the case, accusing Hunter of compromising the investigation. Outsiders said Boulder needed a tough-on-crime prosecutor — decidedly not Hunter — to bring justice to JonBenét’s killer.
What Hunter kept secret in 1999 was that the grand jury had voted to indict the parents on charges of child abuse resulting in death — essentially alleging the Ramseys placed their daughter in a dangerous situation that led to her death — but that he’d declined to sign the indictments and move forward with a prosecution, believing he could not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
“It was so like him to refuse the grand jury instruction,” Hunter III said. “Because he believed in his heart that it would have a negative impact on the outcome of the case.”
Over time, Hunter came to realize the Ramsey case would define his career, even if he would rather it did not. He was surprised by how it followed him even years after his retirement, Hunter III said.
“Horrible crimes happen every day, and that was a horrible crime, but it’s had legs, it’s had a life that I think often surprised Dad in particular,” Hunter III said. “I think that a lot of Dad’s 28 years as the district attorney perhaps got lost in the JonBenét Ramsey case.”
From left, Adams County Chief Deputy District Attorney Bruce Levin, Assistant Boulder County District Attorney Bill Wise, Denver Chief Deputy District Attorney Mitch Morrissey, Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter and the JonBenét Ramsey grand jury’s special prosecutor, Michael Kane, walk outside the Ramsey family’s former Boulder home on Oct. 29, 1998. (Photo by Paul Aiken/Daily Camera)
‘Doing the right thing time and time again’
Through the decades, Hunter was attuned to the Boulder community in a way few others ever were — for years, he invited cohorts of random voters into his office on Tuesday nights for candid discussions on crime and the courts, and he often made decisions and implemented policy based on what he heard in those meetings.
He was a master at reading a room and took pride in surrounding himself with good people, said Dennis Wanebo, a former prosecutor in the Boulder DA’s office.
He rarely faced any serious opposition on the ballot.
“He was there for 28 years,” said Peter Maguire, a longtime Boulder prosecutor during Hunter’s tenure. “And you don’t do that without being the consummate politician who has his finger on the pulse of the community, and by doing the right thing time and time again.”
Hunter was first elected by a narrow margin in 1973 in no small part because he promised to stop prosecuting possession of marijuana as a felony — prompting University of Colorado students to vote for him in droves, said Stan Garnett, who served as Boulder district attorney beginning in 2009.
Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter is pictured in this October 1980 photo. (Photo by Dave Buresh/The Denver Post)
Hunter was part of a wave of Democratic leadership that swept through Boulder in the 1970s. He hosted his own talk radio show for a while in the 1980s, and ran up Flagstaff Road almost every workday, leaving at 11:30 a.m. and having his secretary collect him at the top and return him to the courthouse. He was media-savvy and funny, charming and articulate.
He declared bankruptcy in the 1970s after a failed real estate venture left him $6 million in debt. Hunter married four times and had five children, one of whom, John Hunter-Haulk, died in 2010 at the age of 20 — the “heartbreak of his life,” that Hunter never fully moved past, his son said.
In the late 1970s, after regularly hearing people’s displeasure with plea agreements, Hunter declared that his office would no longer offer plea bargains in any cases, instead requiring defendants to plead guilty to the original charges or take their cases to trial.
The effort quickly failed as the court system buckled under the increased number of jury trials.
“People made fun of him at the time, other DAs mocked him for it and said it was a fool’s errand,” Wanebo said. “And maybe in hindsight it can be looked at that way. And yet there was also a very good secondary effect of that for our office, which was, we got really careful about what we charged people with.”
‘A Renaissance man’
Hunter was moveable when he made mistakes, Maguire said, though he needed to be convinced through either a reasoned or political argument — this is what the community wants — to change his stances.
“Alex was a Renaissance man,” Garnett said. “He was interested in everything. And he was very thoughtful, very kind. He was very ethical.”
Tom Kelley, a former First Amendment attorney for The Denver Post, remembered a time in which he convinced Hunter that he was legally obligated to release some criminal justice records to the newspaper. Kelley swung by the courthouse to pick the records up, and Hunter met him, leading Kelley through the courthouse’s winding back hallways in search of the records.
Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter makes his way down a hill in front of the Boulder County Justice Center, through a mass of media and bystanders, on his way to announce that the grand jury in the JonBenét Ramsey case was disbanding without taking action on Oct. 13, 1999. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
After he gave the documents to Kelley, Hunter immediately called up the Rocky Mountain News — The Post’s bitter rival — and let them know the records were publicly available, Kelley said.
“That was classic Alex Hunter,” he said. “He was a very decent person and he tried to give everybody a little bit of something… He had a strong political sense.”
For Hunter III, having the DA as his dad was “fantastic,” he said. His dad was regularly on the newspaper’s front page. He was “always the coolest dad in Boulder,” Hunter III remembered.
His father’s death this week feels like a mountain suddenly disappearing.
He cherishes the conversations they had as a family in the days before Hunter died.
“We were in deep conversation,” he said. “And he taught us more in that last week than you could learn in a lifetime.”
Dawn Little Sky, an actress who appeared onscreen in Gypsy, The Apple Dumpling Gang and Rawhide and worked as an artist at Walt Disney Studios, has died. She was 95.
Little Sky died Oct. 24 at the Monument Health Hospital in Rapid City, South Dakota, her family announced.
Her husband was late actor Eddie Little Sky, who was one of the first Native men to play Native roles on film and television. His credits included the 1970 films A Man Called Horse and Little Big Man and several episodes of Gilligan’s Island, where he spoke the Siouan language Lakota.
Meanwhile, the couple acted together on episodes of The Magical World of Disney, Gunsmoke, Have Gun — Will Travel and Daniel Boone, and in such features as Chief Crazy Horse (1955), Cimarron (1960), Duel at Diablo (1966) and Journey Through Rosebud (1972).
Born on April 17, 1930, in Fort Yates, North Dakota, Dawn lived on the Standing Rock Reservation (which straddles South and North Dakota) as a youngster, then attended Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas.
While in college, she met Eddie — he called her the “Ava Gardner of Fort Yates” — and they would marry in Roswell, New Mexico, while on the rodeo trail. They ended up in California, where she worked as an actress at Frontierland in Disneyland and as an artist for Walt Disney Studios, where she colored cels for animation projects.
Her acting résumé also included the films Ten Who Dared (1960) and Billy Two Hats (1974), and her career once took her as far away as Israel, she said in a 2022 interview.
In the late 1970s, she and her husband moved to South Dakota, where she served as the director of a cultural center in Eagle Butte and taught art and culture. Eddie died in 1997 at age 71.
She received South Dakota’s Indian Living Treasure Award in 2005.
Survivors include her children, Tojan, Prairie Rose and John, and her grandchildren, Ryanne, Darryan, Britni, Makana, Abigail, Chaske, Edsel, Aleta, Kathryn, Fawn, Trae, Lakota, Duel, Winona, Sparrow, Chanda, Robert, Aspen, January, Nadine, Ardie and Ian.
“Dawn lived an extraordinary life and left a positive impact on all who had the honor to interact with her,” her family said. “Her life was full of so many adventures and unforgettable experiences, and she was the best storyteller with the most amazing sense of humor!”
As I think about Dick Cheney after his death, my memory offers up a snippet from an interview I had with Bob Michel when I was reporting for a New Yorkerprofile of Cheney that appeared in 2001. Michel now looks like a figure from a forgotten Republican past, an amiable congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who had voted for all the major civil-rights laws and who loved crafting legislative compromises with Democrats. In the eighties and early nineties, Michel was the House Minority Leader. The rise of Newt Gingrich and his incendiary brand of Republicanism eventually forced Michel aside—but during much of the time that Michel was leader, Cheney was one of his principal deputies. In the interview, I suggested to Michel that Cheney might be a conservative ideologue. Michel did an instant, reflexive double take: Dick Cheney? The phlegmatic-process guy? No way.
We were speaking some months before the September 11th attacks, and it’s likely that George W. Bush still saw Cheney in the same way that Michel did. Cheney had loyally served George H. W. Bush, a much more moderate Republican than his son, had been chief executive of a Dallas-based energy contractor, and had gone from running the 2000 Republican Vice-Presidential search—a perfect assignment for a neutral professional—to becoming the Vice-Presidential nominee himself. After 9/11, it instantly became clear that Cheney had been a genius at appearing to be neutral, at least to Republicans who outranked him, rather than actually having been neutral. Within minutes of the attacks, he was in charge (Bush was out of town), expertly putting the country on a path that led to the War on Terror and the Iraq War.
How did Cheney manage to strike people as something he wasn’t? When did he become so conservative? And, finally, his reappearance in recent years as a passionate opponent of Donald Trump raises what might be the most interesting question of all: What was it, exactly, that made the currently reigning version of conservatism so repellent to him?
My theory is that Cheney’s time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late nineteen-sixties was his ideological Rosebud. Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his home-town sweetheart from Casper, Wyoming, in 1964. Both of them were the children of career civil servants. With their echt-small-town middle-class backgrounds, plus Dick’s practice of saying as little as possible, they came across as generically, unremarkably Middle American. In 1966, the Cheneys enrolled as doctoral students in Madison; he in political science, she in English. Dick didn’t complete his degree because he went to work for Wisconsin’s governor, Warren Knowles, another moderate Republican. Lynne did finish, in 1970, the same year that radicals bombed a mathematics research center on the university’s campus, killing one person who was inside. The Cheneys appear to have taken from their time in Wisconsin an abiding conviction that the far left is an ever-present threat that Democrats and liberals are incapable of taking seriously. In 2001, Lynne told me that those years had converted them to conservatism. Dick said, “When I was given a choice between returning to academia or staying in the political area, it really wasn’t a close call.”
Dick Cheney was always far more interested in foreign policy than domestic policy. From H. Bradford Westerfeld, a professor he studied with during his brief time as an undergraduate at Yale (he left after two years and later graduated from the University of Wyoming), he absorbed the idea of the Cold War as a world-defining existential struggle. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, quickly commissioned a report suggesting that the United States become the world’s lone superpower—permanently, if possible. Even so, threats, including from radical Islam, preoccupied him. He saw 9/11 not just as an attack to be answered, but as an opportunity to make the U.S. safer by using military force to transform the entire Middle East into an America-friendly region. Cheney believed that our enemies, if shown strength at a level that was beyond the capabilities of liberals, would always submit to our will. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the Iraq adventure would not work out.
If you gave a modern Dr. Frankenstein the challenge of designing a Republican whom Cheney would find repellent, it would be impossible for him to invent someone more perfect than Trump: citified, undignified, showily rich, unable to ever remain silent, and drawn to dealmaking rather than force as the way to solve problems. Substantively, a crucial element of Trump’s appeal was his denunciation of the “forever wars,” of which Cheney had been the principal author. Cheney probably never had any illusion that his brand of maximal hawkishness had broad public support, but Trump demonstrating that he could make anti-Cheneyism unstoppably potent with Republican voters still must have stung. His very loyal and very Republican daughter Liz, whom he would have liked to see rise as high or higher than he did, wound up being unable to hold her father’s old seat in the House in the face of Trump’s vengeance, after she had become an unusually public intraparty critic of his.
Cheney’s life makes for a good means of tracking the evolution of the Republican Party and American conservatism over the past half century. He started his political career in a party dominated by moderates, and helped to make it far more conservative. But he was always an inside player, who didn’t anticipate that more conservative would also come to mean flamboyantly populist. In his own distinctively pessimistic way, he participated both in crafting the zenith moment of American power, around the turn of the millennium, and then in devising the overreach that brought that moment to an end. He saw a series of early twenty-first-century disasters—9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the financial crisis—lead to the revival of isolationism, the ideology he feared most, as the dominant element in his party, when he’d thought it resided mainly on the left.
Thanks to luck or grit, Cheney lived longer than anyone expected, given his spectacular heart problems: five heart attacks, beginning when he was still in his thirties, and then a transplant. His surprising survivability gave him the opportunity to change, in the end, from taciturn company man to florid dissenter. This wasn’t natural for him, and it couldn’t have made him happy. He must have died disappointed. ♦
Otto Nemenz, the Austrian cinematographer and camera operator whose namesake company designed and supplied cutting-edge cameras and lenses to film and television productions for more than four decades, has died. He was 83.
Nemenz died Saturday at his Kaanapali home on the Hawaiian island of Maui, a spokesperson for Otto Nemenz International told The Hollywood Reporter.
Nemenz founded his company in 1979 in a small storefront off Sunset Boulevard, and by 1982, he had built a new Hollywood headquarters on Vine Street. In 2020, he celebrated the grand opening of a 38,000-square-foot facility in Culver City. (The company also has an office in Atlanta.)
In 1991, Otto Nemenz International employees Dick Cavdek and Steve Hamerski received an Academy Award for technical achievement for the design and development of the Canon/Nemenz Zoom Lens, originally developed for five-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Haskell Wexler.
For Roger Deakins, Nemenz came up with a lens system known as “The Deakinizer” when the cinematographer wanted pictures with a sharp foreground and middle ground and very soft edges.
“What’s special about my company is that I went through all the stages of being an assistant cameraman, being an operator, being a director of photography,” he said in 2021, “so I pretty much know what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Born in Judenburg, Austria, on Nov. 12, 1941, Nemenz was the son of an Austrian father and a Greek mother. He spent his youth in Greece, Turkey and Austria, where he attended technical school and worked briefly for Austrian public broadcaster ORF before coming to the U.S. in 1964. (He spoke fluent Turkish, German and English.)
Nemenz landed a job as a lens technician at Panavision, then built specialized lenses and camera rigs for the Formula 1 race cars employed for John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966). He would become the director’s trusted technician.
He said six or seven cameras were smashed during the making of James Cameron’s action film Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), shot by DP Adam Greenberg. And for the Roger Avary-directed Killing Zoe (1994), shot by Tom Richmond, he developed “Swing and Tilt” lenses to create “perspective distortion.”
Nemenz also noted that it only took his company just “three months or so” to be prepared for the industry transition from analog to digital.
A champion of innovation and craftsmanship, Nemenz was an associate member of the American Society of Cinematography and a member of IATSE Local 600 and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
He received the ASC Award of Distinction in 2015 and the ASC Legacy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023 and last year was presented with Cine Gear Expo’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Survivors include his daughter, Patty.
“We will deeply miss Otto’s warmth, generosity and unwavering commitment to the craft that has inspired generations of filmmakers,” Cine Gear Expo said. “His legacy lives on in every frame captured with the tools and technologies he helped perfect.”
Lee Weaver, the familiar character actor known for his work on The Bill Cosby Show, the Loni Anderson-starring Easy Street and the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, has died. He was 95.
Weaver died Sept. 22 at his home in Los Angeles, his family announced. He “wove joy, depth and representation into every role he played and everything he did,” they said.
Weaver played Brian Kincaid, the brother of Bill Cosby’s gym teacher, Chet Kincaid, on 1969-71’s The Bill Cosby Show, and he stole scenes as the exhibitionist Buck Naked on the Steven Bochco series Hill Street Blues in 1982-84 and NYPD Blue in 1994.
On the 1986-87 NBC comedy Easy Street, Weaver and Jack Elam portrayed a couple of down-on-their-luck roommates who move into a mansion recently inherited by a former Las Vegas showgirl (Anderson). That show, created by WKRP in Cincinnati’s Hugh Wilson, was canceled after one season.
In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Weaver had a memorable scene as the blind man who gives three escaped convicts (George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson) a ride on a railroad handcar and some mysterious advice about their future.
Weaver, in fact, turned up in several other notable movies during his long career, among them Vanishing Point (1971), Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Onion Field (1979), Bulworth (1998), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), Donnie Darko (2001) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005).
The son of a chef, Lee Wellington Weaver was born on April 10, 1930, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was raised by his Aunt Mattie and Uncle Lee until he was 14, when he left home to attend high school in Tallahassee and then Florida A&M.
At 22, Weaver enlisted in the U.S. Army and served for four years, then headed to New York, where he worked as a linotype engineer for The New York Times and moonlighted as a promoter at the legendary Birdland jazz club. There, he booked such acts as Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane, Herb Ellis, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and the Heath Brothers.
(Cannonball Adderley, a childhood pal and the best man at his wedding, recorded a Yusef Lateef-written song called “The Weaver” in honor of him that was featured on the saxophonist’s 1964 album, Nippon Soul.)
In one of his first acting gigs, Weaver played assorted natives on the 1955-56 syndicated series Sheena: Queen of the Jungle and a reporter in Al Capone (1959).
In 1967 and ’68, he appeared on episodes of the Cosby-starring NBC series I Spy. And when Cosby was a guest host on The Tonight Show back then, Weaver, in a recurring bit, would be announced as a guest but fail to make it on the show because Cosby would run out of time. Weaver was then seen getting angry in his dressing room.
Years later, Weaver would show up on The Cosby Show and on the Cosby-created A Different World.
Weaver kept busy in the 1970s with work on such TV series as Adam-12, Kojak, Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Soap and Starsky & Hutch and films including Cleopatra Jones (1973) and House Calls (1978).
He provided the voice of Alpine on the 1985-86 animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and in a pair of movies.
His résumé also included the features The Lost Man (1969), Kiss Me Goodbye (1982), The Buddy System (1984), Wildcats (1986), The Two Jakes (1990), The Scout (1994), The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and Max Rose (2013) and guest stints on 227, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Most recently, he played Mel Cordray on two episodes of Grace and Frankie.
With his wife, actress Ta-Tanisha (Room 222), he had a daughter, Leis La-Te.
Doldinger died on Oct. 16, his family confirmed to German press agency dpa.
Born May 12, 1936, in Berlin, Doldinger studied piano and clarinet but was drawn to the jazz music brought to Germany by American GIs after the war. Having lived through the Nazi dictatorship, Doldinger later wrote in his 2022 autobiography, “Made in Germany. Mein Leben für die Musik,” he decided to make music “that you couldn’t march in step or click your heels together [to].” The fascination with those free rhythms never left Doldinger. In 1971, he formed Passport, a long-running jazz-fusion outfit that toured internationally and released dozens of albums over five decades.
Doldinger’s breakthrough in film came with his sparse, electronic-tinged soundtrack to Petersen’s Petersen’s submarine drama Das Boot (1981). Against the backdrop of a minimal orchestral ensemble, just strings, brass and percussion, Doldinger used early synthesizers to create a sonic soundscape evoking sonar pulses, engine drones and the metallic ambience inside the World War 2 U-boat. The title theme’s steadily ascending line, mirroring the claustrophobic tension within the sub, became a signature motif. An early 90s techno remix of the theme, by the German band U96 (named after the submarine’s military designation) spent 13 weeks at number one of the German single charts and topped charts across much of Europe.
Doldinger returned to big-screen fantasy with The NeverEnding Story (1984), Petersen’s adaptation of Michael Ende’s classic children’s book. Doldinger’s original score was a classical European affair, with sweeping strings and brass-heavy cues (with only the occasional synth coloring) inspired by the film’s fairy-tale origins. For The NeverEnding Story‘s international release, producers brought in Flashdance composer Giorgio Moroder to give Doldinger’s score a sleeker pop-synth gloss, adding drum machines and arpeggiated synthesizers, as well as a new title song, performed by English pop singer Limahl, which was a top 10 hit on the single charts in the U.S. and U.K.
Inside Germany, Doldinger was also known for his themes and TV scores composed for television, most famously his brief, instantly recognizable jazz-fusion intro for Tatort, a weekly crime show that has remained Germany’s most-watched scripted series for decades.
Doldinger balanced screen work with Passport, recording and touring while maintaining a steady output for film and TV from his base in Bavaria.
He is survived by his wife Inge and their three children.
By the time I reached the fourth grade, Diane Keaton had already cemented herself as my preferred romantic heroine. Snow White and The Sound of Music’s Maria von Trapp paled in comparison to Erica Barry, the 50-something divorced playwright at the center of Nancy Meyers’s Something’s Gotta Give (2003)—coincidentally, one of the four DVDs my now 80-year-old grammy owned in the pre-streaming era.
Even in my prepubescent state (or perhaps because of it), something about Keaton’s version of falling in love in the movies resonated. Maybe it was the way she so openly resented Jack Nicholson’s aging playboy, Harry. While laid up in her Hamptons home after a heart attack, Harry asks Erica, “What’s with the turtlenecks?” She curtly replies: “I like ’em. I’ve always liked ’em, and I’m just a turtleneck kind of gal,” flippantly waving her hands in a way that’s always stuck with me. He then wants to know if she ever gets hot—and all that implies. “No,” Keaton’s character snaps, dismissively adding, “Not lately.” But there is also a hint of possibility—something Erica allows herself to express in the play she’s writing, but not the life she’s living.
Later in the film, the shedding of that same article of clothing signifies Erica’s sexual reawakening. “Cut it off,” she tells Harry, handing him a pair of scissors so he can slice open the beige turtleneck from navel to neck. With each inch of skin revealed, she breathes a little easier. “Erica, you are a woman to love,” Nicholson’s character rasps. And so was the woman who played her. “Diane Keaton, arguably the most covered up person in the history of clothes, is also a transparent woman,” as Meryl Streeponce put it. “There’s nobody who stands more exposed, more undefended, and just willing to show herself inside and out than Diane.”
The world was stunned Saturday at the news that Diane Keaton—the iconic actor known for Annie Hall, Something’s Gotta Give, the Godfather trilogy, and many other films—had died. Keaton, who was 79, reportedly passed on Saturday, October, 11, after what’s said to have been a recent health crisis. Within hours, Hollywood luminaries began to share remembrances of Keaton, noting her distinctive style, artistic acumen, and kindness.
Many of those tributes were posted to social media. In an Instagram post, Bette Midler, who starred in the 1996 film The First Wives Club alongside Diane Keaton, wrote “She was hilarious, a complete original, and completely without guile, or any of the competitiveness one would have expected from such a star. What you saw was who she was…oh, la, lala!” Kate Hudson, whose mother, Goldie Hawn, was also in that film, shared a clip from the movie, writing “We love you so much Diane.”
Hawn herself wrote “How do we say goodbye? What words can come to mind when your heart is broken? You never liked praise, so humble, but now you can’t tell me to ‘shut up’ honey. There was, and will be, no one like you.”
“We agreed to grow old together, and one day, maybe live together with all our girlfriends,” Hawn continued. “Well, we never got to live together, but we did grow older together. Who knows… maybe in the next life. Shine your fairy dust up there, girlfriend. I’m going to miss the hell out of you.”
Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, and Bette Midler at the premiere of “The First Wives Club.”
There’s a very funny scene in Ron Howard’s frothy 1984 interspecies rom-com, Splash, in which Daryl Hannah, playing a mermaid in Manhattan who swaps her tail for legs, skips out to buy suitable land attire. Given that she emerged from the sea naked, she throws together an outfit from the Tom Hanks character’s closet.
The “fish out of water” turns up on a Bloomingdale’s womenswear floor in a men’s black suit, white shirt, black leather derbies and what looks like a school tie. The ensemble instantly brings a horrified saleslady scurrying over: “Oh my God, darling, darling, darling! That outfit is to die from! What happened, you saw Annie Hall a hundred times? That look is over.”
That was seven years after the release of Annie Hall and the imprint on fashion and popular culture of Diane Keaton’s iconic looks as the title character remained an instantly identifiable reference.
Even more than Marlene Dietrich had done in white tie and tuxedo ensembles in the 1930s, Keaton in Annie Hall kickstarted a wave of genderless dressing with her men’s shirts and wide ties, slouchy trousers and oversized jackets, button-up vests and fedoras.
What made the layered wardrobe trend resonate — and continue to be seen on stylish women today — was how effortlessly cool it looked on Keaton. Her outfits were eccentric but unfussy, tomboyish but distinctly feminine. They made her character appear confident, even at her most insecure. And while the costumes mostly came from shopping expeditions to Ralph Lauren and other menswear emporiums, they were 100 percent reflective of Keaton’s personal style off-camera.
The misconception that comedy is easy — and that Keaton was essentially playing a version of herself — caused some quiet ripples of discontent when she beat out competition that included Anne Bancroft, Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine in dramatic roles to take home the best actress Oscar in 1977.
But Keaton’s justly honored performance in Annie Hall endures for reasons that go far beyond the synthesis of her on- and offscreen personas. She essentially reinvented the classic screwball heroine for a more socially evolved age. Annie might have come off to a casual observer as a kooky ditz, but she was clever, witty, talented, a sponge for knowledge and, eventually, an assertive voice for her own independence.
She emerged with a wave of actresses in the 1970s and early ‘80s that defied traditional standards of silver-screen glamour by being utterly natural, among them Karen Allen, Brooke Adams, JoBeth Williams, Jill Clayburgh and Margot Kidder. And yet Keaton was very much an original, never part of any pack.
The announcement of her unexpected death at 79, less than a month after Robert Redford’s passing, represents another stinging loss to the pantheon of New Hollywood in the decades before the major studios largely stepped away from making movies for grownups.
Irrespective of your views on the now-controversial figure of Woody Allen, the films he made with Keaton, both during and after their romantic involvement, remain among her most outstanding screen work — Annie Hall and Manhattan in particular.
That’s at least partly because while Keaton’s characters might have been amused by the brainy verbosity and self-effacing neuroses of Allen’s alter egos, she was never intimidated or outmatched by them. She challenged her writer-director and co-star in ways that few other women in his movies ever have.
Keaton’s innate radiance and verve made her born to play comedy, but she was no less gifted a dramatic actor. The women in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy are generally submissive. But Keaton made Kay Adams-Corleone — an initially naïve outsider, favoring love over clarity as she agrees to marry Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone — the moral tether to the outside world, beyond the vicious criminal enterprises of the Mafia dynasty. She stands up to Michael and walks away, as few others get to do.
The same year Annie Hall was released, Keaton took on a risky role for a rising-star actress in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. In a fearless performance, she played Theresa Dunn, a dedicated schoolteacher whose repressive Catholic upbringing and history of childhood illness become fuel for her defiant sexuality. After feeling used and disrespected in her first experiences with men, Theresa throws herself into an increasingly dark spiral of sleazy pickup bars and hookups with strangers, ultimately with fatal results.
With a lesser interpreter, the movie might have been just a sensationalistic shocker, but Keaton brought integrity and emotional candor to Theresa’s messy search to define herself. That made it a rare example for its time of a character study that explored a modern woman’s erotic desires without shame.
Keaton was tough, impassioned and ultimately heartbreaking as feminist journalist and Russian Revolution sympathizer Louise Bryant, starring opposite writer-director (and offscreen partner at the time) Warren Beatty as Bohemian communist activist John Reed in his 1981 historical epic, Reds.
But her crowning dramatic achievement came arguably the following year in Alan Parker’s raw, unflinching depiction of marital breakdown Shoot the Moon, starring opposite Albert Finney. In an ecstatic New Yorker review, Pauline Kael described their characters as torn from inside the writer, director and the two stars. Faith Dunlop was a role that allowed Keaton to embrace both depression and steadfast self-possession, refusing to endure more pain from the man she married, even at the cost of great distress to their children.
“Diane Keaton acts on a different plane from her previous film roles,” wrote Kael. “She brings the character a full measure of dread and awareness, and does it in a special, intuitive way that’s right for screen acting. Nothing looks rehearsed, yet it’s all fully created.”
Aside from Paolo Sorrentino, who gave Keaton red meat to chew on as the formidable American nun and spiritual consigliere in the HBO series The Young Pope, it’s disappointing that in the later years of her six-decade career, directors mostly stopped challenging Keaton.
More often they leaned on her signature quirks and mannerisms, at times pushing her to the point of self-caricature. But Keaton could shine even in humdrum material and there are gems among the many cute comedies she could do with her hands tied behind her back.
One such keeper is The First Wives Club, an effervescent feminist revenge comedy in which Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler play women pushed aside for younger models who turn the tables on their philandering husbands. Another is the role that landed Keaton her fourth Oscar nomination, in Nancy Meyers’ advanced-age romantic comedy, Something’s Gotta Give. She stars as a whip-smart playwright who’s much more than a foil to Jack Nicholson’s smug playboy, who prides himself on dating only women under 30.
With her sheer, undiminished magnetism alone, Keaton remained a feisty rebuke to that kind of ageism in Hollywood. Her vitality was unextinguishable. We are fortunate to have shared so much of her life.
Over the course of her career, Diane Keaton also won a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globes (Annie Hall and 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give) , and a Tony Award, among other honors. She was also well known as a style icon for her trendsetting mix of traditionally masculine garb in unexpected proportions. “When you think of Diane, you think of these great pieces of clothing,” designer Michael Korssaid of Keaton in 2014.
Diane Keaton on May 01, 2021 in Los Angeles,
BG004/Bauer-Griffin
Keaton was also a photographer and writer, penning memoirs Then Again, Brother & Sister, and Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. Speaking with Vanity Fair in support of the latter book, Keaton said that her most marked characteristic was “Insecurity in conjunction with ambition.” When asked what her favorite occupation was, she responded “Seeing. As Walker Evans said, ‘Look! We don’t have that much time.’”
